He hunts Bucks County's ghosts by night. Here's what he's found — and what he hasn't | Mullane

By night, Eric Mintel is a jazz musician. Even later at night, he hunts ghosts and monsters. Sometimes he finds them.

“Ghosts, Bigfoot, Jersey Devil, UFOs. You name it, we investigate it,” said Mintel, as we sat in a recent haunt for his side gig, Bucks County Paranormal Investigations.

Created in 2016, his crew travels mostly around Bucks County in search of phantoms and specters of long-told ghost stories. What they discover is recorded and uploaded to YouTube, where it’s presented in polished, TV quality productions of about a half hour each.

“I’ve always been fascinated with Bucks County ghost stories — stories I’ve been hearing since I was a kid,” he said. “We go to historical locations, like old inns, to document some sort of paranormal activity.”

Like the Plumsteadville Inn. It was built in 1751, nearly a quarter century before the Shot Heard Round the World launched the American Revolution. The place is old and looks like it could be loaded with ghosts.

“I haven’t seen one,” said owner Matt George.

But his customers and guests report eerie experiences, like sudden cold spots and a sense that someone’s in a room when no one else is there.

“People feel more spirits than anything else,” he said.

To discern if reports of clammy coldness are drafts or the disembodied dead, Mintel, his high school buddy Dominic Sattele, and friend Karen Hluchan, described as a “spirit medium” (one who has a natural ability to sense otherworldly activity) investigated last year.

With a magnetometer (essential equipment for ghost hunters) they headed to the basement.

“The energy we detected as shown by our magnetometer was off the chart. It has the highest spikes I’ve ever seen of any investigation we’ve been on,” Mintel said.

An area of the basement appears to be a tunnel, its entrance cemented over, he said.

“Like a lot of old inns, this one may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Might have been. We don’t know,” he said.

Upstairs in the inn’s ballroom, Hluchan felt a presence.

“She sensed a mischievous spirit,” Mintel said.

Then something odd happened.

“All of a sudden ‘Bang!’ We hear this noise,” Mintel said. “The (camera) tripod that was on the chair was dropped to the floor. The microphone case that was on the table was now on the chair seat. Something threw them off, maybe the spirit Karen detected. Again, we don’t know.”

The bang sound was captured on audio as the crew shot video. (You can watch it on YouTube).

Usually, Mintel said, he finds inexplicable activity as he’s editing, not while he’s shooting video.

“This was the first time we experienced anything like this in real time,” he said.

Maybe it was a camera-shy ghost sending a message.

“Who knows,” he said.

He and his team of ghost-seeking gumshoes almost always find something, though. In Quakertown, at McCoole’s Red Lion Inn, he said he interviewed a member of the wait staff who recounted a ghostly encounter on the job.

“Later, I was editing the interview and as he’s telling the story, an orb goes right past us. It wasn’t a light, it wasn’t a bug, it wasn’t a reflection, it wasn’t lens flare. I know what all of those look like on video,” he said.

It was a translucent glob of light, an “orb,” which ghost hunters attribute to spirits of the departed.

He has other spooky stories. The shadowy figure at the New Hope Train Station. A ghost who wanders the Continental Tavern in Yardley. A woman who haunts the Black Bass Hotel in Lumberville. A ghost nicknamed “Sarah” at the Wedgewood Inn in New Hope. A ghost of a child at the McCoole’s in Quakertown mistaken for real by an electrician working at the place.

“He swore it was a real kid,” Mintel said.

Future investigations include Bristol Township’s Bolton Mansion in Levittown, with its poignant “Lady in the Upstairs Window,” said to be awaiting the return of her beau killed in the Civil War, and an examination of Pen Ryn, a magnificent riverfront mansion in Bensalem, with its ghost that rises from the Delaware at midnight each Christmas Eve to knock on the front door, then vanish, leaving water and river muck on the step.

Mintel said he’s skeptical about ghosts, monsters and UFOs. Most claims are natural phenomena confused for the paranormal.

“You have to examine the evidence, and go by the science,” he said.

Take the tapping sound he and his team heard as they sleuthed the Plumsteadville Inn. The noise would come in odd intervals, stop, then resume, almost staccato-like.

“We’re thinking what the heck is that?” Mintel said.

One of his team stepped over to a window, from where the sound appeared to emanate.

“Turned out it was cars going over a manhole cover outside,” he said.

Not everything that goes bump in the night is a ghost.

Columnist JD Mullane can be reached at 215-949-5745 or at jmullane@couriertimes.com.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Eric Mintel is a supernatural sleuth, hunting ghosts in Bucks County