For a little while, anyway.
As a housewarming gift to herself, Jeannette purchased two Haitian masks from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They were large and heavy, beautifully carved of solid mahogany, and Jeannette adored them. She had long been a collector of masks from around the world, and now that she had her perfect home, these masks would be the centerpiece of it and of her collection.
The room where the masks took center stage.
The masks that caused much turmoil for the family.
But right from the beginning, something wasn’t right about these masks—even before they’d been removed from their original shipping crates. Jeannette’s husband, Bob, packed his truck with boxes to move to the new place, including the box containing the masks. While driving on the freeway, the truck began to accelerate on its own. No matter what he tried, Bob couldn’t slow it down; it was as if the brakes were disconnected and the truck just kept going faster and faster, even shifting into neutral. With some quick thinking, Bob drove up a steep exit ramp and jammed the emergency brake as hard as he could, stopping the truck.
“He was quite shaken up by the incident,” Jeannette said. “He had the truck checked out a few days later, and the mechanic found no problems with it.”
Once the masks were unpacked in the new house, Jeannette gave them a wall of their own. She hung them in the dining room, the biggest and most central room of the house. That didn’t sit well with her then 12-year-old son, who never liked the masks and didn’t want to see them hanging on any wall, let alone one he’d have to look at every day.
The family’s dog was well trained and behaved, yet once the masks were hung on the wall, she refused to cross the dining room. It was a strange behavior she had never exhibited before, and hasn’t since. The family had to carry or push her across the floor just to get her from one side of the room to the other.
“I’m still not sure if she was afraid of those masks, or if she could just sense or hear what we couldn’t,” Jeannette said.
It wasn’t long before strange phenomena started occurring. At first, Jeannette didn’t think anything of it—paranormal activity always seemed to find her family, no matter where they lived. But soon, the weird things taking place went beyond just regular ghostly goings-on.
One day Bob was at work and Jeannette and her son were in the backyard playing on their trampoline. When they came back into the house, they found broken glass strewn across the floor, making a nearly 70-foot path from the back door to the kitchen counter, where a heavy drinking glass had originally been placed. Though not easily breakable, the heavy glass had shattered, its path of shards trailing around two corners. Jeannette started cleaning up the mess, and when she got close to the front door, she noticed a dead bird sprawled on the floor in the entranceway—even though the entire house was locked, except for the back door, and the security system was armed. There was no way the bird could have made it into the house without anyone knowing.
A couple of months later, Jeannette’s oldest son came home from his third deployment in Iraq, bringing along a large group of friends and fellow soldiers who were going to spend their 30-day leave participating in paintball tournaments in the area. They were all hanging around the dining room and kitchen area when another one of the heavy drinking glasses, sitting on the dining room table, exploded. It broke with such force that the shards covered the entire 25-foot-by-30-foot dining room floor. It freaked out everyone in the house.
“These were experienced combat soldiers, and they all slept together on the living room floor that night or huddled in pairs,” Jeannette said. “And they slept with all the lights on.”
Shattering glass was only the beginning as the phenomena began to escalate. Soon, a loud banging started rattling the walls, first in the kitchen and then on the inside and outside of her youngest son’s bedroom. The activity took a turn for the worse when the youngest son was awakened by the feeling of being slapped by unseen hands at the same time the banging was taking place. One time, he was hit with such force and from such an odd angle that red, upside down finger marks appeared on his forehead.
“It looked like he had been slapped hard by someone or something very tall,” Jeannette said.
When the family realized the bangs were occurring with some regularity, Jeannette decided to time them. For months, they happened every day at 10:19 a.m. One morning, Jeannette decided to leave a digital audio recorder running on the kitchen counter while she went to get her son from school. Nobody was in the house, but when she played the recording back, she was shocked to not only hear the loud banging, but also unintelligible screams as well. Jeannette sent the audio clips to others in the paranormal field, and all agreed it was unlike anything they’d ever heard.
Not long after, Bob took a job out of state, leaving Jeannette and her youngest son alone in the house. Even with all the weird commotions going on, she wanted to stay there to remain close to her dying brother.
After visiting her brother one evening, Jeannette and her son came home to find the dining room door open and the dog—who always greeted them at the door—missing. Food from the cupboards and refrigerator was strewn all about the floor, creating a path that led to the two Haitian masks. The house was large and they were afraid to look for an intruder on their own, so Jeannette called 911 while her son closed the back door. The police arrived and searched the house and garage thoroughly. Everything was secured from the inside and showed no signs of entry or any type of disturbance. Nothing was missing. The police theorized that the intruder had entered the house, was scared by the dog, and then ran out the back door with the dog chasing behind him.
As they stood in the kitchen discussing the break-in, they heard a noise in the garage. They found the dog there—though she had not been in the garage earlier when the police checked it, and the doors were still secured from the inside. It was as if the dog had disappeared and then reappeared from thin air.
“The police had no explanation for where the dog had come from, and neither did we. We still don’t know to this day,” Jeanette said. “But after that, we’d always hear voices and boxes moving in the garage, yet every time, it was empty and secured from the inside.”
The phenomena kept intensifying—the banging, the slapping of her son, the breaking glass. More dead birds were found inside and outside the house, including one inexplicably stuffed with straw. It finally reached the point where Jeanette had to call a good friend, paranormal investigator John Zaffis. John, who began his career investigating claims of the unexplained and the demonic alongside his legendary aunt and uncle, investigators and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, is widely considered the world’s foremost authority on haunted, possessed, and cursed objects. He even operates his own paranormal museum at his Connecticut home, John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal, with thousands of such items on display.
Zaffis felt that because of the age of Jeannette’s son and the family’s history with the paranormal, they might be the victim of a poltergeist. Poltergeist means “noisy ghost” in German, but in actuality, the prevailing theory is that they’re not the actual ghosts of deceased persons. Instead, they’re either a mischievous spirit energy that exists solely to plague people or—a newer theory—are actually caused through unconscious mental abilities manifesting in a prepubescent child. When Jeannette mentioned the correlation between the activity and the arrival of the Haitian masks, Zaffis suggested she cover them for a while to see if anything changed.
“In hindsight, I should have taken them down, but I just covered them with an Army Ranger flag instead,” Jeannette said.
Once the masks were covered, the activity did subside. When a friend of her youngest son died in a freak accident not long after, the family decided it would be best if her son went to stay with his older brother in Kansas for a while. That left Jeannette home alone in the house, along with the family dog and a new puppy they brought home to help ease the young boy’s pain over the death of his friend.
“Once my son was safely out of the house, it didn’t take long before the investigator in me came out,” Jeannette said. “I invited another investigator from the East Coast to spend the summer in my home to help me document the activity.”
It only took three nights before that investigator became just as terrified as Jeannette’s family.
On that third night, the investigator felt something kicking the bed and awoke to see a shadow person standing there, blocking the light. The next morning the investigator told Jeannette it was “the most frightening experience” of their life. After that, the two slept on opposite sides of the house. The activity continued, along with the addition of music and voices in the dining room at night. The sounds would stop whenever someone entered the room, but then start again once the dining room was empty.
In late August, Jeannette’s brother passed away and the other investigator returned home. Jeannette spent the rest of the summer alone in the house. Within a month, the electricity on the side of the house where the masks hung went out completely. Not long after, the plumbing on that side of the house stopped working as well. In the dining room itself, the light on the ceiling fan flickered day and night.
“It got to the point where I didn’t enter that side of the house,” Jeannette said. “Yet I didn’t want to take the masks down, either. It was almost as if I was drawn to them, as much as they disturbed me.”
Two days before Halloween, a family member came to visit and asked why there was a big hole by the front door, inside the gate. Jeannette never used the front door, as she came and went through the garage. She was blown away to find a 6-foot-by-8-foot hole right next to the front door. It was five feet deep, and Jeannette could see the pipes leading into her house. She called the gas company to check for leaks. When the gas man jumped into the hole to check, the ground underneath him gave way. The hole was now about 15 feet deep, with water rushing in two directions. The two quick-fixed the hole by placing plywood over it and securing the perimeter with police tape as a warning. That same week, Jeannette noticed another sink hole in her front yard, this one 20 feet in diameter. It was as if the house itself was being dragged into the depths of hell.
Inside the house, Jeannette began hearing “tinking” noises from the eight-foot arched windows in the dining room, as if they were bending and stressed. She also started to hear deep pops coming from the dining room floor.
“I was very afraid because I know the deeper the sound, the bigger the hole,” she said. “I began having nightmares about giant sinkholes under my home and water running through Swiss cheese-like tunnels.”
Jeannette asked a friend who was a contractor to examine the sink holes and tell her the extent of the damage. He said it was bad. He told her to get everything out of the house before calling the city, or else the city would “red tag” the house and she wouldn’t be allowed back in, it was that unsafe.
While all this was going on, Jeannette became depressed. She asked Bob to come home and help move them out of the house, so he drove from Idaho in a new $40,000 company truck. The day after he arrived, the truck was stolen from the driveway of the house, only to be found abandoned a mile down the road.
Bob decided to quit his out-of-state job and stay home with his wife. Soon he, too, fell into a deep depression, remaining in a dark room in the house for an entire week, something out of character for him. He, too, avoided the side of the house with the masks, and he refused to acknowledge the sounds that were coming from the dining room.
Eventually, Bob shook himself out of his funk and got a new job in Arizona. He found a new place for the family to live and rented a big truck to move their belongings from California. Jeannette took an extra day to say goodbye to her family, and with the masks in a box in her car, headed to the new house. But before leaving, she contacted Zaffis—there was no way she was going to bring those masks into her new home. She didn’t even want to risk driving across the desert with them in her car. She figured the best place for them was in Zaffis’ museum.
With the last of their belongings, Jeannette drove to a family member’s house three miles away to leave the masks. When she got to the second stop sign of her trip, the box with the masks flew forward with such force it pushed the driver’s seat forward, pinning Jeannette against the steering wheel. She was nearly broadsided by another car, and had to wiggle out the passenger side door to get out of the car, hurting her knee on the steering column in the process. She threw the box containing the masks into the trunk of the car. When she arrived at her relative’s house, she left the box outside because nobody wanted it inside. Then Jeannette drove to Arizona where she and her family have lived in peace without any further disturbances.
Meanwhile, the masks never did make it to John Zaffis in Connecticut. The next day, when Jeannette’s relative went to take the box to the post office, it was gone.
“I guess they are someone else’s problem now, and I hope they fare better with them than we did,” Jeannette said. “They ruined our dream home and nearly tore our family apart. They frightened seasoned investigators and baffled policemen. They put us in danger, and I am glad they’re gone. And now I am far more careful about what I allow to come into my home.”
The Haunted Painting
In February 2000, a painting appeared on the auction website eBay under the heading “Haunted Painting.” In truth, it was a painting titled The Hands Resist Him by artist Bill Stoneham. But the truth should never stand in the way of a good ghost story.
Stoneham painted the picture in 1972 and it depicts a young boy standing on a doorstep next to a creepy life-sized girl doll. Behind him, in the glass panes of the door, numerous sets of hands reach for him and press up against the glass. Stoneham has stated on his website that the boy is his younger self and the hands represent other lives. The doll serves as his guide between the waking world and the dreaming world, as represented by the door.
The painting was first purchased in the early 1970s by John Marley, a noted character actor who had roles in films including The Godfather. According to Stoneham, the owner of the gallery where the painting was shown and the Los Angeles Times art critic who reviewed the show were both dead within a year after gazing upon the painting.
Marley owned the painting until his own death in 1984, and at some point it ended up on the grounds of an old brewery, where a California couple found it and took it home. Their four-and-a-half-year-old daughter complained that at night she could hear the figures in the painting arguing, and that the doll would force the boy to exit the painting and enter the room in which it was hanging. In order to prove nothing was happening, the father set up some motion-activated cameras in front of the painting. The family was shocked when, on the third night, they captured what looked like the boy coming out of the painting. The object in the doll’s hands (which according to Stoneham was just a dry-cell battery and some wires) had morphed into a gun, which the doll had pointed at the boy as if to force him out of the painting.
The couple listed the artwork as “Haunted Painting” on eBay, and included the photos of the boy allegedly leaving the painting. The eBay listing had the following warning posted as well: “Do not bid on this painting if you are susceptible to stress-related disease, faint of heart or are unfamiliar with supernatural events … This painting may or may not possess supernatural powers that could impact or change your life …”
The auction description went on in rambling fashion, at first attempting to offer photographic proof that the figures could exit the painting before later claiming, “There are no ghosts in this world, no supernatural powers, this is just a painting” and that it is “pure entertainment.”
Once the item was on eBay, the alleged hauntings took on a whole new dimension. Over 13,000 people viewed the auction, and many reported having paranormal experiences of their own. Just the image on the website alone was enough to impact those who viewed it, from feelings of queasiness to intense heat radiating from the computer monitor. The couple selling t
he painting put an addendum on the auction listing suggesting that people “not use this image as the background on the screen” and “not display this image around juveniles or children.”
The 30-day auction, which began at $199, received 30 bids, and the painting finally sold for $1,025. Although the buyer remained anonymous, there have been numerous websites tracking the tale that suggest nothing paranormal happened to the new owners.
The Other Haunted Painting
In 1985, a series of mysterious fires broke out across England, with one common thread running through them—in each home, everything burned to the ground, except for a print of a painting known as The Crying Boy. The painting, by artist Bruno Amadio, depicts a close-up of a young boy with tears streaming down his cheeks. Around 50,000 prints of the painting were sold across England, and there are also some variations painted by Amadio that appear to be part of the curse as well.
The story first came to light when a fireman spoke to a British newspaper, which printed reports of dozens of other fires that had occurred, with a print of the painting remaining untouched. The paper called for other prints to be mailed to its newsroom to be set ablaze in a big bonfire to quell whatever curse was attached.
Yet the mysterious fires still continued, and the legend of The Crying Boy grew. According to the story, Amadio had taken in a young orphan—the subject of the painting—whose parents had died in a fire just as strange as the ones later associated with the painting, and that it was the boy who set their home ablaze. He was a proven firebug, and some even suggested he was actually a pyrokinetic—someone who can start fires with their mind. Amadio failed to heed the warnings, however, and not long after the boy arrived, the artist’s studio burned to the ground.
Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf Page 15