Intake Weekly: Indy Faces

October 27, 2005

Who ya gonna call?

Maggie Anaya spends her spare time seeking out all things strange, spiritual and spherical.

By Sherri Pfouts
sherri.pfouts@intakeweekly.com

In the beginning, Maggie Anaya wouldn't even get out of her car.

The 30-year-old co-founder of Indiana Paranormal Investigations admits she used to spend more time sitting safely inside her vehicle than exploring cemeteries alongside members of ghost-tracking groups.

That was the old Anaya.

The new Anaya is ready to hunt.

Anaya formed Indiana Paranormal Investigations with Ravenwolfe Teu and Caroline Beam in 2002, when the trio decided it was time to branch off from another Indiana ghost-tracking group.

**This is actually not entirely true. The group was formed by Maggie, Mike and Caroline in 2002. The reporter just grabbed the wrong names from the website.**

With her new organization, Anaya travels the state to visit homes and businesses where paranormal activities are suspected. These days, Anaya even hunkers down for the night in the most haunted of rooms in a home.

You Don't Scare Her

If Anaya has been looking for the ultimate in spooky experiences when searching for ghosts, she hasn't found it yet.

"Unfortunately, I haven't had any amazing experiences or a great story happen to me," she said. "People in the group have. I'm learning more about it and trying to open myself up more to experiences."

Opening herself up to more experiences means clearing her mind, being watchful and turning off the lights to look for orbs, which are small globes of light that sometimes appear in pictures and on video screens. These orbs, according to Anaya, are known among ghost trackers as spirit energies.

When watching for orbs, Anaya tracks the speed of movement to determine what she's really seeing. If "it's an insect or if it's moving slow in one direction (then) it's probably dust," she said.

Anaya watches for 90-degree angle "movements . . . (or) if it moves in one direction and moves back."

And Anaya keeps an eye out for other strange occurrences, too.

"Of course, if a piece of furniture moves or something falls off the wall that would be good, too," she said.

The ghost tracker also listens closely for out-of-the-ordinary sounds. "A lot of times it sounds like a whisper," she said. "I've heard some (things that sound) like shouting."

Anaya remembers one experience where she visited a business thought to be haunted. "The gentleman (business owner) felt he knew what was going on, and he asked the questions," she said. "He (asked) 'How did you die?' or 'When did you die?' and a little girl whispered 'I'm not dead.'"

Seek and ye shall find maybe

All this otherworld activity doesn't happen on demand.

"A lot of times we don't see anything," Anaya said.

But that doesn't mean she's ready to stop looking. "We'll check out anything," she said.

Anaya's investigative group goes for free to any location where haunting is suspected. She said the trio receives one or two investigation requests a month, and, around Halloween, more e-mails arrive.

Overall, Anaya's enjoys the research more than the hunt.

"My favorite part of being a paranormal investigator is the historical research, and uncovering pieces of history that otherwise go unnoticed," she wrote on her Web site.