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I’m what I’d call an open skeptic when it comes to all things supernatural.
Would I like for life to be more than bureaucracy and Instagram? Sure. Have I found proof that there is something that science or logic can’t explain? Unfortunately no, and I think that’s a bit sad.
So, on the evening of Oct. 24, seven days out from Halloween, I packed a recorder, a camera and a yoga mat to sleep on and went over to Fort Mifflin for their annual overnight ghost-hunt event. I was one of 50 to attend the soldout “Sleep with the Ghosts” event at the fort which once weathered the Revolutionary and Civil wars as well as the Yellow Fever outbreak in the 1790s. A “Ghost Hunters” episode on the fort touted the area as one of the most haunted in the country and told of apparitions of a screaming woman and faceless man.
After my 6:40 p.m. arrival, and signing a waiver which I didn’t read, I saw neither the faceless man or screaming woman but instead dozens of well-equipped paranormal investigators.
Tyler Klutkowski, a bearded man who wore all black and gave me a business card for the Eastern Seaboard Paranormal Society said he’d spent over $2,000 on microphones, sensors and cameras for investigating. Others had brought all sorts of light-up sensors and gadgets, some handheld, others meant to be placed for the ghost to interact with that they said could detect “EMF” or electromagnetic fields. Beyond sensors there was no shortage of dowsing rods, heat readers and ghost-detecting apps — ouija boards were prohibited by the Fort Mifflin staff.
“I was in Pennhurst (Asylum) probably seven years ago now and I asked a question in the open of ‘Is there anybody here with us,’” said Klutkowski. “And upon listening to the audio, we didn’t hear it at the time, but there was a very breathy note that you can make out. I like to try to debunk, disprove stuff, so I went through every channel trying to disprove it. Couldn’t figure it out and summed it up to a direct answer.”
As a skeptic, I’m in the majority. A 2025 Gallup Poll found that 39% of Americans said they believe in ghosts. A separate YouGov survey found that 60% reported experiencing something they considered paranormal. Yet, I was in the minority at Fort Mifflin. Prior to the event’s start, attendees shared stories like the one Klutkowski told me. I heard about disembodied voices at the conjuring house, shadowy figures at White Hill Mansion and bumps in the dark at Airbnb’s. I was still skeptical but starting to feel a bit of FOMO at the camaraderie and experience these people shared.
At 7:30 p.m. I and the rest of the attendees gathered around a fire in the fort’s courtyard where Fort Mifflin staff went over the rules of the event and introduced their on-site paranormal investigators and hosts JT and Sandy Burkard. JT, a car dealership owner and Sandy, a Realtor were married and the co-founders of G.Host a paranormal investigation team and event-hosting group.
JT told me he wasn’t always a believer of ghosts and paranormal activity until a tour guide at another haunted spot took him “under his wing,” and helped JT have a paranormal experience.
Almost 10 years and $4,000 worth of equipment later and JT holds almost a dozen events a year with G.Host which is a registered LLC. The Halloween season is of course the busiest for G.Host and often required long hours and six-day workweeks; Sandy would stay up all night for the Fort Mifflin event and JT until 3 a.m.
“For me, that’s what I love the most is if I can debunk everything,” said Burkard. “But if there’s one or two things I can’t debunk, then you say, ‘OK, we found something here.’”
During my own ghost-hunting at Fort Mifflin, I quickly learned how much patience and tolerance for the dark it required. By the event’s start, the sun had set and the lights had been turned off around the fort and inside the areas where much of the hunting took place, many of which were embedded into the fort’s walls.
In the first hour while I adjusted to the habits of the seasoned professionals around me I scared myself a few times by shining a light into a dark area and seeing someone — living and breathing — there looking back at me.
In one area, which served as an underground prison during the Civil War, I interviewed two individuals who claimed to be clairvoyants. One of whom said she saw the apparition of a man with short white hair and an “old-fashioned black tie jacket” in the corner and another behind her who wanted to choke her as she was a woman and we were in what was once a male-only space. I only saw darkness as we all had our flashlights off and I couldn’t see an inch in front of me.
“Sometimes, they are so trapped here that they don’t realize that they are dead,” said Anna Brandimarte of the ghosts she said she was seeing. “As soon as I walked in, I could immediately see a soldier in my face with one of those old pistol guns.”
Brandimarte and the other clairvoyant in the room, Will Shepard, said they had conducted investigations all over the Tri-State, sometimes at the requests of others. Both say they grew up in haunted houses.
“I grew up in a house where it was built, and then the man that built it lost all his money in the Great Depression, and he killed himself,” Shepard said. “So I saw him at night when I was a kid walking around the house.”
There is no scientific proof that clairvoyants are real nor is there any that ghosts are real but after all the talk of death and spirits in the dark with two strangers I was feeling a bit spooked and asked them how the ghosts felt about me being there. They said I was fine.
I spent most of the night hopping around from spot to spot talking to strangers in the dark.
According to a map I’d received of haunted hotspots at Fort Mifflin, there were six locations where I could experience something paranormal and I wasn’t able to experience anything in any of them. No one else seemed to experience anything grand — shadowy figures, things moving on their own — either but that wasn’t for lack of trying. In every room I stepped into, someone had some light-up tool for the ghosts to interact with in some way.
Though most of the attendees who I spoke with said they’d gotten their gear on Amazon where tools ranged from $10 to $300. E-commerce analytics firm Grips Intelligence estimated that two major online ghost-hunting retailers generated a combined $3.8 million in sales in 2025. Reliable figures for how much Americans spend on paranormal investigations each year remain scarce. There is no scientific proof that says any of the ghost-hunting tools will help you find a ghost.
“Everything is theory,” JT said. “There’s no one piece of equipment that says this is gonna find you a ghost 100%.”
The whole experience felt like that of a petting zoo to me, everyone going into the supposed ghost’s spaces with a light-up ball for the spirits to play with or a candle for them to blow on or an app or device to communicate with them with. Questions were a constant and always asked in a way you might ask a child or pet, “Are you there? What’s your name? How are you?”
Never did I observe intelligent answers through any of the tools or aloud though I remained open to the possibility of it happening.
“The biggest thing I always tell everybody is it’s not Disneyland,”JT said. “You can’t flick a switch and spooky stuff happens. You just kind of be immersed in it and just have an open mind and see what happens.”
For a while I tagged along with Klutkowski who didn’t carry anything that glowed. He brought me and his friend who was tagging along on his first ghost tour into another dark, stone, underground room and set up a camera and recorder and began to throw questions out into the dark. He heard a knock and what he thought was a disembodied sigh in the dark that I didn’t.
There’s a name for the brain’s tendency to find familiar sounds in ambiguous noise: auditory pareidolia.
Researchers have also studied how lighting, surroundings and expectations can contribute to supposedly paranormal experiences. During the hunt I thought of the phantom buzzes I hear from my phone when I’m expecting a notification.
Klutkowski said he was “in between” on the validity of the light-up tools others used.
“I like to go after the more like firm evidence,” said Klutkowski. “If I ask a question and I hear a knock, I can go back and check and ask others if they made that sound.”
Up late but not participating in the investigations around her was Mary Reynolds, who was manning the gift shop. Like everyone I talked to who worked at Fort Mifflin, Reynolds said she was a skeptic when she started. She’s still never seen a ghost but became a believer when she was helped down the stairs by something she couldn’t see during a tour. In her 19th year working at Fort Mifflin, she calls the ghosts her “invisible coworkers.”
Reynolds has been a history buff since she was seven years old after she visited Boston with her family and didn’t want to leave the historical sites there. At Fort Mifflin she acts as the lead seamstress and a tour guide, helping with the site’s rather robust programming which includes near-daily events. She calls the ghost tour a way to remember and honor those who died at Fort Mifflin.
“There were many who fought here, they suffered here, they died here,” said Reynolds. “And they deserve to be remembered. And that’s why we’re here, to acknowledge their sacrifice and to ensure that they are not forgotten.”
I stayed up until 4 a.m. that night looking for ghosts. I tried patience and sat alone in the dark asking questions. I recorded for a bump or word that my ears couldn’t hear. I tried to catch the ghosts off guard with the flash of my camera. At around 3 a.m. when temperatures were nearing low-40s and much of the group had gone to sleep, I tagged along with Sandy who seemed to be the ghost magnet of the group.
“They talk to me, I don’t know why, but they do, and I’m OK with that,” said Sandy. “So maybe just because I’m open to it, but I don’t know.”
Perhaps I just wasn’t open to it but when I went with Sandy to find a ghost their ghost voicer tool said “rapture” seven times in 15 minutes and not much else.
I got two hours of sleep that night atop my yoga mat. I woke up with a stiff back and a headache (no spirit appeared to me in my dreams) but I didn’t consider the night a loss.
While I’d missed out on the ghost part of the ghost hunt, in an increasingly expensive hobby economy, I’d paid a little under $100 for a roof over my head for a night, quite a few history lessons from my fellow attendees who I found to be great people and maybe most importantly, a night off my phone and outside. Not a bad deal.
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