Jordan Levy

The magnetic field ghost-hunting detectors lit up all across the train car. A crowd of people surrounded an opening in the back of the train to watch Ryan Richman, a 14-year-old volunteer at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum, conduct an Estes. Suddenly, Ryan sounded panicked: he felt a paranormal presence behind him. 

“They seem to get a lot of activity out of me. I guess because I am here basically 24/7. The ghosts have always kind of formed a little connection with me,” Ryan said. 

Ryan’s brother, 14-year-old Jake Richman also volunteers at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum and has experienced his fair share of paranormal activity, having seen it all: weird lights on the train tracks and oddly shaped figures around the museum.

“I was in the California Zephyr with my brother. For some reason my brother, he has autism, [has] always had a special connection [with paranormal activity]. So we’re in the train car and he’s in a chair and all of a sudden his legs start shaking and all the meters start going off. His legs look like they are cemented. You can’t move them. They are stuck. He’s like ‘I don’t know what’s happening, I can’t move.’ And out of nowhere he just couldn’t start walking and all the lights and stuff that don’t normally go off started going off,” Jake said. 

The Richman brothers are able to have these experiences with the help of War Party Paranormal, a non-profit paranormal research organization based in South Florida. War Party Paranormal hosts events throughout South Florida at Yesteryear Village, the Old Davie Schoolhouse Museum and the Gold Coast Railroad Museum.

These events are open to the public, welcoming believers and non-believers, inviting people of all ages to wander the area and conduct their own paranormal research with the help of professionals from the organization. 

“We have devices that can measure electronic magnetic frequencies. Also, we have devices that can measure temperature change. We have different types of cameras. We have thermal cameras that film and detect different temperatures. We have a full spectrum and night vision camera…We also communicate using recorders, recorders, voice recorders. They can hear at a higher frequency than the human ear can hear and [we] will ask questions and playback the recorder and will get any intelligent response. So that’s our main two ways of communicating with spirits but we use all the devices and we even have psychic mediums, who sense things. So we use them as a tool as well,” War Party Paranormal Team Leader and Investigator Eric Vanderlaan said. 

Many of the attendees at the event are regulars, having ghost hunted multiple times before. 

“The paranormal community in Florida is pretty small. You’ll get to know a lot of them,” Black Smoke Paranormal Co-Founder Steven Hernandez said.

Besides hosting these events, War Party Paranormal offers free house visits for those suspecting paranormal activity in their homes. They conduct an investigation, and if paranormal activity is present, the team will cleanse the home.

“People can reach out to us. They can’t really call anyone for help or call the police. A lot of them don’t want to share their stories on what’s going on because they’re embarrassed and they think people will think they’re crazy. And a lot of times we get most of our cases at our events… So they’ll come to the events and check us out first and at the end of that they’ll come up to one of us and say you’ll never believe what’s going on in my house,” Vanderlaan said.

War Party Paranormal also has a radio show on IHeartRadio and Spotify. In addition, they have a television show called Haunted Files on Paraflix.

Vanderlaan and his team conduct scientific research on all kinds of paranormal entities in a variety of locations. 

“You’ll have intelligent activity where you can communicate with someone from the past still remaining there. You have residual awnings where it’s almost like a broken record, just something crazy in the past that happened that keeps repeating itself over and over. You can’t communicate with them, but it’s like reliving the history. And then, you happen on the dark side which is really rare. You have evil entities that are dark, that aren’t human,” Vanderlaan said. 

South Florida is full of paranormal activity, spanning from intelligent activity to evil spirits. Houses are haunted. Museums are haunted. Maybe your house is haunted. Have you ever heard or seen anything weird? Did you feel a chill? Call War Party Paranormal; you never know what could be hiding in the dark.