Admit it; we're all just a little bit in love with the dead.
The signs are unmistakable: the surprise success of the low-budget film "Paranormal Activity" in theaters and a sold-out presentation at the Pullo Center this week for two stars of Syfy's hit show "Ghost Hunters" are just icing on the cake of annual Halloween spookery.
But not all of us are as dedicated -- or as determined to find the truth -- as York County native Shane Free. The Los Angeles-based filmmaker's first full-length documentary, "Investigating the Afterlife," recently arrived on DVD.
The filming was done in 2007 and 2008, but its roots go back a good deal further.
"I was interested in filmmaking since I was 8 years old," Free said from Los Angeles in a recent phone interview. "My dad took me to see 'Back to the Future,' and, from that point on, I wanted to be a filmmaker."
A 1995 West York Senior High School graduate, Free was an 11th-grader when the ghost bug bit.
"I was in Gettysburg with a few buddies of mine," he said. "We witnessed what we thought was a spirit in the battlefields when we went there at night."
Filming:--> More than a decade later, he headed back to the Gettysburg area, this time to the Cashtown Inn. Free, his brother and their ghost-hunting gear arrived amid rain and flooding, scooting in just before the roads closed.
"We were actually the only people there for that particular night," he said. "It was really creepy."
At the inn, the team captured some audio and "an orb" on film that could indicate a ghost's presence. Free gathered footage with digital audio recorders, a device to measure electromagnetic fields, and three cameras, including two that work via infrared night vision.
"You can literally shoot in pitch black," he said. That's a necessity for ghost hunters, whose best work is often done at night.
"For whatever reason, spirits seem to be more at home at night," Free said, adding that the lack of distractions could be a reason. "The living are all at rest at that point ... so everything's quiet."
Everything but the ghosts, that is. The film crew heard plenty during a midnight tour of the Queen Mary, a historic ocean liner docked off Long Beach, Calif.
"We had the most activity there, for sure. We literally heard three distinct voices," Free said. "When everyone's reacting to the same thing, you know it's not just in your mind."
Recognition:--> The finished documentary, which features visits to a handful of haunted sites, garnered a best documentary nomination at Oklahoma's Bare Bones Film Festival despite a crowded paranormal field.
"The market right now is so oversaturated (with the paranormal), but we were fortunate enough to be able to play at Bare Bones," Free said. "It gets people interested, but you're then competing with all those other things and it's tough to stand out."
An editor for movie and video game trailers by day, Free funded the filming and DVD release for "Investigating the Afterlife" out of his own pocket. Though he'd be happy to recoup the costs, that isn't his driving focus.
"It was a movie I needed to make," he said. The filmmaker's original plan for the movie was not unlike the fictional route "Paranormal Activity" has since taken to success, which he admits is "kind of frustrating." Ultimately, though, Free chose another direction.
"I decided it's probably scarier if you show ghost hunting as it truly is," he said. "I wanted to take the route of honest ghost hunting."
"Investigating the Afterlife," a ghost-hunting documentary by York County native Shane Free, is available for purchase from Amazon.com for $14.99 and for rent from GhostChannel.tv for $3.99. Digital downloads from Amazon should be available soon, Free said, and he's hoping to add the movie to Netflix's rental library.
The DVD includes more than an hour of paranormal investigation, plus the film trailer and deleted scenes.
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