In the meantime, Paula and Kristyn were investigating the area around the side door where Wincher had been shot. Their EMF readings started out low but quickly climbed when they got to a particular spot. Kristyn, especially, was excited about their results—until she realized there was an electrical box in the vicinity. “Damn it,” she muttered good-naturedly, “I hate when that happens. Stupid electrical box.”
By eleven o’clock, Steve and Brian were out walking the grounds of the plantation, approaching a gazebo where a couple of phenomena had been reported: the sight of a Civil War–era soldier strolling the grounds as if he were still alive, and the voices of kids playing. They both sounded like a residual haunting—the kind that repeats over and over again. In any case, Steve was playing his flashlight up ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of something.
At the same time, I was checking out the slave shack with Grant. We noticed that there wasn’t any camera in it, even though we had given Brian specific instructions to set one up in there. Grant gave Brian a call, letting him know about his oversight.
To Brian’s credit, he promised he would address it right away—and did. But that left Steve to go on exploring the grounds by himself.
Normally, no one goes off on his or her own during an investigation. The T.A.P.S. rule is that we proceed in pairs or threes, but never by ourselves. In fact, when this case aired as a television episode, we got all kinds of e-mails about the inadvisability of Steve’s little solo adventure.
Remember, though—if you can see him on television, he’s not alone. There’s a cameraman with him. So in reality, Steve wasn’t breaking any rules. He had all the company he needed.
But after a while, he got a little more—in the form of a flitting shadow. Without hesitation, he pursued it through the darkness, trying to get a video recording of it. Unfortunately, it ducked behind a tree and got away.
When Brian rejoined him, Steve told him what he had seen. As they continued their pursuit, Brian saw something as well. But as before, it proved elusive.
All evening, we heard a dog barking in the distance, getting on our nerves. After Steve and Brian lost the shadow, Steve heard the dog bark again. He yelled, “Shut up your damn dog!” Normally, he’s a pretty quiet guy, so it was a surprise to hear him shout like that. But the bigger surprise was that the dog stopped barking. In fact, we didn’t hear a peep from it the rest of the night.
At this point, Grant and I were exploring the grounds as well, but with the benefit of our thermal camera. We were down in the area of the pond when, without warning, something flashed in front of our lens. When we replayed it in the camera, it looked vaguely human—except you could see through it.
We remained in that spot for a while and tried to capture it again, but to no avail. It was pushing two in the morning when we made our last stop—the slave shack. By then, Grant and I were happy to just sit and chill.
The subject of Brian came up again. I’d had to speak to him twice about setting up a camera there in the shack. It seemed like a small thing, but every camera was important. You never knew which one was going to record something remarkable.
At one point, I felt the air pressure increase in my ears. Grant felt the same thing. But we didn’t think much of it.
By 2: 20, we had exhausted the subject of Brian and were on to a more philosophical one. “Ever wonder,” I asked my partner, “if we’re doing the right thing?” In other words, was our approach to ghost hunting the valid one? “How much time and energy do we expend before we burn bridges we can never repair?”
I was fatigued and I wasn’t expressing myself very well, but G.W. knew exactly what I meant. We had made sacrifices in our personal and working lives to pursue something we believed in. When the dust cleared, would we regret what we had given up? Would we still have our families, our jobs, our self-respect?
The whole point was to have people accept paranormal investigation as a legitimate scientific endeavor. But there was no guarantee that would ever happen, let alone in our lifetimes.
We were so tired and so engrossed in our conversation that we were completely oblivious to what was happening in the slave shack. Fortunately, our camera was rolling, recording what was going on behind our backs.
At 3: 00, we decided to hit the sack. We had covered all the spots we had targeted for investigation and gotten some interesting results. But Steve and Brian would keep the cameras running until morning, sleeping in shifts so that there was always someone to watch the equipment.
In the morning, we packed up. Hester thanked us and said she was eager to hear what we had found. Reluctantly, we left The Myrtles behind and drove back through the gates of the property and into the bayou country.
Meanwhile, Brian had done a credible job. He’d had to be reminded a couple of times about one thing or another, but he had generally acquitted himself well. It was good to see.
At the motel outside New Orleans, Steve, Jen, and Brian began going over the footage we had taken: thirty hours of video and an additional ten hours of audio. It was tedious at first, as it always is when you can’t find anything out of the ordinary. Then something popped at them.
At about 3: 20, after everyone but Steve and Brian went to sleep, we got something from the camera we had left shooting down the stairs in the main house: a shadow on the other side of a translucent glass door that looked a lot like a human figure. I wondered out loud if it could have been a member of our team casting the shadow, but we were all accounted for at the time. So that was something worth discussing.
But it wasn’t the coup de grace. That came when they were checking out the footage from the slave shack. There was a table between Grant and me that had a nice lace cover and a lamp sitting on top of it. As we watched the video, we saw the lamp slowly but surely slide to the right, and it didn’t stop until it had moved a good fourteen inches.
When Grant and I saw it, we were flabbergasted. We’d been right there when the lamp had moved, yet we hadn’t noticed a thing. It was a pretty impressive piece of evidence.
However, we didn’t want to jump to any unwarranted conclusions. After all, Grant might have snagged the lamp cord with his foot and dragged it without knowing it. We decided we had to go back to the plantation and take a closer look at the room.
But when we examined the lamp, the table, and the slave shack in broad daylight, we couldn’t find another explanation. We had to attribute the phenomenon to a supernatural force.
In other words, the place was haunted. Grant and I agreed on that. Our report put a smile on Hester’s face. She had believed all along that there were ghosts inhabiting the plantation, and now she had her proof.
As we left The Myrtles, Grant and I remarked on the funny way events had unfolded in the slave shack. We had been having doubts about ghost hunting and the immense toll it took on our lives. But finding exciting evidence like the moving lamp had given us a fresh start, a second wind.
Once again, we were ready for anything.
* * *
GRANT’S TAKE
If we were looking for a sign that we were doing something worthwhile, we couldn’t have asked for a better one than that lamp. And it happened right behind our backs. It just goes to show—no matter how experienced you are, you can miss something if you’re not paying attention.
* * *
MULTIPLE HAUNTINGS FEBRUARY 2005
There are three kinds of hauntings. The first kind is residual—when a supernatural entity repeats the same act over and over again. The second kind is intelligent—when an entity is aware of its actions and can interact with the living. The third kind is poltergeist activity—when an entity moves objects in the physical world.
In Cranston, Rhode Island, we encountered claims of all three.
The DiRaimo family was the one making the claims. Ken DiRaimo, his wife, and his two daughters had been experiencing what seemed like supernatural phenomena for two decades, since shortly after the girls were born. They had all heard the voice of a woma
n in the house, and Hayley, one of the DiRaimos’ daughters, even believed she had seen her.
She described the woman as brown-skinned with no feet. She had walked across the foot of Hayley’s bed and into her vanity mirror, at which point the woman had vanished. However, Hayley’s bed and the mirror had begun to shake.
More rarely, she had heard a male voice. Hayley claimed to have seen the source of that as well—a man with a white face and black clothing. However, he had made his appearance in the kitchen, not a bedroom.
On another occasion in the kitchen, Hayley had seen the drawers and cabinet doors open and close several times. She had also seen a bust of William Shakespeare, which sat in the living room, turn as much as ninety degrees. And a friend of hers had been pushed down the stairs from behind.
People had told Hayley she was nuts. She wanted T.A.P.S. to capture something—anything—that would prove she hadn’t taken leave of her senses.
In addition to Steve, Brian, and Paula, we had two other T.A.P.S. members with us that night. One was Dustin Pari. The second was Jill Raczelowski, our archivist. Jill loved to take part in investigations, though she depended more on her feelings than on scientific observation and analysis.
We took some time to set up our cameras, including one trained on the bust of Shakespeare. Then we went through the house with EMF detectors and established base ratings for those rooms where activity had been reported. Because the house was a tight fit, we sent a couple of people out to the van—also known as our mobile command center—with our digital video recorder.
We had barely gotten underway when I felt a burning sensation in the area of my shoulder blade. It was as if someone had been holding a match to it. I had my hands full just keeping my composure and not alarming the family, who had been alarmed enough.
First chance I got, I excused myself and went upstairs to take off my shirt. Underneath, the skin looked as if it had been sunburned or rubbed raw. It wasn’t a small area, either. It was easily the size of my hand.
I had never felt anything like it before, and I never wanted to feel it again. But it told me one thing: there was definitely some activity in this house. Before we left, we needed to prove it.
However, we didn’t seem to be having much luck. No voices, no moving objects, nothing that would support the family’s claims. We made the observation that Hayley seemed to be the focus of all the activity in the house. Someone—Paula, I think—came up with the idea of taking Hayley up to her room with us.
So Hayley came up and sat on her bed with Paula, and asked the spirits in the room for a sign of their presence. A moment later, Hayley said her right arm felt cold, as if it had been exposed to a freezing wind. Brian, who was standing nearby, wanted to see if it was just a subjective sensation or if Hayley’s arm had really gotten colder. With his digital thermometer, he took a reading of the affected area.
“Sixty-nine degrees,” he announced.
Colder than it should have been, but not ridiculously so. Then Hayley said she felt chills in her spine and in one of her legs. Again, Brian took a reading. This time, it was forty degrees.
Finally, it was time to wrap. We took our thirty-plus hours of recordings and went back to Warwick. On the way, Grant and I recapped the action.
We hadn’t gathered anything in the way of hard evidence. I had the burn or whatever it was. Hayley’s leg had gotten cold. Both occurrences were inexplicable. However, neither of them was proof of a supernatural presence.
Brian and Steve started the analysis the next day. By evening, they were ready to show us what they had found—which was basically nothing. The bust of Shakespeare hadn’t moved. The cabinet doors in the kitchen hadn’t swung open. We hadn’t sighted any apparitions or picked up any EVPs.
Sometimes you don’t find anything, as much as you would like to. That’s the way it goes in this business. But Brian and Steve had gone through more than thirty hours of footage in ten hours.
The way they had things set up, they could look at four video sources at once. But how closely could they have examined those sources? Not very. And sometimes two seconds of footage makes a whole investigation worthwhile.
When we confronted Brian and Steve, they admitted that they had rushed through the analysis. Brian in particular had fast-forwarded through much of his footage. Grant and I weren’t satisfied. We asked them to start from scratch and do the job right this time.
Steve said he would do as we asked. Brian grumbled a little but eventually agreed as well. Then Grant and I rethought the situation.
If Brian had shirked his responsibility the first time, why should we have any confidence he would do it right the second time? It wasn’t fair to the DiRaimos to give them anything less than our best. In the end, Grant and I decided to go over the footage ourselves. It was good that we did. Partway through the analysis, Grant took off his earphones and looked at me. “I think I’ve got something,” he said.
I listened to the audio. There was a voice, all right—a male voice. Not much more than a whisper, but it was there. “Have them go,” it said. I played it again, just to make sure. Again I heard, “Have them go.”
When we played the tape for the DiRaimos, they agreed: it was a man’s voice saying, “Have them go.” Was the voice talking about our T.A.P.S. team? It seemed like a reasonable assumption.
There was still a question as to what was causing the activity in the house. Was it Hayley? We couldn’t say. But it was clear that she was pleased with our results.
She had proof now. No one could call her crazy.
* * *
GRANT’S TAKE
In the early days of T.A.P.S., Jason and I would often do the analyses ourselves. However, we had long since turned that part of the investigation over to other people, mainly Steve and Brian—guys who had demonstrated a knack for finding a needle of evidence in a haystack of data. It was only because they fell short this time that we reprised our old roles.
* * *
THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER FEBRUARY 2005
Jealous women seemed to be the theme when we went down to New Orleans to help Bruce DeVille, who claimed he had a female spirit in his house that kept scaring off his lady friends. We were brought to the case by Pam Gates of Southern Louisiana Ghost Hunters, another member of the T.A.P.S. family, who believed DeVille’s stories were credible but lacked evidence to prove their veracity.
In fact, she had felt a push from behind when she investigated the DeVille house weeks earlier. So it wasn’t just her analysis of the situation that led her to call T.A.P.S. She was going by personal experience.
Because of the nature of the case, we brought two women with us from Rhode Island, Kristyn Gartland and Paula Donovan, both of whom had accompanied us to The Myrtles.
Even before we got out of the airport, we had trouble. Brian and Steve had driven down to Louisiana with our equipment to meet us at the airport and take us to DeVille’s place. However, they had a flat tire on the way and showed up late.
Normally, I wouldn’t have given them grief for it (well, not too much), but Brian was already on my bad side. His girlfriend, whom he had met because of his involvement with T.A.P.S., was on his cell phone with him constantly, bugging him about spending so much time with us and not enough with her. Every time I turned around, Brian was bent over his phone instead of doing his work.
Anyway, it didn’t take long to get from the airport to DeVille’s place. But just before we got there, we saw a neighbor point a shotgun at us. If we ventured onto his property, he told us, he would shoot us. We told him we were headed for the DeVille house and had no intention of trespassing on his land, but that didn’t seem to calm him down. If anything, it got him riled up even more.
We were still thinking about the guy when we pulled up in front of DeVille’s residence—a white frame house with green trim on land that had once been part of a sugarcane plantation. DeVille, a spare man with a dark mustache, said that as long as he had been bringing girlfriends to the house, they
had never felt comfortable there. When we asked him for background on the place, he said a woman had died there some years before his family moved in.
DeVille’s brother and sister lived in the house as well. His sister had periodically been plagued by shadows and voices in her bedroom. His brother’s room sometimes smelled like what DeVille described as “death.” And DeVille himself had felt someone crawl into bed with him in the middle of the night, though when he turned to see who it was there was no one there.
He also claimed to have encountered the ghost of a Cajun girl in his room. Pam backed him up, saying she believed she had seen the girl as well. Creeped out by the experience, DeVille had since moved to another room.
DeVille’s brother, a big, innocent-looking guy, turned out to be a fan of our TV show and of me in particular. He had even shaved his head to resemble me more closely. As luck would have it, his name was Jason too.
More than anything, DeVille wanted the spirit out of his house. Clearly, it was putting a crimp in his social calendar. But beyond that, he just wanted to lead a normal life.
Our plan was to have Kristyn remain with DeVille in his room in the hope that the spirit would get jealous and do something we could get on tape. We would have a camera running in that room, another in the room where the woman had died, and two more in DeVille’s sister’s room. It seemed like a sound approach, but it hit a snag almost right away.
From the time Kristyn entered the house, she felt uncomfortable and weighted down. She wasn’t a woman who was easily scared off, but in this case she said she didn’t want to stay there with DeVille. So we went to Plan B—a friend of DeVille’s named Ashley Smith, who was kind enough to come over and serve as our spirit-bait.
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