A talent for the paranormal

northjersey.com ^ | 10.25.09 | ELISA UNG

[Coleus]

A good port or Madeira. A special Sancerre or a Châteauneuf-du-Pape. For the past 15 years, the customers of Wine Ventures in Tenafly have known to count on its proprietor, Craig McManus, for a friendly chat and some wine expertise. What they may not know is that wine is just McManus' day job. By night, he chases spirits. He communicates with the dead. He looks for ghosts. He conjures up the late relatives of people he's just met. He ignores those who call this ridiculous.

Instead, he took a phenomenon that initially "freaked me out" and spun it into a cottage industry. More than 500 paying clients have hired him to reconnect with loved ones or investigate those bumps in the night in their homes. Nearly 11,000 tourists in Cape May last year took one of the trolley tours and lectures about ghosts he's found in the Victorian shore town. And McManus has sold 23,000 copies of his self-published books about the Cape May paranormal.

All of this has resulted in enough notoriety that McManus gets recognized on the street in Cape May. The manager of the town's bookstore reports "he's bigger than James Patterson in here." You'll find his four books prominently displayed for sale in a fudge shop, an antique store and a salt-water taffy retailer.

But not in his own wine store in Tenafly. That's because McManus mostly tries to keep the two worlds separate. He'd rather not be harangued about ghosts while stocking bottles in the store, and he knows some are "weirded out" by the supernatural. McManus too has developed a few doubts. He says most orbs in photos are just light refractions and scoffs that objects float around the room only in Hollywood. A few of his "investigations" of buildings netted merely squirrels in the attic.

And while he found formal channeling so draining that he's taking a break, he says the work gives him a thrill. "I can hook someone up with a great bottle of wine for a steak, but when you hook someone up with a loved one, it's a feeling you can't describe," he says.

Surprised acquaintances warn that if you run into McManus, you risk spontaneously meeting those that have passed. He calls it "ambush channeling." Skeptical? So was Thomas Golden, a clinical psychologist in Tenafly who has long purchased wine from McManus. The two became casually friendly, and one night they went to dinner with Golden's wife. Golden said McManus knew nothing about his family. "Sam's here," McManus abruptly told Golden over dinner. Sam was Golden's late father. "Sam wants to talk to Mark about crimson." Mark is Golden's brother and the owner of a paint company; crimson is known as a particularly tricky paint color.

McManus then turned to Golden's wife, Brigita, and told her, "Rina wants to say he's very happy for you in your marriage." Her first husband, actually named Rino, had passed away. "I'm a skeptic of the world," Golden said, "but it's hard to deny what you hear right in front of your face."

That's just one story. Ho-Ho-Kus restaurateur Janice Tinari says McManus randomly conjured up her late aunt Philomena while dining one night at her bistro. Consultant Sally Petro of Pittsburgh says she had just met McManus in Cape May in 2006 when he said her late father appeared, throwing around a ball, saying the food was now salty enough for him and worrying about her brother's stomach. Petro said her father played baseball and hated that his health limited his sodium intake. And later, she learned her brother indeed had stomach problems.

At a recent "investigation" at The '76 House in Tappan, N.Y., a tavern dating to 1686, McManus said he had visions of an oil lamp being knocked off a particular table. It was a revelation that made the tavern's owner, Robert Norden, shudder. Norden said later that table was notorious for things falling off and not breaking — particularly, the glass part of the lamp.

"I'm not all over the top with the whole ghost thing," said Norden, but the building had a new hydrostatic foundation and "there are no vibrations now" when vehicles pass. "And we still get the glassware falling off the table, all the time. And it's just that table."

As a child, McManus was afraid of the dark. But he was still fascinated by haunted house attractions at carnivals. Eventually, he began to notice a pattern: He'd be thinking of someone and then they'd call. Or he'd be playing around with tarot cards with friends and would suddenly be confronted with images or names. "Every time, the people I was sitting with would say, 'that was my grandmother' " or someone else close to them. "It was really a little rattling."

When he began to be invited to parties merely as entertainment, he decided he had to start charging — about $250 a session. And so starting in the late 1990s, his days went like this: "I'd put on my Clark Kent suit for the wine shop" and work there all day.

"Then I would turn into 'the psychic man' in the evening." He'd come home to Ho-Ho-Kus, eat dinner, take a nap and meditate. At 9 p.m., the phone would ring. It would be a client. One was Michael Zeale, a Garfield bank manager who opened McManus' bank account and became curious about his work. Zeale said he found the fee more than worth it after McManus channeled his parents and related specific details known only to Zeale's family, such as his father's penchant for polishing items and his tendency to call a friend "my other daughter."

This could go on past midnight. "It still makes my stomach uneasy," McManus said. "It was like going into an ER ward. Someone reconnects with their mother and doesn't want to let go." After several years, he was burning out. He decided to take a hiatus to focus on his writing and his work in Cape May. His interest in the shore town drew from visits as a child. He later visited in the 1990s and was fascinated by the history. He took the few ghost-themed tours available, which piqued his curiosity. But when he queried innkeepers, he was brushed off.

"Back then it wasn't cool" to talk about ghosts, he said; many feared a tourist backlash. But McManus was curious enough to spend his own money to learn more. He figured that if he was a paying guest, no one could turn him away – and he began to stay in the bed and breakfasts, asking questions about ghosts and investigating them on his own. He began to detail them in his books.

In 2005, he spun the work into a series of ghost tours run by Cape May's Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts, which had previously steered clear of the supernatural. "We are such a historical organization — all of our tours are based on facts," said the group's communications coordinator, Margo Harvey. "But the Victorians were big believers in ghosts."

And now, Harvey says McManus' work has drawn tourists into town. The regular trolley tours featuring a guide relating his findings are popular, and many of this year's Halloween offerings sold out by summer, she said. Several innkeepers now say they find guests mostly intrigued by McManus, who has livened up many a conversation.

Diane Hutchinson, the owner of the Fairthorne Inn, remembers McManus channeling a woman's late daughter over breakfast – and relating such details as her middle name and her penchant for piano-playing and elephants. John Matusiak, owner of the Bacchus Inn, recalls McManus surprising a man with his grandmother's name and a message: She wanted him to buy a new car. The man had been pondering whether to do just that. "When I'm watching him, I feel as though he's translating from another language," said Barbara Masemore, the owner of the John F. Craig House, where McManus has held séance weekends for interested guests.

McManus has built his reputation and sales in Cape May with the help of book signings (he even did one under the bra rack at a local lingerie shop). On a recent chilly Saturday night, a steady stream of customers came in while he signed inside a clothing store, and about 60 showed up afterward for a talk about the ghosts of Cape May's shopping drag. One of them was Jeannie Barnett, a customer service representative from Newark, Del. She had come to get a book signed for her daughter, a fan. While he scribbled, she remarked about suspicions that the ghost of her late mother lived in her house. McManus listened. Then he couldn't seem to help himself.

On came an ambush. "There's a Walter behind you," he told her matter-of-factly. "He's holding up cotton candy." Barnett looked shocked. "Walter was my mom's oldest brother," she said; he was also a trickster who loved sweets. McManus added that he also saw someone with a limp, and that a teakettle was whistling in the background. Barnett's father walked with a limp, and her grandmother, who lived in Cape May, always kept a teapot on, she later said.

The clincher was when McManus told her a woman was handing her a rose. Through tears, Barnett said that was her mother, whom she often brought roses. "I thought I was getting a book signed and leaving," Barnett said later, wide-eyed. "He didn't know me from a hill of beans."

The episode showed McManus' approach to ghosts and spirits. He says he can't control who will appear, what they'll tell him or how they'll look. "I wouldn't want to come back as a 90-year-old guy," he says. "I'd come back as this," gesturing to himself. "Then I'd have other ghosts saying, 'aren't you Craig McManus? Didn't you own a wine store in Tenafly?' "

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