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CATHY WURZER: It's Morning Edition on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Cathy Wurzer. It's a weekend for Halloween parties and ghost stories. Tomorrow afternoon at the historic Warden's House in Stillwater, a group of paranormal investigators will share what they've found at a few notable Minnesota locations that some people claim are haunted. Those places include the First Avenue music venue in Minneapolis, Mounds Theater in Saint Paul, and the Old Warden's House itself.

Justin Miner is one of the founders of the Johnsdale Paranormal Group. He spent the last couple of years trying to explain the unexplainable. He joins me now to talk about modern ghost hunting. Justin. Justin. Justin. There are listeners who are saying to themselves right now, there's no way to prove something like ghosts. It's all bunk. What do you describe as paranormal activity?

JUSTIN MINER: Paranormal activity would be something that can't be explained. It can go from things moving on their own, sounds, footsteps when people aren't there, anything that happens that would be out of the realm of normal human activity.

CATHY WURZER: But are there common explanations for what appears to be paranormal activity?

JUSTIN MINER: There can be. Old homes, I mean, they pop, they creak, they bang. Floorboards are loose so, I mean, you can move in one area of the house and have something sounds like it's moving in the other area of the house. So you definitely want to take a skeptical approach when you are investigating this type of thing. If they're talking about seeing apparitions of people in their home, that's a little bit out there. I might want to go see if we can dig a little bit further into that and see if you can recreate it.

CATHY WURZER: But do you believe there is paranormal activity? You must, obviously, if you're doing what you're doing.

JUSTIN MINER: I do. I've had certain things happen to me personally that I just cannot explain, and that's really what kind of drove me into this whole thing, was trying to find answers for what happened, why it happened, and how it happened. And there's just-- there's so many stories out there that people have that I don't believe that all of them are totally making it up.

CATHY WURZER: What do you use in terms of equipment?

JUSTIN MINER: Really what we go in with is audio recorders, phantom light infrared cameras that can record in pitch blackness as if it were daytime. We also use K2 meters, which pick up EMF, electromagnetic frequencies. So you can use those to track normal EMF within a home. Now if you were to get something to interact with your meter via asking questions or asking commands of it, that's kind of weird.

CATHY WURZER: I have long heard about First Avenue in Downtown Minneapolis, but I like the Mounds Theater in Saint Paul. What did you find when you went into the Mounds Theater?

JUSTIN MINER: The basement of the Mounds Theater is notoriously haunted, I guess, for lack of a better term. There's a lot of claims down there. While I was down there, the K2 meter was going off in direct response to questions. We actually caught one of the better EVPs that we've ever caught, an electronic voice phenomenon. It's a voice or a spoken word or phrase that you don't hear at the time but when you go back and listen to your audio or look at your video, it's something that appears. And you can hear a voice come across saying, what's going on in here? You're overwhelming me.

CATHY WURZER: You mentioned apparitions previous in the conversation. Have you seen apparitions?

JUSTIN MINER: Interestingly enough, the last time we were at the Warden's House, I was going from the carriage house to the actual Warden's House to change out batteries in the camera and it looked to me like somebody was standing outside the back door and I thought it was one of our investigators. And the closer I got, this shadow of a person just disappeared. It was there one minute and gone the next. So as far as apparitions go, that's the closest thing I've ever seen with my own eyes.

CATHY WURZER: Where are you going off to next? Is there a place that you just are, no pun intended here, dying to go to?

JUSTIN MINER: Yeah. Well, even though we've been across the country, I mean, we still are very interested in local, one that I'm really itching to get to is the Chase Resort Hotel up in Walker, Minnesota.

CATHY WURZER: Really? I didn't know.

JUSTIN MINER: There's some interesting claims from the front desk staff. Things move on their own, apparitions walk in, walk up the stairs and disappear. So that one might be kind of an interesting location to be at.

CATHY WURZER: You'll have to come back then.

JUSTIN MINER: We will.

CATHY WURZER: All right.

JUSTIN MINER: Absolutely.