Ghost Hunting (3 page)

STAND BY ME FEBRUARY 1997

M
ost of the ghosts we encounter in books and movies are ghosts of people who lived—and died—a long time ago. They were alive during colonial times, or during the Civil War, or in the Victorian era. That’s what we as a culture have been conditioned to expect from ghostly visitors.

Indeed, many of the supernatural entities Grant and I have encountered have their roots in those bygone times. But not all of them. Some of them are of a much more recent vintage.

When Casey and Dan Kelly agreed to house-sit for their friends in a two-level house in northern Rhode Island, they had no idea what they were getting into. It started when Casey heard what sounded like a male voice in the room where her four-month-old son, Liam, was sleeping. Concerned, she got up and went to check on the child, but there was no one else in the room.

The scenario repeated itself the next night, and the night after that. At the same time, Casey began to feel a presence in the house, as if there were someone lurking just out of sight, watching her. Finally, she caught what she believed was a glimpse of the intruder out of the corner of her eye.

He was a young man with dark hair, dressed in a blue T-shirt, jeans, and white Converse sneakers. Though Casey wasn’t old enough to remember the fifties, it was a look she associated with that era. Over the next few days, she saw the figure again and again, always with her peripheral vision.

Finally, the Kellys called T.A.P.S. Grant and I went out on our own and spoke with the couple. We discovered that Dan hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. The experiences were strictly his wife’s. Casey didn’t seem especially frightened by the phenomena, but she was concerned about the safety of their child.

Because they were only house-sitting, Dan felt it wasn’t their place to remove the entity, if it came down to that. On the other hand, they were supposed to remain in the house another three weeks, and he felt that his family life was being disrupted. Young Liam had gotten very attached to his mother in the preceding few days, and he cried uncontrollably whenever Casey left his side.

Grant and I set up a camera in the living room facing the hallway where Casey said she had seen the entity. Then we walked through the house, instruments in hand, alert for voices or other signs of a haunting. Unfortunately, we came up empty.

Finally, around two in the morning, Casey cried out. When Grant and I responded, she said that she had seen the entity again, out of the corner of her eye as usual. He was standing in the hallway, dressed the same as always.

We reviewed the videotape in the camera and didn’t see any sign of a human figure. However, we did see a flash of light and a collection of floating globules. Obviously, something had happened at that moment.

The rest of the night was uneventful. It seemed to us, based on everything we had heard, that if there was a spirit in the house it was a harmless one. After all, it hadn’t done anything threatening. It just seemed to be curious about the baby and the new people in the house.

When we followed up a few days later, we learned that Casey had been in contact with the homeowners and had told them what transpired. They were a little shaken by the information. Apparently, one of them had had a brother who had died in his early twenties during the 1950s. Eventually, they showed Casey a picture of the young man. He was exactly as she had described him.

Grant and I encouraged Casey to reason with the spirit by explaining her family’s situation out loud and asking it politely to remain hidden until after the Kellys left. Casey did and the incidents stopped—until the day she and her family left the house. Then she saw the entity one last time, as if it were saying good-bye.

THE GHOST IN THE WALL MARCH 1997

A
s Grant likes to point out, if a phenomenon occurs in only one spot, it’s most likely not of supernatural origin. The supernatural just isn’t that meticulous.

That’s the first thing that occurred to us when Eric Small and his girlfriend, Tara Quinn, pointed out the lone wall from which they had heard voices and banging sounds every night. The couple also said they had been pushed into this wall against their will by an unseen force. However, they hadn’t seen, heard, or felt anything anywhere else in the house.

Had we known in advance how localized the occurrences had been, we might have thought twice about making the four-hour trip to Hackensack, New Jersey, where Small and Quinn lived in a 1950s-era, cottage-style, two-bedroom home. But hey, we were there already. It would have been silly not to go ahead with the investigation.

Besides, these people were obviously distraught over what was happening. We don’t like to abandon anyone in need of help.

There were four of us representing T.A.P.S. at the house—Grant, me, an investigator named Brian Drevens, and Bethany Aculade, our group’s clairvoyant at the time. While Brian and I interviewed the couple, Grant and Bethany checked out the place and set up our equipment—which wasn’t difficult, given the concentrated location of all the occurrences.

I couldn’t help noticing how the couple’s story seemed to change during the interview. At first, I thought they were simply confused. Then, when we were talking to them individually, we got conflicting accounts. Something fishy was going on.

Meanwhile, Grant and Bethany found a number of books on the subject of hauntings under the bed in the master bedroom. This struck them as strange—not just that the couple was reading such books but that they had hidden them from view.

A little while later, Brian went into the basement to look around and saw what appeared to be gray speaker wires going up into a wooden joist. The other end of the wires went into a back room that had a padlock on the door.

We decided to keep all this to ourselves for the time being and see what the night had to offer. Right about the time Small mentioned, the noises began—and as he had claimed, they were all in the vicinity of the wall. Ghostly voices. Banging sounds. But they were flat somehow, missing the accompanying vibrations.

That was when we asked the couple about the speaker wires in the basement. Small and Quinn seemed to become defensive at that point and refused to let us into the back room. The tension mounted as we insisted.

Finally, they opened the door for us. The room contained a tape recorder, which was feeding banging noises and ghostly voices into a speaker embedded in the wall. You can imagine how ticked off we were.

Small said he had tried to fool us in order to get his house on
Sightings,
a popular TV show in the 1990s that investigated the paranormal. He pointed out that George Lutz, the owner of the “Amityville Horror house,” had made millions off his experience once it was chronicled in a book and then a movie. Small wanted to ride the same gravy train—at our expense.

HIGH-RISE HAUNTING NOVEMBER 1997

D
ealing with the occult can be a nasty business. The key is to remember that malevolent spirits don’t just show up in a house—they’re invited by something one of the residents did. Usually, it’s an innocent act, a case of someone dabbling in things he doesn’t understand. But sometimes we have to wonder if the invitation might not have been a conscious one.

By the time we got a call from the owner of a Toronto apartment building, he was frantic—so much so that we could barely make out what he was saying over the phone. All we could hear was “golf balls.”

After we calmed him down a little, he started to make more sense. Apparently, he and his tenants were being tormented by a storm of paranormal activity. Doors were opening and closing on their own. Furniture was moving, keeping people from getting into their apartments. People kept hearing growls and other noises at all hours. And in one apartment, a box of golf balls insisted on emptying itself, the balls rolling into the form of an arrow.

“What should I do?” the owner pleaded.

“Don’t follow that arrow,” I said, as we started pulling things together for a trip up north. Obviously, this was a situation that had to be addressed immediately. “We’ll be there tomorrow.”

It took us a few hours to gather a team of five, which included Keith Johnson, Andrew Graham, and Bethany Aculade, as well as the necessary equipment. By driving all night, we were able to arrive in Toronto the following morning. As we pulled up in front of the building, which was a high-rise, we were glad we had allotted ourselves three days to cover the place. Even then, we might be pressed for time.

It turned out that the disturbances had mostly taken place on the tenth floor, and the owner already had an idea of where the problem had originated. He showed Grant and me into apartment 10C, from which a tenant had been evicted for failure to pay his rent. The place was full of occult symbols. Some of them were carved into the wooden furniture. Others were painted on the bedroom walls in fluorescent colors, visible only when we flipped the switch and activated a black-light bulb.

Every room had different-colored bulbs. In the dining room and kitchen they were red, giving those rooms a really morbid atmosphere. There were also occult books and magazines all over the place, including some that contained the writings of Aleister Crowley—an occultist in the first half of the twentieth century who had been called “The Wickedest Man in the World.”

In talking to the other tenants on the tenth floor, we learned more about the apartment of the evicted man. The lady across the hall, who owned a Chihuahua, told us that her dog had started barking uncontrollably at the door to 10C one day. As she went to pick him up, she saw the door open—on darkness, since there was no one there. Then, without warning, it slammed shut, prompting her to wet her pants in fright.

Five people said they had seen a six-foot couch stand on its end, manipulated by unseen forces. They had also witnessed the golf ball phenomenon in 10C, with the balls forming an arrow that pointed into the tenant’s bedroom. A maintenance man had seen the refrigerator in the apartment slide out of its place and throw its doors open. People who had entered the apartment of the evicted man out of curiosity had smelled bad odors from time to time and discovered scratches on their bodies where there hadn’t been any before.

The other tenants were spooked, to say the least. They were moving out of the building in droves. In an attempt to keep them, the owner had had a Catholic priest bless the place, but the exorcism hadn’t obtained the desired effect. Keith Johnson, who is a priest himself, explained that if an exorcism isn’t conducted in a strategic manner, the entity in question can still find a way to hang on.

Over the course of three nights, we went over 10C, its neighboring apartments, and the common areas of the building with every device at our disposal, and we experienced much of what the residents had experienced. Lights went on and off. Doors opened and closed. Furniture moved by itself. Members of our T.A.P.S. team caught electronic voice phenomena that appeared to be words spoken in Latin.

At one point, Grant and I were exploring 10C when we heard the sound of hammering, which seemed to be coming from the bedroom. But when we opened the door and followed it in, we heard it coming from elsewhere in the apartment.

What might have been the most shocking demonstration of the paranormal was the golf ball formation. Right before our eyes, the box opened and the golf balls came rolling out over the kitchen floor. Before they were done, they had formed a perfect arrow pointing to the bedroom. There was no slope in the room, so that couldn’t have been the explanation for it. Those balls just rolled on their own, as if they knew what they were doing.

Personally, I hate it when objects move on their own. It gives me the creeps like nothing else can.

One conclusion seemed indisputable: there was an inhuman entity infesting apartment 10C. The evicted man had opened some sort of doorway, allowing a malevolent spirit to enter his domicile and take charge of it. If we could evict it, the building would probably return to normal.

But as we had pointed out to the owner, an exorcism had to be carried out in a certain way if it was to do any good. With the owner’s approval, Keith blessed the place with holy water, starting with the four corners of the building in order to keep the malevolent spirit from escaping the premises. Then he blessed the rest of the high-rise, one apartment at a time.

In the process, members of our team reported feeling scratched, slapped, and pushed. And paranormal activity wasn’t abating in 10C. But Keith pressed on. Finally, he got to the source of the trouble. As he blessed 10C itself, dishes and glasses started falling from the cabinets in the kitchen and shattering on the floor. Then, all of a sudden, the activity stopped.

It was quiet in the apartment. As far as we could tell, the entity was gone.

We had one regret as we left Toronto: though we had caught some of the paranormal activity with our cameras, we had to turn the tapes over to the owner of the apartment house in accordance with his request. What’s more, we understood. If the results of our investigation had ever gotten out, he wouldn’t have been able to rent an apartment in that building ever again.