WELLINGTON COUNTY – If strange bumps in the night, odd sounds or unexplained occurrences around your house have ever made you question if ghosts exist, a group of investigators from Wellington County want you to know you’re not crazy.
The members of Strange Happenings Investigators of the Paranormal (SHIP) are a group of seven Wellington County residents looking into the paranormal and spooky happenings around Wellington County and beyond.
Tony Harris is a believer. The Rockwood resident and SHIP member originally got into ghost hunting simply to satisfy his curiosity after having some experiences as a hospice volunteer.
“Everybody wants to know the ultimate question right? What is on the other side when we pass on,” Harris said.
SHIP started from members of another investigative group team based in Wellington County splintering off into a new group with a catchy acronym — those involved can also be called crew members.
The crew uses equipment often seen on ghost hunting tv shows like EMF readers to measure electromagnetic fields, spirit boxes to scan radio signals, full-spectrum cameras and sage in their work.
Harris and crew claim to have heard and seen some strange things in some reportedly haunted places around the county. Guelph and beyond.
In a group investigation at the Wellington County Museum and Archives, Harris said they captured recordings of voices of people who weren’t there including one saying “move your car Ruth” and another saying “do I like girls?”
Fergus is a very active town for the paranormal, said SHIP member Dan Hammond.
“If you Google what’s the most haunted town in Canada? Fergus comes up first,” Hammond said, listing off places the group has investigated like the museum, the Fergus Grand Theatre, the Bookery and Brew House on the Grand.
It’s not just buildings they investigate in Fergus but outdoors too such as the forest down by the Grand River near the old mill.
“We’ve been there many times, it’s haunted,” Harris said. “There were four of us sitting around and we could even hear drums.”
Hammond’s introduction to the paranormal was different from Harris as he said the house he grew up in was haunted. He had always seen paranormal investigation groups on tv but didn’t realize it was something happening locally and asked to join SHIP.
Hammond recalled an investigation at the Elora Centre for the Arts which was historically a school.
“We had a face manifest in front of Tony in the basement,” Hammond said, referring to a photo.
“Currently there’s a lot of spirits of little kids in the building and they will put their hand prints on the mirrors in one of the bathrooms. We checked the entire place before we started, noted that the mirrors were clean and when we went back a couple hours later, there was a little kid's hand print in the mirror.”
Although it does look and sound exciting on tv, Harris said investigations for the most part are pretty mundane and stressed television ghost hunting is playing up the “fear factor” to drive viewers. It also takes much longer than people would expect, according to Harris.
“For every hour of your investigation, you got about four hours of review,” Harris said, explaining this is going through audio and video recordings multiple times.
The group also looks at people’s homes if requested at no charge and confidentially. Typically it starts with a phone conversation and then a preliminary investigation usually to initially debunk or find other explanations for people’s alleged paranormal experiences.
Hammond said if people believe their home is having activity, it’s best to ignore it and not to give in to fear.
“A lot of these darker entities feed off your reactions, like if you start yelling at it, swearing at it, telling it to get out of your house, you’re just feeding it and it’s going to get worse,” Hammond said.
Hammond knows a bit about dark entities from a time a spirit followed him home from an investigation at a farmhouse in Marsville.
He claimed to have had a very strange experience of being punched by a spirit after taking a power nap.
“I was waking up or getting off the couch, I saw this hand and forearm manifest in front of me, like an older woman’s hand, and she drilled me right in the mouth,” Hammond said.
Harris said he understands and respects that there will be people who will be skeptical or outright not believe in what he does.
“Full respect, and I only ask to have full respect back,” Harris said. “But I tell people ‘when we get to the other side, don’t be surprised.’”
