Beware the Night (3 page)

This “guest” was quite charming at first. The next day, according to Gabby, the spirit returned in broad daylight, while she was down in the basement. “My attention was directed to a large mirror we have hanging there, and in it I saw Virginia,” she reported. “Again she said, ‘Parents, help,’ then told me she’d been in finishing school abroad and had followed her parents here. In quaint, old-fashioned speech, she said, ‘What manner of place is this?’ Upon looking around the room and at me, she asked, ‘What manner of dress is this?’ I answered that this is how we dress in the 1990s, but she insisted that the year was 1901. I felt no fear of her, and we had a lengthy conversation.”

Joe and I were impressed by how cleverly the spirit slowly unfolded its intricate tale, like a spider spinning a web to catch unwary prey. Ever so smoothly it was drawing Gabby in, plying this suburban housewife with girl talk about fashions and finishing school—a sly tactic to suggest that this was a ghost of great refinement. I also noticed the subtle bid for a mother’s sympathy: The so-called ghost had somehow lost her parents and wanted to be reunited with them.

Gabby was enthralled and couldn’t wait to hear the next installment of the spirit’s intriguing soap opera. Yet her intuition was already warning her about Virginia’s true nature. “The third time she came to me was also in the basement. I felt her presence and said, ‘If you wish to speak, do
not
enter me. I’ll relate whatever you say.’ She paid no attention and immediately entered me. When she came into me, her voice was stuttering, and she kept saying ‘Parents, help.’”

Although Gabby didn’t fully grasp what was happening to her—and her suspicions were blunted by the spirit’s lies about “no harm, no fear”—on some level she knew her mind and body were under siege. Instinctively she resisted having the spirit invade her body—but not forcefully enough. A demon has no respect for human pleas, requests, or even orders for it to depart unless the command is made in the name of Jesus Christ.

Despite her misgivings about the bullying spirit that had forced itself on her against her wishes, she found its voice so seductive that she couldn’t stop listening. Apparently sensing that it was time to turn up the drama, the alleged ghost returned with theatrical flair when Gabby was talking to another resident of the house, Ruth. This middle-aged woman and her twenty-five-year-old son, Carl, had recently moved in, after Carl became engaged to the Villanovas’ oldest daughter, Luciana. As the two women sat in the future bride’s bedroom, chatting about the upcoming marriage, the spirit offered a tearjerking tale of woe.

This time she didn’t bother with smoke or mirrors or any physical manifestation. Instead, the spirit seized control of the housewife’s mind and communicated telepathically, while Gabby answered out loud. “Virginia was crying hysterically, and I kept asking what was the matter. She told me she’d been murdered on her wedding day! Her fiancé was falsely accused of the murder—and was so grief-stricken that he committed suicide in prison. Only after his death did they find out that they had the wrong man. I asked who
had
murdered her. Her reply was ‘Must not say.’”

The human con artists I’ve arrested weren’t half as good bullshitters as that, which is probably why they’re in jail now. I remember one guy who had the gall to impersonate a police officer in an effort to swindle a woman out of thousands of dollars, only to have the scam go sour when the woman suddenly changed her mind just as she was about to hand over the cash. Then this perp’s luck got even worse when he decided to punch her in the mouth and grab the loot—just as I was driving by on my way to work. After a little persuasion from my 9-millimeter semi-automatic, he stopped the assault, surrendered the cash, and let me snap the cuffs on his wrists. I only wish busting the demonic was that simple.

Incredibly, however, Gabby didn’t question the astonishing coincidences between the spirit’s story and her own life. I often marvel at how adept evil powers are at exploiting people’s good natures. You’d think people would be a lot more skeptical about the claims of a supernatural being that shows up in a puff of smoke as they’re planning their daughter’s wedding and announces that, lo and behold, it just so happens to be the ghost of a murdered bride-to-be! But the demonic have an uncanny knowledge of human psychology—as well as of real events—and therefore know exactly which emotional buttons to press to win people’s hearts and minds.

Clearly, a cover story that revolved around a wedding gone wrong was the right strategy here: As the mothers of a future bride and groom, Gabby and Ruth actually wept over this tragic tale. Ruth was particularly touched by the supposed suicide of the wrongfully accused fiancé. One of her relatives had also been arrested and briefly jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. Soon almost everyone in the house was completely captivated by the fascinating ghost story and dying to know more. Only Dominick saw a sinister side to these events. A pragmatic man who worked in an accounting firm, he felt that a lot of what he was hearing simply didn’t add up to the truth. “Even though my wife didn’t seem scared, I was. I didn’t like what was going on at all! Virginia was coming to my wife more and more, and I felt the ghost was starting to, well,
possess
her, if that’s the right word.”

He looked at us with the timid expression of a schoolboy who suspects that he has just given a ridiculously wrong answer and is about to be laughed at by the whole class.

“Tell us what you mean by ‘possessed,’” Joe replied in a deliberately neutral tone. Since both of us have a law enforcement background, we’ve been trained not to lead witnesses or suggest explanations during the fact-finding stage of our investigation.

“Well, this spirit would actually go
into
my wife and try to talk though her lips,” he explained. “Often she’d stammer—which
isn’t
the way Gabby normally talks—or we couldn’t understand her words at all. During these trances, or whatever you want to call them, she’d get stiff as a board. She’d be completely out of it, but when I’d put the light on or shout her name, Virginia would usually leave. Sometimes I had to shake her or even smack her to wake her up. The ghost said ‘no harm, no fear,’ but when I saw my wife like that—stiff, stuttering, and not knowing what was going on—I felt it
was
doing harm, and there was plenty to fear.”

Here was further proof of oppression, an intense terror campaign by the demonic that paves the way for their ultimate goal: possession. Although transient possession was already taking place, Gabby’s will wasn’t broken down enough for full possession. Not suspecting what terrible danger she was in, Gabby and her large, extended family ignored Dominick’s doubts. Predictably, that provoked arguments and hostility between husband and wife, just as the demon intended. Night after night, the bookkeeper would come home from work to find the house a mess, or no dinner on the table because his wife and Ruth were off at the library trying to solve intriguing mysteries the ghost had described. Joe and I could also feel the tension between the couple during our visit and noticed that they’d often interrupt each other or dispute petty details about how certain events unfolded.

The two mothers, however, relished the opportunity to escape the humdrum world of housework and play detective. Virginia eagerly egged them on, claiming that her parents, Nathaniel and Sarah Taylor, had mysteriously disappeared shortly after her fiancé’s suicide. “I fear they may have been murdered,” she tearfully lamented. “If only I knew their fate, perhaps I could rest easy, at last.” Almost every day the ghost offered new clues to help the women trace her purported parents: They came to the United States around the turn of the century, from an unspecified European country, and moved in with their cousins, the Clarkes, while Virginia stayed behind to graduate from finishing school.

To pique their curiosity and heighten the sympathy factor, Virginia tearfully volunteered new details that any mother could relate to. It seemed that the Clarkes were also touched by family tragedy: Their only son was stillborn. Unable to have any more children, they adopted a son, Oliver, who later fell in love with Virginia and asked her to marry him.

A bit impatient with this intricate satanic scam, Joe cut to the chase. “So, did this story check out?”

Not exactly, Gabby replied. “We went through old newspapers, phone books, and public records. There was nothing about Virginia or her parents, just some stuff about the family she lived with. Apparently, the Clarkes were landowners around here at one time, but we didn’t see anything about them having a son named Oliver.”

Although diabolic forces have knowledge of the past and can view the lives of departed humans as if they were watching a videotape, these lying spirits will mix just enough fact with their disingenuous fictions to keep their victims hooked. All Gabby and Ruth had proven was that someone with the very common name of Clarke had once lived in Westchester. No doubt if they’d spent even more time at the library, they would have found some Taylors too.

The utter lack of any newspaper coverage of a dramatic story that definitely would have made headlines—a bride murdered on her wedding day and the arrest of the groom—didn’t lessen the family’s faith in Virginia, who soon asked them to tackle another mystery. “She wanted us to find the grave of her fiancé,” Gabby said. “After his suicide, there was a big cover-up and no one knew where he was buried. Virginia—”

Dominick broke in. “She had my wife in tears. Gabby felt very bad that she’d failed to find out anything about the parents, and now the ghost was weeping and carrying on about her dead boyfriend’s unknown grave.”

Once again the spirit supplied a clue: The body was probably buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Since the next day was a school holiday, Gabby, Ruth, and their five kids drove over to the beautiful old graveyard in North Tarrytown that holds the final resting place of Washington Irving and the friends he used as characters in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
After trudging through the modern and historic tombstones for several hours without finding the grave, the two exhausted families decided to give up and go home.

Just before they reached the church by the graveyard, Gabby suddenly went into a trance. “Something was pulling me up the walkway and back into the graveyard. I was yanked over to one of the headstones, which said ‘Catherine Clarke, 1859–1926.’ Virginia got very excited and said we’d found Oliver’s mother. There was a smaller stone next to it, but it was so worn that I couldn’t make out the name. Was it Oliver’s grave? Virginia didn’t say.”

I was getting pretty curious about this devil myself. The trip to the cemetery was a stroke of genius: Because the spirit had dragged their mother over to a tomb near a church, they made a leap of logic and concluded that this was a nice
Christian
ghost. They were totally unaware that they’d ventured into the Devil’s favorite hunting ground!

Gabby stopped resisting the spirit and actually gave it permission to enter her, so it could reveal more. “My oldest daughter went to the historic society and got old maps of Westchester. I spread them out on the table, got a pen, and asked Virginia to show me where she’d lived. My hand began to shake from side to side and was pushed to a certain area. It drew a letter we thought was either an ‘M’ or a ‘W.’”

It all fit the demonic M.O. Not only do they do everything that’s opposite of holy, but at times they’ll write backward, so you have to read the words with a mirror, or upside down. Their writing is often crooked, as if a right-handed person were using her left hand. Strange writings, sometimes using obscenities, profanities about God, or phrases from obscure languages are also a hallmark of oppression. In this case, the demon’s deliberately ambiguous scrawl was a symbolic way of blowing more smoke and increasing Gabby’s confusion.

The housewife, who clearly was
still
enthralled with Virginia, eagerly offered to show Joe the marked-up map so he could try to divine whatever hidden meaning it held. My partner shook his head: He wasn’t there to decode demonic messages or give the evil power in this house
any
unnecessary recognition.

It was time to clue these people in. “Gabby, let’s get one thing straight. We’re not going to call this spirit ‘Virginia’ anymore, because it doesn’t
deserve
a human name. This isn’t a human spirit or ghost—it’s a demon.” After Joe explained the nature of these spirits, he began to debunk the demon’s tale. “This wedding story is a lot of crap to snare you through empathy and make a psychic connection with your lives. From now on, when we talk about anything this spirit provoked, we’ll say ‘The demon did it.’”

Dominick’s meek, bewildered expression changed to a sly, triumphant look that shouted “See, I told you so!”

Gabby didn’t need much convincing either. Instead, she described what the demon did on Halloween, right after Dominick called a priest, Father Williams, for help. “Virginia—I mean the demon—told me she wasn’t evil.” Once the parish priest was brought in, the demon knew it was only a matter of time before it was exposed for what it truly was. Therefore, it accelerated its plans for possession.

On that same day the spirit tried to lure Gabby to its lair, the basement. She added, “She said she wouldn’t hurt me. I didn’t want to go there, then she said, ‘I’ve dealt with Father Hayes before—and this time
I’ll
win the battle!’” Even Gabby had to admit that it was more than a little strange for the spirit to claim it didn’t want to hurt anyone—and had only the most benign intentions—then announce that it was all set to kick ass against a man of God. But what was odder still was
which
priest the spirit named—not the one Dominick had contacted, but an out-of-state exorcist the family didn’t even know had been called.

In its stuttering voice, the spirit delivered one final ultimatum: “H-h-holy ones must
not
come!”

I should have been warned, but I wasn’t. Seeing that Joe didn’t need my help in conducting the interview, I decided to do the same thing I do in every case: Walk around the house and form my impression of the place. I can tell a lot about a family just by looking around. I check for signs of the occult, what religious articles are present, how the home is kept, what kind of books the people read, evidence of drug use, and any signs that might indicate there’s something wrong with their lifestyle. If I see anything that bothers me, I ask them about it later in the interview.