Local ghost sleuth hits airwaves Sunday night

Any radio can play the Grateful Dead, but it’s another matter to transmit the voices of the merely deceased. That takes a bit of work on the radio with a wire cutter, maybe a pair of pliers, and - the skeptic might argue - a leap of faith.

Jenny Stewart of Mount Airy [Maryland, USA], founder and head of the Paranormal Research and Resource Society, said she’s done it many times, hearing and recording the dead speak through a $25 Radio Shack AM-FM digital radio modified to turn it into a device known in her field as a “ghost box.” Sometimes she and other witnesses claim to hear the dead saying people’s names, or cursing, or forecasting events.

The predictions on one occasion were striking enough to get the attention of producers of “The Haunted,” a new series offered by the Animal Planet network. The hour-long episode to appear tonight at 10, “The Ghost Box Prophecies,” is based on an investigation that Stewart’s small group conducted last year at a home in Waldorf.

Voices from the “ghost box” were said to have made predictions that night, which just happened to be Halloween. Later, Stewart said, things happened.

“That was the most intense ‘ghost box’ session I’ve ever held,” said Stewart. “I’ve done hundreds of them.”

She formed the PRRS only two years ago but has been seeking evidence of the supernatural for about 16 of her 40 years, having been taken with the idea when she was a little girl growing up in a religious southern Indiana household. As many children do, she wondered about heaven and hell and what happens when people die.

Stewart doesn’t claim to know exactly what happens, and she recommends extreme skepticism about anyone who claims to be an “expert” on the supernatural or paranormal. What she claims she has found over the years is reason to believe that the dead do not necessarily rest in peace.

She and members of her group - now numbering five, including herself and three family members - claim to have observed their stirrings in any number of ways over the years: shadowy apparitions confronted during an investigation, faces in windows or balls of light visible only later in photographs, voices of ominous portent from a battery-operated radio.  Read Article

By Arthur Hirsch