Ghost hunter Peta Banks: ‘I’m not there to muck around with them’
She is a paranormal investigator who leads ghost tours through some of Sydney’s historical buildings. So when Peta Banks felt something grab her on the arms during a tour of Parramatta Gaol, she immediately thought it was one of her guests. It wasn’t.
NSW
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Paranormal investigator Peta Banks has had plenty of weird experiences on the job.
But it was leading a ghost tour at Parramatta Gaol when she first felt the cold dread of something she couldn’t explain.
“I felt something grab me on the arm,” Ms Banks said.
“I could feel the four fingers and a thumb and I could feel it grab me on the arm and pull.
“Immediately I didn’t think it was paranormal, I thought it was one of the guests," she said.
“I shone my torch around to see who had done it and everybody was at least 2m away from me, leaning up against a wall.
“That rattled me for a few weeks, it still rattles me now.”
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As owner of the Australian Paranormal Phenomenon Investigators, Ms Banks has been probing strange phenomena across the city for eight years, hosting ghost tours, investigations and paranormal tourism experiences in historic Western Sydney sites.
“I respect these places, I love the history, I’m not just there to muck around with ghosts,” she said.
“We’re also paranormal investigators and not thrill seekers, so we try to debunk any natural phenomenon before we say, ‘That’s interesting’. We don’t say it’s paranormal activity because who knows? We just know we can’t explain it.”
Visual manifestation or phenomena are rare in her experience, although she once saw something chilling during a tour at Liverpool TAFE.
“I’ve actually seen somebody there from the waist down, so I saw someone standing in the door, someone almost in like waterproof pants and big boots, overalls or something.”
She said the TAFE had been the site of her most “interesting” investigation in 2012.
“The activity was off the chart. We had one of our investigators see a full-bodied apparition in the bell tower, we had one investigator walking around the oldest building on their own. They were whistling and every sound they made was being repeated.
“We also had our names being called by people who were not ‘present’, and we were shushed in another of the old buildings.”
But the darkest energy she is aware of is at Casula Powerhouse, a place layered with history, where a ghost dubbed “Crispy” has left many of her tour guests frazzled.
“I had one guest in Casula who was sitting in the theatre near where that Crispy spirit was usually felt. He has no memory of walking into the theatre.
“All he remembers is feeling really drained, really tired and saying, ‘I’ve got to go, I’ll be too tired to drive.”
Peta accepts scepticism around the paranormal, and says she’s sceptical herself.
“I call it paranormal entertainment or paranormal tourism. In my mind I’m providing a service where people can go out with their friends and have a fantastic time.
“ I never promise that something’s going to happen to them, we don’t put anything on, we don’t fake anything.
“I think the difference is for me, I’m a little more open-minded and I am desperate for something to happen.”
Ghost hunting doesn’t come cheap, and APPI has invested thousands of dollars into equipment. Sometimes they host investigations for the public, others are commissioned by property owners or managers, the most recent at Roseleigh Manor at Harefield.
Some things are just everyday devices like digital voice recorders, which can pick up sounds and voices from different frequencies.
“Then we use things like electromagnetic field metres that electricians use, there’s a theory spirits use electromagnetic energy to manifest themselves so if you’re standing there with an EMF metre and it suddenly starts sparking and you’re in the middle of nowhere, and there’s no power, where’s it coming from?”
Infra-red cameras are also used as well a “ghost box”, basically a broken radio that’s continually scanning through different frequencies.
“The theory with the ghost box is that spirits use it to manipulate white noise to talk to you or even the radio sounds to talk to you.”
Whether there will ever be proof is up for debate, but for Peta it doesn’t matter.
“It’s the best job in the world. I get to meet such a diverse range of people, I have made friendships which will last my lifetime and I get to walk around these incredible historic buildings in the dark.”
Originally published as Ghost hunter Peta Banks: ‘I’m not there to muck around with them’
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