With Halloween rapidly approaching and the veil between this world and the next getting thinner, the Memphis Flyer couldn’t help but reach out to local paranormal investigator Tanya Vandesteeg to learn more about her ghostly occupation. By trade, Vandesteeg is an entertainer, having written productions and having performed in various musicals and at Disney World, Universal Studios, and SeaWorld. Now she, along with business partner Stephen Guenther, runs Historical Haunts Ghost Tours and conducts investigations with the Historical Haunts Team, which she co-founded.
Memphis Flyer: How did you get into the paranormal?
Tanya Vandesteeg: I was the creepy girl in school — I guess, I still am. I grew up in Texas and we moved a lot. To make friends with everybody in my new school, I would always just ask them things like, “Oh, what’s the local legend in your town?” I was always really curious about it, and I was always really wanting to debunk it, too.
But I was really into it. I would see portals in my room when I was a small child, like these really spinning weird things. My mind’s always in the supernatural. Things have always come to me and been attracted to me. I always knew there was something else there, so it never was even a question in my life.
So, in college, I found a group of us that wanted to go hunt these things a little more. And then in Orlando, I formed another group, and then I lived in Los Angeles where I did some stuff there. It wasn’t until here where I got into really an official paranormal group. And that’s how I met Stephen [Guenther], and then we decided to break off that group and make our own group, and the rest is history.
What makes someone more sensitive to the paranormal?
I don’t know what makes a person more special than others. Some can see the full body apparitions. Some don’t. Some don’t wanna see it and they see it anyway. I think it’s a gift. I think it can be genetic. I think it also depends on what blood type you are, what astrological sign you are. More closed-off signs don’t tend to attract spirits as much as other signs.
We always say love and gratefulness are the highest levels of vibrations. And so if you’re loving and caring and grateful and thankful, you’re going to vibrate on that level [of the spirits].
What does a paranormal investigation look like?
If someone says they have a haunting in their house, we offer our services for free. We send a questionnaire; we do interviews. We wanna make sure that we’re a good fit. Like, we don’t do exorcisms; we’re not demonologists. But once we say, “Okay, this is a good fit,” we get the team together and we’ll set up some of our equipment, like K-II meters, which read electromagnetic fields. And a lot of times people will sense things or feel things that are actually natural because if you have too many electromagnetic fields running through your house it can create feelings of paranoia, feeling like somebody’s staring at you from behind.
One of the last cases that we were on, they had all these mesh boxes for their Wi-Fi in this really small living room, and all of our devices were going off like crazy. I even felt heavy sitting in that room. We call it a fear cage because it’s natural electromagnetic fields that are surrounding you, but they’re creating a kind of a supernatural environment. We unplug everything and then we show them our meters. Everything’s clear.
So we try to debunk as much as we can before really investigating. We set up cameras, motion detectors, and our team will go through all of the footage. A lot of it is putting headphones on and listening to see if there are any voices we didn’t pick up while we were there — those are called EVPs, electronic voice phenomena. We compile all the footage and we come back with the client. We’re like, “Okay, this is what we found. This is what we didn’t find.”
What kind of hauntings have y’all come across?
There is the whole thing of attachments. Typically, if something’s tied to the land or tied to the house, it won’t go with you. That’s one of the initial questions that we have when people have an investigation. Like, how old’s your house? How long have you experienced this? Have you experienced this before you lived here or experienced it after you moved here? Then we can figure out if something’s tied to you or something’s tied to the house. Typically, it’s the house, land, or an object in the house. Very rarely are you gonna have something that’s just following you around in life. If you believe in your spirit guides, like ancestors, loved ones, that’s a little different.
What kind of tools do you use?
Believe it or not, we use these little cat toys with motion detectors in them, so sometimes we’ll line them down a hall to see if something will set them off. We’ll also set up these laser grids, and if a spirit comes through it, it’ll manipulate it.
There’s the Spirit Box, which is a device that scans through AM and FM channels really fast to create white noise. We ask a question like, what’s your name? And something answers back that we might hear with our ears or if we don’t, we’ll see if something was caught on the audio recorder.
We have dowsing rods, which are really fun. They’re some of my favorite investigative tools; they’re just rods and you can ask questions and the spirits can manipulate them. “If so-and-so is here, can you cross the rods?” We also use K-II meters and ask questions to see if the spirit will light a certain color for an answer.
Have you ever seen a ghost?
We always joke that we’re always looking for the tap-dancing ghost — somebody who looks full body, standing in front of us, going, “Here we are.” It just doesn’t happen that way. I always say the moment I see the tap dancing ghost, I’ll retire. That being said, we have seen full body apparitions. We’ve seen what would look like shadow figures.
There are also spirits that try to look like us, like imitation spirits, but they can never get the smile right. You can research that; it’s through all of history. One day, I left my best friend’s house, and then I drove down the street and saw my best friend standing next to a tree. And then she would smile and it would be really creepy, but it wasn’t her. But things don’t scare me. I get startled, but I don’t get scared.
Are there malevolent forces?
You will find what you’re looking for, and that’s what we always tell people if they wanna be an independent ghost hunter. Any joker with a flashlight and a cell phone could be a ghost hunter now. And that’s the problem — people are breaking in places, going in places they shouldn’t, doing things they shouldn’t. And I’m all about being a paranormal investigator, but do it right and do it safely. Not only physically, but spiritually. Whatever your religious beliefs are, you have to keep yourself protected because there are what we call the cockroaches of the spirit world. They’re lower vibrating, lower frequency, I wouldn’t say demonic or evil, but they’re just not good. And they will attach to you if you are not protected enough.
Like, on Ghost Adventures with Zak Bagans, where he goes into these houses and he is like, “Come at me and slap me and hit me” — that’s why he gets slapped and hit all the time ’cause you will find what you’re looking for. That’s his schtick, but we don’t recommend going and doing that. We don’t allow that on any of our tours or investigations. No provoking. We don’t call out spirits to fight us or scratch us or any weird things like that. Why would you go to somebody’s house in their location and make fun of them? We believe that they’re just differently living.
But if you’re going to look for evil, you will find it.
Have you ever had an experience with something malevolent?
One investigation was really heavy. A little 2-year-old was getting scratched. I was on a couch and I put my knees on my chest because all of a sudden I just started feeling not okay. We all started coiling up. We had to call our friend from New York, who can go into the spirit world and see what’s going on. She said there was something there that was not … not nice. And she had to get rid of it.
Turns out one of the young kids in the house was trying to sell this soul to the devil. We were like, “Stop it.” Then we had a lecture.
Once our friend got rid of it, we could feel the whole environment change. We had a beautiful investigation after that. We contacted the father who had passed, and he came through on our Spirit Box and said things that we didn’t know about and told them he loved them. That’s the most rewarding thing about investigations — when families can find comfort.
Do you have any spirits that you — for lack of a better word — stay in touch with?
Two doors down from the Broom Closet [where Historical Haunts arranges tours], there was a patrolman that was brutally murdered — Edward Broadfoot — in 1918. His spirit haunts the building. There’s still a blood stain on the floor. It’s all down in the basement. But he comes through all the time. We were just on our tour the other night, and we talked with him with dowsing rods. He’s a good friend of ours. We helped get him his memorial at Forest Hill as well.
But, yeah, we always call out the spirits around here. At Court Square, there’s a little boy that died in the fountain. Claude Pugh is his name. It was in all the papers at the time. [Read more about Claude here.] Claude knows us really well.
We’ve made more friends with spirits out there. There’s a sailor or a soldier — we can’t figure out, but we know that when there are more younger girls on the tour, he comes out more often. There’s sometimes a male spirit there that is kind of intimidating and he’ll chase off all the other spirits and make our equipment go crazy.
Sometimes I walk down the street and I’m like, “Is everybody I’m looking at, are they real?” It’s like, what if we are seeing ghosts and we just don’t know?
Historical Haunts’ tours include the Haunted Memphis Bus Tour, Haunted Pub Crawl, Memphis True Crime Tour, Walking Ghost Hunt, Memphis Brew Bus, and Ghost Hunt at Earnestine and Hazel’s. You can schedule a tour here.
If you are experiencing paranormal or unexplained activity, you can reach Historical Haunts’ investigative team here.