Ghost World

Paul Eno doesn’t believe in ghosts per se; he ascribes to a multiverse theory where the deceased thrive in parallel universes.

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The D’Agostinos will tell you their equip-ment has provided a trove of evidence of their encounters with those who have passed on. At an old Victorian house in Gardner, Massachusetts, the homeowner photographed a blurry image in a mirror, which they believe may be the ghost of a nanny once employed there. During another visit, Tom’s recorder picked up a verbal exclamation not made by anyone in his group. He says it may be a toast, “Porteo,” (Portugese for “for you” or “for your”), shouted by a hard-drinking boarder who died in one of the rooms forty years ago. At the Fall River home where Lizzie Borden is believed to have killed her parents with an axe, they picked up another eerie re-cording, a voice that sounds like an Irish maid shrieking “Come quick, ma’am!” During a visit to Chepachet’s Stagecoach Inn, the D’Agostinos watched a light bulb blink on and off, and wrote down the flickers as if they were Morse code. The message: “I am here.”

Asked about the parallel worlds theory, Tom D’Agostino simply shrugs: “What makes a ghost? You might just as well ask how many ways can you catch a cold. We’re still finding out.”

Eno has nothing to say about the D’Ago-stinos’ experiences. He avoids criticizing anyone else in the field. But he does offer some general comments about old-school ghost hunters. “It’s two-dimensional thinking,” he says. “When people see ghosts—they see a transparent figure or get a funny feeling or hear a noise or smell a smell—they often think, ‘Aha! What else could it be but the spirit of someone who has died?’ It’s just like a thirteenth-century peasant looking out on the ocean and thinking the world is flat, because he can’t see anything to indicate that it’s not.”

Eno also scoffs at the notion that ghost hunting is about the thrill of a good fright. He sees most of the shadows he meets as harmless, and tells the homeowners who seek his advice to accept them “with caution; initially approach them with compassion.” The exceptions are the rambunctious spirits usually referred to as poltergeists, which he regards as truly scary. Eno says he has seen such spirits knock items from shelves, scrawl obscenities on walls and cause heavy appliances to float in the air. He calls them “parasites” because he suspects they feed on negative energy that people give off when upset. Fill a house with positive feelings, he says, and they’ll go away. He boasts he once drove one from a house by reading from a joke book.

No such complaints have brought Eno to Hearthside. The organization Friends of Hearthside has asked him to speak at an event next month to raise funds for the upkeep of the two-centuries-old mansion, which is owned by the town of Lincoln. Kathy Hartley, the group’s president, tells him some people have felt and heard things in the house—including whistling—but as yet, no one has been frightened.

Eno is packing some of the same equipment used by the D’Agostinos, but lets everyone know he questions its usefulness. Many things might cause the gauss meter’s needle to jump, including appliances. The sounds picked up by the recorder could be anything. For that reason, he says, he relies on his intuition above anything else.

Before long, he’s picking up signals all over the near-empty house. Visitors are passing in a hallway; women are busy in the kitchen. The strongest sensations hit him in the library.  “Why are there children here?” he asks. “I feel something, maybe little girls.” He opens an album packed with pictures of past residents, and picks out a turn-of-the-century photograph that shows a large family gathering in front of the house. “That’s them,” he says, pointing to several kids.

What he’s tuning in, he explains, are layers of the multiverse. “If we have a multiverse like this, then people don’t die,” he says. “Nobody comes back, because they never left. That frame of the film in which this moment’s taking place, it’s always there. In the multiverse, somewhere, some when, you are each other.”

He leaves Hearthside with a smile on his face, as if he’s been assured that the world is indeed becoming a better place, noting, “It’s one big happy house.”