Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (13 page)

The original Borden house, below, and as it is today, at left, as the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.

In 2004, the Borden house opened as a bed and breakfast. Though known to be haunted, the B&B drew visitors who were more concerned about the infamous crime than about any lingering paranormal activity. Many got more than they bargained for. Ghosts were big business, and the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast constantly appeared on lists of the county’s most haunted locations. Though many people mentioned a darker presence there, the house became well known as a place to have a good night’s sleep while hearing stories of murders and ghosts, and maybe even experience something spooky at the same time.

Jackie Barrett, who grew up exposed to dark cults and specializes in recreating violent crimes to help gather evidence, took a roundabout path to Fall River. After working for years as a psychic and life advisor, she’d seen just about everything. As someone who can tap into energy to see crimes that have happened in a specific location, she was often called upon to look for victims and suspects of murder cases. One of these cases involved a young girl, who was viciously murdered in a suburb of Philadelphia. Although the police arrested a suspect and put him in jail, many involved in the case felt the wrong man ended up behind bars. People related to the case, including police investigators and court workers, saw the dead girl walking through their houses. She was always wearing a nightgown like the one she was buried in, although now it was dirty. “She was usually crying. These hard-nosed people, cops and lawyers, couldn’t get the case out of their heads,” Jackie said.

Through her work, they were able to find the real killer, which opened up a can of worms with other unsolved murders in the area. While the work of a psychic is often exhausting, this case was especially hard for Jackie, who was in almost constant contact with the dead girl.

“I was with her every night,” she said. “Sometimes she wanted to talk and sometimes she wanted to play. It was constant. But I felt connected to her, and I wanted to help.”

People believe ghosts often stay until any unfinished business is settled, but even after the real murderer was caught, the little girl remained with Jackie. “And I let her. I could handle it better than the other people she was going to,” she said.

While at a conference near the end of the case, she ran into Lee-Ann Wilber, manager of the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. Wilber suggested Jackie come to the Borden house to try to communicate with the ghosts there.

“I needed a change of scenery, a vacation, so I decided to go,” Jackie said.

In November 2005, Jackie made the trip to Massachusetts. Before leaving, she invited the ghost girl to go along with her. Even during the journey there, she sensed the presence of the little girl.

During Jackie’s two days at the house, she and her companions had their own paranormal experiences: Her husband has held down in bed during an afternoon nap, they caught glimpses of a ghost cat, and during a séance, the spirit of Bridget Sullivan, the Borden’s maid at the time of the murders, spoke through a woman who had come to visit.

Jackie and her husband were completely convinced there were ghosts in the house, and when they departed, they left another spirit behind: The little ghost girl.

Jackie has never been able to completely understand the little girl’s reason for staying, or even if her soul had just moved on, but she never saw her again. No one else related to the murder investigation has seen her either. There is some evidence, however, that she may be trapped at the famous bed and breakfast.

The people who run the bed and breakfast stock their bookcase shelves with every book on the subject of Lizzie. People who stay there can read every theory of the crime or hear any of a number of ghost stories about the place. Before she left, Jackie added her own contribution to the collection, a copy of her book,
The House That Kay Built
. It is not about Lizzie in any way, but it added to the overall spookiness of the house. The trouble was that the book did not stay in the bookcase.

It began to pop up in various locations throughout the house. Although visitors rarely removed it from its shelf, the book mysteriously appeared on chairs, beds, and even on the kitchen table. Though always returned to the bookcase, it disappeared and reappeared frequently.

A newcomer to the house solved the mystery. Ben was a high school senior when he began working at the bed and breakfast. When
The House That Kay Built
appeared on top of a toy chest, he made a connection. He believed a number of child spirits trapped in the house wanted to be read to, and because there were so few children’s books in the house, he read to them from Jackie’s work. He noticed that the book moved around more frequently when he was working, and when he read the book, activity in other parts of the house decreased. It was as if the spirits of the children were listening to him read instead of roaming the halls. Ben became a common site, reading aloud to the young spirits until he enrolled in college and quit working at Lizzie’s.

Jackie is not sure what to make of it all. Some of the first reports of hauntings at the bed and breakfast involved the original children who died on the property, drowned by their own insane mother, a distant relative of Lizzie’s.

There is nothing about the haunted book that specifically points to her little girl spirit, but Jackie doesn’t live her life by facts alone. “Part of the reason I invited her to come was so she could play with the other kids trapped in the house. She never got to play with other kids when she was alive. I like to think she is just telling me she stayed and is happy there,” Jackie said.

Jackie gets another message, too—the girl wants her to come back—but a part of her doesn’t trust the messenger. During her many paranormal experiences, she has been lured to locations and situations by dark forces, and what walks that property is not always truthful.

“I think they have her trapped,” Jackie said. She believes something stronger (although she refuses to say
demonic
) may have started all the trouble on the property and that it remains there. She also thinks they either kidnapped the girl ghost to use her energy and light, or to get Jackie to come back. “It’s a fun place to go, but there is also something not fun about it,” she said.

Darker forces have found other ways to get into Jackie’s life. Through a series of bizarre events, Jackie came to possess boxes of evidence, court documents, and personal correspondence of Ronnie “Butch” DeFeo, the man who murdered his family in the famous “Amityville Horror” house. His killings made the price of the house fall so low it became attractive to the Lutz family, who moved in and eventually had to move out because of the evil spirits there.

While the Lutz family and their experiences have been open to scrutiny, no one can dispute that DeFeo’s family was murdered in the house. Over the years, there have been whispers that Ronnie was possessed at the time of the murders, that he made a pact with the devil, and that there was something about the man and the house that was evil.

Jackie was drawn to Ronnie before she knew who he was, almost as if he was whispering in her ear. She eventually began to correspond with him and then met him face-to-face. Trust and bonds were formed, or to hear Jackie tell it, reformed.

“Ronnie gave me power of attorney to help him. He was very ill, and I agreed to get him medical attention. And Ronnie gave me his story,” she said.

Along with the story came the paperwork of a lifetime as well as court documents, stored in a room in the Amityville house, which told the other side of one of the most famous cases in paranormal history. But when Jackie got the papers, something else came along with them.

Jackie (wearing a scarf) at the séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.

Bad things began to happen. Jackie, who was used to seeing spirits, saw darker things than she was accustomed to seeing. In the matter of a few weeks after getting the documents, her cat mysteriously died. Over the course of working with DeFeo, three other pets died and he seemed to have knowledge about some of them.

People around her were getting seriously sick without explanation, and she herself was suffering from a physical and emotional attack. “I had things come into my own mind and questioned my own sanity,” she said.

Through working with the murderer, she unlocked doors to her past that had been shut tight for decades. She and Ronnie were destined to be together.

“I saw this face come through a wall when I was a child,” Jackie said. “I realized now (his) was the face I saw. Ronnie knew things about me no one else knew.”

She began to receive phone calls from him at all hours of the night, something nearly impossible because inmates at a prison, especially ones serving multiple murder convictions, do not have access to phones. The caller ID would never display the prison’s name, and most of the area codes were not from New York, where he is incarcerated. Jackie believes Ronnie was able to travel in different ways outside of his body. One way was through phone lines; another was through dark spirits who were with him the night of the murders and continued to be with him until recently.

“He had entities all around him,” she said.

Jackie now believes part of the connection she had with Ronnie was due to his documents stored at her house. However, she is much more disturbed by the new spirits roaming her house.

“There is always something happening here. I keep seeing these dark people in my house. I see them in mirrors and the windows. I see them just walking around and hiding. People don’t come to me like that. I can’t talk to them. They are coming all the time, and I can’t talk to them,” she said.

Chris’ epilogue
: Whether the files are cursed or haunted, or whether there is just something odd about the case, DeFeo’s entities didn’t stop with Jackie. She called me, looking for advice. As we were talking, the phone line went dead twice. At one point during the conversation, I went online to look up some of the things she was talking about, and my computer shut down.

The Amityville House as it looks today.

She asked me if I would be willing to help her write the book about Ronnie. Having written about criminals before, and having received multiple letters from people in prison, I was hesitant to say yes. In addition to exposing my family to the criminal aspects of the case, I was unsure if I wanted to work on a book about someone who had been written about so often and who faced possible legal action because of what he was going to say. I also felt as if I was stepping onto a paranormal mine field. I was already experiencing odd things, and all we were doing was talking. I told her I probably would not get involved.

But Ronnie had other ideas. That night, I saw several black figures roaming around, and one walked into my room as I was falling asleep. I moved out to the couch so I wouldn’t wake my wife. Then my computer turned back on. At one point a loud noise shook the house, as if something large had dropped in my office.

Over the next week, I began receiving phone calls at all hours of the day, most with no number listed on the caller ID. A few displayed “New York State.” I always picked up, but no one was ever on the line.