The Ghost Hunter

Alan Silva and Arkansas Paranormal Investigations always looking for the inexplicable.

Surrounded by different night-vision cameras, Alan Silva, who heads up Arkansas Paranormal Investigations, stood outside his API trailer that was parked at his home in Centerton. Silva travels with a team of ghost hunters to various locations around the country to conduct ghost investigations. 
Left, What appears to be a face caught by a night-vision camera. during an investigation in Oppelo Arkansas. Right, a photo of what is believed to be a shadow figure caught with a Digital Camera at the Booneville TB Sanatorium.
Surrounded by different night-vision cameras, Alan Silva, who heads up Arkansas Paranormal Investigations, stood outside his API trailer that was parked at his home in Centerton. Silva travels with a team of ghost hunters to various locations around the country to conduct ghost investigations. Left, What appears to be a face caught by a night-vision camera. during an investigation in Oppelo Arkansas. Right, a photo of what is believed to be a shadow figure caught with a Digital Camera at the Booneville TB Sanatorium.

— After the death of his brother in 1983, Alan Silva of Centerton began asking questions about the after life and started looking for answers about what happens when we die.

To help answer those questions, Silva began training himself to conduct investigations into the paranormal, a process that eventually led Silva to create Arkansas Paranormal Investigations.

“Everybody always talks about angels and ghosts and other things. It is out there and (API) is about finding scientific proof,” Silva said.

Equipped with night vision, high-resolution cameras, sound-recording equipment, a weather station, electromagnetic field detectors and a mobile command center, API has been conducting paranormal investigationsof the time, it cannot be explained and that is what fuels the fire.”

Several times, Silva has found himself with a serious case of nerves while out on an investigation.

“I do not have a psychic bone in my body. I rely on the equipment, but there have been one or two times when I can say I got the heebee geebees,” Silva said, citing a night spent in the Old Hardy Hotel in Hardy, and the Booneville Tuberculosis Sanatorium as examples.

After 17 years of investigating paranormal activity (Silva started out in San Francisco armed with nothing more than a compass, a 35 mm camera and a voice recorder) Silva has yet to see anything he would call a ghost with his own eyes.

“I have seen a lot of strange things, but I can tell you the one thing I have not seen with my own eyes is a ghost,” Silva said, noting that many of the images of what may be signs of the paranormal have been caught with the help of API’s equipment.

“I am looking for that personal experience one day,” Silva said, and you can bet that if he does finally see signs of the paranormal, he will have the evidence to back himself up.

For more information on Arkansas Paranormal Investigations and to view photos from recent investigations, visit www.paranormalbeliever.com.

all over the country for the past five years.

While the work is tedious, and more often than not there is a reasonable explanation for the activity the API team is called out to investigate, every now and then Silva said he finds something hidden in the video and sound footage of something that simply cannot be explained.

Some of the inexplicable things API has found include footage taken at Opposition Cemetery in Ravenden in northeast Arkansas, that shows a white transparent figure appearing to disappear beneath one of the cemetery’s tombstones, and photos from the Booneville Tuberculosis Sanatorium that reveal a shadowy figure walking down a hallway when there was no one there. Closer to home, photos taken inside the Station Cafe in Bentonville depict orbs of light in an otherwise pitch-black room.

“We spend eight or nine hours investigating and may get 30 seconds of interesting footage,” Silva said. “Seventy-five percent of the cases we have investigated, we found some natural explanation for the occurrence, but 25 percent

News, Pages 1 on 10/31/2009

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