Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (9 page)

“What choo guys filming?” he asked in a backwoods drawl.

“We’re making a film about the prison,” I replied.

“I was in there. A lot of years.”

“Mind if we talk to you about it?” He pulled his car over (I think it said “Limited Edition Escort” on it) and I was giddy at the thought of getting a guided tour from a man who was on the inside. And I mean REALLY on the inside—not an administrator or a tour guide, but someone who lived under the iron fist of justice for many years. A man who not only looked despair in the eye and didn’t flinch, but someone who would turn out to have an intimate relationship with the spirits that haunted the prison. He was Tom “Red Bone” Richardson, an inmate from 1967 to 1983, and an apparent fan of ZZ Top from the looks of his flowing white beard. I really hoped that he would leave his overflowing tobacco spit cup in the car before we began.

When we took Red Bone around the prison, I was pretty quiet. Walking the aisles of steel bars and fencing built to control the movements of dangerous men, I could see the emotion in his eyes. I could feel the intensity of the life he led and see the pain in his cragged face at every turn. I tried to visualize what he saw, but of course, failed to, not having any idea what life at rock bottom is like.

I could hear the pain in his voice and when I saw him break down and cry, his emotions started hitting me as well. When he partially collapsed, I felt the hell that this guy had lived in to pay for his crimes. He was an inmate, but he was also a man who was treated like an animal in this medieval place. It was a punch to the gut for me. I felt sorry for him and got teared up. But the reason we did this is because it gave us a sense of not only what happened there, but what the spirits were going through, which set the stage for the evening’s encounters.

Ray Gaughenbaugh

When we want to find people who worked in a haunted building while it was still in operation, we do it the old-fashioned way—we go knocking on doors and asking around town. It can be nerve wracking because you never know when you’re going to find someone who wants to cooperate and someone who pulls out a shotgun and delivers a “get off my property” ultimatum (it’s happened).

In Moundsville, West Virginia, we got a little more than we bargained for when we knocked on the door of Ray Gaughenbaugh (at first I thought his name was Golfingball). We’d been told he worked at the prison, so we stopped by his house. Ray is old, so when the door opened and he immediately fell flat on his back, it really worried me. For a moment I seriously thought he saw the cameras, fainted from fright, and died. Lucky for us, he just had a bad case of imbalance and fell over from lack of equilibrium. He ended up being a great source of information on the prison, but not before putting a little fear into us . . . and comedy.

Sarah Knight

Sarah Knight, Sloss Venue Coordinator, was well versed on the inner workings of the Furnace. She knew all the weird stories and didn’t need any sort of map to get around, probably because she already had one tattooed on her lower back. It was a simple black skyline of the Furnace that was both creepy and cool at the same time. Oddly, this would not be the last time we saw something like that. For a moment I thought Sloss Furnace once manufactured humans, and she was branded with its logo. After all she was hot like the Furnace. Okay, bad joke.

Animal Hauntings

The possibility of animal spirits brings up many intriguing questions. Their very existence suggests that free will is not involved in hauntings and/or crossing over to the other side because animals do not have the consciousness to choose. If animals can stay in the physical world after death, then it would stand to reason that living beings do not have a choice when it comes to crossing over, that nature randomly chooses who will and will not remain in the physical plane.

Or it could mean that we’re completely wrong when we assume that animals are not conscious beings. Do animals actually have the ability to think and choose like us? Do they possess a soul just as we do? Could animals have unfinished business and need closure like humans? Let’s say for example that a loyal dog dies, but did not have the luxury of seeing its master one last time before it did. Would its spirit remain behind looking for him? Could the bond between human and animal be so strong as to keep its spirit from crossing over? The fact that most animal hauntings are of dogs, cats, and horses—the animals most associated with human relationships—suggest this might be true. It could also mean that only animals with higher brain functions become restless spirits, since stories of turtle, parakeet, and slug hauntings are virtually unheard of.

Another possibility is that we are causing the apparitions of animals ourselves. Telekinesis might not be a popular theory, but there have been a few documented cases of it. It’s very possible that we lead ourselves into believing a beloved pet is in our presence just by thinking very intently about it. People often say, “I loved that dog. I can still see him.” With a little emotional stress, it’s possible that we produce an image of a deceased animal with our own telekinetic energy. In this case, it’s the owner’s love for his or her pet that keeps its spirit alive, not the inherent nature of the animal itself. The fact that the vast majority of animal ghosts are those of beloved family pets could be an important clue that this might be the case.

I believe there are animal hauntings, but they are very infrequent and difficult to pinpoint. Animals make sounds that are easily confused with everyday sounds and it’s pretty hard to have any intelligent conversation with Fluffy or Spot. While investigating the Ancient Ram Inn in England, I was told that two cats were frequently seen in the building—a large, mangy cat upstairs and a black one that had been seen roaming the main lounge. Throughout that investigation I kept hoping I would feel one of them rub against my leg or capture purring on my digital recorder, but it never happened.

I’ve never seen an apparition of an animal, but twice I’ve captured some compelling audio that suggests a dog haunting. At La Purisima Mission my digital recorder captured what sounds like a dog whining. At the Edinburgh Vaults I again captured more whining sounds, which corresponded to what many witnesses said about a dog that still roams the catacombs.

I’ve captured many growls on recording devices, but these are different. Growling is associated more with demonic entities than animals and is often accompanied by dark, evil energy that lurks in the crevices of the afterlife.

As cheesy as it sounds, I want to believe the paranormal world was portrayed accurately in the movie
Ghost
. I want to believe spirits of the dead roam the Earth with unfinished business looking for someone who can hear or see them, and once they find that person, they latch on. I believe there are wandering spirits who are waiting to find someone to tell their story to or who are hiding from the afterlife out of fear of what might happen to them when they cross over.

That’s something I want people to know. Many spirits were either ripped from life or never lived long enough to become bitter or disillusioned by the world. They just want to feel companionship or to know that someone can hear them. And in the end, don’t we all?

can’t imagine the deep sadness of being
discarded and abandoned in a mental institution. I don’t want to envision the maddening confusion of being trapped in an empty building where your only companionship is the occasional prodding paranormal investigator like me. The pain and depression of living and dying in the unforgiving sterility of a hospital bed that deprives the human spirit of its very life energy is a loneliness I never want to know. I imagine it’s like being buried alive and screaming out, hoping someone on the surface hears you. It’s these situations that make paranormal investigation difficult, because it becomes almost impossible to separate your own emotions from the pain and turmoil these spirits went through before they passed on. It also adds to our own confusion of wondering if we’re in the presence of the spirit of a mentally insane criminal or just a confused and harmless individual.

There is a big difference between people who died suddenly and those who died knowing how desperate their situation was. The spirits who knew the end was near usually have clarity about their surroundings and know the eventuality of their lives, so they can move on. But the ones who passed suddenly can harbor a burning passion for closure or forgiveness for what happened to their physical body. You might think angry or evil spirits are the most difficult to encounter, but in fact it’s the ones who either can’t figure out how to cross over or the ones who still hold on to a soul-crushing sadness that are the hardest with which to interact. The angry and evil ones come at me from a known place of hate, so I know how to deal with them. The sad and confused spirits aren’t sure what they want and usually need help figuring it out. They weep aloud and wander in pain until they find it. Those are the hardest ones to deal with because they tug at your heartstrings and test your humanity.

Sad Spirits

A suburb of Boston, Sudbury, Massachusetts, is one of the oldest communities in America and sits a stone’s throw away from the infamous town of Salem, where nineteen people were hanged on dubious accusations of witchcraft by their own paranoid peers. Longfellow’s Wayside Inn was built in Sudbury in 1707 as a combination residential house for the Howe family and a lodge for weary travelers, and has been occupied continuously ever since.

Three-hundred-year-old homes almost always have hauntings. It’s rare that a building can stand the test of time like this one and not have a restless spirit or two roaming it. I went there in February 2011 because the tale of Jerusha Howe sounded like a good romantic backstory for a Valentine’s Day investigation, but in fact I would leave Sudbury in almost the same state of mind as when I left Preston Castle where the restless soul of Anna Corbin touched me—only with a slight difference.

Jerusha is a case study in heartache. It started as an innocent crush and grew to an all-consuming obsession that owns her to this day. The details are lost to time, but we do know that the man she fell in love with departed Sudbury to take a journey across the ocean to England and was never heard from again. We all know that “love” is an impossibly difficult thing to find, and happily married people always say “when you’ve found the right one, you’ll know.” Imagine when Jerusha found her true love only to have him disappear. Those feelings and deep emotions were life changing, and when that love does not return for you there’s nothing left to do but die from despair. Even in my favorite movie,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
, lost true love had the power to turn one into a vampire. Now, that’s my kind of love.

It’s said that Jerusha never loved another and even after her death she continues to wait patiently for his return. Her spirit wanders the halls of Longfellow’s Inn, inquisitively gravitating toward men to see if they are her long lost suitor (what strikes me as weird about this story is that she did not find another love while she lived the last days of her sad life, but now she flirts with hundreds of men while deceased).