ARP INVESTIGATES POLTERGEIST PHENOMENA

Polk: The Alternate Reality Project is investigating a house in Hopkins Grove supposedly beleaguered by a poltergeist. Director of the ARP, William Posey IV, thinks that this case may be instrumental in cracking the mystery of poltergeists once and for all.

     "The conditions we needed to run our experiments have never quite been right before," comments Posey, chomping on a pipe. "We needed strong evidence of poltergeist activity; appearances and disappearances of objects, objects moving about by themselves, and strange noises and or lights. Here we seem to have it all. Plus, the family involved has given us full permission to investigate the situation."

     The family in question is the Brunwald family. Mark, 26, and Heather, 25, first noticed supernatural goings-on in their house when their daughter, Elise, turned two.

     "It was right around her birthday, June 3rd of 1995," explains Heather. "Ever since then, strange things keep happening in greater and greater frequency. First it was just lights turning on and off, which I thought was just due to bad wiring. But then things started falling off of shelves, doors would slam by themselves, that sort of thing."

     "It has never been dangerous living here," continues Mark, a bespectacled freelance journalist. "In fact, we are way more fascinated than scared by what has been going on here. Elise seems genuinely thrilled when what she calls 'magic' happens."

     Posey and his team have witnessed a small portion of this phenomena, including electrical anomalies affecting the lights and television, as well as objects dropping from shelves. Physicist Randall Beecher of the ARP says that while many happenings in the house could be explained away, he feels that the massive amount of such disturbances merits research.

     The group has an extensive variety of methods they are employing to get to the root of this bizarre phenomena. Posey notes that he has checked the house's history, and that in its eighty years, it has never shown any signs of a haunting, nor has it been investigated for such.

     "What we are using here is the widest possible series of experiments to get to the root of the matter," he says. "We've got cameras, infrared cameras, spectrometers, the whole works."

     His team has also brought in devices to record any temperature changes throughout the house, compass-like devices attached to computers to record electromagnetic anomalies, and even laser scanners to try to pick up minute physical alterations in the environment,

     Posey grins as he unveils his piece de resistance. "For the first time, we are using a new synthesis of the I-Gazi drug, which we are calling I-Gazi II. It is hoped that this drug will allow us to see auras that may be emanating from the source of these phenomena. What I'm especially interested in is the possibility of heretofore unseen, but very real and natural forces."

     Believing that the bulk of the odd happenings in the house are coming from a living individual rather than a ghost, he has advised his team to focus much of their attention on Elise. Most poltergeist phenomena, he notes, is not ghostly in origin, but rather seems to be a manifestation of latent psychic power. If this is the case, Posey feels, Elise may provide more insight into the realm of psychic ability than has ever been attainable before.