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A Coconut Grove paranormal team says it has found evidence of ghosts at the Deering Estate.
BY HOWARD COHEN
[email protected]
Neither the hot film Paranormal Activity nor TV's popular Ghost Hunters can compete with Miami-Dade's historic Deering Estate at Cutler.
Ghost trackers investigating paranormal activity on the site say they recently found more than 60 disembodied voices coming from the county-owned estate -- once the home of wealthy industrialist Charles Deering, of International Harvester fame.
One voice captured on a digital recorder seems to say, ``We're trapped here.''
Don't believe it? The Deering Estate is opening its doors to the public Thursday evening for its first-ever Ghost Story Tour. And two days before Halloween, the Palmetto Bay site will allow ghost hunters to bring in their own equipment -- aura cameras, pendulums, EVP recorders -- to snoop around.
Investigators say they found two ``full-body apparitions'' on the grounds of the estate at 16701 SW 72nd Ave., in Palmetto Bay.
The images were of translucent human forms, a male and female, by the boat basin on Biscayne Bay -- with photographic evidence for naysayers to ponder.
``This is what we consider the holy grail in paranormal investigation -- a full-body apparition is not a common finding at all,'' said Colleen Kelley, from the Coconut Grove-based League of Paranormal Investigators (LPI), which spent two days on the estate in August.
Even seasoned ghost tracker Atena Komar pronounced it ``severely haunted.''
Deering scored a 58 on LPI's point scale, which assigns a value to digital recordings, photographs and eyewitness accounts in determining whether a space has spirits. Any figure 30 and above suggests haunted. LPI had never recorded higher than a 29.
``Any ghost hunting group may have one in all of their collection in all of their years of doing it,'' said Kelley, artist by day, ghost hunter by night.
``We had two.''
The 444-acre Deering Estate once was the domain of Paleo-Indians, North America's earliest human inhabitants, who lived more than 12,000 years ago.
Charles Deering built the two main houses -- the 1896 Richmond Cottage, the last surviving structure of the town of Cutler, and the 1922 Stone House -- as his retreat. He died there in 1927.
His heirs owned the home until 1985, when Miami-Dade and the state of Florida jointly purchased it and turned it into a historic site.
Over the years, staffers spoke of hearing noises and witnessing odd occurrences, such as elevators moving on their own.