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Phantom or phenomenon?
By DAVID BALLINGRUD, Times Staff Writer AMHERST, N.Y. -- Old Fort Niagara has a ghost, of course, and that's as it should be. It would be hard to imagine a more likely home for a spirit. Perched on a rocky shore where the Niagara River flows north into Lake Ontario, the 300-year-old fort seems perfect for haunting. Long, dark stone hallways open into shadowy chambers on either side. No sunlight penetrates here; the place is musty and foreboding on the brightest day. Fort Niagara's ghost is that of an 18th century French soldier, headless now following swordplay over a beautiful Indian maiden. His chopped-up body was tossed into the well of the old fort, his head into Lake Ontario a few feet away. Now, when the moon is full, the ghost rises from the well and goes looking ... well, you get the drift. No one has ever seen the ghost, and no one takes the old legend very seriously -- just something to entertain visiting school kids. Why then, is Doug DeCroix feeling so creepy? DeCroix has worked at Old Fort Niagara for nine years. He is the director of research and special projects for the nonprofit association that operates the fort with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. He dismisses the legend of the headless Frenchman -- "we use it as a teaching aide" -- but admits to being a little unnerved by some more some contemporary events. "The fort has a few "bad' places," he says. "There are rooms, and especially a hallway in the back, where a lot of people, mostly women, have told me they feel uncomfortable. They get out as soon as possible." As DeCroix speaks, Joe Nickell scribbles furiously in his notebook. Nickell is a senior research fellow at CSICOP -- the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He has come to Old Fort Niagara to do research on the headless French soldier -- specifically, how such legends are born and how they evolve. As he listens to DeCroix, however, he realizes he has come across something much better -- a real, live, up-to-date claim, by credible people, of what appears to be paranormal activity. Old Fort Niagara is a piecemeal collection of buildings and fortifications, added to by French, English and American armies and navies over three centuries. During the colonial wars in North America, and until the building of the Erie Canal, a fort at the mouth of the Niagara River provided or prevented access to the Great Lakes. It was a major choke-point for commerce and war. The first structure of the original fort was built in 1726 and overlooks the lake. It is now called the "French Castle" and looks like a ghost-story movie set. It is in this building that DeCroix, and other fort employees, say they have had some nasty jolts. Lights that dance in deserted hallways, papers that move from place to place when no one is around, reflections of people who aren't there -- all have been reported by fort employees, DeCroix says. This unexpected opportunity for investigation pleases Nickell greatly, and he begins working through a long list of questions. He and his employer take this kind of thing seriously. But, he adds with a smile, "I wouldn't want people to know how much I enjoy this job." CSICOP (pronounced si-cop) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 by Paul Kurtz, emeritus professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a few other promoters of science literacy such as Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. With about 80 fellows, 60 consultants and a annual budget of about $11-million, CSICOP today wages a public relations campaign against what it calls fringe and junk science, publishing its opinions and findings in its bi-monthly magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. For the last quarter century, it has investigated claims of ... you name it: UFOs; alien abductions; crop circles; various manifestations of Bigfoot; religious icons that cry; religious icons that bleed; mediums; magic healers; and levitating furniture. And, of course, ghosts. Why? Because someone's got to do it in this over-hyped world, says Kurtz. "Pseudoscience has become so popular in the world, it competes with real science. "You can consider us a kind of consumer protection agency." 'We're not debunkers ...'His bio says he is a former professional stage magician at the Houdini Magical Hall of Fame, a former private investigator for the Pinkerton security agency and the author of 16 books, including works on the Shroud of Turin and on ink and hand-writing analysis Now 56, he is a self-described Vietnam refusenik, pardoned by Jimmy Carter. He boasts a doctorate in English literature from the University of Kentucky and is a frequent guest on talk shows from Jerry Springer to Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe. He has spent a night in a haunted house for the Discovery Channel and tromped out crop circles for NBC News. This month, he is rolling through the German countryside, touring haunted castles with the European Skeptics Congress. It's important that people understand that he is a skeptic, not a debunker, he says. "I don't like to be called a debunker," he says. "That might be the final effect of what we do, but if we are going to be credible when we look at the paranormal, we have to be fair. "Most people divide into two groups, believers and nonbelievers," he says. "Both sides have their minds made up. We think it's important not to do that." Nickell acknowledges, though, than in almost 30 years of investigating claims of the paranormal he has yet to find any real evidence that it exists. "But to me that is not evidence of a life of failure," he says, because there is always something to learn -- about human behavior if not the supernatural. "We might investigate UFOs and find out something about the phenomenon called ball lightning (a rare form of lightning sometimes seen as a globe of fire)," he says. "We might investigate ghosts and learn something about dreams. I have not totally closed the door on (the paranormal), though I don't expect to find it. "But many times in my 30 years of investigation, I have started out looking for one thing and have found something else very interesting. And that is worth doing." And so, skeptically, but with great interest, Nickell listens as DeCroix describes his experience in the old fort's dark hallway. It was a cold, rainy Tuesday in March of 2001, DeCroix recalled. A technician had gone to the back corridor of the French Castle section of the fort to perform an annual check on smoke detectors. "It was after hours during the off season," DeCroix said. "The lights were out, but he had a flashlight." In the nearly black hallway, the man was startled to suddenly see a light, a small glowing mass, seemingly suspended in the air about chest level, bobbing down the hallway toward him, DeCroix said. "At first he thought it was light from his own flashlight, which he had stuck into his belt," DeCroix said. "But that wasn't it." When the light continued its advance, the man ran from the building to the park offices a couple of hundred feet away, across an outdoor courtyard. DeCroix then walked over to the old building for a look. He entered the dark hallway, he said, and waited. At first there was nothing. "Then, there it was ... it seemed to move across the hallway, just above head-level. It was yellowish, and about the size of a softball." DeCroix fled, too, and admits the incident left him shaken. "I had been here nine years when it happened, and I had never seen anything like that." DeCroix acknowledges that the nonprofit organization that operates the fort decided to take advantage of his experience and held a spooky fundraiser last year. He insists, though, that he is not making the experience up. Fort curator Jerome Brubaker says there have been other odd events, too, since the lights in hallway. Faxes left on one desk in a locked room overnight are found on another desk in the morning, he said. Another employee saw people in an adjacent room, apparently reflected in a mirror, Brubaker says. But when the employee entered the room to greet them, the room was empty. "Almost everyone who has worked here has seen something," Brubaker said. Nickell takes copious notes but concludes nothing. At least, nothing he will reveal. "Anecdotal evidence is hard to contradict or investigate," he says. "Hard to prove or disprove." The most he will say is that the moving light in the hallway sounds a bit like ball lightning. Everybody loves a good ghost story Kurtz said he formed CSICOP in 1976 when he noticed that his students at the State University of New York "believed as much in astrology as they did in astronomy." Uri Geller was bending spoons with his mind and Jean Dixon was making outrageous predictions, he said, "but there was no scientific criticism of what they were saying; there was no scientific response." Believing there should be one, Kurtz contacted friends and others in the scientific community and began publishing the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. "There was an immediate positive response," he said. Today, he said, Skeptical Inquirer has a circulation of about 50,000 and has spun off a number of newsletters. Kurtz's self-described "twin passions" are skepticism and humanism. In addition to CSICOP, he also formed the Council for Secular Humanism, which publishes Free Inquiry, and Prometheus Books, which publishes numerous works on philosophy, science and ethics. Trying to counter popular culture is difficult, he says, because people want to believe in the supernatural. It's found everywhere in television and movies, he says. "The will to believe is almost impossible to dislodge sometimes," Kurtz says. "A belief is a habit of thought, and people hold on with real tenacity." Most belief in the paranormal taps into some aspect of human hope or fear, Nickell says. "We don't want our moms and dads to be gone, so we believe in ghosts. We don't want to be alone in the universe, so we believe in flying saucers." In one sense, he says, it doesn't really matter that tales of the paranormal are explained or disproved. "Hope and fear spring eternal." "Are there ghosts? is the wrong question," he says. "The question should be do people believe in ghosts, and the answer is yes -- about 40 percent of people surveyed say they do. "My position is that we should investigate these claims, because part of living in the real world is learning how to separate fact from fantasy." He speaks of the "contagion" of an idea, the phenomenon in which people see what they expect to see. A panda missing from a zoo once produced a host of "sightings" of the animal all over town, he said. All the sightings were proven false when the dead animal was later found a short distance from his cage. He tells of a "haunted house" in Toronto, where sober, credible people repeatedly heard footsteps on their stairs at night. Well, they were hearing footsteps on their stairway, he says. "It turned out they were hearing footsteps on a parallel staircase, in another apartment on the other side of a wall," he said. The two staircases shared some connecting pieces of wood, and the footsteps on one produced a creaking on the other. In studying the paranormal, he says, "we learn about ourselves, the kind of assumptions we make, the human hopes and fears which drive most of the reports of the paranormal. "There were footsteps on the staircase, but it wasn't a ghost," he says. "We can be fooled -- all of us." 'Who knows what I saw ...'Eric Bloomquist was in his early 20s when he came to work at Old Fort Niagara 15 years ago. Today he is the interpretive programs manager, meaning he is responsible for the costumed portrayals of fort life frequently performed there. "It was my first winter there," he said recently. "The fort is open to visitors year round, but there aren't very many who come in the wintertime. I was in (a colonial soldier's) uniform, sitting by a fire in the bakery, waiting to talk to people." The doors to the rooms in the French Castle portion of the fort weigh 600 pounds and more, Bloomquist said, and so people often struggled to open them. He helped those who wanted to come into the bakery, he said, and he used the reflective glass of a hallway picture to keep watch on an adjacent door, which opened to the storehouse a few feet away. "On several occasions," he said, "I saw a silhouette of someone entering the storehouse clearly reflected in the glass. I got up to greet them, but there was no one in the room." The incidents unnerved him a little, he says, but they haven't been repeated in a long time. "And there are a lot of things in life we just can't explain. Who knows what I saw?" DeCroix doesn't know what he saw, or what Bloomquist saw either. But he said now regards the old French Castle part of the fort warily. On especially dark and lonely nights, he says, "you could not pay me enough to stay there past closing."
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