“Varese, a land of ghosts,” and here are the hunters.

Let’s get one thing straight, ghosts do not exist. But people who look for them do. Noises, strange figures, glowing at night. These are the phenomena that Angelo Stamaglia and his partner in these ghostly adventures, Luca Boscolo, investigate. And they have been doing so for a number of years, starting with places mentioned in news stories and, above all, in local legends. Figures photographed at night, often between castle battlements, or old trees in the middle of woods, even in Varese Province.

Imagination and suggestion are the protagonists of these mysterious topics. In any case, next Sunday, inside the deconsecrated Church of San Carlo, in Grantola, there will be a meeting on this very topic, with a number of videos filmed by these fans of paranormal activity. Angelo, 35, an archaeology graduate, speaks about the tools of the trade that he uses in his twilight passion: infrared cameras, “k2” electromagnetic field detectors, “EVP” recorders.

And what have you seen with them? “We’ve managed to take photos of human-looking shapes, of children and elderly people, in several places. We start with the books written by local historians and anthropologists, about legends and popular stories. Then, we don’t focus on the case, but on stories gathered, the truth of which needs to be confirmed, given than they often date back to ancient times,” Angelo explains.

And then what do you do? “We take our instruments, which enable us to detect any fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and we start looking. There are some places where these fluctuations can be measured in gauss (the unit of measurement for magnetic flow density), which is well above the norm. We don’t know what this means, we only measure the values, take photos and make videos and recordings to look at and study later.”

What do the two Ghostbusters see? “We’ve taken several photos in the Fortress of Moncalieri, in Piedmont, which is mentioned in lots of legends about ghosts and presences. Here, we’ve taken several night photos, in which you can see some human-looking figures at the windows,” Angelo says.

 

It is difficult to see anything in the photos sent to us, which we have included here. But this is what the ghost fan says he can see. “A figure, like a child with its head bent, watching (photo, top left)” or “A figure at the window, on the left. It looks like an old man. This was taken using an infrared camera, in the middle of the night (in the photo here, on the right)”.

He may be right, but it is very hard to believe that there actually is something that resembles a human figure behind the windows. And the same is true of the third photo, “An Orb (below), or a bright floating globe, which, according to some theories, is the starting point of a potential complete apparition, if the conditions are right for it to happen.”

In fact, the stories behind the night-time outings, like those of the villages in Valcuvia, appear to be more interesting than the photos. For example, it is said that a double murder was committed in the Middle Ages, in Orino, near the Fortress, which stands in the middle of the wood, on a knoll, from which it was possible to dominate the Swiss access routes: here the ghosts of Francis and Ada (from the legend of the same name) can be seen in a video made in May 2012, near the “Great Chestnut”. “The electromagnetic field exceeded 20 milligauss” (the link to the video has been included in this article).

Ghosts, beliefs and rumours have become been intertwined with stories that date back to events that actually occurred, like the presence of the Arians in these lands, and their expulsion. “One of these, a necromancer, was killed and buried by the troops of Saint Ambrose, under the Black Stone, a short distance from the Fortress; it’s an erratic stone from which, according to legend, a large dark-coloured animal occasionally appears. We’ve taken measurements there, but we haven’t found anything abnormal.”

Another observation point is in Gavirate, near the Lazzaretto Church, where plague victims were brought in the 16th century. “Here too, we’ve measured some significant variations in the electromagnetic field, particularly at dusk and on foggy days.”

Aren’t you afraid? “No, we’re not. All we do is measure presences; we don’t know what they are precisely, but they are there.”