Suzi:    Damian,  when did you first get interested in paranormal research?

Damian:    It was 94 when I first started getting really into it, because it was a little bit before that that I found out about EVP.

Damian:   Uh, I saw it in a movie and then I found out it was real.  I thought it was like, just Hollywood, and then I found out it was real, and I just started doing internet searches on EVP and I started finding them all over the place.  There's like a billion of them online.  Go to the South Jersey Ghost Research's website,  The Shadowlands.  It's got, like a ghost hunters’ store, and if you go to that site you can see thousands of cases, listen to EVPS and see positive photos.  He's got clear as a day pictures of full body apparitions using night vision and whatnot.

Suzi:   That's another question I have to ask.  I see these paranormal shows on TV, and people report seeing apparitions when it's light,  and I was wondering why do they turn out the lights if people are seeing these things in the light?

Damian:   Well, a couple of reasons for doing dead time or downtime (lights out).  That's when the spirits are most active, from like between 12 midnight and 5 in the morning, but really 3-5 AM is the golden time. 

Suzi:   You say you became even more interested when your dad passed away so explain how his passing boosted your interest.

Damian:   He was 3rd order Franciscan Catholic.  Very devout and  I was like a lapsed catholic and always struggled with that,  and I figured that if he passed he would try to make contact so he could have proven to me he was right, you know what I mean?  I know that if he could have proven to me that there was - uh - something after,  then uh, because he wanted me so much to believe.  It's not that I was like atheist, it's just that I didn't know what I believed.  A skeptic?  Between science and the inconsistancies and the mistakes in the Bible that have already been acknowledged, you know, I'm like, how much of this can I actually trust?

Suzi:   Well, the original Old Testiment was written in Hebrew, and translated so many times, and so many books have been left out that you really don't know if what's in there is what was really written.

Damian:   Yeah.  It’s like that kid’s game (Password). Imagine 10,000 years of the word being passed from one to another. The original Bible was definitely without a doubt written to keep men in power, to keep women down, and you know, it was a lot of manipulation and greed and just bad stuff,  so I kind of got away from the whole organized religion thing.  If they sold whatever the Vatican is ,  you know, all those jewels, they'd be able to feed the whole entire world.  I just think that's hypocrisy.  So anyway, that's why I got involved,  trying to find some message from my Dad, but I never did.  I also think that he was such a religious person that even though he loved his kids more than anything,  if he got a choice to cross over,  he would and he would never look back.

Suzi:  The word ‘Paranormal’ actually covers a wide spectrum of activity outside the normal realm of our 5 senses.  There are alien hunters, psychics and mediums, telekinesis, ESP, spirit contact to name a few. Which area of the paranormal are you most interested in,  and why?

Suzi:   Do you go into it as a skeptic?  I mean,  I'm always skeptical of other people's experiences. I was a skeptic until I saw these things myself. What about you?

Damian:   I've been doing interviews with people as part of my investigator training.  Interviews with people who have experienced a certain kind of haunting. And these people are absolutely 100% normal, not crazy, not looking for a reality show, they're people who have had a genuine problem or who have had a genuine experience that they can't explain, and there's gotta be something to it.  That's what I'm looking to do.

On my team there's 3 people who are going to be tech based,  myself and two others.  We'll be working cameras, laying wires, setting up all the gear, blah blah blah.  There's one girl on the team who will be the historian, and she's gonna find out all the background on the property, the house,  all the owners,  and who owned it before,  what it was before,  you know, just basic history of the location.  And then I have a girl named Caitlan, who just contacted me tonight from Long Island who is a psychic, and that's the last piece of my puzzle which I needed,  someone who has psychic abilities.

Suzi:  Which brings me to my next question.  Are you psychic?  Do you want to work with psychics or do you consider them to be a hinderance to your work?

Damian:    I am not in anyway psychic but I want to work with a psychic on the team for a specific reason because everyone on the team will be briefed about all the details of the case except for Caitlan.  I'm going to keep her in the dark and not tell her anything until we do an initial walk-through .  At that point I will get her feelings and compare them to the experiences people have already had so I can see if she's picking up on the same things or is full of shit.  Then at that point I can fill her in on the details so she can help us with the investigation,  but I'll always send her in not knowing anything in the beginning.

Suzi:   The spirits don't always cooperate with ghost hunters,  and they don't always cooperate with psychics, either,  so how will you judge that?

Damian:   Well,  I'm not just gonna give her one shot.  I'll work with her for awhile,  but it will be real obvious whether she's for real or not.  I can spot a phony psychic a mile away.  That goes back to when I was a little kid when I was like 11 or 12,  when I was heavily into magic.  I was very much into Harry Houdini who became a great debunker of phony psychics in the latter part of his career,  and reading about that got me interested in the paranormal at an even earlier age.  There was even a planned hit out on him in the day because there were a lot of powerful people making a lot of money off this stuff.

Suzi:  Tell me about the Ocean County Paranormal group. 

Damian:   Well,  I just started the group.  I am the founder.  It was just something that I - um - am three times divorced, and the greatest love of my life, my little dog, just passed away and she was 15 years old,  my 15 year old cat died,  and I had a lot of free time on my hands with nothing to do,  so I find the Shadowlands (www.theshadowlands.net) website and I go out to talk to the guy who's the owner of the website and I find out that I can get training there for free, and I've been buying a lot of my gear from him exclusively,  developing a relationship with him,  using the resources on his website, studying the thousands and thousands of cases that are on there,  learning how to use all the equipment and um... so, basically,  the team is in it's infancy,  I've got some good people in line to work with me and we're gonna start going out and doing cases,  probably by summer.

Suzi:   So you haven't actually done any cases as a team,  but you've been trained?

Damian:   Yeah,  and my first investigation that I'm doing with Dave Juliano and the South Jersey Ghost guys is the Gar Civil War Museum in Philadelphia on February 13th.  That place is cool,  it's like way haunted and they've gotten a lot of EVPs there.  There's a lot of weird stuff there, and a lot of civil war stuff.

Suzi:  You told me earlier that your involvement with music, martial arts and the paranormal are all coming together.  Explain what you mean.

Damian:   A lot of what they do at South Jersey Ghost Research is that they have seminars on Reike and crystals and all that stuff,  and I'm not necessarily into that, but being a Tai Chi practitioner for 27 years, I find it interesting.  I'm not really familiar with Reike, but from what I understand about it, it's about using your internal energy to heal.  When you become a Tai Chi Master,  you've done the forms so many thousands and thousands of times that it's a moving meditation that your chi - or your life force -  becomes very, very strong and to some degree you can use it to heal,  so it's weird that these guys are offering these seminars in Reike, or energy healing, and I'm coming from a different viewpoint but with the same result

"I can do that,  and these new guys don't even know that about me yet.  It hasn't been part of the conversation.  I'm gonna let them go awhile and then I'm gonna say 'I do something called Chi Gung, which is kinda like that,  because Chi Gung is like the internal part of Tai Chi,  which is the meditatiion and the utilization of the energy in the body.  For everything from healing to hurting.  The music isn't really tied into that yet.

Suzi:   But the technology of the music is?

Damian:   Yeah, absolutely, because I'm a recording engineer I have an inherent interest in anything that's recorded, and these EVP things just hooked me right in,  and I got way into it,  as soon as I found out about that.  That's where the music relates.  This girl that just contacted me (the psychic) says she studied forensic psychology, and she's a singer, so I'm like, wow,  another guy in the group,  one of my techs, is a drummer,  so I talked to these other two people and they may very well be musicians,  so we can have a band (laughs) full of paranormal investigators. 

Suzi: You mentioned EVP work and that you work with a digital recorder.  Is one type or brand of recorder any better than the others for capturing spirit voices?  Are there any specifications a budding paranormal investigator should look for if they want to get into EVP work?

Damian:   Get something good.  Get like, a Sony digital recorder,  something reputable,  Panasonics are decent.  They cost under forty dollars.  And you can record something like, 300 hours.  Make sure your recorder has a mini usb out so you can just transfer it into your computer.

Damian:   I think there are no experts in this field,  it's in it's infancy,  and even the guys who've been doing it twenty years will tell you they're not experts, because there's just so much that's unknown,  but it could be attached to a person or location or could be a random occurrence.

Suzi:  What sort of computer program do you use to enhance the EVPs you capture on those digital recorders?

Suzi: A music related question for a moment.  What type of equipment do you use for audio recordings of bands?

Damian:   Tascam 488 digital Portastudio.  It has 8 actual trax but I've gotten 16 out of it.  I'm old school,  and I just don't feel comfortable using a computer.  Although it's still digital,  I think because it still looks like the old analog stuff,  my mind likes it better.  It looks and operates just like the old analog stuff but it's way better.  Just in my mind,  it makes me feel better.

Suzi:  Back to ghost hunting.  What other type of equipment will do you use in your work with Ocean County Paranormal?

Damian:   We use infrared thermal scanners to detect raises or drops in temperature and it's like a contact thermometer like a gun that uses infrared technology by contact to detect minute raises or lowering of temperature.  We use motion detectors, which are very helpful because they can help cover a lot of different rooms in the same place

Suzi:   Do spirits set off motion detectors?

Damian:   Yep,  the thing is,  the motion detectors are designed to only go off when something 40 lbs of weight or better goes past it.

Suzi:   So spirits have weight?

Damian:   If the motion detector is set off,  unless there's a giant German Shepherd in the house,  something was there to set it off.

Suzi:   So a mouse wouldn't set it off?

Damian:   No,  a mouse or a cat or a little dog won't set it off.

Suzi:   I'm still amazed that you say that spirits have weight.

Damian:   Yeah,  and think about it.  It's energy.  It depends upon what they're using to manifest.  Usually they're using electromagnetic energy.  That's another device we use,  EMF detectors.  It detects electromagnetic fields.  It's physically impossible for a freestanding electromagnetic field to exist, so you know if it goes off, there's a good chance of there being a ghost or spirit somewhere in the near vicinity. 

Suzi:   Unless the electromagnetic energy is coming from all directions?

Damian:   Yeah,  but in that case it's usually being created by wires and stuff like that.  But say you're out in a cemetery and there's no wires around anywhere and you all of a sudden start getting all these EMF spikes that are consistent, but moving around with no apparent source for it.  Like,  there's no lights or anything.  And that's another thing,  when you go into an investigation you check out where all the electric is,  if the house is powered.  You check to see where all the lights are, where the outlets are,  the boxes and all that stuff.  You do baseline photos, EMF readings, temperature readings, and all that stuff on your first walk through.

So,  we use all the cameras,  the digital cameras,  the regular film cameras, the EMF detectors, the infrared thermometers, thermal scanners, digital tape recorders, motion detectors and DVR and infrared cameras.  I still have about $600 of equipment left to get before I can go do an investigation by myself.

Suzi:  Tell me a little about your spirituality.  How does that tie in with the paranormal?  It always makes me crazy to think that some religions lay claim to spirits as though they only exist in that religion, by calling them angels or demons or whatever, and yet the Catholic church denies that ghosts exist.  Do you believe that angels and demons are the only forms of beings that exist beyond life and death?

Damian:   No, no no, definitely,  I don't believe that.  In my view spirits are spirits.  I always go back to science.  We view it as from the scientific point of view is that there are human entities,  you know, humans that have passed away,  and there are non-human entities that are spirits that have never been alive, have never been a person.

Suzi:   Do you believe there are animal spirits?

Damian:   I'm on the fence with that. I personally don't believe that there are spirits in animals but I know many people do,  but I haven't actually had enough research into it.  I can tell you that in some of the cases I've reviewed that there have been apparitions of cats and apparitions of dogs, so again, I don't rule anything out, I'm totally open minded.

Suzi:   If anyone out there wants to contact you about Ocean County Paranormal,  or about taking martial arts lessons,  or if they need a good drummer, where can they contact you?

Damian:   They can contact me on Facebook or email me at loongshin1@aol.com,  or they can call me on my cell phone.  1-732-300-8377

Suzi:   Thanks, Damian, and we look forward to hearing about some of your exploits in the future.

Suzi: How did you find out about it?

I do believe that everything has it's own vibrations.  I mean,  we're all the same.  Everybody's connected. All this racism and wars, and we're all just part of the same thing, guys,  you just don't get it.  Just because you live in a different part of the country and the sun's out more and your skin's darker,  or whatever, it's so crazy.  We're all the same.

Damian:   I use Audacity.  It's good and basic,  if you're lucky enough to get something on the recorder.  Once you put it in you will be able to see it on the screen, but you always have to use headphones for EVP,  and if you don't have to clean it up,  then don't,  leave it as it is, because the more you mess with it,  you might make it noisier or cut something out by accident.  I mean,  if it needs to be cleaned up,  like if there's a lot of noise or background his, by all means, you can EQ it and clean it up a bit.

Suzi:   Do you believe spirits are location specific?  The reason I ask is because I've had two encounters of my own and they seem to have had nothing to do with where I was when I saw them.  Do spirits sometimes just drop in?  You know, like if maybe they're on vacation or lost or curious,  or just being silly?  What's your opinion?

But really, they go to dark because they feel that the spirits will be less apprehensive about manifesting if it's pitch black.  And the technology we use,  with using infrared light it's invisible  to the human eye, but we illuminate the room using mini DVR cameras using IR extenders on them so it still looks like it's pitch black but to the cameras and to the tape it's like broad daylight.  So your chances of getting an apparition they feel is better at night with lights out.  I've never seen anything yet, and I'm so psyched.

Damian:   Spirit or ghost hunting.  I’m most interested in the science of it because that's how I approach most everything,  from the scientific point of view,  so I'm interested in using technology and science to prove and capture something on tape that is a better reproduction or better proof of what's been caught on tape or audio so far.  And what's there is pretty damn significant, but there just isn't anything yet that is making the front pages of the newspaper because it's so profound,  you know what I mean?