Hunting ghosts in East Bakersfield from Bakersfield Express on Vimeo.

By Louis Medina

To find ghosts, one needs to have a measure of the very same stuff that allows one to find God: faith.

One definition of faith, as found in the Bible, is that it is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen

Although it would be difficult to find someone claiming to have seen God physically, it’s not hard to find people who believe in him. This can be due to the grandeur and beauty of nature, the moral compass of one’s conscience, the ability to conceive of abstract concepts such as infinity, eternity and an afterlife, the innocence of children, the teachings about God in holy texts, and many other experiences familiar to humankind.

Likewise, finding someone claiming to have seen ghosts or other forms of supernatural phenomena is rare; not so finding those who can entertain the possibility of ghosts’ existence. This is because of stories they’ve heard, read, or seen in movies or television, personal anecdotes from people claiming to have had spectral encounters, unexplained paranormal phenomena like doors that close or objects that move by themselves, or subjective feelings of energy or a presence inhabiting a place that cannot be attributed to a living being.

Modern-day ghost hunters, like Bakersfield local Todd Norton and his team, Ethical Paranormal Investigations of California (EPIC), start out with the faith that they will find ghosts — in a home, a business or any other place ghosts are believed to inhabit. But their faith is energized by science. They go on ghost hunts armed not only with the intuition and sensitivity of the more spiritual among them who claim to be more adept at sensing the presence of ghosts, but also with instruments such as electromagnetic field readers, temperature gauges, sound recorders and video cameras with infrared technology. Using this gadgetry, they strive to gather objective scientific evidence that might prove to those without faith that ghosts do exist.

I went on such a ghost hunt this spring with the EPIC team. It was held at Jackie’s Magical Treasures on Jackson Street in Old Town Kern. During a psychic faire that took place in early April, store owner Jacqueline Perez and Norton invited Bakersfield Express to a ghost hunt.

I was nervous the weeks leading up to the experience. I had heard from the store’s previous owner, Katie Olivares, who ran The Metaphysical Marketplace out of the same retail space, that the store was haunted. Olivares said she sometimes sensed a presence there — like she was being watched. Having been raised in the Christian tradition (although as an adult I have found myself espousing or appreciating some of the spiritual teachings of other belief systems), I thought I might be doing something wrong by going out to try to find ghosts.

What if ghosts were really evil spirits? What if I opened myself up to a harmful spiritual influence? These were the types of questions going through my head. But I set them all aside for the sake of journalistic curiosity. Here was a potentially riveting story. I simply had to explore and write.

I was one of 18 people participating on the ghost hunt that night. Many were members of the local pagan community who are shop customers and quite at home participating in witchcraft and other mystical activities. As a spiritual precaution, many of us were “saged” by having a burning bundle of the aromatic herb passed over our body for protection as we stood with arms outstretched.

“You don’t have a lot of negativity in you. You’re already pretty clean,” I was told by one of the people taking turns saging the others.

Amber Allen, a regular ghost hunter, was playing it really safe, not only getting saged but also wearing plenty of amulets to ward off anything harmful. Mirrored jewelry to reflect negativity, jasper and malachite for protection and grounding (“It sort of keeps me calm,” she said), moonstone to help her communicate with spirits, and amethyst for psychic intuitions.

After the cleansing, Norton gave some no-nonsense directions to follow during the hunt: “Don’t wander off by yourself.” Not only could that compromise our physical safety because we would be moving in the dark and could trip, he said, but, “You can’t prove an apparition unless someone is with you.” Also, “Don’t whisper,” he said, because whispers could be picked up by the tape recorders placed in different locations throughout the store and be confused with ghost whispers.

We would be watching for different possible manifestations, he told us: changes in temperature, phantom smells, paranormal voice phenomena, electromagnetic readings. Everyone listened intently and then broke up into three groups of six who would take turns. One group would try to contact ghosts inside the store as the other two waited in the large yard behind the business.

My more experienced group members would call out to the spirits with invitations such as, “We mean no harm. We just want to communicate with you.”

Many feelings swept over me that night as I participated in each ghost hunt: expectation, apprehension, a genuine desire to believe whenever doubt set in. I’ll describe the most exciting part of the evening:

During one of the ghost hunts, a tarot card reader and witch named Sandy all of a sudden started shivering.

“I have to sit down,” she said, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily but refusing a chair someone brought over to her, preferring to plop down on the floor. She was clearly in some sort of distress — like a receptive antenna or radar dish that is overloaded with a supercharged beam or wave.

She rested for a while and slowly got up after Norton said we would move over to the next room in the store.

Earlier, someone had said they felt the presence of a ghost named Pete. As soon as Sandy got up, she doubled over, seemingly in pain, held her right hip and said as she panted, “His name is not Pete. It’s Piet. He’s Basque. And he got hurt when he was thrown off a horse.”

Sandy had read the cards for me more than a year before and been spot on. I trusted her spiritual intuition and interpreted her actions as clear manifestations that an important liaison had been achieved between our world and the spirit world we were trying to contact.

At that moment, I knew I believed in Piet. Don’t ask me why, I just did — even though I couldn’t be sure then, and am even less sure now that I’ve done some research, whether a Basque would be named Piet. In fact, it appears to be Dutch for Peter.

As soon as we walked into the other part of the shop, I felt my hands get cold. However, a temperature reading showed them to be actually warmer than the rest of my body.

At that moment, a deep desire to communicate with Piet came over me and I honestly thought I could help our group to reach him. I suggested talking to him in Spanish — never mind that he could have been French Basque and not a Spanish speaker. In my heart, I knew that Piet was reaching out to us and that if I could help to communicate with him, I simply had to try.

But whereas suggesting that we try to speak to Piet in Spanish was easy for me, a native speaker, trying to think of what to ask a total stranger who had lived in another time was — well, let’s just say I couldn’t think of anything to say.

Sandy suggested we use one of Perez’s pendulums. I held out my left hand, palm up, over one of the store’s glass counters. Below the glass I could see the shiny orb of a crystal ball that was on display. The questions we asked the ghost were yes-or-no, and Sandy told me to pay attention to the direction of the affirmative and negative swings of the pendulum once we had established “yes” with simple questions like “Is your name Piet?”

I did think to ask him whether he had any living relatives. Piet answered no. His loneliness was what seemed to be the greatest thorn on his side. He wanted to be allowed into Jackie’s store, he said, but some “guardians” were keeping him out. We asked him if he wished ill toward Perez. “No” the pendulum swung. Perez said she’d think about whether to let him in the store. (She also later confirmed that the guardians Piet had referred to had not been placed there by her, but possibly by a previous owner. They were likely friendly spirits whose role was to keep evil away.)

And that was basically the end of our interaction with Piet the Basque ghost. It was quick, straightforward, and riveting. Later, at the end of the night, one of the girls who had participated went up to Sandy and, with tears in her eyes and her voice breaking, told her she had felt Piet’s loneliness.

So here I was, witnessing a moment of compassion from someone who in another time and place could have been burned at the stake or drowned for simply wanting to hear what the dead had to say. I realized that the same thing could have happened to me as well in the same context. And to Sandy. And to Perez. And to Norton and everyone else who was there that night.

Fortunately, our place, time and fate were more benevolent.

In the end, I thought what really mattered was this: that a small group of people had, for a short while on an innocuous Saturday night in Bakersfield, met a dead Basque man named Piet, who had been somewhat crippled in life after taking a fall off a horse and was feeling very much alone in death, and that these same people had taken the time to listen and talk to him and try to ease his pain.

It was the best expression of humanity extended, ironically, to someone who couldn’t even be seen. There was something good and holy about that — an experience that carried the blessing of faith to all those who, as the Bible says, have not seen and yet have believed.