by Will Storr
‘Our youngest son, Timmy,’ says Deborah, as we settle down in the large, cosy lounge, ‘from the time he could verbalise, used to talk about this old man that would show up and talk to him.’
‘We just thought he had a wild imagination,’ Tom says, sitting forwards on the armchair next to her, ‘but he kept seeing it and he’d have all these different stories and stuff. He was three or four at the time, afraid to sleep with the light off, talking about “the old man down the river”.’
Deborah pulls her feet underneath her legs on the sofa. She’s pretty and immaculately, Americanly groomed, with bobbed brunette hair and a baggy, white cable-knit jumper.
‘And then we had the TV switching on and off, lights blowing,’ she says. ‘The back door would slam two or three times during the night.’
‘We’d both sit up in bed right at the same time,’ Tom says.
‘Of course, I’d grab the old gun and run downstairs … nothing.’ He shrugs.
‘My worst memory is this one night I couldn’t sleep,’ Deborah says, with both hands wrapped around her mug. ‘I came down here and I laid on this sofa and I made the German Shepherd come and lay down beside me. I just had this weird feeling. I was lying there and on the exterior of the glass was these, like, skeleton ghoulish heads and I’m just like … ’
Deborah Carven shakes her head at the memory. Her husband stares, with his elbows resting on his legs, towards the rug. Lou potters in the background setting up tripods and laptops and cameras. These people must be crazy, I think. They must be.
‘So, what do you do for a living?’ I ask Tom.
‘I work in a prison in Georgetown, Delaware. I’m a recreation specialist.’
‘And I own the local deli,’ says Deborah. ‘That’s where I first heard about the graveyard. All the farmers and locals come in to sit and have coffee. One morning, one of them started telling me that we live on a graveyard and I’m like, “Excuse me?” So, one night I got a shovel, and I felt a real idiot. I thought, I’m like, nuts. But I started digging and I pulled out a bone. I was like, OK, it could be a dog, it could be a cow. Then I started digging with my hands. I pulled out a femur and a hip joint and a man’s medallion. And then I pulled a handle out, from a casket.’
There’s a silence. Deborah looks at me with sad, uneasy eyes.
‘I just went, “That’s no cow.”’
By now, it’s after midnight and Lou’s almost ready to begin. All the lights are off. An infra-red camera is pointing up the stairs, towards the landing outside Timmy’s room where the old man appears. And the monitor that’s attached to it is sitting on a coffee table, along with a Dictaphone and a digital thermometer. I check the time on the clock on the wall. It’s stopped on the stroke of three o’clock.
And then, just as I expected, nothing happens. For hours. We sit in the dark and watch the monitor, which has bathed the room in a weird spectral glow. The only sounds in the house are the odd structural creak and the shuffling, sniffing and coughing sound of humans trying to keep still.
After a couple of church-length hours, Deborah whispers that she’s cold and is going upstairs to fetch a blanket. We watch the green screen as she walks up, hand on the rail. And then we see it, all three of us. A luminescent white globule, about the size of a fist, appears floating above her head. It follows her up the stairs and then moves, slowly and smoothly, left, towards Timmy’s room, as Deborah walks right towards hers.
‘Did you see that?’ I whisper.
‘Yeah,’ Lou says, calm as milk. ‘That was a ghost light.’
It’s confusion I feel first. Then a small swell of horror. This wasn’t meant to be part of my story. Lou Gentile is supposed to be crazy, and we’re supposed to laugh. He wasn’t supposed to be right.
‘It’s probably best if you don’t mention that to Deborah,’ says Lou, scratching his belly underneath his black shirt.
And then I realise what it is. The cause of the tiny alarm in the diner. The reason that I’ve had this rising, unsettling feeling that something’s not right with my story. It’s the way Lou talks about his subject. He isn’t telling me boastful tales of incredible bravery, or raging against imagined conspiracies or wearing a hat made out of tinfoil. This American eccentric, I suddenly realise, doesn’t appear to be eccentric at all.
When Deborah returns, she senses immediately that something’s happened. Cautiously, she asks what. There’s an awkward pause, before her husband says, ‘Nothing.’
We’re now deep into the night’s silent hours. Lou wants to see if he can get any ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’ on his digital Dictaphone. He told me earlier that when there’s pressure on the microphone, a little light on the recorder is triggered. ‘It’ll be dead quiet and it’ll start to blink,’ he said. ‘How do you explain that? Sometimes I listen to the tapes on the way home and I have to turn it off. It’s just about enough to scare the living bejesus out of you.’
I look at the grey Panasonic machine that’s sitting on the coffee table and then at Lou, who’s sitting forwards with his chin resting in his hands.
‘Are there spirits in this house?’ he says, evenly.
Nothing.
‘Are there spirits in this house?’
The light begins to flash.
‘Do you want this house removed from the land? Knock on the wall – once for yes, twice for no.’
I look up into the dark, stiffly, waiting. Nothing happens. Even though I don’t believe in ghosts, when it becomes clear that there will be no knocking, a wave of relief washes through me.
It doesn’t last for long. Lou picks the Dictaphone off the table and pulls the jog wheel back with his thumb. I then hear something that I never want to hear again, but will. It’s like a cross between a dalek and a growling dog. It’s cloaked in static as if it’s coming from an epic distance away. And it sounds horribly like it’s trying to say ‘yes’.
As the EVP grumble on, we all hear one single, loud thump coming from upstairs. There’s nobody there. I sit up rigid. That’s it, now. I admit it. I am scared. Really, very, very scared indeed. Deborah starts crying, softly. And then, something touches my back.
When I think back to this incident, it’s my reaction that I remember most vividly. It wasn’t: ‘Ooh, did I just feel something?’ It wasn’t even: ‘Hang on, I’m sure something just … ’ It was: ‘Shit! Fuck! Something just fucking touched my fucking back!’ and I leapt out of my chair. There was no momentarily unplaceable sensation, there was no doubt whatsoever. As far as I was concerned, in that instant, something had touched me, hard enough to launch me to my feet, definite enough to make me swear several times in front of mild-mannered Deborah and Tom. It was an instinctive, visceral reaction.
THAT NIGHT, BACK at my hotel, I try to get as much sleep as I can. What comes is fitful and thin. Fourteen hours later, Lou pulls up outside my hotel. We have another long drive ahead of us, this time to Stratford, New Jersey and the home of Kathy Ganiel.
‘She’s in serious need of help,’ says Lou, as he indicates right and pulls out behind a taxi.
‘Why is it down to you to help her, though?’ I ask, reaching for the notebook in my back pocket. Lou never charges any money for his work, and all this staying up all night can’t be good for his central heating engineering attention span.
Lou says, ‘I grew up in a haunted house. I’d tell my parents and they thought I was nuts, you know? They sent me to a psychologist who said I was hallucinating. You know I’m not hallucinating.’
‘What, exactly, weren’t you hallucinating?’
‘It started when I was about ten, always at about three in the morning. Black shadows would wake me up in the middle of the night, things would tap me on the leg, all the covers would be pulled off me, I mean real bizarre stuff, and I would tell this psychologist and she would say I’m having some dream-related stuff. But I’m not dreaming! I’m not dreaming! So I had nobody to talk to. I’m seeing psychologists, they’re telling me I’m crazy, my parents are te
lling me I’m crazy. Until my sister and my brother started experiencing things, then I wasn’t crazy any more. This was quite a few years later. We were sitting there – me and my wife, my sister and her boyfriend, my brother and his girlfriend – and were talking and there was the sound of people talking around us. Everybody looked at each other and ran out of the house and I’m the only one left sitting there, going, “I’ve heard all this before. Don’t worry, that’s all it’s gonna do.”’
By now, the night has returned completely. We’re back on the freeway. The snow has stopped falling, but the landscape still looks petrified, buried and endless in the dark. I noticed, when Lou was talking, that the number three cropped up again. Last night, during a cigarette break, when I mentioned that the Carvens’ clock had stopped at three, Lou asked me not to say anything for fear of frightening Deborah unnecessarily. Later, when he casually asked her about it, she’d said that the mechanism had snapped at exactly that position the other day, when she’d been winding it.
Sporadic flecks of snow have started dancing in front of the windscreen, and Lou, deep in thought, switches on the wipers. We pull out to overtake a couple of gigantic articulated lorries, a blazing rage of lights, smoke and noise. The traffic bombs around us and, it sounds like, through us, as we motor along in Lou’s warm car.
‘You know, when I was a kid,’ he shouts above the freeway drone, ‘I didn’t have anyone there who could explain it. Maybe if I did, things could have turned out differently. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so scared, you know? OK, sometimes I’ve had to go in there and tell people that what is going on is either psychological or natural phenomena. But, when there is a haunting, I’m there to help them make it stop, and so they don’t think that they’re crazy. I’m there so they don’t commit suicide.’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘Has that happened?’
‘Yeah. That was a really sad case, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This guy starts telling me about these things that torment him in the middle of the night. And the next thing you know, he starts getting really sad and starts almost crying. He says, “You know, my wife died and I want to show you the letter she wrote.” When I started reading this letter, I wanted to cry. It was just horrible. The lady goes ahead and tells her husband that she’s killing herself because he doesn’t believe that these things are tormenting her, and how she’s going to take the gun and put it in her mouth and blow her brains out. So this guy starts telling me that he started experiencing the same stuff, that very night after she died. And he never believed her.’ There’s a small pause. ‘Well, you’ve got to find these people some help. You’ll see this lady tonight. If I was to walk away from her and never come back, she’s gonna have these problems for the rest of her life.’
By the time we get to Kathy Ganiel’s modest bungalow, the strange events of last night have been remoulded and rationalised by my brain. I’ve decided that I’d probably just been talked up into a state of wild and paranoid fear. Tonight, I’m determined to be on my guard. I am a professional journalist who deals only in hard facts. I will not start believing in the impossible, just because somebody’s turned all the lights off and told me a story about a spoiled toddler who’s managed to get away with blaming his untidy bedroom on the dead.
‘This lady is basically possessed,’ says Lou, quietly, as we unload his demonology kit from the boot of his car. ‘She’s used a Ouija board, and other things. This is stuff that you do not play around with.’
Kathy doesn’t look possessed. She’s a petite, pale and bird-like 38-year-old mother and wife. Her compact home is clean and comfortable, if basic. Tonight, her husband is working and her kids are long asleep. She’s preparing tea in the kitchen, which is cluttered with baby bottles, fridge magnets, coloured toys and drying dishes. As the washing machine goes into a spin cycle, Lou, still trudging back and forth with his boxes and cables, pops his head round the corner and prompts her to tell me her story.
‘Well,’ she says shyly, stirring the drinks, ‘my dad died five years ago and I started dabbling with a Ouija board. At first it didn’t work, but then it gave me information about stuff that happened with my great-grandparents, and I’d go check with my uncle and he’d say, “Yeah, that’s what happened.” So,’ she says, handing me a mug of milky tea, ‘I was in bed one night and I felt like someone was watching me. And I’m not usually paranoid. I had the covers over my head but I managed to peek and there was a black shadow standing at the side of me. Then the foot of my bed starts shaking. And I’d get scratching noises and knocking and whispering. I would see lights. And this would happen every night. Sometimes I would hear my name, I would distinctly hear “Kathy”. Then the children started to hear stuff and I played it down. At the time, I didn’t think it was evil. I thought it was my dad.’ She pauses briefly and fiddles, distractedly, with her wedding ring. ‘But then I would think, why would my dad come at night and shake my bed? Why would he stand over me and frighten me?’
‘Do you believe in God?’ I ask. Before Kathy can answer Lou appears and interrupts her from the dining area, where he’s setting up a large laptop. There’s a look on Lou’s face. And it’s directed at me.
‘She keeps using divination to try and contact the dead,’ he says. ‘She uses a necklace. She holds the top of it between her fingers so it acts like a pendulum, and then she asks questions. If it sways back and forth, that’s a yes. If it swings in a circle, that’s a no. And when she’s not doing that, she’s using a Ouija board.’
‘When did you last use the Ouija board?’ I ask Kathy.
‘About three weeks ago,’ she whispers.
‘She would tell me she’d stopped,’ says Lou, ‘but … ’
‘It becomes an addiction,’ Kathy says, looking at the floor. ‘I’m trying very hard.’
‘We’ve had a priest over here,’ Lou says, as he waits for his PC to boot up.
‘Lou said I did some inappropriate behaviour. I don’t recall.’ She looks into the middle distance, puzzled. ‘I do remember that I wanted to smack him in the face, and I would never do a thing like that. I don’t remember … ’ She pauses and chews on her bottom lip, frowning. ‘I think I wanted to take a cigarette and stick him with it … and he was fairly nice … Lou?’ she asks, looking up. ‘What did I say to him?’
‘I don’t really want to go into that,’ he says, walking off again to fiddle with a tripod.
It’s just after 1 a.m. Lou has the camera trained on the kitchen and we’re in the living-room area of the L-shaped, open-plan part of the bungalow. There are small, silver-framed baby pictures on the shelves, in amongst crucifixes and small pots of miscellaneous family detritus – badges, safety pins and half-used match-books. A wall-clock ticks in the background, as we sit on the old, slightly grubby three-piece suite – me on the armchair, Lou and Kathy on the sofa. The demonologist sits forward to click the monitor on. Instantly, I want to go home.
There are ghost lights in Kathy’s kitchen. Lots of them. Every few seconds another bright globule appears and travels through the air for a few seconds before disappearing. Larger, static discs throb in and throb out again. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before, like nothing I could ever have imagined.
‘Does anybody want more tea?’ Kathy asks.
‘Sure,’ says Lou.
Kathy walks around the corner and we watch her appear on the monitor.
‘Wow,’ I manage to say. ‘Christ.’
‘Don’t say that in front of Kathy,’ Lou whispers. ‘You already did that once. I told you. If you provoke this lady with religious language, she’ll start to go under.’
‘What happens when she “goes under”?’ I ask, watching the image of Kathy filling the kettle on the screen while the sound of the rushing water comes from the kitchen. Above her head and around her, globules float and dart and throb.
‘Her eyes and forehead will go down. It’s like she’s a completely different person. Psychologically, she’s been tested. She’s not bi-polar, schizophrenic or an
y of the other stuff. She might not look like she’d harm anybody, but believe me, when she goes into full possession, she can do anything. You have to be very, very careful. When the priest was here she really should’ve been restrained.’
‘What was she saying?’ I whisper.
Lou leans towards me and speaks quietly. ‘Something along the lines of, “Take your salt and stick it up your ass, your Christ can’t help me.” Something like that. “Get your fucking salt and stick it up your fucking … ”’
At that moment, Kathy comes back with the drinks. We sit calmly for a time. The wooden squeaks and taps of the house play lightly on top of the slushy sound of the cars on the still, suburban road outside. Lou leans forward. Tonight, his Dictaphone is in the kitchen. We can see it on the monitor, standing next to a packet of Pop Tarts.
‘Is there a spirit in the house with me now?’
We watch the recorder’s LED start flashing in a hectic and terrifying silence. I cough loudly three times to clear my throat and watch the magic, quietly aghast.
‘Christ … ’ I mutter.
‘Show me a sign in the kitchen that you’re with us now,’ says Lou.
Slowly, I become aware that Kathy is staring at me. This is it, I think. It’s happened. I can feel it, the air is thick with it, tense and electric and snarling. Kathy has gone under. I try to pretend it isn’t happening. I stay fixed on the green screen and watch the LED flicker and fade. Then, Kathy starts mumbling gruffly. The only word I can make out is ‘power’.
‘What was that, Kathy?’ says Lou.
She sits up, bolt still and then, in a heavy voice, says, ‘Foolish men sit around and wait for displays of power.’
‘You OK, Kathy?’ Lou says.
‘Playing with fire.’
I stare at the lights moving and throbbing on the screen, and try to block out the fact that Kathy’s eyes are boring into my head.