He was four years old when a spirit first found him. Climbing on the moss-covered Fort Dunbeg ruins in west Ireland, the four-year-old was pushed from his post at the top, pushed toward the rocky bottom, toward the blackness that enveloped him before he even reached the ground.
Senior Matt Jacobs wasn’t pushed by anyone living. He claims it was an evil spirit, a ghost with so much hatred inside of it, that it was able to cross into the realm of the physical. It was able to reach out and push him, a four-year-old, from a 15-foot high wall and to his possible death.“Normally that kind of fall would have killed a four-year-old,” Jacobs said. “But it didn’t kill me. I landed on my head- I had to get stitches.”
Jacobs has a theory as to why he survived an experience that, he admitted, he shouldn’t have. He believes that if he would’ve died, he wouldn’t have crossed over and that would’ve caused a nuisance to the ghost who pushed him.
“Whatever it was that pushed me did not want to have to deal with me until the end of time,” Jacobs said. “So It, in a way, spared me my life so that It could have Its privacy.”
Eleven years later- Jacobs claims to have perienced more ghost-encounters, more claims to have experienced more ghost encounters, more paranormal experiences than he can even count. Some of which are visits from spirits that want to cause him harm, others just need him for something- a favor to help redeem themselves or a request to help them cross over. A few visit him in his sleep.
“Last night I had a dream that was without a doubt influenced by an entity. I am in a room, lit solely by candles,” Jacobs said in a November 2010 post on his former blog, Blog Tiger. “The only object in the room is a large wooden chest with an opening mirror lid… Now my worst fears have been realized, I had hoped that the creature in the blackness was gone for good, locked away for eternity. I was wrong.”
Seniors Neal Page, Kramer Schultz, Chris Barr, and Carlo Clavenna were 16 years old when they first went after a ghost. They call themselves a “paranormal team”- but they’re commonly known as “ghost hunters”.
“We investigate rumored or confirmed haunted places around the [Metro Detroit] area,” Page said.
They each have a ghost code name- a nickname they call each other when they’re investigating paranormal activity in abandoned houses or bridges with a past. Page is known as “October Knight”, Schultz is “Eerie Mist”, Clavenna is “Ol’ Dirty Spook” and Chris Barr is “The Dark Prince”. The group as a whole is called “248Reapers”.
“We’re very serious,” Page said. “We actually use a couple of instruments. We use a voice recorder, where we can catch EVP’s, known as electrical voice phenomenon. We use basic cameras, like flip video. Then we use flash-lights.”
The group got into “ghost-hunting” when Page came up with the idea for a class project.
“It started when we had Vietnam class and at the end we got to research and you got to pick anything you wanted to do,” Schultz said. “We had some problems choosing until [Page] started talking about ghosts and we decided to do it.”
The project grew from there, and the 248Reapers have now created a website, www.wix.com/clavenne19/248reepers, and investigated places from Highland Oaks Community College to Trowbridge to underground Seaholm.
“We always put in new batteries before every time we go out and this time, it was a Wednesday night [at Trowbridge], and the time we went, we just got lucky, because the train actually went by,” Page said. “When the train went by and after it went by all our phones lost battery, our camera lost battery, our digital voice recorder lost all its battery.”
Although, they’ve never seen anything substantial, like fully formed ghosts or apparitions, the “248Reapers” have heard “heavy-breathing”, and felt paranormal vibrations in the air.
“There’s something where you can kind of feel when [there’s paranormal activity],” Page said. “You can feel the vibes.”
Andrea de Brito is hoping Page isn’t the only high school student who has felt the vibes. De Brito, a producer with Syfy channel and her company, Jarrett Creative Group, is currently searching the country for students and teachers who have experienced anything paranormal.
“We’re looking for any sort of substantial paranormal story that comes out of any school or university in the United States,” De Brito said. “Substantial meaning that it wasn’t just hearing footsteps or hearing voices. Ideally we’re looking for stories that evolve or escalate over a period of time. This person may or may not have encountered the actual ghost at some point.”
De Brito has ways to weed out the liars, to make sure that people aren’t making up their ghost stories or paranormal experiences.
“It’s always a concern of ours that people will come in and lie about their experiences,” De Brito said. “The way that we deal with cases like that is we play devil’s advocate, we ask every question in the book in order to verify the details of their account. In most cases we need additional witnesses to corroborate.”
School Spirit, De Brito’s new TV show, will debut in June 2012, but the interview process will begin much earlier, in January.
Each episode will feature two to three schools and any students’, prior or present, and teachers’, prior or present, experiences.
“[There] will be a very vivid reenactment of the actual incident,” De Brito said. “Shows like Final Witness and Celebrity Ghost Stories, they’re examples of very finalized creation shows- it’s an idea of what it’s ultimately going to look like. They’re very extensive; they’re like watching short movies.”
Neither 248Reapers nor Jacobs have experienced any direct paranormal occurrence at Seaholm. They all believe that Seaholm doesn’t have an eerie enough past to be the home to any paranormal entities.
“Birmingham doesn’t have any kind of history that would normally be associated with some place that was haunted,” Jacobs said. “What I tend to find [is] that the theory that traumatic experiences, death or unfinished business, tends to be the norm.”
If you have any paranormal stories that fit De Brito’s description, e-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
