WILKES-BARRE - For sale: Two-story single family home on South Welles Street, complete with washer, dryer, kitchen appliances - and ghosts.

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Stacey Evans and her husband, Matt, are trying to sell her mother's house, but they're afraid its long-standing reputation as haunted might hinder the sale.

 

Enter investigators from nonprofit, Luzerne County based Deadline Paranormal to find out for sure.On Sunday evening the house at 46 S. Welles St. swarmed with human activity as investigators placed cameras, recorders and assorted other electronic devices throughout both floors and the basement in order to check for paranormal activity. Jim Fazzi and Tony Piontkowski, the veteran law enforcement officers who co-founded Deadline Paranormal, say the house dates back to the Civil War era and has a history of unexplained phenomena.

 

Their goal is to rule out things with simple explanations and look further into those without them.The house was built around 1860 by Augustus C. Lanning - "He's the guy they think might be here," Fazzi said, noting that one of the residents saw an apparition of a well-dressed man knocking on the door. In the 1940s and 1950s there were two suicides in the house, Fazzi said. He said since the 1970s, residents have seen apparitions including that of blood on the walls and floors; heard shrieks, moans, roaring noises, crashing sounds in the kitchen and scratching in the walls; and smelled an odor of decay. A resident allegedly found possible signs of voodoo: a tin containing a molar and chicken bones tied in the shape of a cross with a red ribbon. The curving stairway up to the second floor seemed to be a focal point, Fazzi said. One story he heard was that of an infant who fell from its mother's arms, but instead of dropping down the stairs "wafted down gently." "Basically, we think the house is active in the haunted way. It could be hexed, it could be something from the suicides hanging around," Fazzi said.

 

Stacey Evans thinks one of the haunts is her mother Katherine - also known as Kaye - Watkins, who died on Oct. 26, 2012. Watkins' sister Judy Benson said the house was documented as haunted before Watkins bought it in 1980 - for cheap because of its reputation. But she agrees with her niece Stacey. "She never wanted to leave this house, really, so she's probably still there," Benson said of her sister. "I believe she's there. She needs to move on and she doesn't want to move on. She has unfinished business." The Evanses live in Whitehall and Stacey's brother Mark Watkins lives in Florida, so they have across-the-street neighbor Betsy Summers take care of the place and feed Watkins' two cats while it's up for sale."Betsy's a saint," Stacey Evans declared. The Evanses tried Craigslist, but didn't get any serious offers for the house, so they just listed it with a real estate agent, Matt Evans said. Members of Deadline Paranormal planned to spend most of Sunday night in the house, using conventional devices including cameras and digital recorders along with more specialized equipment like thermal imaging cameras, a REM pod that allows communication, and electromagnetic pumps that create energy for apparitions to draw from. "We don't really look for orbs or anything like that. We kind of look for more proof than that," Fazzi said. "We look for the disembodied voices, EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) or full-body apparitions, which we have caught from time to time." Preston A DeadLine team member wielded a Mel Meter, which detects electromagnetic fields and related changes in the environment. He announced a 3.5 spike in the living room, by the table, but it dropped back to 0. "There you go. That's a strange occurrence," Fazzi said. He explained that if the Mel Meter starts "spiking up to 3, 4, 5 and it's just all over the place, then we've got to look further into what's causing that." On the steps, Adam Michaels used a thermal imaging FLIR camera but didn't find anything of note - at least with people standing around. It could be days, or even weeks, before Deadline Paranormal members complete their investigation and make a determination. But before they were even finished setting up the monitoring equipment on the back porch, the investigators got a hit. They flocked around a screen Preston held, which showed video taken by a camera set up in the basement. An elongated white object, something like an electric eel, floated through the darkness and flitted away.

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Stacey figured her mother didn't like all the strangers invading her house."If my mom was in her grave, she'd be rolling over," she said.

 

(All Credit Given To)

By Elizabeth Skrapits (Staff Writer)

eskrapits@citizensvoice.com, 

570-821-2072

 

WILKES-BARRE - Shadowy figures, mysterious balls of light, disembodied voices and ghostly hands that reach out of nowhere are par for the course on Halloween. At 46 S. Welles St., they're a year-round occurrence. When Katherine "Kaye" Watkins died Oct. 26, 2012, her daughter Stacey Evans inherited the house in Wilkes-Barre's Heights section. Evans and her husband Matt wanted to put the house up for sale, but there was a problem - it had a reputation for being haunted. Enter a local group of ghost chasers to find out whether the crashing, scratching, moaning and other otherworldly noises and apparitions were real. Deadline Paranormal members performed an intensive investigation on Aug. 4. They used regular cameras and digital recorders along with more specialized equipment such as thermal imaging cameras, Mel Meters, which detect electromagnetic fields, and an REM pod to allow communication.Their verdict: The house is haunted, all right.

 

Tony Piontkowski and Jim Fazzi, veteran law enforcement officers, decided to form the nonprofit Deadline Paranormal after they got to talking at work about their mutual interest in and experiences with the subject. They have investigated numerous sites in and around Northeastern Pennsylvania, including the Forty Fort borough building and the Hollenback Cemetery, so they're no strangers to the unearthly and unexplained.

 

However, their experiences at 46 S. Welles St. were out of this world. Lights, cameras, action

Fazzi said the investigation "actually took us way longer than we expected," because two computers died during the investigation. The basement in particular was a hot spot. Videos shot there show all kinds of apparent paranormal activity, including what looks like a ribbon of light that twists and turns through the air. "We don't really know what it is. It's just some kind of manifestation of energy," Fazzi said. "No bugs move that fast. "Piontkowski pointed out that at one point a shadowy figure can be seen going up the basement steps. Then there was the incident with the Raggedy Ann doll. Piontkowski said it was set up on a step stool with a non-skid rubber top, so there was no way it could have moved on its own. But it did. "It moved a good inch and a half, two inches," Piontkowski said.

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Deadline Paranormal member Chris Mercavitch took two cameras, one full-spectrum and one regular, and set them side-by-side in the basement. All of a sudden, what looked like a ball of light went in front of the screen of the full-spectrum camera; the standard camera didn't capture it, he said. The ball of light moved up and down "like a bee," then it came toward Mercavitch as he snapped picture after picture for a good 23 seconds, he estimates. He'd never captured one like that in his 20-odd years of taking pictures. Then, "Just like that, it disappeared. It didn't shoot off the screen. It just went out," he said. Mercavitch wanted to see if it would come back - but his camera batteries died. They were new, too. There were also audio anomalies. Fazzi said the group captured several of what are called Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVPs. And this time they got something unexpected. One of the recordings, when played backwards, was "Mommy." "It sounds like a child asking for mommy or searching for mommy," Fazzi said. Demons come forward in the guise of something innocent, and they speak either in code or backwards, he said. "It's a first for us, because we never dealt with a demonic presence like that," Fazzi said.

 

The investigators also had up-close-and-personal experiences. Fazzi was sitting at the kitchen table when "The side of my shirt was pulled - it was kind of pulled, and I had a real staticky feeling under my shirt." Piontkowski said he saw two shadowy figures in the kitchen area and when he called in another investigator, they appeared again in the doorway. Still hanging around? Evans speculates her mother might be among the presences at 46 S. Welles St.

Since at least the 1970s, strange phenomena have been witnessed in the house, including phantom footsteps, dishes crashing, doors opening, scratching in the walls and apparitions of blood on the walls and floors.

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When Watkins lived in the house, there were also plenty of odd occurrences, such as the microwave turning itself on, Evans said. But they didn't bother Watkins. She liked her home so much she wanted to die there, rather than passing away of natural causes in the Evans' Lehigh Valley home. "She was not happy," Evans said. "She wanted to be in her own house." 

 

More scientific equipment In order to more scientifically investigate paranormal phenomena like those at 46 S. Welles St., Mercavitch, Fazzi and Piontkowski are working on new equipment. They are creating a box they will experiment with, that has different receptors and devices that will allow them to read things such as rising or dropping barometric pressure, temperature and other changes in the atmosphere. Paranormal investigation is not really considered a science yet because there aren't enough tools to gauge things, Fazzi said. That's why they're building the equipment - "so we can say scientifically we've captured an experience.""There will always be a skeptic. Then you're going to have the know-it-alls," Fazzi said. "But no one knows everything, and you can't explain everything, either."

 

 

(all credit given to )

By Elizabeth Skrapits (Staff Writer)

eskrapits@citizensvoice.com