Ghost Trackers Newsletter

History

The Ghost Trackers Newsletter began publication in September 1982 as the official organ of the Ghost Research Society (GRS), a membership organisation founded in 1978 by Martin V. Riccardo. Dale D. Kaczmarek served as president and editor throughout the newsletter's run, publishing from PO Box 205, Oak Lawn, Illinois 60454-0205. Three issues appeared each year, in February, June, and October. Regular membership cost $20.00 per year and included the newsletter, a GRS button, a membership card, discounts to sponsored events and tours, free photographic analysis of alleged paranormal images, and discounts on books through a finder service.

The GRS operated as a tiered organisation. Sustaining members at $25.00 could participate in field investigations and haunted-site excursions, restricted to Midwest members and subject to interview. Contributing members at $30.00 received a newspaper clipping service for their state or country. Patron and lifetime memberships ($250.00) were available, and Kaczmarek maintained a network of State Coordinators, Field Investigators, and Area Research Directors covering various states and several countries. The structure was designed to channel amateur interest into supervised fieldwork, with the newsletter functioning as the connective tissue holding the scattered membership together.

The earliest issues in the archive date from 1987, beginning at Volume 6 (the first five volumes, covering 1982 to 1986, are not held in this collection). That first archived issue, from June 1987, established the publication's character. The editor's page thanked members for submitting photographs, clippings, and recordings. James Crocker had photographed the Marfa lights in Texas, and prints were available through the classified section. Sarah Estep, president of the American Association for Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP), had sent material. Two new regular columnists were announced: Tom Perrott, president of the Ghost Club in London, would write "Psychic Britain," and W. Ritchie Benedict would author "The Haunted Bookshop." Maurice Schwalm contributed investigation reports from the field.

The newsletter's core content was field investigation reports. Maurice Schwalm wrote up the GRS's examination of the Majors House in Kansas City, an 1856 building slated for demolition whose caretaker, Louisa P. Johnston, had devoted her life to its preservation and died on the premises at 89. Psychics were walked through the site without briefing. One sensed "optimistic feelings of a permanently important transportation hub" around the main house and "a transitory presence obsessed with unfair and inadequate gifts of money" around the caretaker's cottage. Photographs were taken on Polaroid 667 film, and a small white-robed form appeared in a window. The report included camera settings, time, date, weather conditions, and shooting angle.

Reader-submitted accounts filled pages alongside the formal investigations. A woman named Patty described twenty years of phenomena in a small bungalow in Oak Park, Illinois, built in the early 1930s. Her mother heard footsteps ascending the basement stairs late at night, felt the mattress depress at the foot of the bed as though someone sat down, and years later heard her own dead mother's voice telling her not to be afraid the day before a life-threatening hospitalisation. A neighbour reported that a previous owner had been "extremely unhappy and a severe alcoholic." The specificity of these accounts, named streets, dates, family relationships, distinguishes them from the anonymous anecdotes that fill most popular ghost literature.

Kaczmarek organised "Excursions Into The Unknown," a programme of haunted-site tours that became a signature GRS activity. The most ambitious was a two-week tour of haunted Britain in June 1988: a seven-day motor coach route through Kent, Portsmouth, the Isle of Wight, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Dartmoor, Plymouth, Land's End, Bath, the Cotswolds, Oxford, Windsor, and Hampton Court, followed by six days in London visiting the Tower, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, and Highgate Cemetery. The land cost was $1,538.00 on double occupancy. Later excursions investigated the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis and the McPike Mansion in Alton, Illinois, both of which became regular GRS investigation sites.

Equipment evolved visibly across the newsletter's run. Early issues discussed Polaroid cameras and psychic walkthroughs. By the late 1990s, Kaczmarek was deploying G.E.I.S.T. (the acronym is not expanded in the text), Sony Nightvision cameras, digital cameras (which Kaczmarek publicly stated he did not recommend for paranormal photography), and instruments measuring magnetic fields and temperature variations. Richard Senate contributed a detailed piece on the use of dowsing rods in psychic investigations, describing a controlled experiment at a restored mission church in Lompoc, California, where numbered floor tiles were charted against dowsing rod "hits" by independent teams.

The final issue in the archive, Volume 19 Number 3 from October 2000, dedicated space to the deaths of Dan McKee, Illinois State Coordinator of the AA-EVP, and to Sarah Estep's retirement from the AA-EVP leadership. Tom and Lisa Butler had taken over the organisation. Kaczmarek was promoting his book Windy City Ghosts through signings and library lectures, and the GRS website at www.ghostresearch.org had added sections on investigation anatomy and equipment. The newsletter had made the transition from purely postal communication to a hybrid model, with an email address (dkaczmarek@ibm.net, later @aol.com) and web presence supplementing the printed publication.