OGDEN — Don't crack a Ghostbusters joke. Everyone will know you're a beginner.
Beau Woods, president of the Ogden Ghost Hunters Organization, walks through the basement of the century-old Ben Lomond Hotel looking for evidence of supernatural or paranormal activity with a group of followers in tow.
On this particular night, the ghosts keep to themselves. Woods' infrared camera doesn't pick up any images, nor does his motion detector pick up any movement. He's kept a tape recorder running that he'll review after he gets home to see if it has picked up any voices. It hasn't.
Woods is a 27-year-old Web page designer. When he was an 8-year-old living in Pocatello, he had an experience late one night in his bedroom. The corner of his bed raised and started banging up and down against the floor. He has been interested in ghosts ever since.
Others share that interest. The first night Woods tries to take a group through the Ben Lomond Hotel, 18 people show up. So many, in fact, that the hotel gets cold feet and won't let Woods give the tour.
The group has as many skeptics as it does believers. Aaron Nelson showed up because he "has doubts."
"I really want to see if there are" ghosts, he said. "I want to see physical evidence, I want to see Slimer."
Woods knows the expeditions he does are hit-or-miss. But he says not to blow off the "haunted" hotel just yet.
Adam Port, security guard at Ben Lomond, says he and others on the hotel staff receive regular complaints of unexplained noises or movements coming from rooms and empty hallways.
"At least once a week someone complains about noises and stuff," he said.
And apart from the complaints, Woods has been to the hotel many times, and on occasions he has found some pretty startling stuff.
"There's something going on here," he says. "The whole hotel seems to be active."
About a year ago Woods was walking along the third-floor hallway in the hotel. As he passed by a room, the door handle began to shake violently. All the rooms on the floor have windows that face out into the hallway. The curtains are kept open when they're unoccupied, closed when they're rented out.
Woods said the window curtain was open and he saw no one inside. The experience really freaked him out, he said.
Woods and his group have also captured what they call physical evidence. The evidence captured by most ghost hunters comes in two types, audio and photographic.
The audio evidence is called electronic voice phenomena, or EVPs. As ghost hunters go out hunting, they run a tape recorder. After the expedition, they review the tape for sound that's too low to be picked up by the human ear. If anything is picked up, it's considered an EVP.
Many times EVPs are faint yelps or murmurs. If you're lucky you'll capture a voice speaking. Woods explains that EVPs are good evidence because in an empty room or empty graveyard, a voice picked up on tape can be a manifestation of a presence that can't be seen. Skeptics argue that the tape recorder is simply picking up voices in other rooms, or even radio waves.
On film ghost hunters pick up orbs. Orbs are spots or circles of light in the picture, a bright spot in an otherwise dark room. Orbs are easier to criticize than EVPs because they can be a manifestation of so many things — illuminated dust, overexposed film or light refraction.
But for ghost hunters, the orb phenomenon happens too often to be reasoned away as a camera malfunction. If ghosts have an energy field, the orb is the physical manifestation of that, says Woods.
Ogden Ghost Hunters, like other organizations around the country, is gaining members and attention. The Learning Channel featured a documentary on such groups last October. Woods' organization was contacted by TLC and even followed around for a few days by a camera crew. But, just like on this night, they didn't see or hear anything.
Woods will be the first to say much of the so-called evidence of the paranormal circulating the Internet and other places is either fake or doesn't prove a thing.
However, he says, there are things out there, things he's caught on audiotape or film, that he can't explain any other way than to say it's a ghost.
E-mail: rrogers@desnews.com