Julie Anderson's hobby takes her to some of the spookiest places in America. She claims to have been physically assaulted by spirits unseen and have communicated with the dead on several occasions.
Anderson, who daylights as the chief of recreation therapy for two Veterans Affairs medical centers in New York, said she finds nothing unsettling about any of it.
For nearly two years, the Orangeburg native has been the publicist for Haunted Times Magazine, a publication dedicated to the paranormal and led by paranormal investigator Christopher Moon.
"I just followed them on the Internet for a while, then I met them, and we kind of clicked," Anderson said. "They had already blazed the way in paranormal research."
That blazing was with Moon's use of the "Telephone to the Dead," a device Thomas Edison was reportedly working on before he died, according to various paranormal Web sites.
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Anderson's first encounter with the "Telephone to the Dead" and Moon was at a Paranormal Research Society conference at Penn State.
"We've been able to communicate, real time, with spirits," Anderson said. "Every time it happens, it amazes me, that you can hear your loved one's voice come across this device. I've heard my grandfather's voice, and he had a very distinct Southern drawl."
"I can tell you I am a skeptic. I guess I'm a hopeful skeptic," she said. "Every time something happens, it has to happen in my face. I like to see it. I like to experience it."
Anderson claims several in-your-face experiences. One was in March, when she and other paranormal researchers with Haunted Times traveled to the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, Mass., to conduct an investigation.
While in the Borden house, where Lizzie Borden was accused of murdering her father Andrew Borden and his wife Abby with an ax, Anderson said she was physically assaulted by one of the murder victims. It was her fourth visit to the house.
"It was about 3 o'clock in the morning. It was almost like you have one of those dreams where you're falling and you startle yourself," she said. "I put my head back down, and I closed my eyes, and I was getting ready to go to sleep, and I heard the bed creaking … the bed was moving side to side. I just lay there for a while and going, 'This is not happening. This kind of stuff does not happen to me.'
"So I raised my head up on my elbows, and it stopped, and I lay back down, and it started again. I thought, 'This is crazy.' … I was awakened again by a push of the bed. … So I was like, 'I'm just not going to pay attention to this thing,' because I knew it was Andrew Borden. He likes to mess with people.
"I turned on my side and went back to sleep, and that's when I was woke up by the punch to my stomach." Anderson described it as a "three-finger karate poke" that pushed her across the bed.
"At that point, I stayed up until the sun came up," she said, and the remainder of her night was uneventful.
The youngest of three children, the Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School graduate said while some of her family members have reservations about what she does, she makes sure she is well-protected spiritually before entering into paranormal situations.
"At the time, I don't feel creeped out about it," she said. "I feel I am protected, that I have a higher purpose of helping whoever it is we need to go help, the families or places of business that have problems where we do these investigations. … I feel like it is what I am supposed to be doing, and I don't feel like it can really harm me.
"You have to say, 'I have my beliefs, I have my God. He's stronger than you, He will protect me,' and that's that. … I think about it often, and I'm mindful and respectful of my religious upbringing."
Anderson said there are things she won't do to entice paranormal beings.
"There are some people that investigate their own house," she said. "They try to record in their own house, to catch electronic voice phenomenon … . There are people that do that in their homes, and they really get caught up in it.
"I think the more you do that in your own home, the more you invite things. Your home is your haven; it's my safe place. I don't even want good spirits to contact me here."
Anderson, who describes herself as a sensitive or empath in her Haunted Times biography, says she began to realize her potential when she first started working with a group investigating graveyards.
"They would take me to an area of the graveyard and say, 'OK, what do you feel?' Think about how your body feels in the moment," she said.
In fact, Anderson claims one of her very first paranormal experiences happened during such an exercise.
Anderson said after letting go of everything in her mind and concentrating, the bottom half of her body began feeling very heavy, like it was filling up with water. She said she sensed she was a 28-year-old female and was filled with an overwhelming sadness.
The group began searching tombstones near where they were and found one for a woman about that age, situated next to a young child's grave.
"I believe everybody is psychic, it's just not everybody allows themselves to get in touch with that part of themselves, to allow themselves to be in a moment and sense things," Anderson said.
The 37-year-old said her interest in the paranormal predates the popular "Ghostbusters" movies of the 1980s.
"My great aunt and uncle in Bishopville, they told us stories about their house being haunted, and I always thought how cool that was," she said. "And my grandmother would tell us stories of the unexplained. And I was always interested in ghost stories. I always watched 'Unsolved Mysteries.' I was always interested in the ones that had to deal with ghosts."
There is one local "haunt" Anderson said she would be interested in investigating — the old Girl Scout camp in Orangeburg.
"You always heard it's a Freddy Krueger-type thing," she said.
While paranormal researchers often use TriField electromagnetic field meters, temperature gauges, digital voice recorders, motion detectors, night-vision goggles, cameras and Geiger counters in their hunt for the paranormal, Anderson said she prefers to use just the basics — a camera and a digital voice recorder.
Anderson said not everyone she works with professionally knows about her hobby.
"I guess I just haven't wanted to open myself up to scrutiny," she said. "I don't want to have to defend a hobby. You either believe or you don't. My main goal is not to change your opinion. My main goal is to understand it more myself, and help those who do believe understand it more."
T&D Features Editor Wendy Jeffcoat Crider can be reached by e-mail at wjeffcoat@timesanddemocrat.com or by telephone at 803-533-5546. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.
Who is Lizzie Borden?
For some, thoughts of Lizzie Borden may bring to mind this popular children's rhyme:
"Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one."
According to wikipedia.org, New England spinster and Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden was the central figure in the hatchet murders of her father Andrew Borden and stepmother Abby on Aug. 4, 1892, at the family home in Fall River, Mass. She was arrested and charged with the crime on Aug. 11, 1892.
Although Lizzie Borden's stories were said to be inconsistent and her behavior suspect, she was acquitted on June 20, 1893, in part because no murder weapon or blood evidence was ever found. No one else was ever arrested or tried in the sensational crime, and Lizzie Borden has remained notorious in American folklore.
Dispute over the identity of the killer or killers continues to this day.
(Information from wikipedia.org)
