By ANTHONY ANAMELECHI

The Ledger

FORT MEADE – Randy Wolpin, 30, is fascinated with old houses. In fact, his fascination led him from Fort Lauderdale to Fort Meade, where he decided to buy the former house of the Rev. William James Reid at 401 E. Broadway. But little did Wolpin know that the former tenants of the house, though deceased, may have never left the property. The Reid House was built in the early 1900s. Reid, a minister for the North Alabama Conference Methodist Church South, passed the house to his son, Claude “Cauntess” Reid, who lived there until his death in 1976. The last Reid who owned the house was the Rev. Reid’s daughter, Carrie B. Reid, who sold it in 1985. The three-story house still contains the original plaster, doors and door handles, transoms, wave glass, cedar frame and heart pine floors. In the attic are remains of the books that belonged to the Reid family dating as far as 1919. This is the type of house Wolpin wanted. Wolpin runs a Smoothie King in Fort Lauderdale and wanted a vacation home for himself. He had been looking at the house for two years before finally buying the Reid House in January. But after footsteps were heard in the vacant rooms upstairs, radios mysteriously changed to a gospel station on Good Friday and cup holders were knocked down, Wolpin decided to find information about the paranormal. While he was online doing research, he stumbled across the Peace River Ghost Track team. He contacted the group through e-mail. The Peace River Ghost Track team consists of five members, each of whom claims to have had personal paranormal encounters. The group pays for its own equipment and travel to help residents understand and deal with their situations. So June 16, Scott Walker, Ellen “Sprout” Dvorak, Lori Chapman, Toni Ray and Tom Land met with Wolpin and his mother to investigate their supernatural occurrences. “This house freaks me out,” said Roz Wolpin, Randy’s mother. She said her son’s dream was to own a big, historic house such as the Reid House because “he likes old things.” Though she said the house is beautiful, her opinions about it quickly changed a couple of weeks ago. One day, she said she was preparing to take a shower in the bathroom next to the kitchen whenshe heard a loud crash in the kitchen. When she came out of the bathroom she saw a coffee can that had been on a shelf lying on the kitchen floor with the grounds scattered all over. “I freaked … to hell with the shower,” she said. “Oh my God, this place is really haunted.” The last straw for Randy Wolpin came when he was painting inside the house Good Friday and his radio mysteriously changed to a gospel station. “This is an issue,” said Wolpin, who said he’s not really scared but he does think something weird is happening. At 6 p.m. June 16, the trackers arrived at the house, surveying the area and speaking to the Wolpins about their encounters. The group gathered for the night also included friends of Wolpin along with Michale Graves, a former member of the punk band the Misfits. Graves has a show named RadioDeadly.com that focuses on ghosts, and he decided to fly down from New Jersey to check out the house. But the night before the ghost hunt, Graves and his friends experienced their own encounter. At 1:30 a.m., Graves said he woke out of his sleep screaming. Graves, along with his wife and friends, were all sleeping on mattresses on the floor of the same room. He said it felt like something came into the room and spun him around. As he screamed, his wife and his friends followed. “He’s never been scared before and we were all really scared,” said Renee Graves. “Everybody asks everybody else what happened and nobody can tell each other what happened.” The ghost hunters came with infrared cameras, and devices to get temperature and electromagnetic field readings. “The theory is (that the ghosts) disrupt the magnetic energy field where they are trying to manifest,” Walker said. And the areas where ghosts try to manifest become cold because they are using the energy, Ray said. She said this results in the production of orbs, which are concentrated balls of energy. But Walker said their plan of action is to disprove the ghosts’ existence first. “We have to be skeptical,” Walker said. “We have to disprove everything before we go with the paranormal side.” The group placed one camera at the top of the stairs. The second camera was placed in the kitchen where Roz Wolpin had her encounter. The third was placed in the living room, while the last camera was placed in Graves’ room, which was labeled, “The Scream Room.”

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Ghost hunter Michelle Hajdu is packing for the big one — the biggest investigation of her career. Hajdu and her team of paranormal investigators have booked an overnight stay in the ‘scariest place on earth,’ the Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Sanitarium, a place where 63,000 people died during the white plague from 1926 to 1961. Some of those people, rumors claim, refuse to leave the grounds and haunt the abandoned hallways creating cold drafts, the sound of footsteps, and even smacking curiosity seekers on the head.

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