Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf

by Christopher Balzano

  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.

  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 th
e 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.

  At
the end of October 2010, Jackie talked about the case on our radio show, “Spooky Southcoast.” Everything on my end began to malfunction. My computer would shut down or I would lose work I had done about her. The show aired without a hitch, but I suffered through several power outages throughout my whole house while it was broadcast.

  The next night—Halloween—a documentary about her work and her struggle to free Ronnie from demons aired on cable TV. I set my DVR to record it, but the electricity went out again. I recorded a later broadcast, but when I attempted to watch it, my television kept shutting off. Eventually it was deleted and I never saw it.

  My mind was made up: I would leave this case alone.

  Jackie did not. She pressed on and believes she has freed Ronnie of the demons that plagued him, and has written a book about it: The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story of the Amityville Murders. Since his deliverance, the hauntings have stopped.

  Jackie continues to study the paranormal. That is her life, and however dark or intimidating it gets, she is a survivor and always makes it through.

  Those boxes of documents are still in her house, and her first book continues to grace the bookcase in the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast. They are part of a bigger picture we can’t see with normal eyes. Even Jackie, who sees more than we ever will, can’t take it all in.

  The Haunted Violin

  There is nothing more haunting than the sound of violin music, especially when the violin itself is haunted.

  Harold Gordon Cudworth, a violinist extraordinaire and collector of such instruments, was a popular musician in Massachusetts in the 1930s and 1940s, even hosting his own radio program and making at least one known recording. Yet despite his impressive body of work, Cudworth was perhaps even more famous for the instrument he played, rather than the grace with which he played it.