The South Thomaston family reported hearing growling noises. Something was pushing the 2-year-old out of bed. And the little girl talked about playing peekaboo with her dead grandfather.

The family had already had three paranormal investigation teams come into their home when Eddita Felt and her team arrived last year.

“We were going, ‘What, you’re kidding, you had all these people in there?'” said Felt, from Lisbon. “We were wondering, ‘What are we going to find when we get there?'”

It turned out to be a poltergeist and a homeowner with undiscovered abilities inadvertently drawing the paranormal toward her, Felt said.

The family moved, and three months ago, Felt and her team were at the family’s new Waterville home, this time addressing reports that included a ghost child running up and down the hall, giggling and jumping on the bed.

That homeowner and others will share their first-person hauntings at Felt’s Real Maine Ghosts Real Maine People conference in Freeport next month.

Also on the conference bill: dowsing workshops, paranormal photography, a review of Maine’s scariest places and a lecture titled “Is Everything You Know About Ghosts Dead Wrong?”

“You can’t do what I do and not have a sense of humor, because it’s all really strange,” said lecturer David Franklin Farkas, who calls himself a “professional house healer and ghost rescuer.”

He said he has clients all over the world and has done hundreds of remote energy clearings, clearing property and people, and helping ghosts move on. 

“People will say, ‘What you do is strange.’ And I’ll say, ‘Do you think I didn’t notice?'” Farkas said. “What I want to get across to people is that all of the ghost phenomena, first of all, are very common, and secondly, (they) make sense if you understand them from the ghosts’ perspective.”

The conference on Oct. 18 at the Freeport Hilton Garden Inn starts at 10 a.m. with Felt and Farkas handling keynote duties. Farkas, speaking for the first time in Maine, will offer the “Dead Wrong” lecture, while Felt will talk about what makes spirits stay behind.

She’ll also talk about homes and businesses — Roller World in Topsham, Lakewood Theater in Madison and the Maine State Music Theater in the Fort Andross Mill in Brunswick — where “our team has done investigations and ghost-busted, so to speak.”

“(The owners are) going to be talking about their experiences a little bit and they’ll be available for ordinary folks who might have ghosts in their homes or in their businesses to ask them questions, compare notes, things like that,” Felt said.

Felt offers paranormal classes throughout the year through her company Frontiers of the Mind. Her investigations group, the A Team, is active on about one case a month, she said. The group is releasing a DVD of its Lakewood Theater investigation at the conference.

Admission is $7 in advance, $10 at the door. Most of the workshops, and a graveyard tour that night, are an additional $10 each.

Included in the admission price are the keynote addresses and Felt’s workshop at the end of the day, a sort of how-to for de-ghosting your property.

“I’m actually going to be showing people how to redirect earthbound spirits,” Felt said. “I can teach people how to get rid of easy stuff by themselves.”

What’s “easy?” 

“Residual or ethereal playback,” she said. (Think scenes trapped in time, playing over and over.) “If it’s something that’s a little more involved, then you probably can’t do it by yourself and you need someone else to help you out.”

Farkas advocates seeing hauntings from a ghost’s point of view, and believes that often they’re confused, or lost, and don’t know they’re dead.

“If all we do is confirm for ourselves that life continues after death — that’s what the ghost experience does for people — and have a scary experience and play with the electronics, we haven’t helped anybody,” he said. “The living have a responsibility to our ancestors, to our relatives; this is going to happen to you at some point. If you would help a little old lady cross the road, why aren’t you helping this old lady cross over?”

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, intriguing and unexplained in Maine. Send ideas and photos to kskelton@sunjournal.com.

Real Maine Ghosts Real Maine People conference

Oct. 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Freeport Hilton Garden Inn

10 a.m.: Keynote with Eddita Felt and David Franklin Farkas

10 to 11 a.m.: Paranormal Photography by Robin Davis Poulin and Linda Lee*

11 a.m. to noon: Spirit Box Essentials by Michael Sangillo Sr.*

12:30 to 1:30 p.m.: Dowsing on Paranormal Investigations by Hank Mosher* 

12:30 to 1:30 p.m. Maine’s Creepiest and Scariest Haunted Places

1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Paper Dowsing (with pendulum on paper) by

*

2:30 p.m. Spirit Redirection by Eddita Felt

5:15 p.m. Haunted graveyard tour*

Admission: $7 advance/$10 at the door.

* Denotes a workshop with an additional $10 fee.

Conference admission also gets you into the separate Mind Body Spirit Conference happening in the hotel at the same time.