“The guy who owns the place thinks he may have opened up a portal,” he told the small audience.

I called Bill the next day and asked if there was any chance he’d let me follow him on the job.

“I don’t know,” Bill said, “clients are usually pretty sensitive about who they want around during an investigation … but I’ll ask.”

I hung up, disappointed, but the next day, he called me back.

Bill: I talked to the client, he said it’s OK. The investigation will be on Saturday, we’ll meet at 6:30.… How many people will be with you?

Me: Oh, just me.

Bill: Okay.

Me: So (nervous laugh) should I be worried about this?

Bill: Well, no.

Me: OK …

Bill: Are you religious?

Me: No, not really …

Bill: Not at all?

Me: No …

Bill: Well, usually I advise people, if they’re religious, to say a prayer before their first paranormal investigation. I would suggest to you to ask, before we go in, to ask the spirits to leave you alone, to not bother you, to not touch you …

Me: OK …

Bill: … and before we leave, ask them to stay behind, and not follow you.…

Bill invited me to his house in Miami Lakes to review paranormal evidence he and his wife had gathered over their careers; a sort of preparation, Bill told me, for what I was going to be exposed to on Saturday. I accepted.

I knocked on the door on a Wednesday afternoon. The small home on Jacaranda Lane was perfectly maintained; candy canes wrapped with multicolor Christmas lights filed neatly toward the front door.

“Hey, buddy,” Bill said, shaking my hand. “Come on in.”

Bill was wearing a khaki shirt and hat stitched with the logo of the construction equipment rental company where he works.

Laid out on a nearby table was the equipment used by PAS agents during an investigation: two audio recorders, a digital camera, a film camera, two electromagnetic field detectors, and an infrared thermometer.

Lourdes came into the living room from an adjacent bedroom, where she was taking care of one of their two middle-school-age sons, Mike, who was getting a fever. She greeted me with her high, soft voice; we sat down and started talking.

“I’m Cuban, so my family is very Catholic,” Lourdes told me. “They don’t want to hear what you think. They just want you to believe what they believe.”

Bill and Lourdes were both members of paranormal investigation crews before they knew each other. When they met, they didn’t tell each other about their paranormal work at first, “because there’s a stigma attached; some people think it’s strange,” Bill told me. “But after a while, we got closer and started to ask more and more questions about each other.” Eventually they started PAS together.

Paranormal investigator Amanda Dier seeks out ghost activity with her ghost meter. Photo by Mitchell Zachs /MagicalPhotos.com.

“We didn’t like the way the other groups operated,” Bill said. “They were all about becoming famous, so we started our own.”

Eventually, Lourdes led me to her computer, where she searched through the thousands of photos taken during their investigations, opening some to point out anomalies: small white dots (which Bill and Lourdes refer to as “orbs”), blurs, streaks of light. All the photos were taken in people’s homes; PAS team members, wearing their black uniform tees and black pants, can be seen in many of the photos, in bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, taking temperature and electromagnetic field readings.

Eventually, Lourdes opened an audio file, and invited me to listen.

She hit play, but I heard only a faint noise, barely a sound.

Lourdes turned up the volume and told me to listen a little closer to the speaker.

She hit play again.

I heard some rustling, silence, then, abruptly, what sounded like the muffled voice of a woman, distressed, like she was being strangled.

“It sounds like someone being choked, right?” she asked, putting her hands around her neck to demonstrate.

I agreed.

“I couldn’t sleep one night,” she explained. “Something told me to turn on the tape recorder, so I pressed record, [lay] back down, and when I played it back, that’s what was there.”

Toward the end of our meeting, Bill told me about his preliminary visit to the site of the investigation that I would be following the team to on Saturday.

“When they sat in the circle, they were disclosing things so personal … things I wouldn’t even tell my own wife,” Bill said. “This is probably the most sensitive investigation we’ve ever conducted.”

Later that night, as I drove home, I started to think about the investigation. I liked Bill and Lourdes, but didn’t know them that well. What was I getting into?

I called the well-known skeptic James Randi, a.k.a. the Amazing Randi, an ex-magician who travels the country giving lectures on critical thinking, and who has publicly offered a million dollars to anyone who can “demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability of any kind under mutually agreed upon scientific conditions.” In 1996, he founded the James Randi Education Foundation, an extensive library of scientific writings, videos and other archived resources. Surprisingly, I was immediately patched through to Mr. Randi by a receptionist.

I introduced myself and told him about Bill and Lourdes and their work with the paranormal.

“If someone could prove some of that stuff, it’d be worth spending the million dollars,” Randi told me, “but we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of applications, and never has anyone proven anything. The fact is that the radiation detectors don’t work because we’re swamped with radiation, it’s all around us — cell phones, microwaves.... Orbs appearing in pictures are actually dust or insects illuminated by the flash.”

I asked him if he viewed religion and the paranormal with the same skepticism.

“There’s no difference whatsoever,” he responded. “It’s exactly the same bag. They’re both based on blind belief … but they need something to explain the things they don’t have explanations for.”

As night fell on Saturday, I drove to the spiritual healing center. The front of the small building was ceiling-to-floor smoked glass that only revealed vague moving figures inside, lit up by bright white flashes from PAS cameras.

I poked my head in through the front door and saw that the spiritual healing center was really just a dark, narrow room with wooden floors.

People dressed in black were taking pictures and thermostat readings; Bill and Lourdes were loading small cassettes into video cameras.

The room was hot and humid; Bill always asks that the air conditioner be shut off during investigations to avoid dust causing strange variations in the photographs.

I carefully stepped in and introduced myself to Bill and Lourdes’ PAS team for the night, which consisted of four members:

Amanda Dier: The team leader, an intensely straight-to-the-point 19-year-old studying to become a police officer. “I’m actually terrified of horror movies,” she told me.

Ashley Perrone: A new investigator, brought on by Amanda. “The first time I did this,” she told me, “I ran out crying. I was so scared. But I was hooked.”

Claudette Flitman: A rookie on her first investigation, who discovered PAS by running across the team’s Web site.

Liana Mirkin: Also a rookie who found PAS online. Liana told me she’s a shaman and practitioner of “disaster prevention,” which, as I understood, means focusing “energy” to prevent large-scale natural disasters.

I then introduced myself to the owner/founder of the spiritual healing center, a man with long black hair and a soft, slightly raspy voice named Joe Hernandez.

I asked him how he got into this line of work.

“I had a serious allergic reaction to some medication,” he told me, almost whispering as people clamored around the room. “When they brought me to the hospital, I was dead, but they were able to revive me. It was amazing ... I didn’t even believe in life after death … but it was very beautiful.… It was like going home.”

“Why didn’t you stay, then?” I asked.

“Because I want to bring that feeling back to this life,” he said.

Joe went on to explain that before his near-death experience, he saw the world as “black and white,” and viewed the type of work he does now, as a spiritual healer, as “mumbo jumbo.”

“But then I stopped thinking with only my logical mind,” he added. “Now here I am, part of that mumbo jumbo.”

I asked him about the portal.

“Yea, there’s definitely something going on here, something’s opened up. That’s why I called Bill,” he said.

The plan was to carry on what Joe called a “healing circle,” in which a small group of people would flip over tarot cards, which Hernandez designed himself, and discuss what they saw in each one. The circle would be closely monitored by the PAS team.

The group that would form the circle slowly arrived: Tara Martin and Chris Stubbolo, both in their 20s; Jane Stemmerman, in her mid-60s; and Jayne Thorne, in her 30s. Joe would moderate, and Amanda volunteered to join in, to complete the circle.

They sat on the floor, in the middle of the dark room, and lit six candles.

Two DV cameras, one on either side of the room, were focused on the circle and set to night vision. Bill placed a microphone attached to a digital audio recorder in the middle of the circle.

“Okay, I’m gonna try to fade these guys out,” Joe said to the circle, motioning to me and the scattered investigators.

They all held hands and Joe said a sort of prayer.

“In the end, this is not about spirits, or anything like that — it’s about making our own lives better,” he said.

The investigators flashed pictures as the circle began flipping over the tarot cards.

Jayne flipped the “light and dark” card. And described the two women, one in the dark, one in the light.

“Are there two Jaynes, the light and the dark?” Joe asked.

Jayne nodded.

Chris flipped over the “lovers” card.

“What do you see, Chris?” Joe asked.

Chris thought for a while.

“I get the feeling of acceptance,” Chris answered, “of the ego and another part of me.…”

The whole situation was not nearly as creepy or ritualistic as I thought it would be. In fact, it was like a dinner party after a few drinks, when people start to open up.

But I felt like I was imposing, throwing the whole thing off.

Every once in a while a member of the circle would glance at me taking notes. I wished I wasn’t a reporter writing a story, so they’d feel safe enough to reveal all their secrets, and not worry about them ending up in the paper.

I called Bill a few days later.

“We didn’t get anything that interesting from the investigation,” he told me. No signs of portals, no pictures of spirits.

A few days later, I called Joe and he told me he didn’t want the circle to get as personal that night as it usually does, because of all the onlookers.

“How personal does it usually get?” I asked.

“It can get pretty intense,” he told me. “Some people come in and just … drop a lot of baggage.… If you want to come in, I can arrange that for the next meeting.”

I told him to call me.

Comments? E-mail ryan@miamisunpost.com.