Paranormal investigators have started a crowd-funding drive to boost investigations into unexplained activities in the Mother City.
|||Cape Town - A Cape Town team of paranormal investigators started a crowd-funding drive to boost investigations into unexplained activities in the Mother City.
Cape Town Paranormal Investigations, founded in 2014, probes all manner of spooky occurrences free of charge, using a range of technological gadgets, many of which they have customised or built themselves.
And their pitch sounds a lot like the tag line from the film Ghostbusters: “If someone feels they may have a ghost, who do they turn to?”
But while the Ghostbusters team in the film locks spectres in boxes and fights off phantoms with Photon Packs, the Cape Town investigators said their research was serious and was carried out in “a logical, scientific manner”.
Marc Leitao, who founded Cape Town Paranormal Investigations, said once the group was contacted by a member of the public, the team made a date to investigate what had been causing the creepy creaks on the staircase, or bumps in the night. Using a range of technological equipment, such as laser grids, motion sensors, infrared illuminators and electromagnetic field detectors, they spent hours at the site checking for paranormal activity.
Often, he said, the investigation resulted in a “logical explanation”.
“It is worth seeing the sense of relief that we provide to the client,” he said. But not always.
“We have most certainly come across some instances of activity which we were neither able to explain, nor debunk,” said Leitao.
“I, being a sceptic at heart, need a bit more proof before I can definitively label a site as “haunted”, but there have been some instances caught on camera that we could not explain.”
The team has studied ghostly goings-on at a number of well-known Mother City sites, including Tygerberg Hospital, the Green Point Lighthouse, the historic Glen Lodge - now the Southern Right Hotel - and a “well-known school situated in Simon’s Town”.
Leitao said he received between eight to 10 investigation requests per month.
“Aside from that, we have a constant influx of messages asking for advice or help with situations that people are experiencing, or alternatively people submit their own-captured evidence for our analysis and review.”
The crowd-funding drive seeks to raise enough money to buy a thermal imaging camera.
As of Friday, R600 had been raised from four backers on local crowd-funding site Thundafund. The target is R12 000.
jan.cronje@inl.co.za
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