Posted on Fri, Oct. 31, 2003
Ghost buster says job not as glamorous as seen on TV
BY DANIELA LAMAS
Knight Ridder Newspapers
MIAMI - (KRT) - Steve Vanik is a strong-looking man with a graying ponytail. He's 50, married, a scuba instructor and drummer with three cats, a dog and an iguana.
And he is, well, a ghost buster - a paranormal investigator, technically. He has been for the past three decades, first in Maryland and now in Hollywood (the one in Broward, Fla., not the one that made ghost busters famous).
It's a tedious job, he'll tell you frankly, utterly devoid of the glamour TV shows and movies would have you believe. There are no phantoms spewing green goo, no white suits, no backpacks in which to trap ghosts and other goblins.
Instead, there's a digital camera, two-way radios, a thermometer, an EMF meter to measure change in electrical energy, and a lot of waiting around in the dark.
"Folks expect this sort of thing to be exciting. In fact, it can be really boring," said Vanik, who founded Paranormal Investigations of South Florida in 1976.
He works for free, typically on a couple of new cases a month, with an eight-person staff - currently a few office workers, a graphic artist and a retired nurse.
"We're not a club," said Vanik, who is close-lipped about specific cases. "Some folks believe the spirits of the dead exist to entertain them. Well, you know what? The dead aren't here to amuse us."
A long love of vampire and werewolf movies originally led him to Baltimore's Odyssey Scientific Research in the early 1970s, after reading an item in the local paper. This group focused on unexplained animals. His first case was an ape-like creature, dubbed the Sykesville Monster, which terrorized a small community in the Maryland mountains.
For months Vanik's team interviewed, searched, reported - and then the monster simply disappeared.
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It was a highly publicized case, said Vanik, who saved one June 28, 1973, newspaper article with the headline "Stalking the Sykesville Monster."
"One of the theories was that it came down from the mountains for some reason or another - maybe he was just lost or looking for something - but we never came to any conclusions about that," Vanik said.
In South Florida, it's 98 percent ghosts and hauntings. Requests mostly come over the Internet, 100 e-mail correspondences each year from people who suspect paranormal activity in their houses.
The team launches a full-scale investigation for the estimated two-dozen queries from people who aren't "just lonely or not wrapped real tight," and are within driving distance. They come armed only with the equipment Vanik called "anticlimactic" - the EMF meter, camera, flashlight, and extra batteries.
That's the way the team arrived at Jessie Rodriguez's Miami home two months ago. Rodriguez and family bought the place 2-1/2 years ago, a small 1950s home just down the street from her mother's house.
But there was something wrong - Rodriguez's daughter heard whispering in her room at night, objects disappeared and reappeared in strange places, family members were awakened by what sounded like someone running down the hall in work boots.
"I would feel things touching me, and I'd freak out," Rodriguez said. "It's almost like drowning, like somebody's putting their hand over your mouth and nose and you're struggling to get it off, but you can't move. It's painful, and it's not painful."
She and her husband wanted to move, but it was too expensive. So her husband - who'd initially thought Rodriguez was crazy, she said - started doing Internet research on ghosts and came upon Paranormal Investigations of South Florida.
When Vanik brought his cameras to their home, he confirmed Rodriguez's suspicions, discovering that the yard was "surrounded with orbs" - circles of light that can't be seen by the naked eye, but appear in photos regardless of the camera. Some think they're a trail left behind by ghosts, others think they're the ghosts themselves.
Vanik chooses not to weigh in.
"We're not saying these are ghosts," he said. "Nobody knows for sure."
But Vanik can sometimes sense ghosts even if he can't see them. There's a sudden feeling of coldness, an "unusual" sensation down his spine - a good skill to have in his line of work.
Once Vanik has confirmed the presence of a ghost or spirit, many clients choose to live with it, simply reassured they're not crazy. Vanik has a few ghosts in his home he treats "almost like a pet." In other cases - nine out of 10, some investigators believe - simply acknowledging a spirit's presence and speaking sternly is enough to drive away an unwanted presence.
Some cases call for stronger stuff - spraying a mixture of salt and water, for instance, or burning white sage - but Vanik, who promises confidentiality to all his clients, is deliberately vague.
Rodriguez, for one, has been given a personal regimen that Vanik wouldn't divulge, concerned that readers might mistakenly - and dangerously - apply his advice in the wrong situation. In Rodriguez's case, it included strong discipline that could force the presence to stop its destructive behavior. Sometimes it responds, she said, but the haunting is far from over.
But Vanik is a hesitant ghost buster - he'd rather live with ghosts than destroy them.
"I caution people about that," Vanik said. "To automatically treat a ghost as something that's evil, nasty, dirty … well, it could be a relative. You could be disrespecting your own relative."
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© 2003, The Miami Herald.
The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings February 2003 Newsletter