CASPER — Who you gonna call in Wyoming when the door slams in an empty room and a mysterious disembodied voice whispers “get out?”
Casper’s Pete McDaniels.
A longtime fan of the 1984 hit movie “Ghostbusters” starring Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Harold Ramios McDaniels and his team of ragtag wranglers of all things supernatural are listed are on an official “whoyougonnacall.org" website that lists paranormal investigators in each state.
He is one of 165 franchises nationwide, and the only listed in Wyoming.
“There is a whole group of folks that use that movie to help people in their communities,” McDaniels said.
In addition investigating potential hauntings, Casper’s Ghostbusters do birthday parties, food drives, conventions, “trunk” or treats and raises money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Like the movies that feature iconic ghost-busting cars, McDaniels drives his own version of “Ecto-1,” the famous converted ambulance with the unique whiney siren. It has similar paraphernalia on top and Ghostbusters stickers on the side.
He bought the 2009 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor from someone in Glenrock a few years ago. He renamed it the “Ecto Interceptor.”
A hospital security guard when not busting ghosts, McDaniels had his uniform on when he initially drove the unmodified car. Wyoming Highway Patrol pulled him over, thinking he might be trying to impersonate a police officer.
Ghostbuster Interceptor
“I thought I should probably make this car less cop like and more something fun. And I had always wanted to have a Ghostbusters car, so I started to put stickers on it,” he said.
“Well then I thought, now I’ve got to build a top in it, it can’t just be stickers right? So, I started piecing together bit by bit the roof rack and housing and built all that out. There is one piece of pipe up that’s up there being held onto the roof by a toilet flange.”
Once he had his wheels, as well as the “ECTOI” license plate, the doors opened for him to use it for fundraisers and to market his ghost removal side gig.
October becomes the busy season. There is a “Touch a Truck” event on Oct. 12 at the Excel Academy Private School that allows kids to get in the vehicle, turn on the sirens, read the special tag fastened on the dash that labels the machine as belonging to Wyoming Ghostbusters, and check out the glove compartment.
“There is a ghostbuster’s employee handbook and a little canister of ectoplasm slime,” he said. “The kids like to play with all that stuff.”
He also plans to be at a car show and food drive at the Izaak Walton Clubhouse in Casper on Oct. 18 and end the month on Oct. 25, 27 and 28 with actual ghostbusting demonstrations at the Casper Elks Lodge No. 1353 where he said the equipment used by paranormal investigators will be explained and a walk through of the lodge will be conducted.
“Right now, I’m discussing a fundraiser for a lady that is trying to fight cancer,” he said. “We try and kind of use the car as a way to help people out.”
As in the movie, McDaniels and some other members of the team have uniforms and he and a buddy have the proton packs used in the last version of the film series.
“It’s kind of the iconic part of Ghostbusters history, it gets people excited,” he said.
Supernatural Missions
In addition to the fundraising, and parties, McDaniels also has been on an estimated 15 missions to identify or remove potential paranormal spirits in places around the region and state.
He recently was called to a Casper home where the owners discovered a set of footprints on concrete that went from a pickup truck to the garage door and then just vanished.
“What it looked like was that somebody had walked through a puddle of grease, made about four or five steps to the garage door and then nothing,” he said. “It was kind of crazy.”
McDaniels pulled out his EMF meter that measures electro-magnetic energy and found it registered a few points over the footprints and faded when pulled away from them. He checked to see if there were any internet routers or other source of energy nearby that would trigger the meters. There were none.
Other tools in his ghostbusting toolbox include REM-Pod devices that reflect electromagnetic field changes and air temperature changes and a specialized SLS (Structured Light Sensor) camera that uses infrared light. It can 3D map areas in front of it “so we can see things the human eye might miss,” he said.
He also uses other cameras that can capture images in ultraviolet, infrared, and the normal spectrum of light.
At the garage, McDaniels set up some REM Pods around the area to see if anything would trigger them. Nothing happened. Photos with the infrared camera found nothing.
But it’s not always that way. McDaniels tells the story of being called to a Casper home about five blocks from the cemetery with a man experiencing doors being slammed in his home for no reason.
“He said he was sitting on the couch one day and he felt like his leg started to burn,” McDaniels said. “He looked down and it looked like a handprint had been slapped on his thigh. So, we got to go down and work with that.”
The man requested that McDaniels and his team bless the house. McDaniels said he has studied different spiritual beliefs including druidism and another team member is a Norse shaman.
“Peter McDaniel turned a former police interceptor into his Ecto Interceptor. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels) 
Peter McDaniels and his daughter, Olivia, pose in their Ghostbuster uniforms. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels) 
Peter McDaniels on a paranormal mission. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels) 
Peter McDaniels, left, and members of his team do fundraising for many causes. Here their efforts raised funds for the National Historic Trails Center Foundation. In addition to McDaniels, those shown here are from left are Olivia McDaniels, Nathan Soper, Connie Thompson, and Derrick Lacey. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels) 
Members of the Casper-based Ghostbuster team are from left Einar Ivarson, Peter McDaniels, Raven Metcalf, and Derrick Lacey. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels) 
The Casper-based Ghostbuster mobile has been on missions across the state. (Courtesy Peter McDaniels)
Stubborn Spirit
Their attempts to get rid of the spirit by blessing the house did not work. He claims it was forced into a back room. McDaniels had read about a dybbuk box used in Jewish tradition that is supposed to be able to contain a spirit. So, he tried using one.
“We kind of forced this thing into the dybbuk box and sealed it,” he said. McDaniels said as he was talking to the man at the house, he placed the box by the front tire of his Ghostbuster car and the tire deflated. He had to pump it up to leave.
There was another hurdle as well. Weather at the time was cold and the ground hard, so he couldn’t bury the box as would be his practice. So, he kept it in a storage area at his house. McDaniels noticed the wax seal that he put on the box kept cracking. He needed to keep sealing it nearly every day.
Then his radio started to flip on in his house at random times and the song coming out of the speakers would have a lyric such as “set me free” or “let me loose.”
“I was like, no buddy, that’s not how this works,” McDaniels said. “As soon as it was warm enough we went and buried the box and all of that stopped afterwards.”
He said the man in the house never had issues again as well.
‘Get Out’
The 39-year-old talks about an incident several years ago when he went to a trailer in the “middle of nowhere” as he was receiving training from a woman he labels a “Christian witch.”
The trailer sat on a plot of land that was said to have had a Native American burial ground underneath it. He said he entered the trailer and it was dark and he was trying to feel his way around and made it to a bedroom and sat on the bed.
“I’m just kind of sitting there trying to feel things out and I felt the bed depress behind me like someone was standing on it and then I hear the words ‘get out’ whispered in my ear,” he said. “At that point, I calmly stood up, and I walked out the front door and I got into the car next to the lady that was helping us. And she said, ‘Are you OK?’”
“And I was like, ‘nope,’” he said. “It scared me, oh man, it scared me.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
