Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (12 page)

In the 1970s, a young man desecrated the local nativity scene. He made several cuts in his leg and poured his blood over the statues. He wrote “The Lord’s Prayer” backward in the same blood. He was not connected to any group; he was just a kid who liked heavy metal music, hated authority, and struck out against the strongest group he could find. In occult circles, this activity was seen as both an offering and a prayer. The young man was eventually caught and charged with vandalism.

Alves had kept the prayer and he gave me the small piece of poster board along with the rest of the material. While Alves said nothing strange ever happened to him when he had it, after it came into my possession, it sparked.

I put the prayer in the trunk of my car under several boxes of newspaper clippings. After I arrived home and unpacked, I saw the prayer had moved on top of the boxes. I took a closer look at it. The blood had had several decades to dry and was a dirty brown, the fingerprints still clear in the strokes. It immediately made me sick, which was no surprise. I have no stomach for blood, and the whole idea of cult activity is too much for me.

I decided the prayer was a bit too intense to bring into the house, so I put it back in the trunk. In terms of storytelling, it was a dead end. The case had been closed and there were no reports of ghostly activity attached to it. At most, it would make a nice picture for the cult section of the book.

Two days later, while loading my car for work, I noticed the prayer was on the front seat. I assumed I had forgotten to put it back in the trunk.

That evening, I brought the prayer into the house because I was beginning to organize the materials Alves had given to me. I started to visualize what was happening in the town and wondered where the prayer fit in. For reasons I can’t explain, I ended up storing the prayer under my couch. The next morning it was on top of the couch.

I called Alves and asked him if anything like this had ever happened before. He laughed at me as if to say silly little ghost hunter.

I played it safe and put the prayer in a storage bin, sealing it tight and placing other files on top of it. I woke later that night to a loud bang coming from my office. The bin was tipped over, files scattered, and the prayer lay a good five feet from the mess, neatly displayed on the floor. There was a kitchen knife lying across it.

“This is not acceptable,” I whispered into the air. The last thing I wanted was my wife to wake up and see a message to Satan in my office. “You are not welcome here.”

Anyone hearing me would have thought I was crazy, but I was resolved. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. In those early days of investigating, my toolbox included a small bottle of holy water. I placed the holy water in the bin with the rest of the research materials and the prayer and went to sleep in the spare bedroom. I left the lights on.

Over the next year I submerged myself in the history of Freetown and the recent paranormal activity there. The prayer stayed in storage for the most part. I noticed it around the house from time to time, always sneaking out when my wife wouldn’t find it and always accompanied by a different kitchen knife. It was clearly a message to me, but no matter how many times I tried to get someone to come clean using a tape recorder, no voice ever came through. I went from being frightened to being frustrated and annoyed. When I came home one night to find the prayer on top of a talking board I stored in a closet, complete with a knife stuck in the board, I decided I didn’t want to hear whatever the prayer had to say.

Pictures I took of the prayer never seemed to turn out. I would take them in different light and from different angles, but there was always a glare. That was good enough for me—it would add to the creepiness of the picture for the book.

As with so much of the writing of that book, catastrophe hit in the final days of my work on it. My young son was playing on the computer and deleted all of the pictures I had taken for the book, including those of the prayer. I scrambled around, asking friends for anything they had, and pulled low-resolution pictures from video recordings I had made. I also tried to capture another image of the prayer for the book. Apparently the prayer did not want its picture taken again. It disappeared and did not show itself until months after the book was sent off to the publisher. This time it appeared on the floor with one of my digital cameras next to it. The batteries had been removed from the camera and placed in the shape of a cross next to the prayer.

Rehoboth, one of the most haunted towns in the Triangle.

Eventually I moved out of state and was unable to deliver the materials back to Alves before I left. The prayer stayed in a taped bin inside a storage unit for six months.

When Alves asked me to return his items, I dug deep into the unit and found them. The bin was still taped, but the prayer was neatly placed on top, despite the fact most of my possessions had been thrown around in transit. I placed all of the items in a box, making sure the prayer was on top, and shipped it back to Massachusetts.

According to Alves, when he received the box, the prayer was not in it.

The story doesn’t end there, though. It continued a few years later.

Since the publication of that book, I had stored my research materials, along with all of my old files on Massachusetts, in the garage. Tim Weisberg and I broadcast a yearly radio show where local paranormal groups search the part of Massachusetts known as the Bridgewater Triangle.

One of those groups contacted me looking for a place people didn’t know too much about, but would still make a splash on the show. I suggested following up on a legend at a college in the area. To locate some contact information for the group, I needed to take my research materials out of their storage cabinet in my garage. These files included evidence from the occult cases in Freetown: tapes of interviews, pictures, and books on the subject.

Although the lock on the storage cabinet has never worked, I found it locked. The cabinet itself was noticeably cold, odd considering my garage is not air-conditioned and August is a hot month in southwest Florida. I had no idea where the key was, so I went inside to get a knife to force it open. Back in the garage the light I had turned on was turned off, and the cabinet was unlocked. Better, the drawer containing the information on the Triangle was open.

A wiser man might have heeded the warning, but small moments of unusual activity are common when you study the paranormal. As investigator and paranormal radio personality Matt Moniz says, “For every step you take toward the paranormal, the paranormal takes two steps towards you.”

I took the files into the kitchen, set them on the counter, and poured a cup of coffee. My daughter, two rooms away and sleeping soundly earlier, began to cry hysterically for me. I went in to soothe her and she eventually fell back asleep. When I went back to the kitchen to get my coffee and begin my search for the names, the files were scattered on the floor with a map of Freetown unfolded near them.

At this point, the father and husband in me wanted to throw everything away, but the investigator in me alternated between fear and wanting to understand. There are two ways to look at moments like that: one, a dark and sinister force is trying to find its way into your life, often a prelude to something bigger and scarier; or two, paranormal experiences are scary because we don’t understand them, and they are a way to make contact with the spirit.

After taking several photographs to document the mess, I turned on a tape recorder and began to talk to whomever might be there, hoping someone was trying to break through. The session produced no results, so I carried the files into my office and went to bed. As I tried to fall asleep, I heard bangs coming from my office.

The next morning the files were where I left them, so I considered the whole thing over. That night, however, as I tried to send e-mails to my contacts, my computer shut down. When I work on ghost stories, my computer sometimes goes haywire—an example of how electrical items can malfunction because of paranormal activity. Then the lights in the living room went off. I switched computers, sent the e-mails, and placed the files back in my office. The lights flickered a few more times, but the activity stopped for the most part.

The contacts got back to me and I relayed the information to the group. However, a hurricane hit New England, preventing them from researching the legend at the college.

My paperwork, now permanently stored in the unlocked file cabinet in my garage, can hardly be blamed for the weather 1,700 miles away. Right?

The psychic, the Little Girl and Three Killers

Where does a psychic go when she is looking for a little peace of mind? Jackie Barrett, who has worked on cases involving Amityville murderer Ronald DeFeo, Jr., and counsels people like convicted killer Damon Eckles of the West Memphis 3, goes to one of the most haunted bed and breakfasts in the country.

This story goes back generations. When the bodies of Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were found on Aug. 6, 1892, all eyes in the community turned to Andrew’s daughter, Lizzie. What happened over the next year became the subject of legend. Lizzie Borden was arrested and tried for hacking up her father, a wealthy pillar of the community, and her stepmother. The murders were so brutal they shocked a nation still reeling from the violence of such serial killers as Jack the Ripper and Dr. H. H. Holmes. The Borden family’s dirty laundry was aired, but Lizzie inherited the family money and was able to afford the best attorneys. On June 20, 1893, she was found not guilty and released from jail.

Lizzie Borden.

For the next 100 years, as new details of the case came out and others got painted over, Lizzie Borden reached the status of folk hero. Kids skipped rope to the famous song, “
Lizzie Borden took an ax…
” Movies were made and plays were written about her. The details of what exactly happened that day in 1892 became distorted as everyone attempted to solve the mystery.

Meanwhile, the house in which the murders took place was gaining a reputation of its own. Located at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts, the house passed through different owners. At one time a business was attached to it, and at another time the property was expanded. All the while, people were experiencing various types of paranormal activity there.

Tragedy was nothing new to this house, which had witnessed murders even
before
the Bordens lived there. The people being haunted never knew whether it was the murdered family or one of the other victims knocking on walls, moving things, or crying in the night.