After tramping through the thickets of Mount Peace Cemetery for nearly two hours, Susan Bove and her small group came to a halt. Flanked by three or four aging headstones, she began firing questions into the cool night air.

"Are there any spirits present who want to talk to us tonight?" she asked. "Does anyone present want to say hello?"

Getting no response, she and the others pressed forward. Leaves crackled and twigs snapped. A dim moon cast an eerie glow on the procession.

Susan Bove is unlike most women her age. Instead of curling up with the latest Nora Roberts novel on Friday or Saturday night, you're just as apt to find the 40-year-old Glendora woman creeping through cemeteries such as the one in Lawnside in search of ghosts.

Or through private homes, apartments or offices.

An office administrator, Bove (pronounced Bo-vay) is co- director of South Jersey Paranormal Research, a Gloucester Township-based organization devoted to the advancement of paranormal research. It was incorp-orated in January and seeks to grow its membership, which currently stands at 15.

Through on-site investigations, SJPR attempts to prove or disprove the existence of spiritual beings. To do so, it examines suspected sites with the latest in electronic gadgetry: video recorders, digital audio recorders, digital cameras, EMF meters, 35 mm cameras and motion detectors.

At Mount Peace, where a woman is said to walk in a flowing white dress, the most popular instrument was a digital camera. Whenever someone felt to be in the company of spirits, he or she would say so and the rest of the group would start snapping pictures. Though no one spotted the mysterious lady, the group didn't go home empty- handed.

plays on the back of the group's cameras displayed small, semi-transparent circles of white, which the group said were orbs. Bove defined an orb as the simplest form of spiritual activity.

"There's one right here where my hand is," said Margie Mahoney, a property manager from Pennsauken who says she has seen her deceased father many times. "It's following the contour of my hand. Now, it's moving over. Oh dear! I can't take a picture at the same time I'm carrying this flashlight."

Unfortunately, there was no one nearby to record what she was experiencing. Undaunted, Mahoney continued her trek through the graveyard, stopping occasionally to explore with her hands what she called an "energy field" just in front of her.

"I can feel orbs," she said. "I'm a healer, but anybody can be taught to do it. There's nothing mystical about it. You can learn to think with your hands and to feel the air. I can feel the energy."

Those within the organization admit some people look at it with raised eyebrows, but say they wouldn't if skeptics accompanied the group on an investigation.

"I was never really a believer until we started getting evidence," said Judy Lewitt, 41, of Erial, a SJPR member and Bove's sister. "To hear it or see it is to believe. After people see our evidence, it makes them think."

As a child, Lewitt says she was always suspicious.

"We grew up in a haunted house in Oaklyn," she said. " Noises and footsteps, doors slamming, lights going on and off by themselves ... All kinds of weird stuff growing up that we could hear but not explain. My father saw apparitions. My mother still lives there, but my youngest son won't stay there today."

Bove says there are about a half dozen organizations similar to hers in South Jersey and that she has enough requests to keep her busy through June. To accommodate the membership, however, SJPR conducts its investigations only on Friday and Saturday nights.

"We all write reports and put a lot of effort into it when we get our pictures," she said. "We edit them on the computer. We also do a lot of sound recording and will go through that looking for EVP (electronic voice phenomena). There's a lot to do with the evidence once we collect it. If we had two investigations a week every week, we would burn out our members."

As a nonprofit group, SJPR provides free home and business investigations. It depends on donations received at seminars and lectures for funding.

Most people, Bove says, request her services to prove their own sanity.

"We probably get six calls a month," she said. "Most are from homeowners who want to know they're not nuts. We'll go out and collect evidence to either prove or disprove the footsteps and voices they've been hearing."

Bill and Patty Rice of Laurel Springs called SJPR a few weeks ago. The lid on their clothes washer was opening by itself and a downstairs lamp was turning itself on and off.

"We're fifth generation and my grandfather had always talked about ghosts in the house," said Rice, 41, a paramedic. "He would see my grandmother's mother in the hall. We never knew whether to believe him or not."

SJPR arrived March 23 and collected evidence in the 106- year-old house for three hours, recording numerous orbs and some EVP. Bill Rice said he enjoyed having his house examined and he was pleased with the results.

"It was a fun thing for us," he said. "We had a good time. We wanted to see if they could hear anything or see anything. They were here from 9 p.m. to midnight - with all the lights out."

Before sending a team to investigate, SJPR dispatches a person to the caller's home or business for a preliminary look. The client is asked to fill out a questionnaire, after which the investigator takes a few pictures and tells the caller what to expect.

Once the preliminary investigation is completed, an an appointment is scheduled. All investigations are between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. (spirit hours, as they're known in the trade) and with the lights out.

If it's a home, two-person teams are assigned to each floor. All investigators are given flashlights with red tape over the lens (white beams tend to show up as anomalies on film).

Though no SJPR member has actually spotted an orb or spirit with the naked eye, the group has recorded several with cameras, video recorders and audio recorders, Lewitt says. With the use of computers and sound enhancers, she says the group has been able to prove spiritual activity each time out.

"One of the things I've found very interesting are the audio recordings," said 39-year-old member Rorie Hirschmann of Clementon, who has gone out on three SJPR investigations. "When you come back and replay the tape, you might hear whispers or voices that weren't there when you were standing in the room."

Some of the most compelling evidence gathered to date was collected the day after Thanksgiving at the Mount Peace Cemetery. The ghost hunters had gone there to train and managed to make a picture of what it says was a man seated near a headstone.

"It's called ectoplasm and it looks like fog, but you can see the smoke emanating out of the headstone and sitting nearby is the figure of a man," Bove said. "It's on our Web site."

Its investigators rarely find homeowners who are scared and most people who share their homes with spiritual beings don't want them to leave.

"They've learned to co-exist,," Lewitt said. "We called ours Mr. Ghost and talked to him. You don't realize it, but spirits are just about everywhere. Have you ever been standing in your kitchen and felt like somebody walked into the room and you turned around and there was nobody there? Well, there probably was. For that one moment, you were sensitive to what was behind you. People generally don't look for an explanation, however. They just shrug it off."

• Story originally published by:
Courier-Post / NJ | Lyford M. Moore - Apr 6.02

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