by Leslie Rule
Canary Wharf
West India Quay
London, England E14 4AL
www.museumindocklands.org.uk/English/
Hanging Out
The Frontenac County Courthouse in Kingston, Ontario, is a formidable yet elegant structure. With its grand entry of towering columns and domed tower, the historic gray building draws the eyes of passersby. Originally constructed in 1796, it suffered fire damage twice and each time was rebuilt. During one renovation, workers discovered a clue to the strange goings-on there.
Over the years witnesses had reported seeing a peculiar man. He was always leaning against the same courthouse wall. A noose hung from his neck, and before observers could question why, the figure vanished.
Six sanctioned hangings had occurred at the Frontenac County Courthouse and Jail—the first in December of 1867 and the last in January of 1949.
Apparently, an unauthorized execution was also conducted there. Construction workers discovered a grisly surprise when they cut through the very wall where the apparition had been sighted.
Hidden behind the wall was a skeleton in a makeshift coffin. His identity remains a mystery. Once he was given a proper burial, sightings of his ghost ceased.
————
FRONTENAC COUNTY COURTHOUSE
5 Court Street
Kingston, Ontario K7L 2N4
Ghosts in the News
Those in Glass Houses
THE BODMIN JAIL in Cornwall, England, is home to an eerie presence, according to an April 6, 2005, report from the BBC News. Erected in 1776, the castle-like jail was the site of more than fifty-five executions. More than twenty thousand spectators turned out to watch one public hanging. The last prisoner was hanged in 1909, and apparently he and some of his peers are still around.
When members of the Paranormal Site Investigators (PSI) spent the night in Bodmin Jail, two of the team were overcome by inexplicable nausea that drove them from the building, said the BBC News report. When the members were exploring the gloomy underground cells, stones were tossed at them by an unseen source. The mystery of the stones was deepened when it was discovered there were no nearby windows, and the ceiling was made of metal. The rocks apparently materialized from the other side and were “significantly hotter than the ambient temperature of the cell, the roof, and the floor.”
Team leader Nicky Sewell, who managed to get a tape recording of a ghostly grunt, told a reporter, “There’s definitely something at Bodmin Jail which was trying to make its presence known to us that night.”
eight
Stranger Than Fiction
Actress Sharon Tate was one of “the beautiful people.” It was a fact that annoyed Charles Manson, the wild-eyed monster who orchestrated a mass murder that shocked America on August 9, 1969. A sociopath who could charm the last vestige of integrity out of a lost soul, Manson had followers. They were a confused group of young hippies known as his “family.”
Set on destroying those who achieved wealth, he targeted Sharon’s home in Bel Air, California, and directed his followers to savagely kill its five occupants and to write words from The Beatles’ songs on the walls in blood.
Sharon, a lovely blond actress famous for her role as Jennifer North in Valley of the Dolls, was eight months pregnant when she was murdered.
Mercifully, Sharon’s younger sister was not in the house that night. She had asked if she could spend the night, but her big sister had said no, that she was too tired for company.
I’ve often wondered if she had had a premonition that it would not be safe for her little sister and had used fatigue as an excuse.
According to a story that has been circulating for decades, Sharon had had a strange premonition long before the tragic night. While the anecdote has changed over the years as it is told and retold, the earliest version is probably closest to the truth.
Standing at the top of a staircase, Sharon glanced down to see an apparition of herself murdered at the foot of the stairs.
It is not the first time I have heard of ghosts appearing out of our timeline. When it comes to their realm, they do not seem to have the rules that confine us in our world. While Tuesday never comes before Monday on this side, events may be haphazard and out of sequence in theirs.
I experienced this sort of ghostly time warp in 1982. I was walking along Kent-Des Moines Road, in Des Moines, Washington. The normally busy stretch of curving road was unnaturally still, when I heard a pitiful scream.
I turned to see a blond woman standing on the balcony of an apartment in a large complex. She had a little girl about six or seven by the ankles and was dangling her in the air, two stories above the ground. I could not see the child’s face, because she was facing inward.
Her long blond hair rippled in the breeze as she shrieked. In shock, I rushed to the apartment manager’s office, and as I opened my mouth to ask her to phone the police, I began to cry instead. The emotion of witnessing the scene had overwhelmed me to where my lips could barely form words.
A policewoman responded, but when she visited the apartment in question, she was told that there was no one there who matched my description.
I knew what I had seen and assumed that the residents were lying to protect an abusive friend who had left in a hurry with the young victim in tow. When I described the incident to my mother, however, she gently said, “I think you saw a ghost.”
I dismissed the idea. I could not believe that ghosts could appear so solid. This had been real. The event occurred years before I began researching ghosts, and despite my other paranormal experiences, I was skeptical.
I will never forget the surreal quality of the scene. The child’s scream had sounded tinny, almost as if it were echoing from the bottom of a big tin can. And the emotion I’d felt was nearly too much to handle.
Several years later, I was sitting in court in Eugene, Oregon, assisting my mother in researching her second true crime book, Small Sacrifices.
Diane Downs, a letter carrier with an obsession for a married man who did not want children, was accused of shooting her three children as they slept in her car on a lonely stretch of country road.
Nine-year-old Christy and four-year-old Danny survived the shooting, but poor little Cheryl, age seven, was killed.
I could not remember the face of the abusive mother on the balcony, but the slender figure and the blond hairstyle matched Diane’s. The frail ghostly child’s long hair looked exactly like Cheryl’s.
Did I, perhaps, see what was happening to poor Cheryl as it occurred? Or was I witnessing a future event? I do not know if Diane ever actually dangled her sad middle child from a balcony.
If, indeed, the scene on the balcony was of a paranormal nature and connected to the Downs child’s murder, why did I see them? The murder happened in Oregon, and I witnessed the scene in Washington, long before the homicide.
Why me?
Emotion.
We find that emotion plays a huge role in psychic phenomena. My very presence at the trial tied me emotionally to Cheryl. I, like some others who covered the trial, suffered from anxiety throughout, as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that a mother could kill her child.
Several years after Diane Downs was convicted, a movie was made based on my mother’s book. It starred Farrah Fawcett, and my mother and I were extras in the movie, sitting in the courtroom where we had in real life. I covered the making of the film for a Sunday feature in the Oregonian, the major newspaper in Portland, Oregon.
Though it was admittedly exciting to be involved in the making of a movie and to pen my first big article, icy fingers of dread sometimes twisted my stomach into knots so tight I was physically ill.
Farrah Fawcett played the deadly mother in the ABC miniseries Small Sacrifices, based on Ann Rule’s book. Was the ghost of an abused child I spotted one shocking afternoon connected to the case? (Leslie Rule)
When talented Farrah, made up to appear pregnant, sat at the defense table for her courtroom scenes, I
flashed on the memory of Diane Downs in the real-life scene.
I will never forget the sight of Diane with her smug smile, as she continuously ran the tips of her fingers over her huge pregnant belly. She was growing another child, she maintained, so she would have someone to love her.
Farrah Fawcett on the set with John Shea, who played the prosecutor who put Diane Downs behind bars. (Leslie Rule)
My mother and I still think of little Cheryl, the pitiful middle child who never stood a chance. And when I think of the shrieking girl I saw dangled from the balcony, I feel a coldness that goes to my toes. If that child was the out of time ghost of Cheryl, it was an occurrence stranger than fiction.
Read on for more ghostly accounts too strange for fiction.
Marvelous Marvin
When I research and write about the paranormal, I never intend to include myself in the stories. Yet, when peculiar things happen to me, I am torn. On the one hand, I am self-conscious about sharing. What if readers think that I am nuts?
On the other hand, I feel that I am cheating my readers if I do not share my own experiences. Without the many people who shared their strange stories with me, I could not write ghost books.
It seems only fair that I also confide.
At the time I wrote the previous page, I had yet to experience the odd thing that I am about to confess. In fact, it occurred last night, and as I write these words, I am on the plane, returning from a research trip to Reno, Nevada.
I was invited to Nevada by fellow ghost author Janice Oberding, who assured me that the state was so haunted that there were enough ghost stories for both of us.
Janice and her friends, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) experts Mark and Debby Constantino, had read my books and were eager to meet me and escort me to some of their favorite haunted spots.
Mark and Debby are pioneers in the exploration of a phenomenon that is all at once exciting, baffling, and chilling. While EVP is not yet a common household term, it soon will be.
An EVP is the mysterious presence of a voice on tape. Investigators throughout the world are taping voices that seem to belong to the dead. Though ghostly voices can be recorded with any ordinary tape recorder or answering machine, researchers like the Constantinos have learned to utilize this equipment to maximize the results.
When they visit haunted locations, the husband and wife team turn on a voice-activated tape recorder and take turns asking questions posed to whatever entity is within earshot. They then wait for a full ten seconds to give ghosts plenty of time to respond. Sometimes one of the team will generate white noise, such as that of a small hand-held, battery-operated fan. They wait, the fan whirring softly as ten seconds drift by.
As Debby explains it, the white noise is a sort of raw material, akin to a sculptor’s slab of clay. While the sculptor can turn an indefinable lump of clay into a magnificent bust, the ghosts can take the whir of a fan and mold the sound into words, complete with distinctive voices, inflections, and accents.
Though the voices are rarely heard during the actual recording, they are inexplicably on the tape when it is rewound and played.
Debby and Mark were excited about sharing their most impressive EVPs with me. The clearest voice they had ever gotten, they told me, was without white noise. Not only that, it was in their own home. The fact that Debby is very psychic likely adds to the couple’s success in obtaining so many phantom voices on tape.
In February of 2005, they were experimenting with collecting EVPs in their home when they received an unprecedented number of replies. The phenomena continued for forty-eight hours, prompting the couple to stay awake the entire time.
When Mark went to the store, Debby left the voice-activated recorder on the dining room table and stepped into the kitchen to tidy up.
As she bustled about, she heard a cat meowing in an extremely expressive manner. She assumed it was their cat, Wheezy, prowling about the dining room, and she wondered vaguely why the kitty was so excited.
But was the meowing she heard really that of her cat?
Janice Oberding and her husband, Bill, and I all sat on the Constantinos’ huge, comfortable couch and listened as they played their favorite EVPs.
“The woman’s voice is really clear on this one,” said Mark, as he brought up another file on his laptop computer. It was the EVP obtained the day Debby was in the kitchen, when her kitty meowed in such an odd manner. The EVP began with a long string of meows that was presumably the voice of their kitty, Wheezy.
The taped meows were followed by a mysterious adult male’s voice, meowing back at the cat, in the playful manner that humans do. I listened with interest, but it was the next word spoken by a distinctive female voice that made me sit up straight. It was a single word, formed into a question.
“Marvin?”
I gasped. I knew the voice well. It was my own.
“That’s me!” I exclaimed. “Play it again!”
I made them play it over and over again, and each time I heard it, I repeated in awe, “That’s me!”
“It does sound like you,” Janice agreed.
But how could it be? The recording was made thirteen months before I had met any of these people, before I had ever set foot in Reno.
“Marvin?”
It took a few moments for me to regain my composure enough to explain to my new friends the significance of Marvin.
None of them knew about the sadness I have carried daily since May 2005. They did not know about Marvin. Marvelous Marvin was my tuxedoed cat who was not quite two years old when I lost him. It is not something that I like to talk about, but it is with me always.
Normally an inside cat, Marvin’s first taste of the wild may have been his last. A freak set of circumstances ended with me and my cats camping for several days on a friend’s wooded acreage in Eatonville, Washington, in May 2005.
My animals are my only children, and it hurts to put these words down on paper. My cats were out of my sight, when I heard the horrible yips of a marauding pack of coyotes. I rushed to investigate, but the coyotes were gone, and so were Marvin, Piper Sam, and Frank.
My remaining cats stared at me, their eyes wide and concerned. But they could not tell me what had happened. I pray every day that the three missing cats were simply frightened away by the coyotes and have found new, wonderful homes.
Now, as I write about the ghosts of victims, I wonder if Marvin was the victim of the coyotes. Has my charismatic kitty become a subject in my book? Is he a spirit, sending me a message? Did Marvin somehow manifest my voice, so that I would know that the frantic meows were his?
I have no answers, but so many questions.
At the time that Debby obtained the EVP of the voice like mine, it was several months before the awful day I lost my cats.
Marvin, my amazing kitten, and I are working on a project called “A Kitten’s Work Is Never Done.” Marvin sews his own clothes. Marvin carefully hangs laundry in the little set I built for him and then yawns, exhausted from the work. Did Marvin communicate with me out of time and out of space from the other side? (Leslie Rule)
If Marvin’s ghost did supply the cosmic meows on the EVP, how did he do it three months before he vanished?
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the theory that time is nonexistent on the other side may apply here. Perhaps Marvin’s spirit traveled to the best place possible to get a message to me.
If so, it was not the first time that Marvin took paranormal steps to telepathically communicate. In October 2004, I received a telephone call from a psychic whom I barely knew. She lived in California, and I had spoken to her only a couple of times when I interviewed her for a story.
She knew little about me. She knew that I had cats, but I had never described them to her. On the morning that she called, I had been worrying about Marvin. He was lethargic, and his eyes were runny.
“I had to call you,” she told me. “One of your cats contacted me. He is black and white,” she said, as she described t
he exact areas of Marvin’s white markings. “He has a cold, and you need to take him to vet, but he will be OK.”
I was stunned. How did she know?
“He is very persistent,” she said.
I immediately took Marvin to the vet, and as the woman had predicted, he had a cold. He received medication and soon recovered.
Since Marvin went missing, I have wished many times that he would communicate with me as I close my eyes and imagine that I am holding him.
All three cats who disappeared were my beloved furry friends. Marvin, however, stood whiskers and tail above most felines. Unusually intelligent, he also was very loving to both people and other animals alike. I still hope that he is alive and well. I hope that the psychic messages he is sending are from this side and not the other. I am afraid, however, that Marvin is another murdered spirit.
When I met the Oberdings and the Constantinos, I felt immediately bonded with all of them. We are all big animal lovers and, coincidentally, had all lost beloved pets in the weeks prior. The Oberdings lost their geriatric black lab named, Buddy, and I lost my geriatric cat, also named Buddy. The Constantinos had lost three animals in the last year, including their cat, Wheezy, who had died just days before our meeting.
As it turned out, Debby had e-mailed me in the summer of 2005. She had seen the amazing photograph of the ghost cat, taken by an Oregon woman, in my book Ghosts Among Us and wanted to borrow the photo for a presentation she was giving at a paranormal conference.
My computer crashed, and all of my e-mail was lost before I could respond to her. When she told me that she had e-mailed me, I told her that I remembered her letter and apologized for not answering.
As Debby said, “There are no coincidences.” The odd connection we shared that swirled around the life, death, and ghosts of pets was compelling.
As Debby and Mark finished their two-day marathon of recording phantom voices, they were exhausted and, apparently, the ghosts were too. One of the last EVPs they got before finally going to sleep was an exasperated male voice that said, “Enough, lady!”