Ghost booster

Debby Constantino and her husband, Mark, own a business called Spirits-Speak, www.spirits-speak.com. Debby and Mark record electronic voice phenomena, conduct séances and teach people how to use electronic equipment to record and refine EVP. “What’s EVP?” you ask. It’s spirit voices. “Never heard any EVP,” you claim? Well, check out the Web site. A psychic, Constantino attributes some of her talent to the fact that the house she grew up in in Patterson, N.J., backed up to a graveyard. If you are troubled by spooks, call the Constantinos at 746-3877.

What spirits did you see as a child?

I saw something like a black mist kind of form through my door and stand at the foot of my bed. It actually paralyzed me. The only thing I knew to do at that age was to pray. I prayed, and it broke. It was very aggravating as a child to try and tell my parents this. As a child, I would see things out of the corner of my eye, things stirring. There was so much going on in that house I grew up in, it’s not even funny. I believed these things that I saw to be elementals. They were tiny. It sounds crazy, but they looked like the Travelocity gnome with no hat. They were little like that.

OK.

I would play a game with myself as a little kid. I would keep my head as straight as I could and try to see them. It always happened in a particular part of the house. Now, as the years have progressed, I’ve gone to schools—I’m a student at Morris Pratt now …

I’m sorry—could you spell that? What is it?

It’s the Morris Pratt Institute. It’s a correspondence course. It’s a very highly regarded school for mediumship. As a result of constantly delving into the paranormal, the more I learned, the more I didn’t have to turn my head anymore. I’ll make a long story short: The more you educate yourself, and the more you meditate, the more you become aware, the more that you see. It’s very rare to see a full-fledged apparition, though.

Is there a business associated with the EVP, or is it purely hobby?

A lot of people are realizing that [EVP] is a real phenomenon. We teach people how to do EVP. I do lectures; we did a lecture in Las Vegas. We’re thinking about going downtown to do some lectures before Halloween in the bookstores. We do teach people how to edit EVP. We’ve just written a book. It’s EVP: A Guide to Record, Edit and Communicate with Spirits. We’ll also be selling that on our Web site. When you start getting these voices, you need to use musicians’ equipment to edit them. You have to get rid of the background noise, bring the EVP up. This book walks you completely through, with photos. It gives you little things that I have learned in my life about how to communicate with spirits easier: the time of season when we get more EVPs; check the moon phases, the weather, anything associated with when you get a good EVP.

What’s the scariest thing you ever experienced?

That would be when I was a child, and that thing came through my door. I’m an only child, and my parents were in the next room, and my face was sort of mushed in the pillow. I watched this black figure walk through my room. I know it was a woman. It stood at the foot of my bed with its arms open. I couldn’t scream. I don’t know if when you get so scared you can’t scream, but I was actually paralyzed. There’s something called Old Hag Syndrome, among psychics, or Psychic Sleep. I think it was trying to harm me in some way. It was not a good feeling. The only way it left was when I prayed. I said the prayer, and it actually broke.