Ghost Hunting

  When I saw what my partner had captured, my mouth went dry. We had stumbled on a full-body apparition, the Holy Grail of the ghost-hunting field!

  Looking closer, I saw that the apparition had a numeral 2 on its sleeve—or seemed to. Actually, it was the numeral on the locker behind the apparition. But it looked like it was embroidered on the apparition’s sleeve, and—for no reason we could figure out—it was burning a bright, fiery red.

  Also, the apparition seemed to be wearing a hat of some kind. A Civil War soldier’s cap? That was how it looked, but it was hard to tell.

  Part of me was jazzed beyond belief. But there was another part that told me to be cautious, to keep my enthusiasm in check. We weren’t amateurs on our first jaunt through a cemetery. We had to make sure the apparition wasn’t something else before we could put any faith in it.

  Maybe it was a reflection of Grant. After all, it was looking back at him the way a reflection would. Putting him back where he was standing when he caught the image of the mysterious figure, we looked for a way the light could have bounced off a locker surface into the camera. We couldn’t find one.

  We also couldn’t figure out why that numeral 2 had glowed so red. On the locker, it was spray painted white, and it was as cool to the touch as the rest of the locker. There wasn’t any reason for it to be so hot, yet it had definitely shown up that way in the thermal image.

  I should have been ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t allow myself to trust what I had seen. We called Steve down, knowing he would approach the problem with a level head, but he couldn’t explain the figure either.

  The rest of the night was pretty quiet. But then, given what we had already captured, it was hard to concentrate. By 4: 30 we had logged nearly fifty hours of recordings. We decided to pack it up.

  Usually, I’m perfectly happy to get my sleep and leave the analysis phase of the investigation to someone else. This time, while Steve and Dave were going over our footage, Grant and I got up and returned to the morgue.

  I wanted to disprove the apparition before someone else did. As it turned out, we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t find anything to make that numeral 2 heat up, we couldn’t make Grant’s reflection in a mirror fit the form of that figure, and we couldn’t figure out where the hat came from.

  Also, we couldn’t imagine how Grant’s laptop had wound up leaning against the door of room 419. Unless, of course, there was some bona fide paranormal activity in the place. So there you have it.

  I don’t often find myself saying this about a place, but the Crescent Hotel is haunted.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  There was a moment when I knew what was in the thermal camera and Jason didn’t, and that was a moment of pure delight. First, because I had seen something amazing. And second, because I knew how bowled over Jason would be when he saw it.

  * * *

  DOCTOR’S HOUSE JUNE 2005

  While we were down in Eureka Springs, we visited the house of Dr. Ellis, the Crescent Hotel’s staff physician back in the 1890s. Filled with handsome, well-preserved Victorian furniture and an amazing collection of antiques, the place was owned by a guy named Carroll Heath, who claimed he was a medium.

  Heath had long believed that he shared his house with a number of “unseen friends,” including Dr. Ellis himself. When he played the piano in his parlor, he said he could feel a crowd gather around him, attracted by the music. On other occasions, he could hear people walking upstairs.

  He had seen a lady in Victorian clothing sitting and reading in the bay window of the master bedroom. And in the wooded hollow across the street, visible from that same bedroom, there had been sightings of ghostly beings and strange animals.

  Heath was the twelfth owner of the place. One of his predecessors had had the house exorcised, but—according to Heath—the exorcism hadn’t been successful. He was hoping T.A.P.S. could provide documentation.

  This time, we took Steve along when Heath gave Grant and me a tour of the place. It allowed the setup to proceed much more smoothly. Grant and I decided we would continue with that approach from then on.

  The plan was for Dustin and Dave to walk through the hollow across the street. We would have sent Steve, but he’s afraid of spiders. Before Dustin and Dave set out, they sprayed themselves with insect repellent. After all, this was Arkansas, a breeding ground for mosquitoes if there ever was one.

  Meanwhile, Steve and Donna turned the lights out in the house and took a walk through it with Heath as their guide. I must say it was good working with him. He had never met us before, but he seemed to fit right in.

  Dustin and Dave—who was wearing a headlamp that made him look like a cyborg out of a Star Trek episode—spent quite a bit of time in that hollow, dodging flying insects and huge spiders. Finally they came across something substantial, which could have been one of those strange animals Heath mentioned. As luck would have it, it was just a confused and scared-looking deer.

  At the same time, Grant and I were making our way around Heath’s house. At one point, we heard a distinct bang. Following the sound to what we believed was its source, we found something unexpected—but it wasn’t evidence of the paranormal. It was evidence that Steve, our tech guru, had screwed up.

  One of our cameras was on the floor, having fallen from the place where he’d taped it up. “Looks like Steve owes us four hundred dollars,” I muttered. I hate the idea of losing expensive equipment.

  As it turned out, the camera was okay. And according to Grant we were actually better off, since we had a better idea of how durable our cameras were. But then, my partner’s always looking on the bright side. To me, every silver lining’s got a dark cloud.

  Back at the hollow, Dustin and Dave weren’t having much luck, headlamp or no headlamp. They ran into a cat to go along with the deer, but that was about it.

  While Steve and Donna continued to take readings all around the house, Grant and I invited Heath to sit down with us and demonstrate his medium ability by giving me a personal reading. And since he didn’t mind, we would record the whole thing.

  Over the years, we’ve come across any number of people claiming to be mediums or sensitives. Of course, when we tested them, very few had any legitimate affinity for the paranormal. We were eager to see how Heath stacked up.

  Again, we put our thermal-imaging device to good use. While Heath gave me a reading, Grant trained the camera on us. I have to say here that Heath wasn’t working under the best conditions. In addition to Grant, we had a couple of guys with TV cameras in the room, so it wasn’t exactly a private encounter.

  Also, I was doing my best to block Heath’s efforts. Though I willingly repeated my full name three times, giving him permission to read me, I didn’t want my innermost secrets plastered all over national television.

  Nonetheless, Heath came up with some interesting stuff. He mentioned a farmhouse in the country and said I had memories of it but had never lived there. Check. He said deceased ancestors came to me when I slept. Check again. He said my wife wasn’t especially interested in the paranormal. Double check.

  Grant didn’t comment, but he did seem eager to get his reading next. He handed me the camera. Then, repeating his full name three times, he gave Heath the go-ahead. Heath told him that he had had a visitation from “the other side,” a near-death experience. Grant confirmed it.

  It was only after Heath had finished with him that Grant showed me what was in the thermal-imaging camera. Though I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary when Heath read my partner, Heath’s reading of me was a different story. As he proceeded, you could see my face and forehead turning bright red, as if my temperature was suddenly skyrocketing. And Heath? He was what Grant called “a psychedelic show,” a riot of every color in the rainbow.

  Then it got even stranger. As Heath and I spoke, a thick tendril of red moved out of me and began crossing the space between us. It migrated slowly but unmistakably in Heath’s direction. Suddenly, just befo
re it reached him, he gestured with his hand—and unknowingly wiped the tendril away.

  Now, the thermal-imaging camera is a new tool in our field, which is why we use it every chance we get. There could have been an explanation for what happened that didn’t involve the paranormal—for instance, something about the camera itself—so we called the company that made it and got hold of a tech guy.

  He didn’t seem especially interested in talking to a couple of ghost hunters, making sure to tell us he didn’t believe in the paranormal. He also couldn’t explain why the camera had recorded that kind of energy.

  When Steve saw the footage, he said, “Maybe it’s Heath that’s haunted, not his house.”

  When we returned to Heath’s parlor to tell him what we had found, he said his “unseen friends” had been active since we’d left, and were interested in our investigation. Grant and I told him that we hadn’t picked up anything significant in the hollow, but we had recorded something interesting in his house.

  Then we showed him the thermal-image recording. Needless to say, he was delighted. It validated the fact that he had the ability to draw energy from another person, which is a key to any psychic reading.

  We were delighted too. With a full-body apparition and a psychic energy migration in the can, our drive back to Rhode Island was a happy one.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Once again, I was in the position of having the thermal-imaging camera in my hands and knowing something Jason didn’t. It was pretty exciting. But it would have been even more exciting if Heath’s reading of me had produced the same results.

  * * *

  ROLLING HILLS ASYLUM JULY 2005

  The Rolling Hills Asylum in Batavia, New York, has been the site of misery, insanity, and the deaths of more than a thousand inmates over the course of its 180-year history. It was a prime place for a haunting if we at T.A.P.S. had ever heard of one.

  We were invited to investigate Rolling Hills by Lori Carlson, its owner. But the building had had a tortured history long before she got involved with it. It opened its doors in 1827, offering refuge to the unfortunates of Genesee County, New York. Its original residents included orphans, transients, unwed mothers—anyone who couldn’t support and care for himself, including the insane.

  New York State had a law back then that if people were homeless, they were automatically wards of the state. As a result, they were taken off the street and thrown into asylums. There, they were given the chance to grow their food on the hundreds of surrounding acres owned by the county.

  However, if the legends can be believed, there were sinister occurrences within the brick walls of the asylum. The people in charge of the place practiced devil worship and black witchcraft, secretly tortured their innocent charges, and made sacrifices of human infants.

  By the 1950s, the building had been turned into a nursing home, and it remained that way for about twenty years. Then its residents were moved to a new facility nearby, and Rolling Hills fell into disuse. For two decades it sat empty. Then it was refurbished and reopened as Carriage Village, a collection of small shops. It became Rolling Hills Country Mall in January 2003, a far cry from a house of madness and despair.

  But the grimmest features of the place remained intact over the years—for instance, the army of grass-covered mounds that still surrounds it. These are unmarked graves, filled with the bodies of a thousand John and Jane Does.

  Inside the building, you can still see the morgue where the bodies were examined prior to burial. Rolling Hills slaughtered its own animals, so it had a large meat locker. When the morgue was full, the administrators used the locker to store additional corpses—or so the story goes.

  When we arrived at the place, we were a team of six that included Grant, me, Dustin, Paula Donovan, Steve, and Dave. Carlson and her manager, Jim Swat, came out to welcome us. They were eager to share the list of claims people had made, which included ghostly voices, doors opening and closing on their own, and chairs moving about.

  People had smelled strange smells, felt their hair tugged, and heard noises where there shouldn’t have been any. And then there were the apparitions. One person had glimpsed a couple of kids walking through the place. Another had seen a woman being carried by her elbows.

  The asylum had had three floors. The first was where its offices had been located. The second was where its doctors had practiced electroshock therapy. On the third floor, we were introduced to a room where teenagers broke in from time to time and performed black magic rituals like those in the old Rolling Hills stories. We’re talking candles, weird paintings of cats, bats and skulls on the walls, and pentagrams.

  For me, this was something of a homecoming. I had spent the first part of my life about half an hour from Batavia, in a town called Canandaigua. Fortunately, Rolling Hills was nothing like the place where I had grown up.

  I was reminded of that as we were setting up our equipment and we spotted a car way off in the distance. It was just sitting there with its lights on, as if watching us and waiting for us to leave, even though our hosts had kept our investigation a secret.

  We asked them if they knew anything about the car, and they said they didn’t, so we drove over there to see what was going on. Before we could get there, the car sped away. To this day, we don’t know who was in it or what he wanted.

  In any case, we had an investigation to carry out. Steve and Donna began their part in the basement, where there was a strong and unmistakable smell of feces. Anybody who thinks ghost hunting is a glamorous deal should spend a few minutes down there. As it was, Steve and Donna could barely wait to escape.

  Dustin and Dave took the second floor. They weren’t getting anything unusual on their instruments, which was leading them to believe that the claims about the place were exaggerated—until Dustin felt something grab his ear.

  It wasn’t a light brush, either. Not the way he described it to us later. It was a firm, two-fingered tug.

  At that point, Grant and I were in the furnace room carrying out a thermal scan. Let me say this without reservation: we love our thermal-imaging device. It opens up ways of looking at the paranormal that we never had access to before.

  Unfortunately, we weren’t picking up anything with the thermal imager. If there’s nothing there, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your equipment is. Then, just like Dustin, I had an experience.

  It wasn’t a tug on the ear, though. It was more ominous. The furnace door, a metal monstrosity about two inches thick, suddenly swung closed on me.

  My first thought was that Grant had closed it on me as a joke, but he denied it. Unsure about what to make of the incident, I pushed the door open. This time, it swung closed even harder, pinning me for a moment.

  Okay, I thought, something’s going on here. Shoving the door off me again, I took a moment to examine it. As far as I could tell, there was no reason it should have swung anywhere. I tried kicking it, but it didn’t move an inch. And yet it had swung closed with no apparent provocation.

  Suddenly, it swung open again. And as it did, I heard a hissing sound. The next thing I knew, Grant and I were drowning in a river of flapping bat wings, and I did the one thing no self-respecting ghost hunter should ever do—I yelled.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Jason’s yell spooked me more than the sudden appearance of the bats. If Jason’s scared, I thought in that moment of surprise, I’m dead. Of course, neither of us was in any danger. The bats were more of a nuisance than anything else.

  * * *

  Evil person that I am, the bats gave me an idea. A few minutes later, we found Dave and Dustin. With a straight face, I sent them down to the basement—where, like us, they were swarmed over by a wave of bats. Except in their case it was worse, since Dustin is very particular about his hair. The thought of bats pulling at it made him freak a little.

  And we weren’t done yet. After all, Steve and Donna hadn’t gotten the bat treatment yet. Before long,
we heard their yells of surprise and disgust. Mission accomplished, I thought gleefully. In fact they had to brave the bats twice, because they forgot to take their cameras with them when they went running the first time.

  We sure had fun that night. But the next day, when we went over our recordings in a nearby Holiday Inn, we were disappointed—both for ourselves and for the owner of Rolling Hills. We couldn’t find a shred of evidence to prove the place was haunted.

  On the other hand, Dustin had felt a tug on his ear and I had had a furnace door close on me, so there is some sort of activity there. We just weren’t lucky enough to document it.

  THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY JULY 2005

  The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, was about as weird a place as you can imagine. But then, it hadn’t been built according to any plan. For thirty-eight years, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, workmen simply added rooms onto what was originally a six-room farmhouse, making it up as they went along.

  You see, a psychic back East had told Sarah “Daisy” Winchester that her husband and daughter had been killed by the ghosts of all the Native Americans who had fallen victim to the Winchester rifle, the most famous weapon in the Old West. If Daisy herself didn’t want to perish, she had to build a house out West and keep on building. Never mind that it didn’t make sense. Daisy fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

  Construction stopped when Daisy died of natural causes in 1922 at the age of eighty-three, but not before her house had grown to include 160 rooms. Forty of them were bedrooms. The place also boasted ten thousand windows, forty-seven fireplaces, and forty staircases, most of which led nowhere. Some doors led nowhere as well. As I said, the workers made it up as they went along.