Ghost Hunting

  This time, it was Steve and Dave who went over the data. After all, Dave had said he wanted to get involved in all aspects of the investigation. But it wasn’t just a matter of our helping Dave. Before long, he made a contribution by finding an EVP on one of our audio recordings.

  It had taken place in one of the bedrooms, right after Steve and Mike had posed a question. You could hear a female voice saying “…keys…” or “…kitties…” On the other hand, we weren’t sure where Cheryl had been at the time, so we couldn’t say for sure it was a legitimate piece of evidence.

  The cough Mike and Dustin had heard would have been a nice piece of documentation as well—except we couldn’t find a recording of it. That left us with Grant’s experience, a questionable EVP, and an unrecorded sound.

  Instead of making the trek back to New Hampshire, we called the Worthingtons from our conference room. Needless to say, Cheryl was eager to hear about our experiences and how we interpreted them. All things considered, we said, it seemed there was some activity in the house but we couldn’t prove it.

  However, we went on, the family didn’t have to let a supernatural entity push them out. By getting together and taking a stand, they could show the spirit who was boss and reclaim their home. Others had done it with lasting effect.

  But it sounded like Cheryl was leaning toward leaving. “Why stay?” she asked. “It’s not fair to the kids.”

  Whatever she and her husband finally decided, we sympathized with them. We were parents too.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  I’ve felt the touch of spirits before. I’ve seen objects move with my own eyes and even captured their movement on videotape. But that was the first time I had been hit with anything as big as a drum.

  * * *

  THE HOUSE WITH A HISTORY JUNE 2005

  As I’ve noted, I had a problem with visions when I was in my early twenties. It was a constant source of pain to me in that I wondered if I was losing my mind. I don’t know how I would have survived the experience if not for the patience and compassion of a ghost hunter named John Zaffis.

  Zaffis steadied me and assured me that I wasn’t going nuts. He told me that I was just sensitive to paranormal phenomena. He was the one who suggested I find people with similar problems and that we turn to each other for support. That’s how I founded RIPS, and then wound up cofounding T.A.P.S. with my friend Grant.

  So, when you come right down to it, I have John Zaffis to thank for my status as a ghost hunter. And it’s his example that has allowed me to become a good one. But over the years, Zaffis and I have become more than colleagues in the pursuit of the paranormal. We have become close friends.

  That’s why I always jump at the chance to include Zaffis on one of T.A.P.S.’ ghost-hunting forays. It doesn’t happen that often because he’s got a load of his own cases, and his approach tends to be different from ours. But on one particular investigation, I really wanted Zaffis to come along.

  I first learned about it when Grant and I—in our day jobs as plumbers—were taking out a dishwasher from a fish-and-chips restaurant. We got a call on my cell phone from Donna, who told us we had been invited by Norma Sutcliffe to visit the home she shared with her husband in the northern part of the state. I was jazzed because the place had a history of paranormal occurrences.

  Twenty years earlier, a previous owner had allowed it to be investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren, who had been chasing ghosts since 1952. The Warrens, who claimed to be sensitives, said the activity in the house was off the charts, an eleven on a scale of one to ten. But as always, they went strictly by their feelings. There was nothing scientific about their approach to ghost hunting.

  At T.A.P.S., any instincts we might have with regard to the supernatural are just the beginning of our investigation. We don’t say a place is haunted unless we have backup in the form of documentation. So we had to take any conclusion reached by the Warren group with a grain of salt.

  Which brings me to the reason I wanted to include my friend Zaffis in the case. As it happens, Zaffis is the Warrens’ nephew. If we were going to examine the same premises they’d examined, it seemed right to bring him along.

  In addition to Zaffis, Grant and I recruited Steve, Dustin, and Donna to visit the Sutcliffe house with us. It had been built in the mid-1700s, even before the War for Independence, when houses were all made of wood and had lower ceilings than we do today. You couldn’t walk in and not feel the history in the place.

  Legend has it that the original owner got drunk in his barn one night during a blizzard. At first, he tried to wait it out, but eventually he got too cold and tried to make it back to the house. It wasn’t far—less than a hundred feet—but he never made it. He was found the next day lying face-down in the snow, frozen to death.

  Previous owners had heard footsteps and voices and seen entities, including gray mists, dark shadows, and so on. They had seen doors open and close on their own. Pretty much the gamut of paranormal activity.

  I was eager to hear what kind of experiences the Sutcliffes had had.

  Mrs. Sutcliffe took Grant, John, and me to a part of the house where she and her husband had seen a door rattle and shake until he finally opened it. In the study, which was full of books, she showed us a chair that vibrated when her husband sat down in it. Then she escorted us to the master bedroom, where she said the bed had shuddered for a minute or two on several occasions.

  Zaffis wanted to check out the study and its vibrating chair. Sitting down in it, he opened himself up to the room, trying to get a sense of the forces at work there. I like to do the same thing, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have.

  Zaffis had his first brush with the paranormal at fifteen, when he encountered an apparition of his grandfather. From that point on, he couldn’t learn enough about ghosts and the way they manifested themselves in our lives. His approach to ghost hunting was a little less scientific than the one Grant and I had adopted, but we valued his sensitivity and experience.

  As Zaffis maintained his vigil in the study, Donna and I checked out the master bedroom, where the Sutcliffes claimed their bed had vibrated. While Donna reclined on the bed, I sat in a nearby chair. After a while, I felt it vibrate, if only just a little—at exactly the same time that Zaffis felt his do the same.

  Then something else happened. As Donna and I were talking, we heard a door in the room unlatch and open. But when we examined it, we saw it was still closed. We were surprised. It had sounded exactly as if it were opening.

  I turned the handle and opened the door—and with a shock, saw what looked like someone on the other side. To my relief, it was just a hanging jacket. There was a mattress there too, which made it difficult to get past the door into what looked like a walk-in closet.

  When I slipped inside, I saw another door at the closet’s far end. As it turned out, the closet connected the master bedroom to a second bedroom. It occurred to me that one of our guys was playing a prank, but everyone except Donna, Zaffis, and me was outside the house.

  I called Steve and Dustin in the mobile command center and asked them to rewind their recording of what had happened to Donna and me, as captured by the equipment in the room. When they did so, they could hear the door unlatch, just as we had. They marked that portion of the audio for special attention.

  By that time, Steve and Dustin were eager to get some time in the house themselves, so we let them out of the van and unleashed them on the study. As they were walking around the room, Dustin felt something grab and squeeze his hand. Afterward, he felt a coldness there, as if his hand had been bathed in ice.

  It’s a common side effect of physical contact with a paranormal entity. In Dustin’s case the feeling didn’t last that long, but it can stay with you a while. Of course, everyone’s experience is different.

  Steve and Dustin also took readings upstairs in the master bedroom. Like Donna and me, they heard the closet door open. When they checked it out, they found that the d
oor on the opposite end was open—even though they had made a point of closing it a few moments earlier.

  Not too much later, I made the decision to pack up. At that point, Grant was in the other bedroom—the one that shared the closet with the master bedroom—sitting on the bed and doing some EVP work. The cameraman who was with him stepped out of the room for a moment, leaving Grant by himself.

  After a while, Grant realized that something had changed. Using his iPod for a light source, he saw that the closet door to his right was wide open. He hadn’t heard it move, but there it was. So he experienced the door phenomenon as well.

  When we were done packing, we said goodnight to Mrs. Sutcliffe and began loading our vehicles. We were halfway done when a bat flew into one of the SUVs. Dustin said he didn’t care about the bat—unless, of course, it got caught in his hair.

  Later that day, Steve and Dustin began their analysis. The first significant footage they came across revealed what appeared to be an orb in the study. However, on closer inspection it turned out to be a reflection from our camera. Then they found something really interesting.

  As you’ll recall, Donna and I had heard the closet door unlatch in the master bedroom. Then, to our surprise, we had seen that it was still closed. Well, later in the investigation the door did open itself, right there on one of our cameras. And not a little—it opened a couple of feet.

  Then, still on camera, the door closed. But it wasn’t done performing for us. Twenty-two minutes later it opened again, this time all the way. Finally, it closed, locking itself. You could hear the latch plain as day.

  There was no one in the room. In fact, our quad footage, which allows us to monitor four cameras at once, showed us we were all eating at the time. So whatever was happening seemed to be doing so without human assistance.

  Being my usual skeptical self, I had to wonder if there wasn’t a draft coming through the closet from the other end. And even though the Sutcliffes and our T.A.P.S. team were all accounted for, I couldn’t completely rule out the notion of human intervention. We needed to get back to the house and take another look.

  When we returned to the Sutcliffe residence, Grant and I examined the closet door more closely. I went inside the closet and tried to open the door, but it wasn’t easy. There was no way a draft could have done it.

  Also, there was a mattress standing on its side in the closet, restricting movement in there. Anyone opening the door from inside the closet would have been forced by the mattress to come into view of our camera. That ruled out “foul play.”

  When we met with Norma Sutcliffe, we showed her the video of the door and told her about our experiences. Something had happened to each and every one of us in her house. All things considered, Grant and I had to agree that the place was haunted.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  We subject all of our observations to rigorous tests. In the case of the door in the Sutcliffes’ master bedroom, we tried to find a way to open it from inside the closet—and couldn’t find one. Only then did we agree that the supernatural might have been involved.

  * * *

  HORROR HOTEL JUNE 2005

  Most groups in search of the paranormal are only too happy to embrace “evidence” when they find it. T.A.P.S. is different. We examine that evidence five ways to Sunday, looking for a way to disprove it—to show that it’s attributable to a breeze, or a reflection, or some other normal, everyday phenomenon. And the more spectacular the finding, the more eager we are to find an explanation for it.

  It sounds masochistic, I know. But that’s how we’ve established a reputation for credibility. Our first impulse is to debunk even when it’s our own findings that we’re debunking. In fact, we often go at our own observations harder than we go at other people’s, because we don’t want to put our stamp of approval on them and then see someone else pick them apart.

  Of course, there are times when we can’t debunk a finding, when the evidence is so clear that we have to accept it as evidence of the paranormal—which brings us to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, home of the infamous Crescent Hotel.

  The Crescent Hotel and Spa was built in 1886 by investors who believed the hot springs in the area possessed healing powers. Its first house physician was a man named Dr. Ellis, a respected doctor in his day. For a long time, the Crescent was known as America’s most luxurious hotel.

  Then time passed it by, and people began to catch on that the hot springs were just hot springs. Shortly after 1900, the building became a conservatory for young ladies, and it stayed that way pretty much until the 1930s, when a quack named Norman Baker, who claimed to be a doctor, conned people into thinking he had developed a cure for cancer.

  That was when things got ugly. Taking the life savings of desperate cancer patients, Baker subjected them to cruel and outlandish methods that had no chance of working. One of his favorite techniques was to open a person’s skull, treat the brain with a paste of mashed walnuts and mineral oil, then close the skull up again. In the end, his patients all died, some of them in terrible pain without the benefit of anesthesia.

  T.A.P.S. responded to an invitation to check out the hotel with a team of six—Steve, Donna, Dustin, and Dave Tango in addition to Grant and me. We were greeted by Jack Moyer, the hotel’s general manager, as well as Ken Fugate, Eureka Springs’ resident historian.

  The first thing they showed us was the dining room, where a table in the corner was set for two—a Victorian gentleman known as Jacob and the lady he loved, who was supposed to have met him for breakfast in the hotel but never showed up.

  Our next destination was room 212, where the esteemed Dr. Ellis had had his offices. Guests of the hotel had reported seeing a man in Victorian dress come out of the elevator, cross the hall, and go straight through the door of room 212—without opening it. In room 419, guests had woken in the morning to find their clothes packed and their bags neatly stacked by the door.

  Down in the morgue, where Norman Baker carried out autopsies, the table he used was still standing against the wall. It was in that same room that he’d stored human body parts in large glass jars full of formaldehyde.

  The paranormal activity in that area, according to Fugate, was attributable to the guard, who had a hostile nature. Moyer said that any number of guests and employees had had experiences in the hotel, but he wanted T.A.P.S. to document them.

  Whenever we can, we stay up late the night before an investigation in order to acclimate ourselves to working into the wee hours. That’s what we did our first night in Eureka Springs, finally going to bed at four-thirty or five in the morning.

  Sometime later, I heard someone knocking on my door. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it was 5: 30. Too fuzzy to figure out what was going on, I said, “Who is it?” A voice outside said, “The building’s on fire. You’ve got to leave.”

  I put on my clothes and opened the door. There was no sign of a fire—just a little old man going about two miles an hour, knocking on doors. I didn’t believe the hotel was on fire, not at the pace this guy was going. Still, I went outside and saw everyone else out there, and realized there was a fire all right.

  It was the roof. Apparently, it had been hit by lightning. But like the little old man, no one seemed in any particular hurry. Not even the fire department, when it finally showed up. For a while, I had to wonder if we were still going to be able to investigate the place, or if we were going to have to call it off. Or maybe be restricted in terms of where we could set up.

  Fortunately, the damage was minimal and we weren’t restricted at all—not that it was going to be an easy job. For one thing, the place was huge. For another, the rooms we were going to check out offered logistical problems. Knowing this, Grant and I had given Donna a list of everything we wanted to cover.

  But when she met with Steve, Dustin, and Dave, it became obvious that she couldn’t answer their questions—for instance, how to get a cord all the way down into the morgue and where to aim our cameras.
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  It was Steve who pointed out that we needed to give the rest of the team better information. Grant and I agreed that we would take Steve on the tour next, so he could get a better understanding of the job at hand.

  The first inkling we got that there was genuine activity in the hotel was when Dustin tried to get into room 419, where Grant had left his laptop, and felt resistance against the door. Pushing against it, he heard a thump.

  It was the laptop. Although Grant had left it on the other side of the room, in front of the TV, it had somehow gotten propped up against the base of the door—even though there was no one in the room. Putting the laptop back in front of the television, Dustin made a mental note to tell Grant and me about the incident.

  When we heard about it, we immediately made an EMF sweep of the room. It didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. However, it was a promising beginning. Encouraged, Grant and I took our new favorite toy—our thermal-imaging camera—and went to check out the morgue.

  It was eerie down there. Even without the jars full of human body parts, we had no trouble remembering how many corpses had lain in that room, victims of Norman Baker as much as their own cancers.

  The camera didn’t show us anything as we scanned the morgue table. Everything seemed to be more or less the same temperature, the same energy level, so it appeared pretty much the same color in the viewfinder.

  We checked our watches—which showed us it was a few minutes after one—and kept going. In a back room of the morgue, we found a series of numbered lockers. Grant was scanning them when he came across something. Something incredible, judging by the look on his face.

  He rewound the camera and showed it to me. It was clearly and unmistakably the figure of a man rendered in gaudy thermal colors, less than six feet from Grant and the camera. And the figure was looking back at Grant, as if it was as curious about him as we were about it.