Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (10 page)

On quiet days Jerusha can be heard playing the piano, and on other days she reaches out to touch men as they walk by. In one room, it’s believed she climbs into bed with them at night to caress them. I would joke here that Jerusha is my kind of spirit and I was looking forward to meeting her, but her plight only raised sympathy in me. Jerusha leads an eternal afterlife of loneliness that I would not wish on anyone, so I was very motivated to make contact and ease her suffering.

The Inn was so completely opposite from the dark, brooding places I’ve investigated that it took some getting used to. Instead of possessions, growls, and tales of demons, it felt more like a bubble bath, slippers, and a robe were in order. It was a comfortable, quaint cottage environment that certainly didn’t seem like the place where an agonized ghost frightened (and intrigued) the residents.

Jerusha has been reported to be most active in room number nine, so I lay down on that bed and got to work. Before long I felt the unmistakable tap of fingers on my right leg and knew there was a presence in the room, not only from this physical touch, but because I felt the heavy air that always accompanies the presence of a spirit.

A wave of pure ecstasy hit me like snake venom. What may sound like just a tap to you was a transference of incredible energy that you just have to feel to understand. There’s a scene in
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
where Keanu Reeves is being seduced in bed by several gorgeous bloodthirsty erotic vampires and he can’t do anything but sit there and be at the mercy of their trance. This wasn’t as extreme as that, but it made me feel almost the same. Now if Jerusha had made herself visible, and she looked like one of those vampires, I wouldn’t be typing this right now—catch my drift?

In Anna Corbin’s room I felt at peace, as if she was telling me everything was going to be alright. I felt that Anna knew she was dead and did not want me to feel sad over it. With Jerusha, it was more like she was longing for the companionship of someone. I believe spirits like Anna and Jerusha want you to feel their emotions. They try to work through you like an avatar, and once you tap into that energy, it’s better to talk about the emotion and make a connection with the spirit instead of opposing it (but not when you encounter an evil one).

Although it didn’t happen while I was there, we captured visual evidence of a spirit in room number nine on a full-spectrum camera that we set up. As its name implies, the full-spectrum camera operates in the full light spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet. It can see things our eyes can’t and is very efficient at detecting any changes in light.

When I reviewed the footage from that camera the next morning, I was surprised at what I saw. A mist, clearly in the form of a woman, manifested next to the bed in room nine. It formed, floated for a moment, and then dissipated. It looked like a woman walking around the bed, and I knew instantly that this was the spirit who reached out to me earlier in the evening. I finally got to see the woman who touched me. I saw Jerusha Howe. Even more exciting was that just before this capture, I clearly saw with my own eyes a white dress moving toward Jerusha’s room from the top of the staircase. So to have captured on film the same thing that I saw was astounding.

Jerusha’s sadness stems from the longing for a loved one whose fate she never learned. Hers is a sad story, but not on the same level as another spirit I encountered who blamed himself for the accidental deaths of several people and who still wanders the Earth wracked with guilt.

The story of Jonathon Widders goes like this: In the spring of 1914 the wealthiest family in North Adams, Massachusetts, the Houghtons, invested in their first car, a huge status symbol in those days. On August 1, Mr. A. C. Houghton and his daughter, Mary, decided to go to Bennington, Vermont, for a pleasure drive of about three hours. The family’s matriarch, Cordelia Houghton, stayed at home, so they were accompanied instead by Dr. and Mrs. Robert Hutton of New York.

With their longtime chauffeur, Jonathon Widders, at the wheel, the car left the mansion at 9:00 AM and by 9:30 the group was in Pownal, Vermont, heading up an inclined road. The road was under repair and partially blocked by a team of horses on the right side as their car approached. Behind the wheel, Jonathon Widders decided to pass the horses on the left at about twelve miles per hour. It would prove to be a deadly mistake.

On the narrow left shoulder the car tilted. One wheel slipped over the edge and the vehicle began an unrecoverable slide down a steep embankment. The vehicle rolled over three times before coming to rest in an upright position in a farmer’s field. Everyone except Mary Houghton was thrown clear. The men all escaped with minor injuries, but Mrs. Hutton was killed almost instantly when the car rolled over her. Mary Houghton was just as badly injured and died five and a half hours later at the North Adams Hospital. Expecting to survive, Mr. Houghton was taken home, traumatized and in disbelief. The investigator for the State of Vermont cleared Widders of all wrongdoing, blaming the accident instead on the soft shoulder of the road. But Widders still blamed himself, and the next morning he took his own life in the cellar of the Houghton barn with a single gunshot to the head. Ten days later, A. C. Houghton, having lost his precious daughter, passed away in his beloved mansion.

In the basement of the Houghton Mansion I sat on an old steel chair conducting an EVP session. The mansion had been very active, and we’d captured several pieces of great paranormal evidence, but the one I was about to capture would shock me.

In the basement, I got that heavy feeling in my gut and my Spidey senses tingled, suggesting there was a spirit in the room, so I asked a few times out loud who was with me. Then I called the spirit out by name. “Jonathon Widders . . . are you here?” I didn’t realize it until I listened to the recorder later, but at that moment I got a chilling response.

“Ran for help.” It was a man’s voice and the syllables were clear and easy to make out. This was not a muffled EVP, but rather a crystal clear statement made by the man who took his own life rather than live with the guilt of what he’d done.

I wholeheartedly believe it was the voice of Jonathon Widders explaining to me that he had run for help after the accident that claimed the lives of Mrs. Hutton and Mary Houghton. The voice was filled with regret and sadness and wasn’t a simple statement of fact—it was an explanation and maybe even a plea for forgiveness. It was Jonathon Widders’s admission that he tried to find help after that terrible accident.

This is why knowing the history of a building before conducting an investigation is so important. If we hadn’t been aware of Mr. Widders and the accident, I don’t think we would have deciphered the meaning behind this voice. I will admit that a lot of EVPs are open to skepticism because we sometimes try too hard to identify speech patterns and look too deeply into what is many times just garbled noise. But this EVP response was clear as day and represents a great example of an intelligent haunting.

Moment of Mortality Spirit

An only slightly more common yet closely related phenomenon to the living ghost is the “moment of mortality ghost” in which the manifestation of a person far away suddenly appears to a friend or family member at the precise moment of death. A woman, for example, suddenly awakens from a deep sleep and sees her father, whom she knows to be residing at a nearby nursing home, sitting on the foot of her bed. Though surprised, she is even more amazed to hear him say, “Don’t worry. I’m okay,” before suddenly vanishing, filling her with confusion and panic.

Finally persuading herself she has simply had a strange dream, she falls back to sleep only to be awakened a few hours later by a phone call from her mother telling her that her father passed away during the night. Recalling that her phantom visitor appeared at 2:15 AM, she asks her mother when her father passed, only to be told 2:15 AM—precisely the moment she saw him in her bedroom.

This isn’t something anyone can actively investigate because we can’t always predict death, but it’s an intriguing part of the paranormal science nonetheless. Can we establish such powerful bonds with each other that at the moment someone dies his or her spouse or friend or family member gets a paranormal wake up call?

Shadows

Shadows (or shadow figures) are common in paranormal investigation and are the centerpiece of many reported hauntings, but they’re also the culprits of false claims as well. Shadows of physical objects (especially humans) can be mistaken for paranormal activity and photokinesis (shadows moving out of the corner of your eye as a result of natural light reflecting or refracting) is oftentimes to blame for perceived ghost sightings. However, we’ve captured countless pieces of evidence of shadow figures that we could not debunk as photokinesis or any other phenomenon after thorough analysis, so I am a believer in shadows and shadow figures being paranormal.

We captured a great shadow at Ashmore Estates in Ashmore, Illinois. Once called the Coles County Almshouse, it was a home for the indigent, the poor, and the mentally disabled and has at least two hundred reported deaths on the property, so it’s just my kind of place. During an investigation there, I was in the main stairwell. Nick was a flight above shooting down with an IR camera, and Aaron was a flight below shooting up at me with the only light source in the building. Earlier in the night I had heard a loud bang come from a room, which was also the same spot where a man had been thrown from his chair by an unseen force. So I decided to take pictures of the doorway with a full-spectrum camera in IR mode.

I took three pictures. In the first picture there was nothing but empty space around the doorframe. In the second picture the upper torso of a man could be seen creeping into the frame, as if he were curious to know what we were doing and wanted to peek into the hallway. The third picture was the jackpot. A fully formed shadow figure of a man had moved into the doorframe! I was happier than a housewife at “Oprah’s Favorite Things” show.

We were able to debunk this on the spot as not being anything normal. The only light source in the house at the time was an IR light below me, which could not have projected any image in that direction. There was no way it could have been a shadow from Aaron or Nick because they were not even on the same floor at the time and both of them were holding cameras, but the shadow figure was not.

But one of the best shadows we’ve ever captured was during an investigation of Old Fort Erie on the banks of the Niagara River, just across the Canadian border from Buffalo, New York. To this day it gives me chills to think about it, and I only wish it had happened to me instead of to the human trigger object that we persuaded to participate in the investigation with us.

Holding a strategically advantageous location at the north end of Lake Erie, the old fort was bitterly disputed by the American and British forces during the War of 1812. It was built by British Canadian forces in the area, taken by the Americans, and then abandoned in 1813. The British reoccupied Fort Erie, but were then driven away by the Americans in 1814. Before dawn on August 15, 1814, the British launched an attack to retake the fort, but the battle had disastrous results. The Americans had plenty of time to establish a strong defense around the fort, and when the battle was over, the British had lost over a thousand men. That event broke the British and forced them to withdraw, but just two months later the Americans were forced to abandon the fort yet again to respond to new British threats in the eastern states. Before leaving Fort Erie for good, American forces destroyed most of it to prevent anyone else from using it, which is how it remained for over one hundred years.

Reconstruction started in 1937 and lasted two years, during which time Fort Erie gave up a few of its hidden secrets. A mass grave of 153 soldiers was unearthed and a second grave of 23 soldiers was also discovered where a private residence now sits.