The newly formed Coffs Coast Paranormal Research Group has been inundated with calls from northern New South Wales residents wanting 'haunted' sites investigated.
Group founder and lead investigator Jamie Schwartz said he became interested in the paranormal after an encounter with what he believes was a ghost 25 years ago.
"I was house-sitting for my sister; I went to bed one night and was in the bed face down and all of sudden I felt two hands on my back pushing me into the bed," he said.
"I turned around and said 'I'm not the person you're after' and then it just totally disappeared with the weight and hands gone.
"About four weeks after that, my sister rang me and said 'we saw it, it woke us up' and it was a little girl with long blonde hair, wearing a white dress and sitting on the nightstand.
"Apparently it was attached to her now ex-husband."
Mr Schwartz began taking paranormal investigations seriously while living in Sydney where he was part of a Penrith-based research team.
With that team, he learned how to use a range of equipment including a 'spirit box', smartphone applications, audio and video recorders and cameras to capture paranormal activity.
"A spirit box looks like a small transistor radio and when you turn it on, it sweeps through all the stations and creates that white noise and that's how the spirits can talk to us," he said.
"And we can hear that in real time."
Group are not 'ghost busters'
Mr Schwartz moved to the northern New South Wales town of Glenreagh late last year and discovered there were no local paranormal research teams, so he decided to start his own.
"We research the paranormal, we don't do 'ghost busting'," he said.
"Ghost busting is when you just get a group of people together and get some cameras and just look for ghosts and spirits.
"We actually research where we're going first and look for history associated with the locations, and we conduct an analysis of the evidence we gather after the investigation."
He said he put an initial callout for investigators on social media.
"I put it out on the Glenreagh Facebook page and I thought I'd get responses like 'you're crazy'," Mr Schwartz said.
"But the response has been so overwhelming, with people saying 'we've heard of spirits at this place here and this place there'.
"They've asked me to do private investigations in their houses, so it's been absolutely phenomenal."
Casey 'Ogre' Lowrey, from Coffs Harbour, was the first to sign up to Mr Schwartz's group.
Bitten, scratched, punched by 'dark entities'
Mr Lowrey said he began researching the paranormal after the death of his mother in 2005.
"A week after my mum died, chairs started moving on their own and a big thick heavy curtain would start lifting up," he said.
"I took that as her letting us know she was still around."
He said throughout his eight years of investigations, his most memorable encounters had been with 'dark entities'.
"A lot of religious people call them demons, but we prefer to call them dark entities because we don't know," he said.
"They're very violent and can bite and scratch; I've been bitten, scratched, pushed down stairs and punched in the face."
Rachel James is the final member of the Coffs Coast team and has signed up as a trainee investigator.
"I've always had an interest in things that can't be explained," Ms James said.
"And I've caught a photo of what I believe is a man and a woman in a cemetery."
The group have been visiting sites across northern New South Wales and recording apparent paranormal activity, such as photos that show mysterious 'orbs' or 'mists'.
At one Clarence Valley cemetery that Mr Schwartz did not wish to identify, he said the team had captured several photographs of figures including someone leaning over a grave.
Mr Schwartz said while he respected the views of sceptics, he had a simple explanation as to why some but not others had encountered paranormal beings.
"Some people are more sensitive than others," he said.
"It's up to spirits who they talk to and don't talk to.
"You have to remember that spirits were once human and there are people they may like and people they don't like."
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