Phantom Man

The spirits first moved John Warfield in early childhood. Today, as senior paranormal investigator of the DC Metro Area Ghost Watchers, he’s come to serve the region as resident chief specter sensor.

By Forrest Glenn Spencer   Photography by Jonathan Timmes

For more than six years, the Washington DC Metro Area Ghost Watchers group (DCMAG) has investigated the region’s paranormal activity, ranging from ghosts, electronic voice phenomena (EVP), poltergeists and other unexplained goings-on.

John Warfield, senior investigator and chief of operations for DCMAG, recently replaced founder Al Tyas as team leader. Since 2002, their group has conducted more than 100 official investigations. Many occurrences have been debunked—but this paranormal collaborative operation has collected evidence that cannot easily be explained away.

How did you get involved with paranormal investigations?
When I was a child I experienced my own paranormal activity. I lived in Lansdowne, not too far outside of Baltimore, and we lived in a house that I believed to be haunted. The cat would inspect things that weren’t there. We constantly heard banging noises in the basement, like a hammer. When you [would] go to the top of the basement stairs it would stop, and when you [would] go back upstairs, it would start again. One night we heard a giant crash in the basement. It sounded like glass breaking everywhere. But when we went downstairs there was nothing there.

That was some of the activity in our house that was unexplainable. That was the only time I had [that] kind of experience until I joined DCMAG about a year ago.

How did you become team leader?
When I retired from the military I wanted to get back into something I was really interested in, and paranormal activity always held that, so I called DCMAG, which was run by Al, and he said he was retiring and wanted to turn the team over to somebody. With my 20 years of leadership in the military, he gave it to me.

What are some of the paranormally active places in NoVA?
There’s a place called The Christmas Attic in Alexandria that’s pretty haunted and an old movie theater there that’s haunted. There are private residence cases or other businesses known for haunting. The Carlyle House is another; it seems everything in Alexandria is haunted.

At The Christmas Attic we picked up some EVP’s, and I had my hair pulled there, which was one of the constant complaints by people there. We reviewed the EVP, and there was definitely something with us at the time.

Tell me about your team.
Constantly varies. There are five of us right now; I’m trying to pick up a few new members because it’s going into the active season again. It seems everybody has paranormal activity around Halloween. I get tons of calls then. Some are legitimate; some are nothing at all. We get about four to five calls per month.

You’re affiliated with The Atlantic Paranormal Society [TAPS], the group who produces “Ghost Hunters” on the SciFi Channel. Have you ever met TAPS leaders Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson?
I haven’t met Jason and Grant. Al is close friends with Jason and Grant. They called me in December and asked if they could do some investigations up here, and I said that wouldn’t be a problem, but apparently it conflicted with some of the things the producers wanted, so it never really happened. I’m sure we’ll meet up. They’re doing bigger and better things, and we’re doing our own thing now.

I have worked with [ghost hunter] Barry Fitzgerald from Ireland. He’s on the show at times. I’ve met him, and he’s sort me out on the things he has learned over his 15 years in paranormal research. He’s helped me out quite a bit.

Describe your investigative equipment.
We don’t have a fully equipment van like TAPS, but I think our equipment is a little bit better than theirs. We have a closed-circuit television system that’s basically a DVR and eight different cameras. We’ve got four Sony infrared cameras and four bullet cameras. They’re a little bit smaller, but they can get into the smaller rooms better than the bigger cameras. We have eight cameras we can watch on one computer monitor. We also have a digital thermometer, a Pyrometer. We got an Air Ion Counter—it measures the amount of positive and negative ions in the air—an AC-EMF and a trifield EMF detector.

Why are paranormal investigations conducted at night?
From my research and theories, most activity is going to occur at night, for the same reason only stars come out at night: The power of the sun overwhelms the energy the spirits need to manifest themselves.

What’s your professional background?
I’m retired military. I’m actually an occupational therapist on the side, and I work just enough hours to buy equipment for the team. I try to do this full time, if I can. I work two to three days a week, but I’m also in culinary arts schools. I’m not married; I’m a single parent with an 11-year-old daughter.

Your team—what do they do for a living?
Margaret is an instructor at a Northern Virginia Community College. She has a doctorate in Internet security sciences. We also have Kim, who’s a professional photographer. We have Spencer, another photographer, but he’s more into the investigations than evidence review and analysis. We had a couple of new people on the team. We have Terri, and she’s an assistant team leader. She’s working on her degree for psychology and social work.

Describe an investigative setup.
Eight cameras running eight hours, so that’s up to 64 hours’ worth of video—and that doesn’t include the handheld videos we may take. EVP’s: half-hour to an hour. One of the theories is that, for every minute of audio or video, it takes 10 minutes to review. During the investigation we’ll have one to two people sit down on the B monitor. Anything they see, they can flag. That makes it easier for us.

From what era do our area’s paranormals derive from?
Majority comes from the Civil War era. Females don’t tend to show themselves. Male entities are not afraid to appear.

Have you ever investigated a battlefield?
We’ve been asked to the Manassas Battlefield. We have to figure out how to do that in the future.

Do you get many demonic calls?
We do, actually. I’d say one or two every three months. We recently had one with a lady in her house who heard growling noises. She had an iron thrown at her head. She’s actually scared; she hasn’t called us back for us to investigate that.

You said Alexandria is very active—any interesting cases that come to mind?
In one case, we found a body in the basement. It was a Civil War soldier, his bones. We called in the police, and they reviewed it, saw no foul play and left it up to us. We called the historical society, and they took care of it. The owner knew there were bones in the basement, but she thought it was a dead dog or something.

I understand most hauntings are non-threatening.
We had one case where the couple thought they had a demonic spirit in their house. I asked what happened, and they told me they had just a baby and that, when the baby came to the house, the ghost kept turning on the gas, trying to kill them. So we did an investigation, and we found out an old lady had been killed in that house. We interviewed neighbors about her, and they told us she was a wonderful woman, very friendly. And I was thinking, Why is she trying to kill a family? That doesn’t make sense. So we ended up talking to the ghost and told her that there’s a new baby in the house and that turning on the gas is very dangerous for them. The latest we’ve heard from the family is that hasn’t happened since. One of the theories was that she was trying to help out in the cooking … with the new baby in the house. It’s just a theory, but they’ve had no problems since.

How long do you plan to continue with the investigations?
This is something I want to do the rest of my life. It is a lot of fun, and we are helping people. That’s the best part of it.

(October 2008)

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