When Tammy Rosenfeld was 5 years old, the shadows standing at the edge of her bed didn’t scare her.

She was used to them — the sometimes one, sometimes many, shaded outlines of a human figure. They stood where the hard light seeping in from her bedroom window hit the mattress, where shadows shouldn’t be, in a space where only she slept.

In 2012, Rosenfeld founded Salt City Paranormal Investigations, a not-for-profit team of three that does public and private investigations of central New York hauntings. SCPI joined an abundance of already established teams in CNY, like the Syracuse-based Shadow Chasers that Kate Creighton’s husband, P.W. Creighton, founded eight years ago.

The women knew they were different their whole lives, and have spent parts of their adulthoods investigating the paranormal.

Kate Creighton identifies as a medium, one who feels sensations when a spirit is present. Rosenfeld, who is an empath, or someone who picks up on energy of the deceased, experienced a lot of the paranormal growing up.

The oldest of five, Rosenfeld grew up bouncing from house to house in the rural countryside of Onondaga County. Her parents were renters, so the family moved every three or four years, totaling seven or eight houses.

It was at these houses, alongside her four sisters and one brother, where she shared her first encounters.

“My sister (Rosenfeld) is more sensitive, so her experiences were more extreme, but it was definitely hard to tell how much of this was just our childhood imagination and how much of it was real,” said Wanda Toscano, the second oldest child in the family. “But as we got older, stuff started lining up and I realized ‘yeah, this is real.’”

It wouldn’t be until 2005, the year Rosenfeld watched the first episode of “Ghost Hunters,” a SyFy original about two plumbers-by-day, paranormal investigators-by-night, when she realized it wasn’t just her family who could feel spirits.

“I was shocked that people were actually talking about this stuff that I had experienced all my life. I was like ‘People do this? I can do this,’” she said.

So she started her research. For five years, the West Virginia University graduate spent her free time scouring the Internet for answers.

In 2010, she found one in a local team she quickly joined. Rosenfeld became the case manager and did the nitty-gritty tasks, like setting up investigations, filling out and filing paper work and organizing events, meet-ups or appearances.

After a falling out in the process, she quit and started SCPI.

Like Kate Creighton, having a team was the turning point for Rosenfeld. The teams made both women more comfortable with her abilities, both in practice and conversation.

“It made me realize that I’m not crazy, but I actually just see things on a different wavelength than other people,” Kate Creighton said about Shadow Chasers.

As a freshman at East Tennessee State University, P.W. Creighton traveled to the Appalachian Mountains for a project to document local folklore.

There, he met a woman who told him stories of paranormal occurrences in the area. P.W. Creighton realized that these stories weren’t documented, but are worth telling.

“He really started paying attention to paranormal local folklore and thought, ‘Well, if I can document this, maybe I can analyze this,’” Kate Creighton said.

When he returned to campus, he started Shadow Chasers.

As a junior, he met Kate Creighton in a graveyard near the State University of New York at Potsdam on a ghost hunt with her two friends. They hit it off, and now the married couple works together on a ghost hunting team only slightly bigger than Rosenfeld’s, but still small enough to count on two hands.

In their almost decade of work, the Creightons have investigated asylums, hotels and theaters, including the Capitol Theater in Rome, New York and the Stanley Theater in Utica, New York. This Halloween, they’ll investigate the Hotel Utica.

Rosenfeld’s work has taken her to similar venues, like the abandoned Pennhurst Asylum in Spring City, Pennsylvania, and the Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, Connecticut, two of the Northeast’s most haunted locations.

The first time she went to Pennhurst, she went with Joe Chin, a former member of Ghost Hunters, the show that set the stage for her hobby.

“When we were in the boys’ dormitory, I saw a black shadow that was about 3 feet high, and it started charging at me,” Rosenfeld said. “That kind of freaked me out.”

Mostly, though, on these eight to 10 hour investigations, both Rosenfeld and Kate Creighton agreed there’s nothing to fear.

The teams use science-based equipment, like EMS scanners, RSF meters, thermal scanners and, for the Creightons, a PX, an oculus that takes in energy and translates it into words, Kate Creighton said.

During instances where spirits are present in a private investigation, the teams will ask the homeowners what they want to do. Many times, the spirits will be left to stay and the investigation acts simply as affirmation that something is present.

Others times, a priest will be called in to perform a cleansing.

“Many homeowners just want an objective third party to come in and say: ‘Yes, something is here, and no, you’re not crazy,’” Kate Creighton said.

The teams will leave, often unpaid. Rosenfeld works a 9-5 job as a social worker, Kate Creighton works in customer service and her husband is a published author and archaeologist.

On the side, Rosenfeld writes for Paranormal Enlightenment magazine and hosts a radio show called “Sisterhood of Women in the Paranormal.”

Though the dark shadows at the edge of her childhood bed never scared her, she understands that the paranormal does frighten some people.

That’s why she’ll stay up all night in abandoned asylums, old hotels or graveyards — so the shadows and gut feelings don’t creep up on those who don’t want them.

“My number one main reason why I do it is to help people,” Rosenfeld said. “When my family was experiencing a lot, there was no one there to help us. No one. So that’s why I do it — to help people.”

Published on October 28, 2015 at 10:55 pm

Contact: kasotelo@syr.edu