Ghost Hunting (6 page)

GHOST LOT NOVEMBER 1999

A
few years after we started T.A.P.S., a woman named Maura, who lived not far from Grant in western Rhode Island, told him that her grandparents were hearing and seeing strange things in their two-bedroom home.

What kind of things? Unearthly growls from somewhere inside the house. The sound of gravel crunching in the driveway outside. Doors opening and closing on their own. Blurs and shadows in almost every photograph taken in the house. Every so often, Maura’s grandmother, Helen, saw a scraggly-looking figure standing outside her bathroom or in the backyard.

But the most unsettling incident was one that involved the family cat, which had gone missing. When they found it, its torso had been ripped away, leaving only its exposed spine to hold its upper and lower halves together. You can imagine how upset they were.

Grant and I checked out the house on our own. It was a good thing he knew the area, or I might never have found the place. It was dark out, and the area was too rural to have streetlights. When we got close, I could see that the house was built on a hill, with a gravel driveway curling around beneath it.

Maura and her grandparents were nice people. That much was obvious. They were also troubled by all the goings-on. You could see it in their eyes.

We all sat for a while in the living room, talking about what had happened and how we were going to proceed that night. Then we set up our equipment and went to work. For the rest of the evening, we heard what sounded like footsteps, but we didn’t hear growls or see any apparitions.

Then, around 12: 30 in the morning, we heard the crunch of gravel outside the house and the thud of horses’ hooves. Shooting to our feet, Grant and I peered out into the darkness from the family’s enclosed porch. The sound of hooves had abated, but we heard the scrape of boots and people talking.

Without our coats, we went outside to see what was going on. But when we got out there, there was nothing to see. No horses, no people, and no explanation for what we had heard. We went back inside.

For a while after that, it was quiet both inside and outside the house. We listened for a repeat of what we had heard before, but there wasn’t any. After a while, we wondered if that was all we would get that night.

Then we heard three amazingly loud growls from under the dining room table, which was only about six feet away from us. After we caught our breath, we agreed that the sound had come from a particular spot in the floor. Examining it, we found loose floorboards. With some trepidation, Helen told us it would be all right to pull them up.

When we did, we found a trapdoor.

Grant and I exchanged glances. We knew the answer to all the house’s troubles might be down there under that door. Preparing ourselves for what we might find, we swung it open. Underneath there was a hole of some kind, choked solid with rocks. They had some kind of markings scratched into them, but we had no idea what they meant.

While Grant was looking at the rocks, I happened to glance in the direction of the bathroom—and saw a tall, shadowy man dressed in scraggly clothes standing there and watching us. By the time I pointed him out to the others, he had gone back down the hallway. We pursued him, but we couldn’t find any sign of him.

Helen hadn’t seen the apparition this time, but she agreed that the description I gave her was the figure she had seen before. She seemed relieved that I had caught a glimpse of it too.

As it turned out, we weren’t done hearing sounds that night. But the ones we heard next weren’t at all like the others. They sounded like someone pounding the underside of the floor. When we checked it out, we found evidence of a leaky pipe.

Now, we may be ghost hunters when we’re investigating claims of the paranormal, but we’re also plumbers. When we see a leaky water line, we can’t just ignore it. We have to fix it.

In this case, that was easier said than done. The only practical way for us to address the problem was to lay in a new ten-foot piece of copper pipe and solder it into place, and we only had a small, unlit crawl space in which to work. What’s more, there was hand-blown insulation above and below. If we hit the insulation above us with the flame from our torch, the house would go up like a Roman candle. If we hit the insulation below us,
we
would go up.

So we had to be extra careful. First, as we made our way through the crawl space elbow over elbow, we sprayed down the insulation with our water bottles. Then we laid a foot-square fire blanket under the section we would be soldering, so we wouldn’t drip any molten metal on anything flammable. It was a tough job, but we had come to help—one way or the other.

By the time we were done, it was almost dawn. We packed up our stuff, told Helen we would be in touch with her, and headed back home. But we were eager to see what we had picked up on our equipment.

When we ran our analysis the next day, we saw that our cameras hadn’t recorded anything interesting. It was a pity. We were hoping to have gotten some footage of the scraggly figure near the bathroom.

However, when we went over our audio footage, it was a different story. To our satisfaction, we had captured some EVPs.
Nasty
ones.

The first had been recorded when those three loud growls had come from under the dining room table. As it turned out, there were nine growls altogether, three before the ones we had heard and three more immediately after.

The second EVP came up when we found the trapdoor and saw the man in dirty clothes watching us. As he retreated into the hallway, we heard a voice saying something like, “Now, now, now, dirty folk…mean.”

Of course, the job wouldn’t be done until we had conducted our research. Grant and I spent the next couple of days poring over records and visiting the local historical society. Finally, we struck pay dirt.

The house had been built in the middle of a “ghost lot”—an area marked on old maps to denote a territory held sacred by its original Native American inhabitants. Such places are thought to be haunted by Indian spirits. Not a good place to build, you would think.

And yet, someone had—a man named Jeremiah, who had owned not only the ground on which the house was built but also any number of acres around it. Apparently, the entities that haunted his land, which he’d referred to as “dirty folk,” had driven him crazy enough to burn his house down.

The police had responded to the blaze in horse-drawn carriages, and they’d taken Jeremiah away. In the end, he’d accomplished only part of his purpose. He’d burned down the house, all right, but its foundation had been preserved. It was on this foundation that Maura’s grandparents’ house had been constructed.

Armed with this knowledge, the couple made the decision to have the entity removed by their clergyman.

GOOD SPIRITS AND BAD DECEMBER 1999

P
eople have all kinds of personalities and dispositions, good and bad. So, apparently, do ghosts. And sometimes, you get both kinds at once.

Pia and John Devine lived in a two-bedroom bungalow in a suburban community in central Rhode Island. The first inkling they had that something was amiss was when their two-year-old son, Jack, woke up screaming in the room he shared with his younger brother Joshua. When Pia went into the room to see what was the matter, the hysterical Jack pointed to his rocking chair.

It was empty, but Jack kept pointing to it as if there had been someone sitting in it. Pia did her best to soothe her son, then she put him back to bed.

She was still pondering the incident the next day when she caught a glimpse of a strange figure in her kitchen—a woman wearing white. It shook her up. And soon after that, she felt a male presence in her basement and a female presence elsewhere in the house.

She didn’t know where to turn. Eventually, she heard about T.A.P.S. and gave us a call. Four of us—Grant, Keith Johnson, Andrew Graham, and I—visited her house to see what we could find.

By then, the Devines had experienced other disturbing phenomena. Pia had heard a female voice singing lullabies in her children’s room. John had felt an uncomfortable presence in the master bedroom late at night. And Pia had discovered what sounded to us like ectoplasm on the children’s unused changing table.

She had inadvertently captured yet another phenomenon. Pia, who was an accomplished violin player, had recorded herself playing one day. When she played back the recording, she could hear faint voices calling her name.

T.A.P.S. wound up spending two weekends collecting evidence at the Devine house. We found what appeared to be three distinct supernatural entities. One, a female, was clearly interested in the children. A second seemed to wish only to be left alone in the basement. The third, a spiteful spirit, seemed intent on agitating the entire Devine family, as well as the female spirit.

While we were conducting our investigation, both Jack and Joshua were in hysterics, and neither of them would go to sleep. However, they were fine once they left their bedroom. At one point, Pia went into the children’s room and came out petrified. When Grant and I went to see what disturbed her, we found that the room was five degrees warmer and the air was difficult to breathe.

We addressed what we believed was the mischievous entity, and the room went pitch black. The air seemed to become even thicker, and the temperature shot up another sixteen degrees. We couldn’t speak for a moment, it was so oppressive in there.

Finally, we were able to find the words to call Keith, who blessed the room. After the blessing, the children seemed to have no trouble going to sleep. However, to rid the Devines of the mischievous entity, we would have to bless the entire house.

In the end, Pia and John decided to remove the spirit that was tormenting their children while letting the two benign spirits remain. We had no problem with that. To date, the unfriendly spirit hasn’t come back, and the Devines are enjoying their other two guests.

THE PERSECUTED HUSBAND MAY 2000

L
ike living people, ghosts have their own agendas. Some people fit into them and others don’t. And if you’re one of those who don’t, they can make your life a hell on earth—as they did for one poor guy in eastern Connecticut.

In this case, a haunted house situation, we were brought in by Maine Paranormal Research, a member of our T.A.P.S. extended family. Four of us went to check it out—Grant, myself, Keith Johnson, and Shelley King. Shelley, who was an early member of T.A.P.S., specialized in finding EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena.

What we found when we arrived was a two-level home with two bedrooms, a large walk-in closet, a bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, an attic, and an unfinished basement. Nothing out of the ordinary—or so it seemed.

The couple that lived there had an unusual relationship in that neither the husband nor the wife was home much of the time. Then again, they didn’t have any kids—just a big, friendly mastiff. Erica, the wife, worked for a hotel company and traveled a lot to other countries, while Frank, her husband, worked for a construction company in Florida building high-rises eight months out of the year.

Frank was a tough guy by all appearances and professed not to believe in ghosts, but he was clearly starting to get paranoid. He related one instance to us: he had been standing on a table in his barn when he felt something shove him, causing him to lose his footing and go crashing to the ground. On another occasion, he’d been standing in the house’s main hallway when he felt something push him from behind.

But those hadn’t been his only bad experiences. Doors that had politely remained open for his wife had closed on him when he walked by. He had woken up sometimes in the middle of the night to see something standing over his bed—often enough that he had taken to sleeping downstairs on the couch.

Interestingly, Erica wasn’t plagued by any of this activity. What’s more, female friends would say they felt extraordinarily comfortable in the house, while men who visited felt nervous and distinctly unwelcome.

For reasons she couldn’t identify, Erica felt that she knew the spirit’s name. She called it Michael.

Once the interview was over, we began setting up our equipment—camcorders, high eights, and digital recorders—pretty much wherever Frank had experienced activity. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any luck at first. No EVPs, nothing on video, no personal experiences.

Then Grant, who was going upstairs to the attic, felt something grab his leg. Naturally, he thought it was me. I do that to him sometimes when I’m kidding around. Suspecting that I had done it in this case as well, Grant turned to sock me in the arm—but no one was there.

He finally found me two stories below, talking with Erica and Frank, and gave me the shot he had been saving up. “You grabbed my leg,” he told me when he saw the puzzled look on my face. “I did not,” I said. And the homeowners backed me up. Grant still thought I was pulling a fast one, so he checked the camera in the room where we were standing. Sure enough, I had been down there for some time.

Something else had grabbed him.

Encouraged by Grant’s experience, we continued to seek out evidence of the entity Frank had described. Hours went by, but as before, we were stymied—until we went into the second bedroom, the only room in the house with no reported activity.

No sooner had we opened the door than we saw a shadowy mass in the corner of the room. It wasn’t shaped like a man. In fact, it wasn’t shaped like anything. It was like a heat mirage, the kind you see coming off a hot summer sidewalk in the distance. Except that it was pitch black.

Approaching it, Grant and I reached into it and felt an almost Arctic cold. It seemed to us there was electricity in there as well, though not enough to give me any serious kind of shock. Then the mass disappeared.

But it wasn’t gone completely. A moment later, one of us spotted it in the bathroom a few feet away. Again Grant and I tried to touch it, and again we felt a terrible cold, like the inside of a meat locker. This time when it vanished, it returned to the bedroom where we had seen it originally. When we followed, it went past us like a stiff wind—and wasn’t seen again the rest of the night.

In the wee hours of the morning, we packed up and headed home. The next day, we went over the footage we had taken. Unfortunately, we hadn’t managed to get the black mass on videotape. However, we had captured some rather interesting EVPs.

One of them said, “Get out now.” Another said, “Leave here.” And a third, recorded when the entity had left the second bedroom like a harsh wind, said, “Get down from there. You’re wasting your time.” The words were whisper-thin but unmistakable.

We also did some research on Frank and Erica’s house, which turned up a nugget of interesting information. A man named Michael had indeed been a previous resident of the place, but not recently. He had lived in the house a couple of centuries earlier. Michael’s wife had cheated on him with another man, causing him to murder her in a fit of jealous rage. The man with whom she had cheated had then killed Michael, completing the circle of tragedy.

If the supernatural entity in the house was Michael, it was no wonder he didn’t like seeing men there. Of course, he might have been hostile to women too, considering what his wife had done, but he seemed to have a soft spot for them.

We offered Erica Keith’s services as an exorcist, figuring she would want to get rid of the spirit. But she said she wouldn’t mind hanging onto it. After all, the spirit offered her comfort while her husband was away down in Florida.

Which left Frank in a difficult spot. His wife had gotten attached to a paranormal entity, and as far as we could tell the feeling was mutual. We suggested that Frank cut a deal with the spirit: he would leave it alone if it left him alone.

Frank felt funny about the idea, but he couldn’t live with what was going on. In the end, he agreed to talk with the spirit. Soon after, the hostile incidents stopped, and to this day the spirit seems to be abiding by the deal.