It’s a problem that most think they’ll never encounter, but ghosts don’t necessarily care if you believe in them or not. When even the most skeptical of skeptics start hearing and seeing inexplicable things happen in their homes, who they gonna call?

They might call Ocean State Paranormal.

Led by Buddy Thayer, the Ocean State Paranormal group is a nonprofit, scientific-centric group of investigators who seek to get to the bottom of spooky happenings in every dark corner of Rhode Island its surrounding areas.

Unlike other paranormal groups who may try to advertise every bump in the night as a bona-fide proof of the boogeyman, Ocean State Paranormal prides itself on making efforts to debunk things rather than immediately chalking it up as a supernatural occurrence.

The group’s presence drew a standing room only crowd at Warwick Public Library last Wednesday, as they showed off some of their ghost-hunting technology and played audio and video evidence of some hair-raising encounters during their investigations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

However Thayer also has another motive for such presentations.

“I’m a big proponent of historical preservation, and I hope this will somehow help with that,” he said in his intro to the presentation.

Thayer’s investigations have led him and his team of fellow investigators to some of the spookiest, most notorious haunts in Rhode Island – including Sprague Mansion in Cranston, Smith Castle in North Kingstown and the former Ladd School in Exeter. However they have also been to less known gems of local haunted history, including an investigation at what the Second Kent County Jailhouse in East Greenwich.

The group mostly shared EVPs from their investigations – which stands for electronic voice phenomena, which are inexplicable whispers and voices heard within audio recordings, not audible to the naked ear, which can share some shocking and undeniably creepy statements. Many EVPs are suspect, explicable as simple audio contamination or investigators talking, others are not so simple to explain.

During the investigation at the jailhouse, a hushed woman’s voice clearly seems to speak out “Sheffield,” which could be a shocking reference to Frank Sheffield, a man who went mad after suffering a head injury and killed his five-year-old daughter – after kidnapping her and taking her to lunch at Rocky Point, no less – who was sent to serve his prison sentence at the jail.

However those who may brush off audio evidence as faulty should take a look at the lone piece of video evidence produced by the team, which was captured at the Oak Lawn branch of the Cranston Public Library.

We see a shot of the investigating team walking down a stairway, with a video camera cable dangling along the stairwell wall. Well after the team has passed, the cord begins to move back in forth in a sweeping motion, as if it was being brushed aside. It does not go taut, as if pulled from above, but has a clear side-to-side movement, which is not so easily debunked.

Throughout the other investigations, which included the Varnum Memorial Armory in East Greenwich and the SK Pierce Victorian Mansion in Gardner, Mass., the group caught voices telling them to “get out,” calling one of their investigators a “geezer,” and multiple intelligent responses referencing one of their investigators using a camera flash.

Although they don’t claim to have proven the existence of ghosts – nor do they purport any of their evidence is derived from ghosts – they leave their clients and interested audience members to grapple with the question: We’ve tried to debunk this phenomena in every different way possible, and we still cannot explain it. So what is it?