Supernatural sleuths get the goods on ghosts - #lakewoodnews

Even when she was by herself, Luana Kurz always knew she really wasn't.

"I never felt alone at nighttime," she said.

As a child Kurz didn't want to believe in ghosts, despite mounting evidence that her family shared their home with other, invisible tenants.

Candles blew out on their own. Cabinet doors, closed when the family went to bed, were open in the morning. Lying in bed one night when she was 17, Kurz received a visit from her grandfather.

"I was lying on my side, I couldn't move, and I felt cold," Kurz said. "I felt a hand patting me, and I looked down and saw his hand, and I just felt his peace." She remained in bed, motionless, until her father knocked on her door.

"About an hour later, the phone rang and my father came to my room," Kurz said. "He said `I just want to tell you that your grandpa died about an hour ago.' "

Englewood resident Michelle Mayer always had a feeling her childhood home in Rochester, New York, was haunted, but her parents wouldn't talk about her suspicions.

When she moved to her own apartment in 1987, she didn't suspect there were ghosts in the building. She knew.

Lights turned themselves on and off. The phone rang spontaneously. She watched plates float around her kitchen.

"I'd be cooking and the dish I was about to put the food on would move from one side of the sink to the other," Mayer, 45, said.

At 10 years old in Michigan, LeeAnna Jonas and two friends played with a Ouija board, hoping for a spooky thrill. They ended up screaming and running from the basement.

"We all looked up and saw an apparition of a woman sitting in a rocking chair, with a baby in one arm and a knife in her other hand," the 54-year-old Littleton resident said.

"I always knew it was there," Jonas said. "I just didn't know how to find out for sure."

Now she knows.

Jonas, Mayer and Kurz all spend their nights probing the noises, apparitions and other unexplained phenomena that keep others up at night. They offer their services for free, to maintain objectivity and propriety.

"It's kind of unethical to have a scared homeowner and charge them for your help," Kurz said.

"We're out there to learn, we're out there to help," Jonas added. "The living and the dead."

'They reach out to you'

Kurz, 40, leads Colorado Shadow Investigations, a team of 10 to 12 people who feel connected to the afterlife and look for traces of it in the metro area.

The team has performed approximately 200 investigations since its 2010 inception, relying on a combination of intuition and technology. The goal, Kurz said, is research rather than finding hard proof.

"When I started out I just wanted to find that one piece of evidence, to prove it to the scientific community," Kurz said, but the more she looked for evidence, the more elusive it became.

"You can't repeat results like you do with scientific research," she said. "You can't make an apparition walk the same way down a hallway."

As she got more seasoned, Kurz relied less on her tools than her senses. After more than 200 cases, she said her abilities have sharpened to the point that she can see, smell and hear ghosts, as well as sense their moods. She said the spirits she meets are almost always playful and positive.

"Eventually I learned to open up," she said. "When they know you can communicate, they reach out to you."

"Reaching out" has never been a problem for Jonas, who says she and her partners at Spirit Realm Investigative Project "always find something" on the 50-plus investigations they've conducted.

A bigger problem, she said, is getting a ghost to back off.

On her first investigation with partner Lolli Hughes, the duo explored a historic warehouse in Central City. The building's original owner was reputed to have traveled to Haiti to dabble in voodoo in the early 1900s. Jonas said he brought something back with him, something that attacked Hughes.

"She said it felt like something was squeezing her spine," Jonas said. "We had to get her out of the building as soon as possible."

Like Kurz, Mayer said she's performed more than 200 investigations, but hasn't had any violent interactions with spirits.

"I haven't had any that were what I'd call scary. Creepy, I'd say maybe 1 percent. Grumpy, which I define as having an attitude but harmless, I'd say about 20 percent," she said. "The only time I've ever screamed was in Ca on City."

Mayer and her team, Full Moon Explorations, were touring the former women's prison, notorious for the restless spirits of former inmates. Wrapping things up for the night, she picked up her laptop.

"There was a cockroach about four inches long under it," she said.

Opening minds, not changing them

Mayer welcomes skeptics to accompany her group on investigations. She lets them use audio recorders and cameras she provides so they know the information hasn't been manipulated. Still, she says, not everyone can be convinced that spirits walk among them.

"I won't say we've turned a lot of skeptics into believers," Mayer said, "but maybe we've opened their minds up."

The peaceful connection Kurz feels to the afterlife is reason enough to continue her work. Whatever others think of it, she said, isn't her concern.

"For me, this has opened up another world," Kurz said. "I don't worry about other people's opinions."

All three women added that while they are happy to share their findings, convincing skeptics isn't part of the job.

They leave that to others.

"They won't believe it," Jonas said, "until it happens to them."

from Lakewood Sentinel - Latest Stories http://lakewoodsentinel.com/stories/Supernatural-sleuths-get-the-goods-on-ghosts,237410