Ghost Hunting Gear Manufacturer Making PPE for Front Liners
Posted by By Julie Tremaine, SyFy Wire (syfy.com) on May 13th 2020
Even before the coronavirus pandemic shut down life as we know it, Shawn Porter’s “normal” life wasn’t all that normal. By day, he runs GhostStop, a company in Saint Cloud, Florida, that manufactures ghost-hunting gear. By night, he leads a team of paranormal investigators who go into rumored haunted places looking for evidence of supernatural activity.
GhostStop is a supplier and manufacturer of paranormal investigative equipment, building devices that aid in searching for supernatural phenomena, like K2 EMF meters that measure electromagnetic fields, 360-degree Ghost Cams to capture everything happening in a room at once, and laser grids to detect anomalies in a space. When the stay-at-home order came through for central Florida, though, Porter tells SYFY WIRE that “I thought it best to close down our shop to keep my crew safe and be part of the solution.”
But soon, he started hearing stories about equipment shortages from family and friends who work in health care. “It really nagged at me,” he says. “What can we be doing with our resources to help?”
Being an investigator by nature, Porter started looking into ways he could use GhostStop’s 3D printing equipment to make a difference. It turned out that the most help would come from providing personal protective equipment (PPE), which were in shortage, to local first responders. “I researched what could be made, and found some much-needed products that could be printed, and are approved for medical use by the National Institutes of Health,” he says. So he worked up some prototypes from publicly available specs and called in his crew.
GhostStop is now manufacturing PPE seven days a week, and to date has donated over 500 face shields and mask straps to central Florida hospitals, testing facilities, and first responders.
