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Click above for enlarged image. Illustration by David Stroud. Carlson Photo by Clint Karlsen. Tina and Steve Carlson occasionally do supernatural investigations in real graveyards; the one in their front yard is just for Halloween fun. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

PARANORMAL: In search of spirits

Couple on the trail of ghosts as members of Las Vegas Society of Supernatural Investigation

The first thing you might notice in conversation with Tina and Steve Carlson is how normal they are. Pleasant. Intelligent. Cordial. Salt of the earth.

Steve, 40, is a network administrator at Nellis Air Force Base and a master sergeant. He's an affable guy with a bright sense of humor.

Tina, 39, is a stay-at-home mom with a warm and open face, and a serene personality.

But there's something else about Tina that most people don't learn right away, and that is she has an avocation as well. She's director of the Las Vegas Society of Supernatural Investigation: a real-life ghostbuster.

While the organization is new, Tina's association with the spirited side of life is not. She traces it to age 3 and a bout of spinal meningitis.

"My parents were told to go ahead with funeral arrangements," Tina said.

The doctors were right. It appeared Tina's time on earth had ended.

"I guess I died," she said.

But, in the classic experience reported by people who have recovered from being clinically dead, Tina said she was going toward a light when she was met by an older woman. Not yet, the woman told her.

Some years later, paging through a family photo album, Tina spotted the woman. Family members said she was a great-aunt who had died before Tina was born.

By that time, Tina had already tuned in to her spiritual side. Two of her

cousins had died

very young, but Tina felt they were often with her.

"Rocking chairs would rock," she said. "Whispers: `Hi, I'm here.' "

It didn't hurt that Tina's family believed in the supernatural, particularly one grandfather, she said, whose own mother was an American Indian.

In her small-town Iowa house, Tina said there were other unexplained goings-on that her family attributed to their spirited forebears. Then, when Tina was a young teen, her other grandfather died on her October birthday. He wasn't a big believer in the supernatural, but did put a lot of stock in practical jokes with an edge.

"It was mean tease," Tina said.

Every October for several years, Tina heard footsteps on the stairway: two steps up, one back; three up, two back. The steps came higher every year, but never made it to the top -- until Tina was 17.

The steps entered her room, she said, manifested as a huge cloud of light. She tried to turn on a lamp, but it wouldn't work. The cloud moved closer. She kept trying the lamp, finally succeeding. The cloud vanished but the footsteps kept moving.

Tina recited a prayer her spiritual grandfather had taught her. She heard the footsteps move to the window, groan, and then silence.

She went to tell her parents. Her father ran upstairs and as he approached her door, it slammed in his face.

"He opened it, and asked, `Dad, is that you?' " Tina remembers. He was met with cold so extreme he could see his breath, and felt a manifestation of evil.

"My father said, `I don't know what it is, but we're leaving,' " Tina said.

They fled to her grandparents' house, where they stayed for a week. When they returned, leaders from their Mormon church came to bless the house, Tina said.

Some years later, Tina said, while the family was renovating the house, they pulled out a porch and found gravestones below. A search of town records revealed some confusion about where an old cemetery had been.

The house later was destroyed, Tina said, in a controlled burn for a fire department training exercise. The property remains vacant and for sale.

Steve, who's known Tina since he was 14, seems comfortable with what Tina calls her gift, but he remains, she said, "my resident skeptic." When she gets a report of a possible haunting, the couple and other members of the society load up their equipment and take off to investigate. They use an electromagnetic field detector, a temperature detector and an electronic voice phenomenon recorder, among other things.

Before going in to investigate a building or other site, Steve checks to be sure power is turned off or at least accounted for, as that would activate the electromagnetic field detector.

"I try to disprove as much as I can to prove that it's not a natural phenomenon," he said. "I try to come up with a scientific reason for things to happen."

They've visited a couple of local cemeteries and numerous buildings, including several at Nellis. In one building, Steve said, "guys who worked at night had reported hearing doors close and footsteps when the building was empty."

During their investigation of one building, they ran the recorder, a routine practice.

Listening, one hears the Carlsons' voices and then, much louder, something that sounds like laughter.

Whatever caused it, there's no doubt about one thing: It's creepy.

Tina has investigated reports at several local homes as well. One woman, she said, was having a problem with furniture moving on its own. Tina said her investigation indicated a wandering spirit had come along with some antiques the resident had purchased.

Besides her work with the Las Vegas Society of Supernatural Investigation, Tina is co-director of The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings, a Web site at http://theshadowlands.net/ghost, with more than 3,700 reports of paranormal activity.

E-mails tend to peak in October, Tina said, when she typically gets 200 to 300 a day. She tends to work at night, because "you get more into the spirit of things."

And she doesn't get paid for her work, because "I don't believe in getting paid for a gift."

Tina thinks we're all born with the ability to perceive spirits, but that most of us block it out.

She frankly doesn't see the need.

"Most ghosts aren't here to hurt anybody," she said. "They just want to be noticed. I'm more afraid of the living than the dead."

And she scoffs at the idea that the recognition of spirits somehow violates God's laws.

"You keep your own free will and your own personality when you die," she said. "God has given us our free will. Why would he take it away when we die?"

The spirits, she maintains, are all around us.

"If you're standing in an empty room and you feel like you're being watched ...

"You are."