COP BY DAY, A GHOSTBUSTER BY NIGHT 
by Elaine D'Aurizio
©The Sunday Record, March 10, 1996

    By the time he grew up, Liebeck had realized he couldn't make much of a living tracking the non-living. So 10 years ago he entered law enforcement. Now he's a sergeant with the federal Department of Veterans Affairs police in East Orange, investigating con artists who prey on elderly veterans.
    But his passion for ghost hunting kept growing.
    He started researching reports with the idea that he'd write a book. Aquaintances told him stories. Ads he put in magazines drew leads. People came up to him at lectures at libraries and schools and told him about incidents that happened to friends or relatives.
    He isn't quick to judge those who report a haunting. For obvious reasons, they're reluctant to tell others, fearing they'll be dismissed as crazy.        "I try to assume in the beginning that they're not lying," said Liebeck, the only person in the 11-member state chapter of the Ghost Research Society doing active investigations.
    Liebeck admits he believes in ghosts - at least in theory. Research has strengthened his belief: There are similarities in sightings through centuries and from different parts of the world. He points out that people once were scoffed at when they reported seeing rocks fall from the sky. Not until the 19th century were meteors acknowledged.
    "It's similar with hauntings," Liebeck said. "I hope I'm playing a part in the advancement of science. If we can gather enough evidence to prove that something exists, a ghost would move from being a mythological subject to being a scientific fact.
    "But I guess I'm in search of the Holy Grail," he said. "I'd like to actually see a ghost appear in front of me, preferably with witnesses so somebody wouldn't say I've lost my mind." 
      Besides lecturing, Liebeck writes magazine articles. He confers with other members of the Ghost Research Society - an Illinois based group that tracks and documents reports of the supernatural - and similar organizations, as well as independent ghostbusters. And he's sought by television talk shows as an expert. He once appeared on the Sally Jesse Raphael show to offer an opinion on a family's report of a demonic figure that attacked them.
    So what does a ghost look like, anyway? Frankly, despite poring over the hundreds of books on the subject that fill his West Paterson apartment, Liebeck has trouble describing one. He knows what it's not: the hokey, white-sheet, floating-in-air "Casper" kind that Hollywood likes.

    By day, Randy Liebeck is a federal police officer busting criminals.
    At night, he's a ghostbuster.
    From 9 to 5, it's just the facts, ma'am. After that, it's a plunge into the world that facts can't explain.
    But exploring the unknown is what excites him. "It's the thrill of the search," he says. "And ghosts are very elusive at being caught."
    So elusive that Liebeck, state coordinator for the national Ghost Research Society, hasn't really caught one yet. The closest he's come was a spooky experience last year at the Bernardsville Library, where workers for years have reported mysterious footsteps, telephones and lights acting up, and sightings of a female ghost called Phyllis. Instead of a gun, Liebeck was wielding thousands of dollars worth of equipment - thermal anomaly detector, Olympus 35mm camera, video cameras, and a meter that detects magnetic fields. A librarian warned him that Phyllis didn't much like those newfangled electronic gizmos.
    "At the moment she said that," Liebeck recalled, "my Olympus started snapping pictures. The flash started firing, even though my fingers weren't near the buttons and you have to press each time you take a single photo."
    Everyone stepped back.
    "It had gone haywire and has never done that before or since," he said.
    "Actually, it kind of spooked me."
    There have been other close encounters. He has smelled oranges and pipe tobacco in houses where there weren't any. He has recorded splotches and streaks of light that don't correspond with normal flaws in film or cameras. He has felt unexplained cold spots and, in a restored historic mansion in Sussex County, he has detected weird activity with a thermal vision camera.
    "We had pockets of heat and cold floating through the room that showed up on film, and the hot spots were nowhere near a radiator," he said.
    Liebeck, 33, wanted to be a professional ghostbuster since he learned to read. Like most children, he loved spooky stories. The more he read, the more interested he became in whether the spooks actually existed.
    When he was 9, Liebeck marched into the library, anxious to explore parapsychology, but was told he was too young for those books.
    "Being turned away just piqued my curiosity," he said. "So I brought my mother and she took the books out."