On a cold and gloomy October evening, under a full moon veiled
with storm clouds, more than 150 people packed in to hear real-life
ghost stories Monday at the University of Pittsburgh at
Bradford.

John Zaffis, known as The True Life Ghost Hunter, spoke for
nearly two hours in the Mukaiyama University Room – which had
chairs spilling out into the hallway to accommodate the large crowd
– about his work investigating hauntings and the paranormal.

“I grew up with the paranormal being part of my family,” he
explained. His aunt and uncle, Lorraine and Ed Warren, are
researchers known for investigating the house from “The Amityville
Horror.”

Zaffis acknowledged the skeptics, and said he hasn’t always been
a believer himself. After 32 years investigating haunting,
assisting at exorcisms and witnessing the unexplainable, he
believes.

“If I were to tell you the things I get involved with in a week,
you’d think I was nuts,” Zaffis said with a laugh. He shared a few
stories and some slides of cases he investigated, such as a family
in Upstate New York who had moved in to a former funeral
parlor.

He and other researchers spent nine weeks in this home with the
family, and he had an experience that almost made him hang up his
ghost-hunting hat for good.

“It was a hot night. All the windows were open. I was sitting in
the kitchen documenting some things when all of a sudden I could
smell this disgusting smell,” he told the crowd.

He got up from the table to investigate. When he looked up the
stairs, he saw a “transparent thing forming on the stairs … it had
thousands of wings behind it … it said, ‘Do you want to know what
they did to us?'”

Zaffis recounted how he fled the house and made his hour-long
trip home that night in a record 25 minutes. He wouldn’t speak of
the incident or tell anyone the reason he had left so quickly.

Zaffis, a Roman Catholic, had worked with members of the clergy
before and was friends with several. One of these friends, Bishop
McKenna, called him and urged him to return to work, asking him if
the apparition was going to stop him from helping people.

That’s when he knew he had to continue, he explained.

He also showed a picture of an antique doll, slightly burned on
the right side of its face, and told the story about how he became
involved with a haunting surrounding the doll.

“A woman restored antique dolls,” Zaffis described. She had
purchased the doll at an estate sale. When she took it home,
strange things started happening.

“She would wake up in the morning and the doll would be at the
foot of her bed and her ankles would be scratched up,” Zaffis
said.

She called Zaffis for help. He advised her to ask about the doll
where it had been purchased and find out the story behind it.

The doll had belonged to a young girl who had died in a fire at
the house. He advised the woman to return it to the attic where it
came from. She did and the problems stopped, Zaffis explained.

Some haunted things Zaffis removes from homes he keeps in a
museum in Connecticut, the John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal,
while others he destroys by burying or disposing of it in a body of
water.

The lecture, presented by the Student Activities Council, was
attended by students and community members alike.

“It’s something different,” said Tracy Sherman, a community
member who attended the event to hear what a real ghost hunter had
to say. “It’s fun.”

Marta McHale, another community member, agreed. “I think people
are really interested in it.”

And as the people filed out of the Frame Westerberg Commons
building under a stormy sky, many could be seen looking over their
shoulders at the wind rustling through leaves on the trees.