Hamptons Hauntings

It was 1:30 a.m., and Chris Hadel and Michele Basileo were craving a cigarette.

The couple left their hotel room at Montauk Manor and made their way down to the lobby. They stopped and commented to the man behind the front desk, “We heard this place was haunted.”

He replied, “Well, there’s a graveyard nearby.”

Soon thereafter, once they had received directions, the couple embarked down a dark, wooded trail. They immediately felt the presence of something—not the crisp April air—and snapped a few photographs.

Mr. Hadel and Ms. Basileo couldn’t explain what they saw in the photos. It was a white mist with traces of characteristics that bordered on the line of being human.

They told their tale to paranormal investigator Joseph Flammer, who relayed their story during a telephone interview last week following a lecture on ghosts and ghouls that he conducted with his partner, Diane Hill, at the Hampton Bays Public Library last Thursday. The couple promised Mr. Flammer that they weren’t smoking at the time the photos were taken and breath mists were not responsible, either.

“It’s very commonly described that a lot of supernatural manifestations seem to take the shape of mists, like Casper the Friendly Ghost, milky white and floating in the air,” Mr. Flammer said. “That’s the perspective of ghosts handed down through the ages.”

As reports of paranormal activity date back thousands of years, so does ghost hunting, Mr. Flammer explained.

“It started by people getting the hell scared out of them,” he said. “There’s such a history, in so many societies, of spirits taking shape and appearing to people. It’s nothing new. The only new thing is the technology to apply to it—cameras, voice recorders, all digital now—and that makes life so much easier.”

Ghosts fall into different categories, Mr. Flammer said. There are spirits of human beings who come back to express love, usually to people. There is a branch of spirits that have no relevance to people at all—impressions in the environment that somehow dislodge from the oblivion and materialize, he added.

“Then there are things that can’t really be explained, like ghost rods, ghost lights, orbs, balls of light,” he said. “There’s other manifestations that can’t be pinpointed. Why they appear to people, I don’t know. I don’t really have answers in this area except that we don’t know anything.”

The popular theory is that ghosts are the spirits of people who died suddenly, usually tragically, that are now earthbound, Mr. Flammer reported during his lecture. He then asked audience members to share their spooky experiences.

Hampton Bays resident Rosemary Tucker spoke up. One night, she said, she was driving home after working a late shift at Southampton Hospital. She was tired and it was foggy. But while on Montauk Highway, she slammed on her brakes because she saw a group of people walking across the road.

“I said, ‘Oh, what are they? They look like Indians,’” Ms. Tucker recalled of her experience, which occurred near Despatch storage, she said. “There was a whole herd of them walking across the road. I was so tired, I didn’t give much thought to it. I actually thought they were there.”

Timidly, another Hampton Bays resident, who preferred not to be named, offered her haunted tale.

“My uncle had a grey felt top hat,” she said. “It was from England and it was in my closet, up on the top shelf. And I looked at that hat and said, ‘I’m going to burn that thing. I’m going to throw it out.’ With that, the hat slipped off the shelf, and the brim was hard, and it smacked me on my upper lip. And it hurt! I said, ‘Alright, alright.’”

The packed audience broke into laughter.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if spirits could take a magic marker, go to a nice white wall and write, here is information,” Mr. Flammer said. “Here is why we’re here. This is the purpose of us appearing to you. We don’t get that. What do we get? We get a hat falling over, hitting us on the mouth.”

Mr. Flammer and Ms. Hill, also known as “The Paranormal Adventurers,” find themselves mostly on the North Fork or on western Long Island during their investigations. The same is true of ghost hunter and Southampton resident Peggy Vetrano, who founded Eastern Suffolk Paranormal, a team of supernatural investigators.

About two years ago, the group’s investigations brought them to the First Parish Church in Aquebogue, where there had been reports of music, choral singing and organ notes when no one was performing.

In what Ms. Vetrano called a digitally-recorded electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, an English-accented voice can be heard saying, “Great job!,” she said during a telephone interview last week. She also reported that she heard disembodied voices in the hallway, but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

Ms. Vetrano said she’s also heard rumors of Southampton hauntings. At UA Southampton, moviegoers have reported seeing the seats go up and down, and believe it’s haunted by one of the theater’s former managers, she said. Also, Ms. Vetrano said that the windmill on Stony Brook University’s Southampton campus is supposedly guarded by a ghost Indian warrior. She hasn’t investigated either location yet, she added.

After reading “The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time” by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon, Ms. Vetrano was inspired to poke around the book’s setting, Camp Hero in Montauk, she said.

“The book claims there were these secret experiments supposedly in mind control and time travel,” she said. “If you ask the government, they’ll say no such thing was done and the structures there were used for wartime purposes, but according to this book, that’s not true.”

Upon entering Camp Hero, an odd feeling overcame her, Ms. Vetrano recalled. It was almost as though the ground was electrically charged, she said.

“Then we got a really weird EVP,” she said. “I asked, ‘Was mind control practiced here?’ I got a ‘yes.’ I intend to return to Camp Hero. Things were very, very strange.”

Montauk Manor is one of the next destinations on Ms. Vetrano’s list.

Belief in paranormal activity is becoming much more mainstream, she added.

“For years, studying the paranormal was believed to be done by those who were weird or were strange, and that’s not true,” Ms. Vetrano said. “Now the scientists who are studying quantum physics and string theory are telling us that there are at least 11 other dimensions that they have proved mathematically. Hopefully, we’ll be part of the answers. We’ve gotten such great stuff that we could never ever come to a conclusion that there’s nothing going on.”