A Department of Veterans Affairs cop, convinced his former New Jersey workplace is haunted by evil spirits, says the feds are using his belief in ghosts as an excuse to fire him, The Post has learned.
The spooky story pits Valdo Vaher, 48, a retired Army sergeant and former lieutenant in the New York Guard, against the VA, where he began working in 2006.
Vaher, who lives in Rockland County, defiantly insists otherworldly phenomena are real.
“This seems strange to some people, but for religious Catholics like myself, many feel as I do about this — that there are spirits in the world and they sometimes show themselves and are more likely to be doing this in and around hospitals, where people suffer and die,” he told The Post.
The VA initiated a long and bitter legal battle to permanently exorcise Vaher because, it charges, he’s basically too crazy to be a cop.
At one point he actually was fired. But in 2013, a judge for the Merit Systems Protection Board in Washington ordered he be re-hired.
“There are spirits in the world and they sometimes show themselves and are more likely to be doing this in and around hospitals, where people suffer and die.”
- Valdo Vaher
As part of a settlement, he was reassigned from the Manhattan VA Hospital to a facility in East Orange, NJ.
In February, he was stripped of his gun, placed on modified duty and reassigned to another New Jersey facility for “making bizarre statements and displaying unusual behaviors,” according to a letter from VA Deputy Police Chief Bernais McNeil.
Vaher was chided for giving a hair-raising talk to a rookie colleague about how their East Orange command was haunted by “evil spirits” — comments the agency suggested posed a safety risk to his co-workers and warranted his dismissal.
“You should stay away from certain areas here because there are evil spirits. I will give you some holy salts to ward off these evil spirits,” Vaher is quoted as having told the rookie.
Vaher is also alleged to have said, “Watch out for certain trees because they have faces and I just have a bad vibe with them” and “People around this area are animals.”
Vaher, who holds dual US-Estonian citizenship and who served in that country’s military, was an MP at West Point for nearly a decade and worked as a civilian observer in Kosovo for the State Department in 1998, a position that required him to brief the White House on a daily basis.
Vaher’s lawyer, Alan Wolin, accused the VA of “using psychology as a weapon, just like in the old Soviet Union” and insists the agency doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance of winning its case against him.
“They’ve been targeting him since Day One,” he said. “The bottom line is that they tried and failed to fire him twice before and we’re extremely confident we’ll win again.”
The VA formally notified Vaher this month of its latest plan to cast him out.
But Vaher still won’t back away from his claims that the VA’s East Orange site is haunted by ghostly apparitions.
“There are many people who work there who would tell you privately that there are spirits in that place and lots of them,” he said.
“There’s a lot of paranormal activity there. The police know it. The janitors know it. And the nursing people know it. They all know it — especially the people who work the night shift,” he said.
A VA spokesman declined to comment.