Mount Clemens, Michigan - Growing up, as children, both men had an interest in some of the things that just couldn’t be explained.

Paul Chevalier, a physicist by training but a software engineer, had an interest in mysterious things but says he still couldn’t call himself “a believer.”

“I always found it as an amusing thing,” Chevalier said.

One night, when Chevalier was an adult and caring for his sick daughter, he saw something that would stretch his beliefs to accommodate the paranormal.

“I saw something that I could not explain,” he said.

Walking down the stairs he saw what he describes as a 5-foot-6-inch figure - roughly human-shaped - at the bottom of the steps. He stood and watched but when he began to approach it, it dissipated.

“There was no explanation for it being there,” Chevalier said.

Roughly 15 years later, Chevalier has teamed with Todd Hurley, a co-worker with an interest in the paranormal, in creating the Great Lakes Paranormal and Research Society as a way to research and investigate local phenomena.

“It’s something that we’re devoted to doing,” Hurley said. “We’ve both have had interest in these things - hauntings to general unexplained things.”

Beginning in 2007, the co-founders, while keeping their day jobs, have used their spare time to investigate local disturbances - a service for which they do not charge.

They strongly state that they are not clairvoyant, do not toy around with Ouija boards and are in no way associated with the occult. They use instruments and research, taking a practical approach to try to investigate sounds and other happenings, first trying to explain such occurrences.

Some, they said, were written off initially as loose floorboards or furnace noises, but have not been satisfactorily explained except by paranormal activity.

There was a recent investigation that brought them to Shelby Township and the Hurley house.

Using an electronic recorder, the pair recorded for hours inside the house and discovered over 30 EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena) that could not be simply written off.

From there, Hurley and Chevalier entered into conversations with entities in the house through an instrument called an EMF detector.

With the notion that some entity was in the basement, Hurley asked it to make the device flash. It did.

He asked it to make the device flash twice. It did.

Then he asked it to count the people in the room and yes-or-no questions, with all of which it complied.

“We proceeded with questions,” Hurley said. “Question after question, and it responded. We didn’t expect it to happen and it hasn’t since. Two different occasions, we had 20-minute conversations with it.”

Following an investigation, if it does yield some sort of paranormal activity, the decision lies in the hands of the customer.

Hurley and Chevalier say that many just wish to validate that there is in fact something there, a reason for previously unexplained activities. But if they should wish to get rid of it, then steps can be taken.

They first suggest forcefully asking it to leave - something with which the pair will assist and say has a great success rate - but if that should fail, a clairvoyant or clergy could be brought in.

To anyone interested, the pair can be contacted through their website, where those interested can view write-ups of previous investigations, as well as view other society members and equipment.

“Our approach is to be as professional as we can,” Hurley said.

“There are groups out there that just go by their feelings and go in with the assumption that the place is haunted. We go in thinking it’s not and try to prove it.” - Dave Jones