Two neighbors who didn’t know each other took a shared skepticism about the paranormal and turned it into a mission.
Pharmacist Kenny Hayes and teacher Mark LaBello of Seymour are co-founders of the North American Paranormal Research Team. Their goal is “to try and explain activity that is considered paranormal and answer questions that will bring our clients peace of mind.”
They are aided by a crew of eight to 10 fellow investigators as well as a spiritual intuitive.
Hayes and LaBello, who met on a paranormal investigation of Old South Pittsburg Hospital in Old South Pittsburg, Tenn., were drawn to the field after watching television shows such as “Ghost Hunters” on Syfy. Hayes estimates he’s been investigating 10 years now, LaBello about seven.
Hayes was working night shift at a local hospital when he first dabbled in paranormal investigation. A technician came to him “freaking out” about something he thought he had seen on a closed floor of the hospital, but security staff said there was nothing up there.
“I said, ‘I’ve got an audio recorder and a video recorder; let’s see what we catch,’” Hayes remembers.
It was in one room, oddly cold despite having no air conditioner on that floor, that Hayes heard a voice cursing him. The next time he caught a female voice.
“When I catch something that cannot be explained, I will present it to you and let you make the decision of whether it is paranormal or not,” Hayes says.
LaBello started investigating as a self-proclaimed skeptic.
“I was trying to disprove everything they found,” LaBello remembers.
It was during his second investigation, however, that he felt something tug on his hair. Later that evening he thought he saw something six or seven feet tall in a corner. His wife and mother-in-law, watching on a live stream at home, later confirmed they had seen the same thing on camera.
“I couldn’t disprove it,” LaBello admits. “I’m still a skeptic to some point. You always have to be. I don’t believe in forcing anyone to believe in anything.”
Hayes agrees.
“There are a lot of weirdos in this field,” he says. “We debunk a lot of things that aren’t true, and we gain a lot of credibility that way. It develops our clients’ trust.”
The North American Paranormal Research Team does not charge for investigations, and Hayes and LaBello caution clients to be skeptical of those who do because taking someone’s money could increase pressure on investigators to find something that is not there.
Supporting Wheatlands
Their exception to the no-charge rule is investigations of the Wheatlands Plantation in Sevier County, established in 1791. Wheatlands, built on the site of a Revolutionary War battle, has a storied history including fatal fires, falls and family disputes, and its grounds include both a Cherokee burial mound and a graveyard for the plantation’s slaves.
“We hold ghost hunts here to raise money to try to take care of the place,” LaBello explains of the “tagalongs” that the team sets up about once a month at the plantation off Boyd’s Creek Highway in Sevierville.
Not only will the North American Paranormal Research Team set up the equipment and teach folks how to use it on these tagalongs, which typically last about four hours, the team will live-stream the investigations so that family and friends watching from home can chat back and forth with those on site.
The North American Paranormal Research Team also offers private investigations of Wheatlands for groups that are visiting the area, but they warn that “you can’t turn paranormal on and off like a light switch,” Hayes notes. “Nothing could happen for hours and hours and hours.”
A lot has happened for the team, however, at Wheatlands, which is located just five miles from Hayes’ and LaBello’s Seymour neighborhood.
“We’ve caught a lot of voices here,” LaBello says, including one that sounds like an elderly lady saying, “blood on the floor” in the room known as the Blood Parlor because its floor still is stained with the blood of “Big” Tim Chandler, bludgeoned to death by his son “Little” Tim Chandler in 1942.
Another recording caught a man’s voice saying, “It’s time to go.” On a separate occasion, LaBello heard a door handle jiggle while he was alone in the Blood Parlor, and the audio recording picked that up as well.
“I also thought I saw a small shadow on the staircase, like an arm on the railing,” LaBello remembers. “There are things you can’t explain. That’s how we got started in it, and now we can’t stop.”
Talking with the dead
There are many pieces of equipment the North American Paranormal Research Team uses in its investigations. One of the most successful for communicating with spirits is a simple Maglite flashlight that Hayes and LaBello believe spirits turn on and off using their energy in response to yes or no questions the investigators ask.
Hayes and LaBello say they’ve communicated at Wheatlands with one of the former owners named Adele, a slave named Paul, a Civil War soldier named Jim, a Cherokee Indian and the children who died when the original house burned to the ground around 1818. (The house there now was built on the same site and completed in 1825.)
Other equipment includes the Ovilus III, which picks up words the team cannot hear; the K2 EMF, which measures electronic magnetic fields; the REM-POD, which goes off when something unseen comes near it; full-spectrum cameras, which can take pictures in the dark; a vibration detector; a shadow detector; and a digital voice recorder called a Zoom, which could probably pick up a pin drop, LaBello says.
“This is your best friend,” he notes. “We catch EVPs — electric voice phenomenon — all the time, and usually we don’t know it until we download it onto the computer. Nine times out of 10 we don’t hear it.”
Some of the EVPs the team have caught include babies crying in hospitals that have been closed for more than 20 years and a female scream in an elevator shaft in a sanatorium in Kentucky.
“Some say, and I agree, that it’s like they’re trying to yell through water at you,” Hayes says.
Hayes and LaBello chose to name their group the North American Paranormal Research Team because they are willing to travel to investigate supposedly haunted places. Hayes has been as far as Pennsylvania while LaBello has been to Indiana, and the team will spend two nights this June in the Sedamsville Rectory in Cincinnati.
“We love it,” says Hayes, noting they pour their own money into purchasing equipment for the team. “It’s our passion, like people who work on old cars.”
Helping the living
Hayes and LaBello see their paranormal investigations as a way of helping people, they say. One couple contacted the North American Paranormal Research Team because their 3-year-old daughter said she was seeing another girl in the house. The child was calling the other girl “Mona.”
An investigation picked up what sounds like a child’s voice saying, “Mommy, Mommy,” in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, Hayes said. The team took their findings to the mother, who listened and said, “That’s not my daughter’s voice.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever felt a threatening presence,” LaBello notes, adding they do not use Ouija boards or anything else that invites evil. “But here’s the sad thing: When we give evidence to the owners, they often say, ‘Can you get rid of this for us?’ We can’t do that. That’s not our field.”
Their paranormal investigations have not dissuaded them of their religious beliefs.
“I believe they are able to make contact with us, and that helps me prove that there is an afterlife,” says Hayes, who was raised Southern Baptist. “I like to call it research. I don’t judge. It is best to keep an open mind.”
For information on the North American Paranormal Research Team, including dates of their upcoming investigations at Wheatlands, visit www.naprt.com or find them on Facebook.
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