Spirits in residence

By Matt Breslow

Staff Writer

October 7, 2006

NORWALK — Afterlife may be imitating art at the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum.

More than 30 years after the landmark appeared in the vampire movies “House of Dark Shadows” and “Night of Dark Shadows,” paranormal investigators reported finding spirits last month at the historic mansion.

But that doesn’t mean the Second Empire-style country house is haunted.

Haunting involves spirits upsetting and bothering people, said Christine Kaczynski, who runs Connecticut Paranormal Research and Investigations.

“There’s no haunting at Lockwood,” said Kaczynski, whose team visited the mansion Sept. 18. “Nobody’s ever upset. Nobody’s being harassed or bothered.”

She took a series of photographs showing phenomena such as a glowing orb and “psychic fog,” darkness that obscures the background, she said. Kaczynski said the orb stage precedes a psychic fog as a spirit moves toward manifestation.

The photos were blown up and put on display as a new feature of the Lockwood-Mathews tour. On Halloween night, visitors can take a candlelight “ghost tour” at the mansion.

Observers said the paranormal images photographed last month could not be seen with the naked eye.

Standing on a balcony inside the museum, Executive Director Marjorie St. Aubyn recently pointed out a large section of darkness in a photo of the area, displayed on an easel. The “fog” obscured a doorway and much of a portrait of LeGrand Lockwood on the wall.

“You only saw that in the camera,” St. Aubyn said.

She recalled that during the investigators’ visit, Kaczynski said LeGrand Lockwood almost seemed to be standing on the balcony, surveying his house.

Lockwood, a banking and railroad tycoon, had the mansion built in 1868 and died four years later.

Kaczynski believes the spirits of LeGrand Lockwood and his wife continue living at the home. The couple don’t want to move on to the “complete afterlife” yet, she said.

“They were happy there, and that’s where they want to stay,” Kaczynski said.

A report she wrote on her team’s findings states that spirits living at the home “are benign in nature and cause no disruption to those at the mansion.”

“They’re friendly ghosts,” said Jon Walker, program director at Lockwood-Mathews.

Walker described bizarre occurrences he and others have experienced at the 62-room mansion. About a week after he arrived several months ago, Walker said he was in the private archives room on the mansion’s third floor and heard giggling. Thinking other staff members were playing a trick, Walker stepped into the hallway.

He said he re-entered the archives room, heard giggling again and saw an object that had previously sat in a hallway across from a third-floor children’s room.

“It was a baby stroller with . . . little baby dolls in it,” Walker said. “It had been moved.”

Another time, he was standing in the Moorish Room on the second floor with the doors closed. When a voice from behind asked what he was looking at, Walker began to answer and turned to face the speaker, he recalled.

It was LeGrand Lockwood, wearing a long-coat tuxedo and top hat, Walker said. He said children wearing Victorian clothing have been spotted on the grass field outside the mansion’s Music Room, where someone has seen a chandelier sway.

Connecticut Paranormal Research and Investigations is a self-funded group whose members hold day jobs in fields such as law, computers and engineering, Kaczynski said. She owns an electrical engineering firm in East Haven and said she’s spent 35 years investigating the paranormal.

Five investigators visited the mansion from about noon to 5:30 p.m. Sept. 18. They brought equipment including cameras, electromagnetic-field detectors and a tri-field meter, which registers natural energy fields, Kaczynski said.

The group donated its services and photographs after Kaczynski called the museum, asking to test the validity of rumors of paranormal activity. The same outfit reported finding spirits on Sheffield Island in July.

In the mansion rotunda, Kaczynski said she felt the presence of someone standing, looking over the second-floor balcony. She looked up, saw no one and decided to concentrate on that area.

At 1:08 p.m., Kaczynski reported recording a 10-degree temperature drop while standing in a second-floor bedroom. A supernatural entity can make areas cold because it takes in a lot of heat and energy when it manifests, she said.

An EMF meter registered a red reading, which is the highest, Kaczynski said. That’s when she took seven photographs which, she said, capture paranormal phenomena.

“It was a spike in paranormal activity, and we happened to be fortunate enough to catch it,” Kaczynski said.

Dr. Steven Novella, president of the nonprofit New England Skeptical Society, said the account of the Lockwood-Mathews visit is an “absolutely typical story” for a ghost-hunting group.

The society’s Web site states it is “dedicated to the promotion of science and reason, the investigation of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims . . . improved standards of education for science and critical thinking skills.”

Novella, a physician at Yale-New Haven Hospital, said ghost-hunting groups skip many steps in the scientific process. There’s never been a blind or controlled study performed to try to validate their methods, he said.

The groups look for anomalies and believe fluctuations are evidence of ghosts, but there’s no reason to draw that conclusion, Novella said. “They’re just anomaly-hunting,” said Novella, who hosts the podcast “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.”

Taking measurements doesn’t constitute science, Novella said. Regarding irregularities in photographs, he said orb-like shapes can be attributed to lens flare, while flashback can cause areas to be obscured.

According to an article Novella co-wrote, posted on the New England Skeptical Society’s Web site, “flashback is simply light from the camera flash reflected back at the lens, causing a hazy overexposed region on the film.”

Lens flare, according to Wikipedia.com, describes “shapes created by light reflecting in camera lenses.”

– Mansion tours are held from noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The last tour starts at 3 p.m. Reservations are required for the Halloween tour Oct. 31. Call 838-9799.

Copyright © 2006, Southern Connecticut Newspapers, Inc.