Ghost Hunting (5 page)

INCUBUS JULY 1999

E
veryone in Rhoda Long’s historic Newport, Rhode Island, neighborhood thought she was crazy when she said she had been violated by an invisible entity.

At first, she had only seen shadows that shouldn’t have been there and heard noises she couldn’t explain. Then, in the middle of the night, she woke to the sound of growling and a feeling that someone or something was holding her down. At the same time, she felt a terrible pressure between her legs, an insistent pushing that she desperately wanted to stop.

But she couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t move at all. She could barely even breathe, the air was so thick and heavy around her.

The feeling lasted for only twenty seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. When it finally ended, Rhoda sat up in bed and gasped for air. Her husband, Roger, alarmed by her behavior, asked her what was wrong. When she told him, he didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually, they went back to sleep and tried to forget about it.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t Rhoda’s last such experience. A few days later, she was coming out of the shower when she got the feeling she was being groped. Again, it only lasted for about twenty seconds. But this time, she was left with more than a memory. She had red marks all over her torso—the kind a pair of grabbing hands might have made.

Needless to say, Rhoda was scared out of her wits. And it got worse that night, when she felt pressure again in the same place, and again she couldn’t move to try to make it stop. It was as if she was paralyzed, if only for a few seconds.

Rhoda told people what had happened to her, but no one seemed to believe her. She became a nervous wreck, dreading the idea of falling asleep. She began chain-smoking cigarettes, though she had seldom smoked them before.

And the violations kept occurring.

After a while, the nightmare expanded to other parts of Rhoda’s life. She would leave her kitchen in perfect order and come back to find all the cabinets open. At least once a day, she heard banging sounds coming from her basement.

Finally, she called in T.A.P.S. Hearing how troubled she was, Grant and I put together a team and responded as quickly as we could. Because of the nature of Rhoda’s experiences, we brought along a woman team member, Heather Drolet.

When we arrived, Heather sat down with Rhoda to interview her and reassure her while the rest of us explored the house. Heather found that Rhoda had occasionally used a Ouija board, which can give demonic spirits an excuse to enter a house. It wasn’t a good sign.

In the meantime, Grant and I checked out the basement, where Rhoda had heard banging sounds. Being plumbers, we were able to come up with an explanation for the noises. The city of Newport has notoriously high water tables, and the Longs were running a sump pump to keep water from flooding their basement. However, the pipes in the basement weren’t braced, so when the water table rose and the pump came on, the pipes would bang. Nothing supernatural there.

But the banging had been the least of Rhoda’s problems. As we continued our investigation, I entered the Longs’ bedroom and lay down to get the feel of the place. Before long, I felt a weight on my chest—exactly what Rhoda had described. When I tried to get up, I couldn’t.

It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. And as I lay there, I thought I saw someone leave the room. But at that point, my fellow ghost hunters were elsewhere. I should have been all by myself.

A few seconds later, the feeling passed and I was able to get up. But I’ll never forgot the feeling of helplessness I experienced. I began to get an inkling of what Rhoda was going through.

Grant and I talked about it and admitted the possibility that Rhoda was being tormented by an incubus—a demonic spirit that lies down on sleepers, especially women, in order to have sexual intercourse with them. The incubus is also said to drain energy from its victim in order to sustain itself.

On the other hand, there was a scientific explanation for her troubles—a phenomenon called sleep paralysis. Sufferers find they can’t move, get the feeling that someone is on top of them, and sometimes see shadowy figures. But I had felt the same thing in the Longs’ bedroom, and I had never been prone to sleep paralysis before.

In the end, we weren’t able to document Rhoda’s experiences. However, in light of what had happened to me and the intensity of Rhoda’s feelings, we had Keith Johnson perform an exorcism. We stayed in touch with the Longs after that, but they never again reported any experiences out of the ordinary.

Most of the time when we run into a paranormal entity, it’s a benign one. If there was an entity plaguing Rhoda Long, it was what we call “negative” or “inhuman.” That’s the kind we don’t play around with.

WHAT A CHILD SEES AUGUST 1999

W
hen an adult reports the sighting of a spirit, all kinds of questions arise. When the reporter is a child, and a very young one at that, there are even more questions—from her parents in particular. Is their child crazy? What should they do to make the sightings stop?

Four-year-old Selena Taylor told her parents, Louis and Delia, that she talked to “Grandma” on a regular basis. Unfortunately, her grandmother had passed away several months earlier. Louis and Delia might have chalked this up to their child’s imagination except for the fact that Selena seemed to know things only her grandmother could have told her.

Beyond that, objects were disappearing in the Taylor house, a single-family duplex in Franklin, Massachusetts. There were noises at night and sometimes during the day. And both adults in the house reported catching glimpses of a human-looking figure.

When T.A.P.S. arrived at the Taylor residence, at about four o’clock on a sticky summer afternoon, both the Taylors and their daughter were present. While the rest of the team went around the house and looked for places to set up equipment, Keith and I interviewed the adults, who told us about the entity they believed might be the ghost of Louis’s mother.

The entity hadn’t given any indication of being hostile or aggressive. The reason the Taylors contacted us was that they wanted to make sure that they—and their daughter, especially—weren’t in any danger.

Next, we interviewed little Selena. She sat in her big red chair and refused to talk to us until we played a while with her beany animals. Only then did she start to open up to us. We found her to be very articulate, and not at all afraid of what was happening to her. But then, she was still young enough to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so to her anything must have seemed possible.

By six o’clock, we had two camcorders with infrared capability running upstairs, one in the girl’s bedroom and one in her parents’ bedroom. According to the Taylors, the entity had appeared in both places. If it existed, there was a good chance we would catch it on videotape.

Nothing happened until a quarter to eight, when Selena informed us that she had seen her grandmother while walking upstairs to her room. The entity had walked past her into one of the house’s two spare bedrooms. Changing tack, we redeployed our equipment. In a matter of minutes, we had installed infrared cameras and motion sensors in the bedroom the girl had indicated.

About half an hour later, the motion sensors went off. Rushing up to the room to see what had happened, we checked the infrared cameras. Unfortunately, there was no visual evidence of anything.

At 9: 30, Selena was put to bed. But by 10: 00, she was back downstairs to tell us that her grandmother had spoken to her and said she wasn’t in the house to harm anyone—only to watch over the family. We asked Selena why her grandmother hadn’t passed over to the other side. She said her grandmother just wasn’t ready.

The Taylors were comforted by this information. They told us that if the entity was in fact their grandmother, they didn’t want to push her out. They just wanted us to gather evidence and document her activity.

At 11: 15, the motion sensors went off again. This time, the infrared cameras captured some apparent orbs, but nothing more. At midnight, we heard someone moving about in the kitchen, though neither the Taylors nor any member of our team was supposed to be in there. When we checked, the kitchen was empty.

Grant and I asked the Taylors if they would like us to bring in a clairvoyant, or a sensitive, to try to communicate with the entity. The Taylors liked this idea and gave us the go-ahead. By 5: 00, we hadn’t picked up anything else, so we packed up and left—with the understanding that we would be back.

Five days later, we returned with the same team that had worked on the case previously, as well as Bethany Aculade, the sensitive who had worked with our group in the past. Bethany met with the family, discussing the things she would say to the entity and also what she would not say.

The Taylors stressed to Bethany, as they had to us, that if the entity was Louis’s mother, they didn’t want to make it leave. Bethany acknowledged that wish and began preparing for a communication with the entity in Selena’s room, where it had been seen most often.

At 9:00 p.m., there were seven of us in the girl’s bedroom: the three Taylors, Bethany, Grant, Keith, and me. Bethany started trying to communicate with the entity by means of clacking—the tapping together of two sacred stones in an attempt to speak with the dead. It has been said that the energy from the impact and the resultant noise helps the spirit to communicate and sometimes even show itself.

Almost immediately, the temperature in the room dropped. This was especially surprising considering there were seven people in a 12-by-15-foot enclosure, and common sense would tell you it would get warmer in there. Bethany interpreted the temperature change as the spirit’s way of trying to communicate with us.

Selena confirmed it: her grandmother was in the room with us. Our EMF meters were showing marked fluctuations in the room’s magnetic field, adding credence to the idea there was a supernatural presence among us.

We watched as the little girl carried on one end of what seemed to be a two-way conversation. Every so often, she relayed a message to one of her parents or a member of our T.A.P.S. team. However, we had no hard-and-fast evidence that she was in contact with her grandmother—only her word for it.

Abruptly, Selena stood up and asked, “Are you sure?” We didn’t hear an answer. Without warning, the girl walked out of the room.

Curious, we all followed her. She led us downstairs, all the way to the basement, where we watched her dig through some cardboard boxes at the back north end of the room.

None of us knew what she was doing. We just stood there, looking at each other.

Finally, Selena pulled out a small wooden box, turned to look past us, and asked, “Is this the box, Grandma?”

She must have received a reply in the affirmative, because she said, “Okay,” and opened the box. There were pictures inside—old ones, from the look of them. And something else.

A diamond ring.

Handing it to her mother, Selena said, “Grandma wants her ring.”

It was one of the eeriest moments I have ever experienced. And though one question seemed to have been answered, it gave rise to another one. If Selena’s grandmother had indeed requested her ring, how were we to get it to her?

Sitting around the Taylors’ kitchen table, we talked about it. The family decided that they would go to the deceased woman’s gravesite in the morning, dig a hole over her coffin, and put the ring in it.

A week later, we contacted the Taylors to find out how things were going. They told us that they had indeed buried the ring and that the spirit’s appearances in the house had ceased.

We are still in contact with this family, and they haven’t had a single paranormal experience since.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS SEPTEMBER 1999

M
ore often than not, the paranormal events we encounter are the results of tragedies that occurred a long time ago. But in some cases the tragedies are much more recent, and it requires some sensitivity on our parts if we’re to conduct an investigation.

In this particular instance, we were called down to southern Connecticut to help a well-to-do couple plagued by a number of odd events. Vases had toppled over and broken without explanation. Necklaces and other valuables had gone missing, only to be found later in another part of the house. The wife, whom we’ll call Lisa Edison to ensure her privacy, had been awakened by voices in her bedroom. Both she and her husband, whom we’ll call Robert, had seen fleeting apparitions throughout their home.

Also, the stereo in their daughter’s room had been discovered blasting in the middle of the night. This was especially disturbing because their daughter, Jennifer, had been killed in a drunk driving accident on her way to school on graduation day. Her parents kept her ashes on the mantel in the living room.

Because the family couldn’t deal with a full-scale investigative team, Grant and I approached this case on our own. As soon as we spoke to Lisa and Robert, we could tell that Jennifer had meant everything to them, almost to the point where they couldn’t live without her.

Grant spent a lot of time with Robert, listening sympathetically to how much the man missed his daughter. I used that time to talk to Lisa. She showed me Jennifer’s diary, which she had found after her daughter’s death. It said that Jennifer had been miserable, that she had been closer to her friends than her family, and it spoke of how she would escape to the beach whenever she could. That was when she was happiest—when she was sitting in the sand, surrounded by her best buddies.

We interviewed both Lisa and Robert pretty extensively, all the while being careful not to add to their pain. Then we walked around the house with a camera, an EMF detector, and an audio recorder. Unfortunately, we didn’t experience any activity.

The next day, Grant and I went over the recording of our interview with Lisa and Robert, hoping it would give us an idea as to how to continue our investigation. What we heard knocked us off our seats. In addition to the voices of Lisa and Robert, there was a third voice—one that was distinctly female. As we listened to it, we heard the names Joe, Aaron, and Melissa.

Returning to the Edison house, we played the interview for them and asked them if the names were familiar to them. Lisa said they were Jennifer’s closest friends, though Lisa wasn’t very fond of them. At our suggestion, she agreed to invite the three kids over the next day.

Joe, Aaron, and Melissa all showed up, but they were obviously pretty weirded out. Unlike Jennifer’s parents, they didn’t want to get to the bottom of what was happening. They just wanted to put their friend’s death behind them and move on.

As we talked with the three of them, we found out a couple of things. First, the song that Lisa had heard blasting from Jennifer’s stereo had been their theme song as friends. Second, Jennifer and her friends had all made a pact: when their time came, they wanted to be buried somewhere near the ocean.

Grant and I suggested the idea of having a ceremony on the beach and casting Jennifer’s remains into the water. Her parents were reluctant to do that, however. After all, this was their only child and her ashes were all they had left of her. It was certainly understandable.

But later, when Grant and I played back the interview with Jennifer’s friends, we heard a female voice again. This time it said, “Water,” and “Get out.” When we told the Edisons about this, they relented.

Sometime later, they had a ceremony on the beach and entrusted their daughter’s ashes to the waves. They experienced no more activity from that point on.