When we meet for the first time at a Midtown Barnes & Noble, paranormal investigator Dan Sturges is dressed in loose-fitting blue jeans and a short-sleeve shirt that exposes his thick arms and tattoos. His right forearm features a portrait of his beloved late dog Gus, and another of the Bruce Springsteen lyric “Learn to live with what you can’t rise above.” Sturges, forty-eight, is a burly guy with blue eyes framed by pale blonde brows and lashes, a bald, shiny head, and a pink complexion that makes him seem slightly overheated.
While investigating, Sturges, who lives in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan, likes to travel light, but this wasn’t always the case. When he first started dabbling in the paranormal business, he was all about the gadgets. He had a digital video recording system, cameras equipped with night vision and a $3,000 microphone that recorded subhuman hearing frequencies. Then, he says, he started thinking with a level head. “You realize ghosts don’t have a voice box and that they don’t have a tongue to manipulate sound waves, so why are you buying a $3,000 microphone?” he asks rhetorically. “It’s not going to capture sound waves that aren’t being made.”
On a recent investigation, his work bag contained a slightly smaller inventory: a laptop, some EMF meters (“To pick up changes in the electromagnetic fields,” he explains), small speakers, a few voice recorders, two flip video cameras and some dirty gym clothes.
Sturges believes that ghosts—or apparitions, as they are called in his circles—are very likely real. He lives for investigating historical haunts like the Merchant’s House Museum in NoHo, which comes complete with a colorful family of fact-checkable spirits, and the Bartow-Pell Mansion, a 171-year-old landmarked country house in the Bronx. However, he’s picky when it comes to taking on clients from private homes. “If I think things are a little sketchy or I feel like the story is being embellished, I’m out,” he says.
Ghost BUSTERS … always interested in the edge – but would love to see repeatability in examine the phenomena