Tommy Netzband's obsession with ghosts dates back to the day he drowned in a bathtub at age 5 or 6. He remembers being on the ceiling and gazing down at his body submerged in the water, until his sister rushed in to pull him out.
"Then I was back in my body," Netzband says, adding that he's tried to relocate that liminal, near-death space ever since. "It's been my life's quest."
Today, Netzband holds a desk job at a nonprofit and moonlights as a ghost hunter. He leads weekly walking tours through haunted pockets of Haight Ashbury, and occasionally hires himself out for ghost-themed birthday parties for 13-year-old girls. Most importantly, he presides over the San Francisco Ghost Society, a 10-year-old organization that leads paranormal teams into the spookiest buildings in San Francisco. The idea is to sniff out the old specters that might still be lingering in basements or attics or old freight elevators, and see if they're willing to talk.
That's often a dicey proposition. Most neophytes who join the investigations don't experience anything, Netzband says, and even the seasoned ghost whisperers often grasp at tiny, fleeting signals — the shadowy figure that flickers into a cellphone picture, or an inexplicable draft in the corner. Such abnormalities all became freighted with meaning during a recent Ghost Society tour of the Odd Fellows building on Seventh and Market streets, where amateur sleuths used electromagnetic field readers, all-spectrum cameras, and old-fashioned seances to communicate with the dead.
Ghost hunting, like so many other San Francisco subcultures, has become both entrepreneurial and high-tech. While the rest of the country marvels at paranormal reality shows that milk the afterlife for entertainment value, members of San Francisco Ghost Society pride themselves on being gumshoe sleuths and evidence-gatherers. Netzband, who describes himself as an "open skeptic," prepares for the night's ghost hunt by unveiling a large messenger bag into which he's piled all the latest ghost gadgetry: a K2 electromagnetic field reader; an Ovilus III, which uses an algorithm to convert environmental readings into words; an Xcam SLS "structured light sensor" camera provided by the society's directors of technology. (It uses thermal temperature, light frequency, and ultrasonic distance sensors to detect ethereal forms.)
"It's a rare treat to see one of these cameras," Netzband says, beaming. "There are only 30 in existence." Two of them are at the Odd Fellows ghost hunt.
Despite the fact that members of SF Ghost Society have managed to infuse science and technology into the ancient practice of otherworldly communication, there's still no getting around the "otherwordly" aspect. At the end of the day, a ghost hunter's job is to hunt for ghosts. Access to whiz-bang gadgetry is much less important than an ardent belief in the supernatural.
And whether or not you believe, there's a good chance you won't encounter any spirits on your first hunt. In fact, Netzband says, that's what happens about 90 percent of the time. It takes a while to build up a good eye for spectral presences, much less a ghost rapport. Oftentimes, a ghost might hover over a ghost conference, but refuse to participate.
That's what seems to happen at the Odd Fellows tour, during which a disembodied head materializes on a cellphone photo snapped in the club room, and one section of wall in the basement feels inexplicably cold. Ghosts seem to be wandering about everywhere, tiptoeing along floors or slinking into camera frames, but most efforts to engage them are fruitless.
Perhaps that's understandable. Years after shuffling off the mortal coil, a ghost might grow weary of long cross-examinations. Or of only talking to ghost enthusiasts.
"How would you feel if you were dead, and everyone kept asking if you were dead?" ghost investigator Anthony Anderson posits to a group of hunters assembled in the Odd Fellows basement. "That would get old very fast."
Anderson isn't one for aimless cross-examinations. After gathering the group for an EVP session — a séance in which participants use recorders to capture voices (called "electronic voice phenomena") that they can't hear with naked ears — he offers a short, helpful primer: Ask the ghost for something concrete, he advises. Get it to say its name. Tell it to touch the green light on one of the group's electromagnetic field detectors, and turn the light red. Tap the opening line of "Shave and a Haircut" on a wood table, and have the ghost knock out the last two beats. (Anderson tries it — no dice.)
This particular group of hunters qualifies as "expert" by Ghost Society standards, and includes a medium named Verna Wilson, along with several people who'd brought their own ghost-finding devices. Some tote thermal meters and cellphones; others sit down and squinch their eyes in stubborn concentration. Anderson pulls out a stuffed horse with a recorder inside, and sits it on a table.
"You leave this in a room," he explains. "And then if it starts to talk [by itself], you know something was talking to it."
But even the stuffed horse fails to entice our phantasmal brethren. Netzband, nonetheless, seems unfazed. "One of the biggest challenges in ghost hunting is you can't bring the ghosts out on command," he explains. "It just doesn't happen that way."
And the various attendees don't seem disenchanted, either. A 29-year-old office clerk named Nicole Hyee says she came out of curiosity; a Las Positas College student named Evan Elias says he got into paranormal TV shows a few years ago, and took part in a couple of ghost hunts with a similar society in Hayward. Others confess to being titillated by the afterlife, if not obsessed.
For stalwarts like Netzband, though, it's a lifelong calling. He launched the Ghost Society 10 years ago because he'd already been investigating haunted houses on his own; since then, he's attended countless national conferences, presided over paranormal-themed coffee klatches, and assembled a sprawling email network that he calls the RIPList ("RIP" stands for "Really Important People"). Outside his day job, much of Netzband's life revolves around the underground paranormal community, and around his long-held preoccupation with the out-of-body experience he had as a kid.
It's a moment he's considered over and over, and one he may never revisit. No high-tech paranormal machine can get him there. But maybe no ghost can, either.
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