It was Christmas Eve, and Greg Pocha was but five years old. Earlier that day he and his family had laid rest to Pocha’s grandmother.

“It was a bad evening,” recalls Pocha. “There were the usual family-type arguments, then we left to go to my grandfather’s place.”

What would come to happen at his grandfather’s home would forever change Pocha’s life in ways he wouldn’t realize until decades later.

“I remember sitting and looking over and seeing my grandmother standing there. I looked at her – she looked at me, and I leaned over the couch and said to my mother that grandmother was here,” remembers Pocha. “She shushed me quickly as we had only buried her that afternoon so it must have been hard for her to hear, but being only five, I had no idea what ghosts were.”

This event and years of research into paranormal activity led Pocha to the eventual formation of Eidolon Project Canada (EPC), in which he and a team of paranormal investigators travel the province gathering evidence to support a life after death.

Pocha acts as Eidolon’s director of paranormal and parapsychology studies, leading teams based out of Red Deer, Edmonton and Calgary.

With the success of TV shows such as Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters along with the major Hollywood blockbuster Paranormal Activity, Pocha explained how in recent years a fad of ‘ghost hunters’ has appeared around the world.

“There are a lot of ‘ghost hunting products’ on the market, and I hate being called a ghost hunter – I’m a paranormal investigator and a parapsychology investigator, I’m not a ghost hunter,” said Pocha.

He explained that most ‘ghost hunters’ are those who have the strict ideology that ghosts exists, whereas there are also hunters who without a doubt believe ghosts do not exist and are merely there to prove everyone else wrong. Pocha believes that as a paranormal investigator one must remain unbiased.

“There are a thousand books out there on haunted house stories and it’s the same thing over and over again so I read my fair share of those books and that was interesting enough but then I began to read more into parapsychology, psychology, sociology, religion and anything to do with the more scientific side of paranormal activity so that I had the knowledge to be able to look at any situation from both sides of the ideological spectrum,” he explained.

“It gives me an unbiased opinion and this is important because ghost believers are going to say that every little noise and movement is a ghost, however the parapsychology side is the more rational approach where instead you will say, ‘Okay. A noise happened. Why?’”

EPC’s investigation begins when interest is expressed from an individual regarding paranormal activity they are experiencing. Pocha and his team will then travel to the home or business after receiving consent from the individual.

He and his team will assess the property and begin to set up cameras, video recorders, audio recorders, temperature monitoring equipment, electro magnetic frequency monitoring equipment, computers, communication devices and often times a variety of experimental equipment.

After all equipment is set up, the team will go ‘hot’ – meaning they will begin to record audio, video, and still shots while attempting to contact any entities that may be residing at the location. This can last anywhere from 30 minutes to multiple hours.

While very rarely does the team experience feedback from entities up close and personal while investigating, it is in the post review of the audio and visual evidence collected where they commonly find their anomalies.

“There are things we have recorded and picked up that have absolutely no explanation and cannot be explained in a rational sense,” said Pocha.

“I would like to believe and discover that there is something else out there, and I have a fair amount of circumstantial evidence to make me think there could be a life after death, but in the end our evidence so far proves nothing. We have the data saying there is something there but it doesn’t prove an afterlife.”

Pocha recalled one such incident in which Recorded Audio Phenomena (RAP) took place during an investigation in Forestburg, AB.

“The family was being bothered by who they assumed was the rancher, Bill, who originally built the house they were living in and the land had a lot of history, as a woman died there during childbirth along with her unborn baby, one of the farm hands had committed suicide and then Bill himself passed away in the house, so there was a lot of spiritual activity there,” he said.

“We attempted contact with the entity by asking ‘Bill, if you want us to leave then all you have to do is tell us’ – we all went quiet waiting for a response, no one heard anything,

“However on playback of the RAP we hear clear as day, ‘Get out!’ in a very low harsh tone – it’s hard to rationally explain something like that.”

Pocha explained aside from RAPs, the team has also filmed tightly closed doors opening and again closing by themselves among a variety of other things.

“We’ve filmed shapes, not little dots or orbs, but full shapes, going across the room through one wall and then through another wall,” said Pocha.

Not all of EPC’s investigations are as thrill-filled as this unique day, explained Pocha, and more often than not cases can be solved through measuring electro magnetic frequencies which have been proven to cause hallucinations and haunt-like experiences.

Once such case took place in Red Deer. Upon arriving at the residence the team did a property assessment, noticing there was a chair beside a wall and on the other side of the wall was a refrigerator.

“She was feeling a lot of weird things whenever she would sit in this chair, haunted feelings, she would see things out of the corner of her eye and she would always feel uneasy sitting there,” explained Pocha.

“When we took our EMF meter into the house, the area where the chair was showed extremely high levels of EMF, so what would happen when she sat in the chair is she was feeling the EMF from the refrigerator and she just happened to be more sensitive to these frequencies than the average person so we moved the chair – case closed.”

Pocha and the Eidolon Project hope to gain substantial evidence to one day prove the existence of an afterlife, they do not charge for their services and welcome an inquiries via their web site at http://www.eidolonproject.org.

jswan@reddeerexpress.com