G.R.I.M.: Central Maine's very own Ghostbusters
Halloween is approaching rapidly, bringing with it the usual frightening fanfare: fake spiderwebs hung over trees, jack-o-lanterns leering out from porches, and soon, a whole smorgasbord of candy and costumes.
Perhaps most iconic of all Halloween outfits is the ghost- otherwise known as draping a sheet with two holes cut out for eyes over your head. It even inspired a recent TikTok trend of teens dressing up in their bedsheets and doing artsy photoshoots around town. But what if costumed kids trick-or-treating weren’t the only ghosts around here? What if spirits, poltergeists, and demons aren’t just scary stories you tell at sleepovers?
That’s what Ghost Research and Investigations of Maine (GRIM) is trying to figure out. GRIM responds to claims of hauntings and ghost sightings in Maine and seeks to discover whether seemingly supernatural occurrences really have a beyond-the-grave cause.
“People get a hold of us to come check out their house if there’s something weird happening,” GRIM member Travis Hartford said in an interview with The Colby Echo. “Most of what we try to do is debunking- saying, oh, those weird noises you’re hearing are just leaky pipes. We always try to find explanations for things, but sometimes, you find things that just can’t be explained.”
GRIM takes a scientific approach to ghost-hunting, using various technologies to detect and interact with spirits. One such item is the Spirit Box, a device that runs through different radio frequencies extremely quickly in an attempt to hear the voices of ghosts.
“[The Spirit Box] will cycle through frequencies very fast,” Hartford said. “Sometimes it’s pretty obvious that okay, this is just a radio station getting picked up, but it’s when it goes through multiple frequencies and it’s the same voice or just a completely different sort of voice that you know something is up.”
During the interview, Hartford decided to demonstrate the Spirit Box. He turned it on and asked if anyone was present in the room with him and asked their name. Besides brief noises from radio stations, it was silent- until a deep voice said “Brock.” Hartford attempted to talk to Brock with little success and turned off the Spirit Box.
Not all Spirit Box endeavors are unsuccessful, however. A woman whose father had recently died invited GRIM to her house on her late father’s birthday, hoping to communicate with him. GRIM set up the spirit box and asked her father if he knew what day it was, and a voice saying “Birthday” came through the spirit box. The woman then said that she baked a cake for him, and the same voice said “Thank you.”
“I think it was good for her to know that her dad was still there in some shape or form, you know?” GRIM member Jeff Atwood said. “She was very comforted by that, that he’s still around.”
Besides the Spirit Box, GRIM also uses an SLR camera that detects heat and maps out human forms. While the camera has to be used with discretion as it often picks up on human forms that aren’t there, it has proven fruitful for GRIM on many of their ghost-hunting endeavors.
“Once we were up in the attic at the Mill Agent’s house in Vassalboro with another lady trying to reach her father,” Hartford said. “ She said, ‘Dad, if you hear me, can you come sit down next to me?’ So we have the SLR camera hooked up to a tablet and we see this figure sit beside her on the couch, and she’s talking to her father saying, ‘I love you, dad.’ And she kind of leans into this figure and the figure leans back into her. It was a pretty powerful moment.”
GRIM also uses electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors as well as a REM pod detector, which Atwood described as being rather controversial within the ghost hunting community. The EMF detector picks up on electromagnetic energy in a room. It will often go off near walls, outlets, or light sockets, but the real tell for paranormal activity is when it goes off in the middle of a room. The REM pod also detects energy and connects said energy to different lights, allowing GRIM to potentially communicate with nearby spirits.
“[The REM pod] is a great visual and auditory thing for people,” Atwood said. “You can have it in a room away from you, and you might still want to hear it, so you can set a camera on it. Then someone who is sitting back watching the actual monitors can say, oh, by the way, the REM pod is going off.”
GRIM takes cases all over Maine, from Portland right up to the border of Canada. One of the self-proclaimed creepiest cases they ever had was in a tiny town up in Northern Maine-- so tiny, it couldn’t even technically be called a town. According to Atwood, the man who founded the town in the early 1800s brought slave labor with him, and in the harsh Maine winter over 15 slaves died.
“So now, people say it’s haunted,” Atwood said. “People say they see shadow people working like the fields, they hear the sounds of chain rattling. They hear people talking and moaning.”
GRIM traveled to the remote town alongside a psychic medium. In the middle of the night, they went out to the trails near where the slaves supposedly worked when the medium said “They’re coming; standby.”
“We separated out from the trail on both sides and felt this massive gust of energy passing through us, at the speed of a horse or buggy,” Hartford said. “Every hair on my body stood on its end. This intense amount of energy had just passed through us all. That was one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had.”
Another particularly memorable moment in GRIM’s ghost-hunting escapades occurred just a short jaunt away in Oakland, Maine. A seemingly normal family living in a nice, well-kept house was having a problem: every time the mother fought with her teenage daughter, weird things would happen. The mother described how one time as she and her daughter hashed it out in the kitchen, a pitcher flew straight off the wall and crashed into the floor.
“We believed it was poltergeist activity,” Atwood said. “A lot of people believe that poltergeist activity can happen if there’s a teenager in the home that’s causing an energy flare up.”
“Yeah, it’s not the teenagers themselves,” Hartford added. “It’s them feeding an energy that’s already attached to the house and causing trouble.”
According to Atwood and Hartford, much of the paranormal activity at the home in Oakland seemed to settle down after the daughter went to therapy, confirming their suspicions about the poltergeist. Hartford, however, wants to emphasize that clear-cut cases like these are the exception and not the rule.
“I think that sometimes people over exaggerate things,” Hartford said. “Then we go on to find a draft in the window and realize okay yeah, that’s why you feel cold at night, not a ghost. More often than not, if you hear a noise, it’s because the wind or you got mice in your walls. Most stuff can be explained.”
Self-described skeptics, the members of GRIM aren’t trying to convince anyone to believe in ghosts or spirits. To them, the unanswered questions ghost-hunting raises is the fruit of their labor.
“I don’t have any proof that there is anything out there, you know, but at the same time, there’s a lot of weird stuff that happens,” Atwood said. “And that’s what’s compelling for me, is trying to find an answer for that weird stuff or finding something that that we absolutely cannot get an answer for. That’s the thrill.”
To keep up with GRIM and their ghost-chasing, make sure to check out their Facebook page.
~ Sarah Warner `21
