Dan's Papers - October 13, 2006 - Chance Of A Ghost In Mattituck

While the rest of us were in the bar, hoping to catch a glimpse of a ghost at The Old Mill Inn in Mattituck, Brian and Bryan were sniffing around the restaurant area with a voice recorder and a digital thermometer.

"You know why the ghost likes the bar area?" Brian said to Bryan. "Because of the BOOOO-ze. Get it?"

"Another joke that bad - you'll be the one haunting the place," Bryan told him.

We had come in at closing time with four night-vision cameras, two voice recorders, a digital thermometer, an electromagnetic field detector, still cameras, and a hankering to catch evidence of Jan Holmes, former owner of The Old Mill Inn, who is reputed to hang around, occasionally hurling the heavy ice scoop across the bar or grabbing a gentleman's leg. That may not sound like much more than a personality disorder, but Jan deserves kudos for pulling those things off since she's been diagnosed as what doctors call "dead" for 30-plus years.

Who are we? Why, we're the Long Island Paranormal Society, or LIPS (catchy, eh? Fine, go ahead and laugh, then) and we're here to hunt ghosts. After all, Halloween is just around the corner.

Paranormal activity has been reported at The Old Mill Inn restaurant in Mattituck for decades, by dozens. Okay, by like two people. Once the stereo burst on by itself (at least once when the building's power had been cut), diners have seen a specials board slide two feet on its own, the door to the pantry opens and closes itself and the list goes on.

The Old Mill Inn is old (that, you see, is why it's not called "The Relatively New Mill Inn"). It's a great place to go. Built in 1821 as a grist mill, it was changed into a tavern around 1900, and expanded to a restaurant in the fifties. From early on in its tavern-era, patrons of the Old Mill Inn would scrawl their names on the thick beams of the building, along with the year (try that in your local Starbucks today). In fact, you can still read names on the beams from the last century, including that of Jan Holmes herself.

So the LIPS team, taking our cue from popular ghost hunters like The Atlantic Paranormal Society, went in to see if we could debunk the claims.

None of us could have predicted beforehand that we would be the first to definitively prove the existence of the afterlife that night.

Which was fine, because we didn't.

Did I mention this was the LIPS team's first ghost hunt? Rob and I had hunted one building in 2001, but for Matt, Brian, Bryan, Greg, and Karen, it was a first. We gave the impression of a seasoned specter-searching team because I had gotten us all matching tees. "NO BODY? NO PROBLEM!" they read on the front, with "LIPS" on the back. Yeah...you couldn't look any cooler than we.

We'd been given a tour by Bia and Barbara, two of the restaurant's friendly co-owners, and after I had set up one night-vision camera in the bar and one in the ladies room (where no man had "gone" before, ha ha), we went dark and got down to the matters at hand:

Check for temperature fluctuations or cold spots. Much like myself at a party, "entities" are said to suck energy from the area around them, which can drop the temperature in that area. Check for electromagnetic field spikes. Since a "ghost" is supposedly all energy, increases in EMF readings that can't be explained could be a phantom in the room. Try to pick up EVP (electronic voice phenomena). This mega-creepiest of theories suggests that if you record in a "haunted" locale, sometimes when you play back the audio at high volume, you can hear "ghosts" talking on the recording that you did not hear while recording. You can listen to thousands of examples on the Internet. We'll take photos and night-vision video.

In hindsight, we learned a lot of dos and do-nots during the evening. We were sweating slightly and had left the door open earlier for cooler air, which allowed several flying insects to join us.

Next time we also may not want to bring seven people to a hunt of two rooms, since with all the people walking around, talking, bumping things in the pitch black, shining lights around, cursing, sitting on impossibly creaky chairs, any noises captured on the voice recorders must be discounted as us. No one could wait outside because it was raining.

The only odd things we caught were a small "click" in the bathroom (no biggie), one suspicious EMF spike that couldn't be identified as normal, and a few orb photos, which could just be dust. Matt also took extended close-up footage of a small sailor carving on the wall, claiming he thought he saw the eyes move. This was at 2:20 a.m., I should note.

So can we say The Old Mill Inn is truly haunted? No. We found nothing that could be used as evidence, but, since our own learning curve kind of ruined the data, a haunting can't be ruled out, especially when one considers the variety of experiences reported by so many people over the years. It also might have just been a quiet paranormal night.

We had put out a glass of Dewers, Jan Holmes' favorite drink, in hopes of attracting her attention. Later, when Rob looked in the glass with his flashlight, I asked if there was anything interesting.

"Two of the fruit flies we let in earlier drowned in there," he replied.

Only time will tell if their tiny ghosts will haunt that glass.

Scott Teel is a writer living in Saint James. His work can be seen at his website, www.karatelobster.com. To see more photos and video from LIPS' hunt of The Old Mill Inn, visit www.myspace.com/lipsparanormal.