Orange County has just lost its best chance of ridding its jail of ghosts.Lloyd Anthony Rajcoomar, a Middletown security guard with a well-publicized sideline as an investigator of haunted buildings, has been denied a job as a correction officer in what he calls a case of religious discrimination.
There's no telling why he was rejected, since the Orange County Sheriff's Office can't discuss its job applicants.
But the earnest ghostbuster has no doubt that his ultra-serious dabbling in the paranormal — plus two misinterpreted crown tattoos — got him tossed from the candidate pool.
Rajcoomar, 28, who works as a security guard at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, became interested in supernatural activity in 1998 after being injured in a car accident and having what he describes as an out-of-body experience.
In 2005 that interest resulted in Post-Mortum, a small group of like-minded believers who use gadgets to detect spirits in our midst. Like Bill Murray and his crew in the 1984 movie "Ghostbusters," they go where they're called.
In these parts, Rajcoomar's group has searched for the ghost of a 9-year-old boy who died in a fall at summer camp at the Salesian School in Goshen in 1964.
They've also gone after a rambunctious spirit that supposedly slammed doors and left a foul odor in the basement of a Newburgh home.
Rajcoomar thought he was on track for a career at the Orange County Jail after he got a letter in April from the sheriff's office inviting him for an interview. The base pay was $36,071.
But his application path ended weeks later with an apologetic message left on his answering machine.
He thinks part of the reason was that someone mistook his two crown tattoos for the symbol of the Latin Kings gang.
But those crowns actually stand for the Christian archangel Michael, a sword-wielding enemy of Satan that Rajcoomar and his fellow ghost-hunters have embraced.
Lloyd Anthony Rajcoomar Paranormal
Lloyd Anthony Rajcoomar Paranormal
