July 27, 2011, 9:30 pm Over the Verrazano, Into the Shadows
By ALINA SIMONE
The Ghost Hunter has Louis Vuitton floor mats, and this I did not expect. He arrives at my building in a customized white Mitsubishi Eclipse with a sound system that’s Madison-Square-Garden-loud and a TV hidden in the dash. It’s less Ghostmobile, more getaway car. I’d forgotten that, esoteric hobbies aside, the Ghost Hunter was born and raised in Brooklyn. And like a lot of guys from Bergen Beach, he loves his car.
It is 10:07 p.m. and we are barreling across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island. The sky above is as black as devil’s food cake. It’s also the Fourth of July, which says a lot about our respective social lives, the Ghost Hunter’s and mine.
His name is John Lattanzio and he works as a guard at a cemetery not far from where I live. I like to go walking there and often stop at the gate to exchange pleasantries. One day I asked John how his weekend had gone and he told me, with a tired crack of the neck, that he’d had a late night. Ghost hunting.
He dropped this piece of information like it was no big thing, the same way another New Yorker might say he’d spent the night drinking, or at a Fassbinder film retrospective, or sleeping on the sidewalk outside H&M for a shot at the new Lanvin collection. That’s because, I came to learn, John is not a ghost hunter in air quotes. He does not broadcast his exploits by way of blogs or customized license plates. There are no ghost heads stuffed and mounted to his Facebook wall. He is dead serious.
Only animals and babies can naturally detect ghosts, John explains. If you’re an adult of our species, ghost hunting is a highly technical affair.
For the past two and a half years, John told me, he has kept a detailed log book of his ghost hunting activities. Though he does monitor paranormal message boards online for news about prime ghost hunting locales, he’s not much of a joiner, preferring instead to go alone or with close friends. When he offered to take me along sometime, I felt as if I’d been invited to join a secret society, and immediately said yes. Most of these forays take place on the fringes of the city and farther afield — Canarsie, Richmond County, Bensonhurst, the Bell Parkway, Tom’s River, Seaside Heights, Atlantic City …
“Atlantic City?” I interrupted.
“Notice how the windows in casino hotels are always screwed shut?” he asked cryptically. “Suicides.”
Working at the graveyard at night, he said he’s seen orbs, shadow spirits and residuals (apparitions that repeat a certain ritual, say, always playing hacky sack on the same path). Sometimes, he hears children playing in the mausoleums. It was his job that first got him interested in ghost hunting, but there is also a genetic component; his grandmother had a sixth sense, a gift John believes he has inherited.
“I pick up vibes from people,” John tells me as we drive over the bridge. “I can sense if people are hiding something, if people are lying to me.” But tonight I notice John’s Spidey sense is taking the backseat to a whole lot of gear — a single lens reflex camera with flash, an electronic thermometer, a digital recorder, an electromagnetic field reader and a thermal imaging camera, which translates the heat emitted by objects into visible colors. Only animals and babies can naturally detect ghosts, John explains. If you’re an adult of our species, ghost hunting is a highly technical affair.
Tonight’s destination is Wolfe’s Pond Park. Before leaving, I’d looked it up on Wikipedia, just to get a bead on where we were going. “Like much of Staten Island,” the passage casually states, “the park is rumored to be haunted.” According to urban legend, two teenagers died there in the 1970s after crashing their car.
“They walk the paths of the park at night,” John tells me, “calling out for their parents. “Usually around 2 a.m., but some people have seen them earlier.”
I have never been ghost hunting before. I have also never been to Staten Island. Now a silent battle rages within me as to which of these firsts is more exciting.
“When do we get to Staten Island?” I finally ask.
“What?” John says. “We’ve been here for a while.”
I stare out the window at the strip malls and polite-looking houses streaming by on Hylan Boulevard. What was I expecting? Palm trees?
John and I pass a sign for Great Kills Harbor. “Don’t you ever get scared ghost hunting?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Even out at some remote location?”
“No.”
“Where horrible things have supposedly happened to people?”
“No,” he says. “Believe it or not I have a lot of fun. I really do. Besides,” he adds, “working at a graveyard, you see a lot of stuff.” Before I can ask what kind of stuff, we have reached the park and John is stopping the car. Almost immediately, a police officer pulls up alongside us.
“Any problems here?”
“Not at all officer. Just going for a walk,” John chirps. Meanwhile I sit there, nervously, doing my best impression of someone who regularly hangs out at haunted parks in the middle of the night. To my relief, the officer, satisfied, nods and drives away. “Don’t worry, he just thinks we came out here to smoke pot,” John says. “Hey, are you O.K.?” he adds, noticing my worried look.
I assure him that I am. We get out of the car. John hits the auto lock on his key chain. The car beeps. I scream. And with that, we stride forth, firmer in our knowledge of where we both stand.
Angie Wang
I can’t shake my uneasiness as I follow John past the safe perimeter of the last street lamp and into the dark woods. Why can’t I just relax, I chide myself. Maybe it’s because — although I never could find any proof of the mysterious 1970s car crash — bodies have turned up at Wolfe’s Pond Park from time to time, one as recently as last year. The foliage around us is dense and still, and I have to admit: I kind of hope tonight turns out to be the Night of the Dead Dead.
We walk toward the sound of the cold slap of the waves and the distant cannon fire of fireworks booming out across the water. Suddenly, I sense we are not alone. A firecracker goes off and my heart jumps so high, I swear it hits my brainpan. Down by the water are three muscle-shirted guys.
“No bonfires,” one says, scanning the deserted strip of sand. “Nothing’s going on.”
“It’s like the whole holiday just died,” another intones morosely.
“Let’s go to Jersey.”
“If we go to Jersey,” the third says, “it has to be worth it ’cause I have work at seven in the morning.”
John, too busy juggling camera, thermal imaging cellphone and digital recorder to notice, goes right on taking pictures of the dark air around us.
The last time he was here, John tells me, he saw some great orbs. This time, as he points his lens toward a thicket of trees, he says he fears he may be immortalizing a man peeing in the woods. It wouldn’t be the first time; he’s already surprised people playing paintball and having sex.
“O.K. I’m getting a really weird feeling now,” John says, perking up. “Like, that feeling.”
“Did you hear something?” As I am neither an animal nor a baby, the woods remain impenetrable to me.
“No. No E.V.P.s yet.”
“Easy peas?”
“Eee vee pees,” John frowns down at his recorder. “Electronic voice phenomena.”
If it’s weird to apply hard science to something as ephemeral and, O.K., possibly imaginary, as a ghost, then we’ve been living with that incongruity for almost 100 years. Harry Price, who opened the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in 1926 and is widely acknowledged as the father of ghost hunting, was also its first major gearhead. Employing machines as diverse as thermographs, X-rays and “Noctovision” (a kind of infrared television used to see through fog), Mr. Price studied all manner of supernatural peculiarity. But he also used more analog means to test paranormal phenomena, once faithfully enacting a spell on a mountaintop that involved dousing a goat in honey, blood and the scrapings of church bells. The spell, he proved, failed to transform the goat into a boy.
Later I ask John, if ghost hunting doesn’t scare him, then what does?
“Losing people,” he replies. “Losing my friends. Losing my family.” And I wonder if all that elaborate technology, the air ion counters and motion detectors, isn’t just a way to gain the upper hand over that which we can’t control. The knowledge that we are powerless to protect ourselves and those we love from freak accidents and man-made terrors haunts us. Maybe ghost hunting is just a way of reversing the status quo for a few short hours. Surely, the rest of the time, it is the ghosts hunting us.
What scares me, on the other hand, is dying while engaging in needless, thrill-seeking activity. And since these dodgy places are, at the very least, haunted by the kinds of things that create restless spirits — ditches, serial killers, encounters with other ghosts — I am relieved when we head back to the car.
Our next destination is Historic Richmond Town, a “living history village” with buildings dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. If you believe the reports of ghost sightings, Richmond Town is more or less the Mall of America of the spirit realm. There is the ghost of a jilted young woman wandering around the graveyard, accosting potential suitors, and another specter haunting the upstairs window of a house with a green cellar door. The schoolhouse, P.S. 28, is lousy with ghosts, and supposedly so is the old county clerk’s office.
But while Wolfe’s Pond was forbidding at night, Richmond Town totally fails to thrill me. I grew up in the Colonial town of Lexington, Mass., and when your friends’ dads regularly get together to don breeches and shoot at one another with fake muskets, our country’s revolutionary past becomes a lot less ominous.
On the way back to Brooklyn, talk turns to the Syfy channel reality show, Ghost Hunters.
“There’s nothing real about it,” John insists. “They’re all like, ‘Whoa! Did you see that?’ But what do you see? You don’t see nothing!” he continues. “It’s just a buncha Brooklyn guys goin’, ‘Whoa!’”
Still, if he got the call, he would gladly join the cast. “I’d do the ‘Whoa,’” he admits.
After he drops me off, I get online to try to verify the Richmond Town and Wolfe’s Park sightings. Sources discussing ghosts are abundant, but it’s hard to know whom to trust. StrangeUSA.com? Paranormalknowledge.com? UnsolvedMysteries.com? The question of how to fact check a ghost remains a metaphysical one.
A few days later, John arrives at my apartment with his flash drive. It turns out he took more than 200 photos that night in Staten Island. As he loads up the first one and begins to manipulate the exposure settings, I notice that it’s a picture of a Porta-Potty in the Wolfe’s Pond parking lot.
He scrolls through the images, reducing them to skeletal X-rays by maximizing the contrast, then scrutinizing each one for suspicious blurs or other incongruities. An hour later, John finally spots a ghost; the upper half of what appears to be a man’s face in the window of the old tin shop in Historic Richmond Town. In a similar photo, taken a minute later, the mysterious figure is gone.
“How about that?” John says, excitedly toggling back and forth between the two images. I nod, hoping he’s not picking up a vibe from me. If I said I believed this was a ghost, John’s sixth sense would tell him I was lying. But I don’t completely not believe it, either. That small part of me is grateful that the hunt has migrated to the digital realm. I can deal with a smudge in a photograph. A confused goat, covered in honey, blood and the scrapings of church bells? Now that’s scary.
Alina Simone, a singer, is the author of the essay collection “You Must Go and Win.”
William Widmer for The New York Times 
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