A funny thing happened on the way to this point……
If you do something long enough, you are bound to get it right! Right?
Let me give you some insight here. I’ve been at this for more than 30 years, and there is no such thing as getting it right! Let
me encapsulate this for you.
About the time in was 21 I found myself being asked to do a story about a “supposed ghost” living in Greenwich Village in
Lower Manhattan for a magazine I was writing for at the time. I thought it might be fun, so off I went. At the time I had two full
time careers going and was also a full time student with a little girl to support. My family wanted me to pursue a career in Law
Enforcement, the family business, so to speak, the other the career I really wanted was journalism..
That first assignment introduced me to unexplained phenomenon and to Paul Hoffman, a journalist with the New York Daily
News. The subject of the story was Abram Ogden Butler, of Butler Hall fame, an old established family in New York University
history. Old Abram was a drunk, back before the Civil War and had lived in the house. The house had one other illustrious
resident, Mr. Edgar Allen Poe, who lived with his wife in the attic of the house on Sullivan Street. My assignment was to see if
old Mr. Poe was haunting the house, which was filled with strange noises and the inevitable things that go bump in the night.
While the Poe connection was interesting, it really didn’t add up. Poe had spent his happiest year in that attic, so why blame
him for the noise. After doing some due diligence, I found that Mr. Butler had died just outside the house, falling into the gutter
one night in a drunken stupor and being run over by a passing milk wagon, was carried lifeless into the hall of what was now
Butler Hall. While standing in the main hallway, I looked up at a giant portrait of Butler and said, out loud, "If he were a real
gentleman, he'd come down to greet us!" I told this to Paul Hoffman on our last visit to the house, in the company of several
NYU officials. The next thing I knew, the giant painting of Butler came crashing down from the main hall wall, where it had
been hanging for over a hundred years. Abram Ogden Butler seemed to enjoy learning someone now believed it was he
who haunted Butler Hall. Paul Hoffman wrote about the affair a few weeks later and mentioned what had happened. At 21 I
was now a famous ghost hunter! What Hoffman did not add was his response after the incident..."Rick, don't tick off the
ghosts, OK?"
In all, I have taken part in more than a five hundred cases of paranormal occurrence. In New Jersey I was asked to assist
another group in a project involving a two hundred year old former wagon stop. The assignment was boring, but I did my part,
shooting infrared film all evening, going from room to room with another research at my shoulder taking notes of ever click as
the night passed. By midnight, I had just about had it and Peter Jordan and I returned to New York. I didn’t expect to find
anything on the film, I never had an image of anything I could not explain before, but Pete asked me to process the film
anyway.
As I went to dry the last of a dozen rolls of film, I noticed something different. I made a contact sheet of the roll and then a
print. Standing behind an old rocking chair in the main room of the house, you could see a very distinct image of a dark
shadowy figure, his hand on the back of the chair, his boots firmly rooted to the ground between the runners. That was the
first image of a ghost I ever took, and the last. But it was enough to keep me shooting.
I’ve also researched spontaneous healings. A now well known psychic healer had been given a hard time in the press and
the group he was associated with wanted an experienced and unbiased witness to his next session, a seventy year old
woman with a very visible cancer winding its way around her spine. The woman believed she could be healed by the psychic
and I was asked to monitor his visit. He palpated her back and talked with her for a while and left. Then the doctors, who
were barely tolerating the show, agreed to a new set of e-rays. The X-Rays showed no sign of the cancer, which had been
very visible and recognizable in three other sets, one as recently as the morning before the visit. To this day, I can’t tell you
how, but I can tell you what I saw.
Of course, Amityville gave me the reputation of being a nay-saying debunker and to this day there a folks who think I don’t
believe in any of this, even after I went public over my experiences with the Men in Black and Mothman. We could go on and
on about the various cases that I have been a part of with ASUP, but it would be redundant, at best. Sometimes, something
happens; that is what we want to document. Theories are great, but hard evidence is even better.
The biggest challenge is to remove the fact from the fiction. I will sometimes spend months looking at a case, only to unravel
it as a total hoax, other times the exact same phenomenon simply can’t be disproven and in others, we end up with evidence
that is irrefutable that something unexplained has taken place.
If I last another 30 years, I doubt I will find one key that unlocks all of these secrets, but I certainly have enjoyed the trip thus far
and intend to continue to do so until I have the opportunity to give others an opportunity to study me after I am gone.
©2006 – ASUP (All Rights Reserved)
If you do something long enough, you are bound to get it right! Right?
Let me give you some insight here. I’ve been at this for more than 30 years, and there is no such thing as getting it right! Let
me encapsulate this for you.
About the time in was 21 I found myself being asked to do a story about a “supposed ghost” living in Greenwich Village in
Lower Manhattan for a magazine I was writing for at the time. I thought it might be fun, so off I went. At the time I had two full
time careers going and was also a full time student with a little girl to support. My family wanted me to pursue a career in Law
Enforcement, the family business, so to speak, the other the career I really wanted was journalism..
That first assignment introduced me to unexplained phenomenon and to Paul Hoffman, a journalist with the New York Daily
News. The subject of the story was Abram Ogden Butler, of Butler Hall fame, an old established family in New York University
history. Old Abram was a drunk, back before the Civil War and had lived in the house. The house had one other illustrious
resident, Mr. Edgar Allen Poe, who lived with his wife in the attic of the house on Sullivan Street. My assignment was to see if
old Mr. Poe was haunting the house, which was filled with strange noises and the inevitable things that go bump in the night.
While the Poe connection was interesting, it really didn’t add up. Poe had spent his happiest year in that attic, so why blame
him for the noise. After doing some due diligence, I found that Mr. Butler had died just outside the house, falling into the gutter
one night in a drunken stupor and being run over by a passing milk wagon, was carried lifeless into the hall of what was now
Butler Hall. While standing in the main hallway, I looked up at a giant portrait of Butler and said, out loud, "If he were a real
gentleman, he'd come down to greet us!" I told this to Paul Hoffman on our last visit to the house, in the company of several
NYU officials. The next thing I knew, the giant painting of Butler came crashing down from the main hall wall, where it had
been hanging for over a hundred years. Abram Ogden Butler seemed to enjoy learning someone now believed it was he
who haunted Butler Hall. Paul Hoffman wrote about the affair a few weeks later and mentioned what had happened. At 21 I
was now a famous ghost hunter! What Hoffman did not add was his response after the incident..."Rick, don't tick off the
ghosts, OK?"
In all, I have taken part in more than a five hundred cases of paranormal occurrence. In New Jersey I was asked to assist
another group in a project involving a two hundred year old former wagon stop. The assignment was boring, but I did my part,
shooting infrared film all evening, going from room to room with another research at my shoulder taking notes of ever click as
the night passed. By midnight, I had just about had it and Peter Jordan and I returned to New York. I didn’t expect to find
anything on the film, I never had an image of anything I could not explain before, but Pete asked me to process the film
anyway.
As I went to dry the last of a dozen rolls of film, I noticed something different. I made a contact sheet of the roll and then a
print. Standing behind an old rocking chair in the main room of the house, you could see a very distinct image of a dark
shadowy figure, his hand on the back of the chair, his boots firmly rooted to the ground between the runners. That was the
first image of a ghost I ever took, and the last. But it was enough to keep me shooting.
I’ve also researched spontaneous healings. A now well known psychic healer had been given a hard time in the press and
the group he was associated with wanted an experienced and unbiased witness to his next session, a seventy year old
woman with a very visible cancer winding its way around her spine. The woman believed she could be healed by the psychic
and I was asked to monitor his visit. He palpated her back and talked with her for a while and left. Then the doctors, who
were barely tolerating the show, agreed to a new set of e-rays. The X-Rays showed no sign of the cancer, which had been
very visible and recognizable in three other sets, one as recently as the morning before the visit. To this day, I can’t tell you
how, but I can tell you what I saw.
Of course, Amityville gave me the reputation of being a nay-saying debunker and to this day there a folks who think I don’t
believe in any of this, even after I went public over my experiences with the Men in Black and Mothman. We could go on and
on about the various cases that I have been a part of with ASUP, but it would be redundant, at best. Sometimes, something
happens; that is what we want to document. Theories are great, but hard evidence is even better.
The biggest challenge is to remove the fact from the fiction. I will sometimes spend months looking at a case, only to unravel
it as a total hoax, other times the exact same phenomenon simply can’t be disproven and in others, we end up with evidence
that is irrefutable that something unexplained has taken place.
If I last another 30 years, I doubt I will find one key that unlocks all of these secrets, but I certainly have enjoyed the trip thus far
and intend to continue to do so until I have the opportunity to give others an opportunity to study me after I am gone.
©2006 – ASUP (All Rights Reserved)
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
