Long Island ghostbusters hunt for spirits and spooks in paranormal probes of local landmarks

They’re true boo-livers.

There’s a ghastly group of folks on Long Island who spend their spare time trying to speak with spirits and investigate alleged hauntings for private clientele and curious members of the — living — public.

“Between Suffolk County and Nassau, we probably have about 65 to 70 locations that we’ve investigated,” Mike Cardinuto, founder of the 30-member strong Long Island Paranormal Investigators, told The Post.

“We’ve captured evidence at every single one of them,” he added, noting many “holy crap” moments where “heaviness” could be felt on the premises.

Since creating the LIPI in 2003 out of love for the paranormal following a strange appearance in a photo taken by a friend, Cardinuto, 45, and his team have hit all the classic haunts on LI.

They have traversed the Kings Park Psychiatric Center, a shuttered mental health ward believed to hold the hauntings of former patients, along with the darkly lit Sweet Hollow Road, and Mount Misery in Melville, a location voted one of America’s creepiest roadways for its dead forest-like backdrop.

LIPI are also regulars at the boos-filled Smithtown bar, Katie’s, which is believed to be home to an apparition from the 1920s.

Cardinuto said the key to supernatural discovery is repeatedly visiting locations for new findings.

“Everyone thinks you just walk into a house, [and say] ‘yeah, it’s haunted’ and capture stuff. It’s not like that at all. It takes time and effort,” Cardinuto added, saying some sites require up to 40 visits.

While the LIPI have strictly confidential private clientele for house calls, they also welcome members of the public to tag along on ecto-adventures.

“They’re blown away by it,” the creator boasted.

Who you gonna call?

Members like Ronkonkoma-based Cardinuto, who works with kids with disabilities, won’t quit their day jobs to explore their passion for the unusual, but they do try to link up weekly on evenings.

“I tell them, ‘I guarantee the first year of you being here, you’ll get a personal experience at bare minimum,’” he said. “Something is going to happen.”

They bring along equipment that looks like it came off the set of “Ghostbusters,” like EMF readers, AM/FM radio sweepers, digital cameras, and a paranormal music box with a motion sensor that plays a bone-chilling tune when something crosses by.

“Why they picked the creepiest freaking music out there? Beyond me,” Cardinuto joked of the device meant to give a supposed spirit a “control object” to interact with.

A jackpot goal is evoking electronic voice phenomenon — what we non-spirituals know as EVP for short — through a radio frequency as most ghosts tend to be camera shy.

“You’ll get a simple hello or something on the lines of that, you might get a name,” said Cardinuto of the typically distorted and hard-to-make-out audio

Sure, the CIA declassified files on the topic a quarter century ago, but more recent, clear-cut psychological research may crush the spirits of true believers.

Experts have reported that EVP-related events commonly trigger the psychological phenomena of pareidolia — when the human mind makes out words from broken sounds or finds faces in obscure images.

However, LIPI also stresses keeping the normal in the paranormal, too. When supposed evidence is found, they become their own harshest critics.

“We try to debunk it,” said Cardinuto. “To see if we can try to figure out a scientific explanation for it.”

A ghost told The Post?

The Long Island Paranormal Investigators have recently had their eye on the Nathaniel Rogers House, an 1800s Bridgehampton estate recently converted into a museum, after picking strange audio on its third floor some weeks ago during a public event.

“We had a device set up, and we captured some voices that came through it,” said Cardinuto before a re-exploration that The Post exclusively joined in on.

While traversing the former home — it originally belonged to Rogers, a local shipbuilder who turned to art after being injured on the job and was later used as a hotel into the 1940s with different owners in between — LIPI experienced what Cardinuto said was its most clear instrumental transcommunication they ever heard.

Using a microphone-less device called a “ghost box,” a fancy title for an ordinary radio scanner that can sweep normal frequencies at different speeds and save the recordings, The Post asked the most crucial question of the evening at dinnertime.

“Are you trying to tell us something? Are you hungry too?” we asked.

After a spooky spike in garbled volume, “great question” shockingly came out of the box. The strange event ultimately was a perfectly timed connection to a randomly scanned radio frequency — the only direct one heard all night.

“That’s the clearest I ever heard something come through that device,” said the startled Cardinuto.

“It was pretty wild…that was clear as day.”

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Stephen Collopy

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