Ghost Hunting (10 page)

THE ARMORY OCTOBER 2004

L
ike people, ghosts have their own rules. Abide by them and they may leave you alone. Break them and you may wish you hadn’t.

The Armory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, had seen its share of guilt, despondency, and despair. Built in 1903, it had welcomed soldiers home from a half-dozen wars, each man carrying his unique backpack full of horrors. One might have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, one might have discovered that his wife had been cheating on him, and one might have felt he just didn’t fit into society anymore. Every soldier’s story was different, yet they were also very much the same.

Too often, the burden proved to be more than the guy could carry, and he sought relief the only way he could. In the office, a first sergeant hanged himself from the ceiling. Another poor soul hanged himself in a back room. Yet another guy was depressed because he was separating from his wife, so he went into his office and blew his brains out.

The most famous story involved a general who was really rough with his troops. The thing he hated the most was horseplay. If a soldier played a prank, the general would discipline him hard. Apparently, he was hard on himself as well, because he committed suicide one night on the armory drill floor.

It wasn’t surprising that guardsmen had reported paranormal experiences over the years. Guys had seen footsteps appear in puddles of water. They had gotten shoved by unseen entities. In the hallways they had heard and seen figures that disappeared under close scrutiny.

T.A.P.S. was invited to investigate the place by the local National Guard battalion, the idea being to prove or disprove the stories once and for all. Our team of five was shown around the armory by Sgt. Joe Rebello, the battalion’s medical section chief. In addition to the usual core group of Steve, Brian, Grant, and me, we had along Mike Dion, a seasoned investigator from the T.A.P.S. group in Massachusetts.

Rebello had had some experiences of his own, which he described to us. One night when he was alone, he heard a door slam on its own. When he looked into it, he couldn’t figure out how it had happened. On another occasion, a hot night in August, he suddenly felt cold and his breath froze right in front of him. In fact, cold spots turned up in the building all the time.

We were eager to begin our investigation. However, since we had arrived earlier than usual, we took a lunch break first. None of us blinked when Frank DeAngelis, our sound technician, tripped one of our cameramen. It was the kind of practical joke we play on one another all the time.

But Rebello and Sgt. Steve Thrasher, another armory officer, seemed to cringe. When I asked why, they reminded me about the general who hated horseplay. Apparently, his spirit wasn’t tolerant of it either, as soldiers who had been pushed around at night could attest.

As we finished lunch and began setting up our equipment, we agreed to take the warning seriously. We had brought along our newest toy—a thermal-imaging camera that would show us variations in temperature in more dramatic terms than any electronic temperature gauge.

Grant and I headed for the room where the first sergeant had hung himself. At first, our thermal camera didn’t pick up anything unusual. Then what looked like a mist passed in front of the lens. What surprised us wasn’t just the presence of the mist—it was the fact that it registered as warmer than the surrounding air. Normally, mists are colder than the air.

Meanwhile, Steve, Brian, and Mike Dion had moved onto a catwalk that overlooked the building’s big, hangar-like drill floor. It had been described to us as a place where a disproportionate number of cold spots had been detected. The guys were able to corroborate that by detecting some of them with their instruments.

They were trying to see if the cold spots were attributable to drafts when they realized their camera battery was draining at a ridiculous rate—as if something was sucking the energy out of it. They knew that supernatural entities need energy to manifest themselves and that they’ll take it from any source they can find. Was their battery being used for that purpose?

Before they could draw any conclusions, something completely unexpected happened: Frank DeAngelis’s feet went out from under him and he fell right on his back. Steve, who’s a police officer, didn’t know what had happened, but he was at Frank’s side in a heartbeat.

“You okay, man?” he asked.

Frank didn’t look like he could move. In a thin, terrified voice, he answered Steve’s question. “No.”

As he lay there, tears running down the sides of his face, Frank described what had happened to him. It had begun with a feeling of extreme cold. Then he’d felt something come up through the core of his body and yank his head back.

Right now, his chest felt like it had a weight on it, and his back hurt, and he was caught in the grip of a cold sweat. Steve, Brian, and Mike took their shirts off to keep him warm, knowing he might be going into shock—or worse.

A moment later, Rebello responded and took Frank’s blood pressure. His breathing was quick and his heart rate was well into the hundreds, but it was gradually coming down. To everyone’s relief, Frank wasn’t in any serious danger.

When Grant and I got there, he was lying on his back, looking pale and sweaty and scared half to death. When we trained our thermal camera on his face, it showed inflammation under his chin, as if he had been struck by someone.

Finally, Frank felt well enough to get up. Grant and I took him to a room where we could debrief him in private. Naturally, the investigators in us wanted to know exactly what had happened. But that wasn’t our only reason for speaking with him.

Frank had been through a harrowing experience. He needed to talk about it, to get his feelings out in the open. To obtain some perspective.

After he had had some time to gather himself, he said it was an entity he had felt inside him. In his brief contact with it, he could feel what it was feeling, and it was full of negative emotions. He felt as if all his worst fears had been realized, as if doomsday were descending on him and there was nothing he could do about it.

At that point, it was six hours into the investigation. We called it a night. As we left, we told Rebello that we would be in touch as soon as we had a chance to go over the data.

When we did, it was nothing short of startling. Frank had said that he’d felt his head being jerked back. But in fact, he’d been hit by his audio equipment bag. Without warning or explanation, it had jumped up and slugged him under the chin.

We checked to make sure Frank hadn’t inadvertently pulled the bag up with his hands. But we could see his hands and they were otherwise occupied. Besides, it was a heavy bag, and it wouldn’t have been easy for him to yank it up that way.

When we returned to the armory, we met with Sergeant Rebello and his superior, Capt. Winfield Danielson. We told them what we had discovered. For one thing, we had detected the cold spots they mentioned. For another, we found that warm mist in the room where the first sergeant hanged himself.

However, the biggest piece of evidence was what had happened to Frank, all of which had been captured on videotape. In fact, it was the most violent documentation of the supernatural that either Grant or I had ever seen. Clearly, the Armory was host to legitimate paranormal activity.

But that wasn’t the end of it. I still wanted to talk with Frank back at headquarters. Though from a medical standpoint he wasn’t suffering any lasting effects, it would be naive to think he hadn’t been damaged in some way.

“You may be changed by this,” I told him. “I just want you to know that we’re here for you.”

Frank thanked me but decided not to go with us on any more investigations. He had had enough.

LINGERING OCTOBER 2004

T
hough we use a lot of different instruments when we check a site for paranormal activity, we also depend on our instincts. After all, we’ve been at this for a while, and we can usually tell when something’s going on even without our collection of recorders and cameras and computer systems.

Then there are times when we’re completely fooled. For instance, the night we visited the house of Adam Zubrowski in northern Connecticut.

Zubrowski, a friend of one of our cameramen on the show, was a pleasant enough guy with what sounded like a haunting problem. Every so often, he would hear a woman’s voice in his house, even when there weren’t any women present. This was especially true in the room where he kept his pool table, which had been his grandparents’ bedroom before their deaths in 2000 and 2001. Zubrowski’s grandparents, you see, had been the house’s original residents. After they passed on, Adam became the sole owner of the place and all its contents.

But his grandparents hadn’t just lived there. They had built the place, and gone on to build some of the furniture as well. What’s more, their ashes were sitting in a container in the living room, so there was clearly a strong and intimate connection between Zubrowski’s grandparents and his house.

Recently, he had woken up in the morning to find a bunch of bric-a-brac lying around his feet, nestled in the folds of his bedcovers. What freaked him out was that the stuff had been standing on his headboard when he went to sleep the night before. How had it gotten there? He hadn’t the slightest idea.

His friends didn’t either, but they knew enough about the place to stay away from it. One of them told us about the time he had stayed over in the back bedroom, where Adam’s great-grandfather had died some years earlier. When the friend got a weird vibe in the middle of the night and heard a woman’s voice whispering to him, he bolted from the house and refused to sleep over ever again.

There were other incidents. One time, a heavy oak fire door swung closed and locked itself on its own. Another time, Zubrowski went down into his basement and got the distinct feeling he wasn’t alone. That was the last time he visited his basement on his own after dark.

“I used to be a skeptic,” he told us. “But not anymore. I just want to know what’s going on.”

We tackled the Zubrowski residence with a team that included Brian Harnois, Steve Gonsalves, Heather Drolet, and Jen Rossi, in addition to Grant and myself. Jen, our archivist, was expanding her role in T.A.P.S. by training to be a field researcher.

Heather, who had brought her divining rods, was teamed with Brian and an EMF detector. The idea was to go over the reportedly active parts of the house with both modalities, to see if the rods and the detector came up with the same results.

They did and they didn’t.

In the basement, for instance, Heather’s brass rods crossed a bit, indicating some ambient energy. Brian’s detector, on the other hand, showed nothing unusual. In the back bedroom, where Zubrowski’s great-grandfather had passed on, neither Heather nor Brian came up with anything. It was only in the room with the pool table that Heather’s rods registered a serious energy source, going so far as to form a perfect X when she placed them over the center of the table. But in the same room, Brian came up empty.

So, according to the divining rods, at least, there was activity. However, none of us felt anything out of the ordinary—not even Heather. When that’s the case, it usually means we’re barking up the wrong tree, and all we’ve done is encounter another homeowner with an overactive imagination.

We thanked Zubrowski, who had been a congenial host, and went back to Rhode Island. “Not a total loss,” I told Grant on the way north. “At least Jen got some valuable investigative experience.”

Then Brian and Steve sat down to go over the data, as they usually do. They were fully prepared to file an uneventful report. But when they examined our EVP recordings, they found something difficult to ignore.

Calling in Grant and me, they played the EVP for us. Though Zubrowski had described a woman’s voice, this one seemed to belong to a man. Though the voice was labored, wheezing, the words were eerily clear: “I miss Adam.” It sent a chill up my spine when I heard them.

We captured the voice again in another part of the tape. However, we couldn’t make out the words this time. That was disappointing. When you get an EVP, you want to know what the heck it’s saying.

Anyway, we brought the evidence back to Zubrowski’s house and went over it with him. His dad was present, though he preferred to stand in the doorway that led to the kitchen, out of camera range.

When we played the “I miss Adam” EVP, Zubrowski’s eyes opened wide. Obviously, he was moved by the idea that his grandfather was calling to him from the other side, expressing his longing for his beloved grandson. But it made sense, Zubrowski told us. He’d been very close with his grandparents, his grandfather in particular.

Then we played the other EVP, the one that sounded like gibberish to us. Before Zubrowski could comment, his father blurted out, “Oh, my God. It’s Polish. He’s speaking in
Polish
.”

He went on to tell us that his father—Adam Zubrowski’s grandfather—had died of a respiratory disease that had made it hard for him to breathe, which was why it sounded like the speaker of the EVP was struggling for air. The elder Zubrowski was caught up in a wave of emotion, grateful for the chance to hear his dad’s voice again.