The Florence Ghost Finders
A Nevada woman, Meghan Hines, just wants to help people who are having problems with the supernatural.
by Mark Cowling
When Meghan Hines was growing up in Northern Nevada, paranormal experiences were commonplace. One night, sitting in the living room with other family members, her CDs were swept off the table by some unseen force. “And we just kind of looked at each other. It just happened so frequently that we would just automatically go, ‘OK hi, how are you?’”
Meghan and her two older brothers were told they probably shouldn’t share these experiences outside the walls of their own home. “‘They’ll lock you up; they’ll think you’re crazy.’ So for a long time I just kept that inside.”
Then in January of last year, Meghan was hit by a car. The injuries were bad enough to end her law enforcement career and her training in mixed martial arts. Not long afterward the wife and mother of three was bored and sitting in her Queen Creek home, and did an Internet search for “paranormal.” That led her to universalclass.com and a course in paranormal investigation.
“I had been doing research on my own, trying to figure out why it had been happening to me for years.” The course taught her not so much how to do investigations, but what is paranormal and what isn’t.
“That was really important to me. I know how scared and confused I was, and thinking I was crazy. Thinking I needed to go see somebody because obviously this wasn’t right. After feeling that way, I wanted to help people. I want to prove that this stuff does happen because I know in my heart it does. I’ve seen it.”
In February of this year, Meghan, 27, started Dirty South Ghost Hunters. Her husband, Curtis, 32, is a member, and the name Dirty South is also the name of their mixed martial arts gym at the Copper Basin YMCA. The group has a total of five members and they’re working on recruiting a sixth. The group wants to be of service, whether it’s to unseen entities, living people, or both.
“If we can help the entities out, as well as the people who are like, ‘I can’t even sleep at night; this is just driving me crazy.’ If we can help those people out, that is so fulfilling to me, because I never had that,” Meghan said.
Whenever possible, the group tries to provide natural explanations for what people may be experiencing. “It could be something as simple as a tree branch scraping against your window,” Curtis said.
He said some people see paranormal activity going on around them but are afraid of what others might think if they tell anyone or ask for help.
Meghan said, “If we can show them, ‘OK, this is just your doors, or this is what happens when the humidity rises’ and what not. Or we go and say, ‘Listen, this is what’s in your home.’ If I feel threatened by it , I have to let them know. But if I’m not threatened by it, ‘Can you live with this being in your home?’”
Group member Missy Nicholson of Florence said she has lots of “deja vu” experiences - something happens and it feels like it isn’t the first time. She also feels the presence of her mother, who died 10 years ago, guiding her to the right decisions. She also senses her younger sister, who she lost a year ago, isn’t completely at rest.
“Being around people who have a connection and feel like I do will help me to have closure with my sister,” Missy said.
Meghan said she wants the group to “help people understand what it is they’re dealing with.”
If the resident wants it out of the house, Dirty South calls someone else in. “Because I don’t personally do that; I don’t get rid of ghosts,” Meghan said.
Curtis says he’s a big skeptic. “It’s not necessarily that I don’t believe what you’re telling me is true, but for me to be able to help you I have to be able to see or hear it for myself, to better understand it. I’ve done a lot of studying because I am intrigued by this kind of stuff.”
He’s always trying to find a natural cause for what someone is experiencing, Meghan said. “But even him ... there have been times he can’t say it’s a ghost and he can’t say it’s not. It’s just there and we’re out there scratching our heads saying ‘All right. What was that?’ And that just makes us want to investigate it more.”
Meghan and Curtis said they love meeting people and learning about local history. To date they’ve done seven investigations. “Most have been in Florence because we just can’t get enough of it,” Meghan said. They’re hoping to next investigate the second Pinal County Courthouse and Gibby’s Cantina.
Florence Cemetery
Meghan, Curtis, and Missy investigated the Florence Cemetery on the night of March 22.
Meghan said it was a beautiful cemetery and Morris Taylor, with the town Public Works Department, was “just awesome” with his assistance to the group. “But I will not be back to (further) investigate.”
She couldn’t shake the feeling that something didn’t want her to be there. However, “Curtis laughs because he’s such a skeptic and he never felt anything,” she said.
It was a full moon, and Meghan saw shadows moving that weren’t supposed to be moving. “You could only see it out of your peripheral vision but as soon as you looked there was nothing there.”
Curtis sat on a bench and started doing an EVP session - asking questions to see if a spirit might favor them with an “electronic voice phenomenon” on any of their digital voice recorders.
Meghan could hear what sounded like something being drug on the dirt road. She and Missy also felt several cold spots in the cemetery.
A couple of times Meghan and Missy would be walking, they’d stop and hear the scraping of another set of footsteps behind them stop as well. “We’d turn around and Curtis is way out there. Nowhere near us,” Meghan said.
Missy eventually left and sat down by the road. “She said she just didn’t feel right.”
Missy said this week she was feeling “just really overwhelmed, kind of anxious” at that time. She said it was a feeling of “you need to go, you’re not welcome.”
Meghan said she asked her if she was ready to go. “Then there was suddenly a horrible stench. I have smelled decomposing bodies. It was way worse than any decomposing body I’ve ever been in contact with,” Meghan said.
“We both got the feeling we needed to get out of that area.”
Meanwhile, Curtis said, “I got absolutely nothing while I was there. I walked that whole cemetery.”
Despite the first impression, Missy said this week she wouldn’t mind going back. “It really fascinated me.”
One of Meghan’s photos of the Florence Cemetery shows a mist, and “everyone we’ve talked to can point out a face in the mist.
“I cannot go back there at night. I’ll go back there in the daytime, it doesn’t bother me.” What she experienced, “I can’t say it was malevolent, but it didn’t want me there. And I didn’t fight it. If you don’t want me there, I will leave.”
“I’ll probably stay,” Curtis added with a smile, although he realizes there are some bad spirits out there.
“There are some energies that are evil energies. ... In no way, shape or form are we trying to hunt demons. That’s way above what we’re certified or classified to do,” he said. But by far the majority of the entities the group encounters don’t mean any harm, he said.
Meghan has had “a few bad situations” where she was shoved by something unseen. But generally 90 percent of them have been good. “They want to say hi. Or they haven’t quite found a way to go to the light yet. Or they’re not aware that they’re even dead.”
Not all cemeteries make Meghan feel unwelcome. “I’m just in love with Adamsville Cemetery.”
At first, she wanted to go just because she was interested in the history of Adamsville, whether there was anything paranormal there or not.
In a total lights-out investigation, “We got everything from little orbs to a snaky mist,” and “that weird orange-ish glow, which looks like a swipe across the picture.
“When we do our pictures, we make sure we are conscientious about where our fingers are. Our hair is always tied back, so hair doesn’t hang down and give you a false positive.”
Curtis added, “An orb is considered a ball of energy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an entity or a ghost. An orb can be many different things.”
Meghan continued, “There are so many mixed opinions about orbs it’s really, really hard to prove that an orb is paranormal in nature. Generally what you’re looking for in an orb is a perfectly round ball that emits its own light and follows its own path.” But even that’s no guarantee you have something. “Sometimes bugs give off that same effect.
“If it’s translucent, it’s generally dust or moisture.”
Silver King Hotel
On April 5 at the Silver King Hotel, the group recorded what Curtis considers “by far the most convincing evidence I’ve seen so far.” The group set up its recording equipment with Bonnie Bariola, a member of the Florence Preservation Foundation which owns the building.
Curtis set up a voice recorder with a microphone upstairs and let it run for 3 1/2 hours. When they were playing the tape back, they were startled to hear a woman’s voice loudly whisper “Yes!” as if she were standing over the microphone.
Meghan’s voice could be faintly heard downstairs. The question was then to see if the mysterious voice was in response to anything Meghan was asking.
“I made Meghan amplify that several times because I wanted to hear what she was saying downstairs. ... I wanted to know if she was asking a question or making a statement,” Curtis said.
Meghan added, “It was so important to figure out what I had said, because you have a couple of different types of entities, residual and intelligent. Residual is basically the past playing itself over and over like a tape recorder. The entities have no idea you’re there. Intelligent means the entity knows you’re there, knows exactly what you’re doing and is trying to communicate with you to get its point across. That’s why it was important to know if it was answering a question I had asked or (simply saying) ‘Yes, I’d like another drink, sir.’
With more amplification, Meghan was heard to ask, “Is there anybody here with us right now?”
Another EVP captured that night was the voice of a little boy saying “Mommy” at two different times.
“And then there’s a weird - it kind of sounds evil, it creeps me out - an evil laugh,” Meghan said.
Curtis said someone turned off a camera that he specifically recalls turning on. “How it got turned off, I don’t know.” The motion detector, across the room, went off a couple of times. There was no one there. “We could not debunk it ourselves,” Meghan said.
“The theory is that entities drain energy from whatever they can to manifest themselves,” she continued. “The biggest problem we have is battery drain. We go through so many batteries. We always start an investigation with new batteries in everything.” They were in the Silver King five minutes and her camera battery was dead, she said. She and Curtis said It’s not a problem with the camera, which they use all the time.
The Dirty South team takes a variety of equipment on investigations - night vision cameras, night vision goggles, electromagnetic field (EMF) readers, digital thermometers, infrared cameras, motion sensors, digital voice recorders, still cameras and video cameras.
An electromagnetic field might show the presence of a spirit; or it might only indicate an electrical source.
“EMF sweeps are the first thing we do in a building,” Meghan said.
If there are extremely high EMF readings from electrical sources in a house, the side effects can be paranoia, the feeling of being watched, nausea, and hearing things, Meghan said. “It’s not paranormal, it’s actually because whatever that device is is emitting a very high EMF reading. That’s also one of the things we use to debunk as well.”
When an entity is real, it can bond itself to an object, a place or a person, Curtis said.
“You could have a house that’s not haunted at all. Go to a garage sale, buy an antique desk, put it in your home, and all of a sudden your house is haunted. Weird stuff starts happening,” Meghan said.
“ ... If they’re bonded to a person, we usually call that an ancestral spirit; it’s one who follows you around. Personally, I have one,” Meghan said.
They’re not yet personally acquainted with the other investigating group in Queen Creek, the East Valley Paranormal Society.
“We’re all going for the same cause,” Meghan said. “We’re not out to compete with each other. Even though some of our beliefs and our thoughts may vary, we’re still looking for the same thing. And it’s really good that we have other groups. ... we can always go over evidence together to find out what we’ve got.
“Because of my accident, I can’t do law enforcement any more, I can’t do mixed martial arts anymore,” Meghan said. “It’s hard enough for me to just to try and walk up stairs or do a whole investigation.
“Thankfully, 90 percent of this hobby is just sitting there and listening.”
