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  We reviewed the videotape in the camera and didn’t see any sign of a human figure. However, we did see a flash of light and a collection of floating globules. Obviously, something had happened at that moment.

  The rest of the night was uneventful. It seemed to us, based on everything we had heard, that if there was a spirit in the house it was a harmless one. After all, it hadn’t done anything threatening. It just seemed to be curious about the baby and the new people in the house.

  When we followed up a few days later, we learned that Casey had been in contact with the homeowners and had told them what transpired. They were a little shaken by the information. Apparently, one of them had had a brother who had died in his early twenties during the 1950s. Eventually, they showed Casey a picture of the young man. He was exactly as she had described him.

  Grant and I encouraged Casey to reason with the spirit by explaining her family’s situation out loud and asking it politely to remain hidden until after the Kellys left. Casey did and the incidents stopped—until the day she and her family left the house. Then she saw the entity one last time, as if it were saying good-bye.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  People often look at us strangely when we tell them to communicate with the spirits haunting their homes. But sometimes it’s the only way to make a house livable again. If you had a neighbor who was doing something bothersome, you would talk to him, wouldn’t you? It’s the same with a ghost.

  * * *

  THE GHOST IN THE WALL MARCH 1997

  As Grant likes to point out, if a phenomenon occurs in only one spot, it’s most likely not of supernatural origin. The supernatural just isn’t that meticulous.

  That’s the first thing that occurred to us when Eric Small and his girlfriend, Tara Quinn, pointed out the lone wall from which they had heard voices and banging sounds every night. The couple also said they had been pushed into this wall against their will by an unseen force. However, they hadn’t seen, heard, or felt anything anywhere else in the house.

  Had we known in advance how localized the occurrences had been, we might have thought twice about making the four-hour trip to Hackensack, New Jersey, where Small and Quinn lived in a 1950s-era, cottage-style, two-bedroom home. But hey, we were there already. It would have been silly not to go ahead with the investigation.

  Besides, these people were obviously distraught over what was happening. We don’t like to abandon anyone in need of help.

  There were four of us representing T.A.P.S. at the house—Grant, me, an investigator named Brian Drevens, and Bethany Aculade, our group’s clairvoyant at the time. While Brian and I interviewed the couple, Grant and Bethany checked out the place and set up our equipment—which wasn’t difficult, given the concentrated location of all the occurrences.

  I couldn’t help noticing how the couple’s story seemed to change during the interview. At first, I thought they were simply confused. Then, when we were talking to them individually, we got conflicting accounts. Something fishy was going on.

  Meanwhile, Grant and Bethany found a number of books on the subject of hauntings under the bed in the master bedroom. This struck them as strange—not just that the couple was reading such books but that they had hidden them from view.

  A little while later, Brian went into the basement to look around and saw what appeared to be gray speaker wires going up into a wooden joist. The other end of the wires went into a back room that had a padlock on the door.

  We decided to keep all this to ourselves for the time being and see what the night had to offer. Right about the time Small mentioned, the noises began—and as he had claimed, they were all in the vicinity of the wall. Ghostly voices. Banging sounds. But they were flat somehow, missing the accompanying vibrations.

  That was when we asked the couple about the speaker wires in the basement. Small and Quinn seemed to become defensive at that point and refused to let us into the back room. The tension mounted as we insisted.

  Finally, they opened the door for us. The room contained a tape recorder, which was feeding banging noises and ghostly voices into a speaker embedded in the wall. You can imagine how ticked off we were.

  Small said he had tried to fool us in order to get his house on Sightings, a popular TV show in the 1990s that investigated the paranormal. He pointed out that George Lutz, the owner of the “Amityville Horror house,” had made millions off his experience once it was chronicled in a book and then a movie. Small wanted to ride the same gravy train—at our expense.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Unfortunately, the Small situation isn’t unique. We have found there are lots of people out there seeking to scam us in order to cash in one way or the other. Our best safeguard is the T.A.P.S. philosophy we established on Day One: Make sure you rule out the normal before you concede the possibility of the paranormal.

  * * *

  HIGH-RISE HAUNTING NOVEMBER 1997

  Dealing with the occult can be a nasty business. The key is to remember that malevolent spirits don’t just show up in a house—they’re invited by something one of the residents did. Usually, it’s an innocent act, a case of someone dabbling in things he doesn’t understand. But sometimes we have to wonder if the invitation might not have been a conscious one.

  By the time we got a call from the owner of a Toronto apartment building, he was frantic—so much so that we could barely make out what he was saying over the phone. All we could hear was “golf balls.”

  After we calmed him down a little, he started to make more sense. Apparently, he and his tenants were being tormented by a storm of paranormal activity. Doors were opening and closing on their own. Furniture was moving, keeping people from getting into their apartments. People kept hearing growls and other noises at all hours. And in one apartment, a box of golf balls insisted on emptying itself, the balls rolling into the form of an arrow.

  “What should I do?” the owner pleaded.

  “Don’t follow that arrow,” I said, as we started pulling things together for a trip up north. Obviously, this was a situation that had to be addressed immediately. “We’ll be there tomorrow.”

  It took us a few hours to gather a team of five, which included Keith Johnson, Andrew Graham, and Bethany Aculade, as well as the necessary equipment. By driving all night, we were able to arrive in Toronto the following morning. As we pulled up in front of the building, which was a high-rise, we were glad we had allotted ourselves three days to cover the place. Even then, we might be pressed for time.

  It turned out that the disturbances had mostly taken place on the tenth floor, and the owner already had an idea of where the problem had originated. He showed Grant and me into apartment 10C, from which a tenant had been evicted for failure to pay his rent. The place was full of occult symbols. Some of them were carved into the wooden furniture. Others were painted on the bedroom walls in fluorescent colors, visible only when we flipped the switch and activated a black-light bulb.

  Every room had different-colored bulbs. In the dining room and kitchen they were red, giving those rooms a really morbid atmosphere. There were also occult books and magazines all over the place, including some that contained the writings of Aleister Crowley—an occultist in the first half of the twentieth century who had been called “The Wickedest Man in the World.”

  In talking to the other tenants on the tenth floor, we learned more about the apartment of the evicted man. The lady across the hall, who owned a Chihuahua, told us that her dog had started barking uncontrollably at the door to 10C one day. As she went to pick him up, she saw the door open—on darkness, since there was no one there. Then, without warning, it slammed shut, prompting her to wet her pants in fright.

  Five people said they had seen a six-foot couch stand on its end, manipulated by unseen forces. They had also witnessed the golf ball phenomenon in 10C, with the balls forming an arrow that pointed into the tenant’s bedroom. A maintenance man had seen the refrigerator in the apartment sl
ide out of its place and throw its doors open. People who had entered the apartment of the evicted man out of curiosity had smelled bad odors from time to time and discovered scratches on their bodies where there hadn’t been any before.

  The other tenants were spooked, to say the least. They were moving out of the building in droves. In an attempt to keep them, the owner had had a Catholic priest bless the place, but the exorcism hadn’t obtained the desired effect. Keith Johnson, who is a priest himself, explained that if an exorcism isn’t conducted in a strategic manner, the entity in question can still find a way to hang on.

  Over the course of three nights, we went over 10C, its neighboring apartments, and the common areas of the building with every device at our disposal, and we experienced much of what the residents had experienced. Lights went on and off. Doors opened and closed. Furniture moved by itself. Members of our T.A.P.S. team caught electronic voice phenomena that appeared to be words spoken in Latin.

  At one point, Grant and I were exploring 10C when we heard the sound of hammering, which seemed to be coming from the bedroom. But when we opened the door and followed it in, we heard it coming from elsewhere in the apartment.

  What might have been the most shocking demonstration of the paranormal was the golf ball formation. Right before our eyes, the box opened and the golf balls came rolling out over the kitchen floor. Before they were done, they had formed a perfect arrow pointing to the bedroom. There was no slope in the room, so that couldn’t have been the explanation for it. Those balls just rolled on their own, as if they knew what they were doing.

  Personally, I hate it when objects move on their own. It gives me the creeps like nothing else can.

  One conclusion seemed indisputable: there was an inhuman entity infesting apartment 10C. The evicted man had opened some sort of doorway, allowing a malevolent spirit to enter his domicile and take charge of it. If we could evict it, the building would probably return to normal.

  But as we had pointed out to the owner, an exorcism had to be carried out in a certain way if it was to do any good. With the owner’s approval, Keith blessed the place with holy water, starting with the four corners of the building in order to keep the malevolent spirit from escaping the premises. Then he blessed the rest of the high-rise, one apartment at a time.

  In the process, members of our team reported feeling scratched, slapped, and pushed. And paranormal activity wasn’t abating in 10C. But Keith pressed on. Finally, he got to the source of the trouble. As he blessed 10C itself, dishes and glasses started falling from the cabinets in the kitchen and shattering on the floor. Then, all of a sudden, the activity stopped.

  It was quiet in the apartment. As far as we could tell, the entity was gone.

  We had one regret as we left Toronto: though we had caught some of the paranormal activity with our cameras, we had to turn the tapes over to the owner of the apartment house in accordance with his request. What’s more, we understood. If the results of our investigation had ever gotten out, he wouldn’t have been able to rent an apartment in that building ever again.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  I’ll never forget that nice old lady with the Chihuahua. She was genuinely scared, and with good reason. No one was happier than she was when the activity ceased and the building got back to normal.

  * * *

  UNHOLY SPIRITS FEBRUARY 1998

  We look to our houses of worship for shelter in spiritual matters. But what happens when a house of worship is itself haunted?

  That was the question in front of us when a pastor in eastern Connecticut called T.A.P.S. to investigate his old Baptist church, which was rife with seemingly paranormal activity. He first got an inkling that something was amiss when he heard laughter from the mezzanine during one of his sermons. Although the church was full at the time, he was the only one who heard the strange laughing sound. It chilled him, but he convinced himself that he had misheard. Then it happened again, and it continued to happen.

  When he was busy in his office, he would hear the sounds of a crowd in the chapel. But when he went to check out the noise, he saw no one. Lights turned on late at night, seemingly of their own volition. One time when the pastor arrived at the church early, he found most of the free-standing pews stacked in front of the main chapel doors.

  From the vantage point of a playground across the street from the church, parents pushing their kids on swings would see a winged creature standing next to the church entrance—and it didn’t look like an angel. Its wings were sloped downward, like a demon’s.

  Clearly the pastor had a problem, one he couldn’t dismiss. The final straw was when he was standing in the chapel and saw some man-shaped shadows approach him, then fade away. It made him wonder if there was something evil in his church, something that needed to be addressed—and soon.

  When our team arrived, we found the pastor to be a kindly, soft-spoken gentleman. He and his maintenance man gave us a tour of the church property, which included a walk through an old Christian graveyard. We would have to investigate that as well if we were going to do a thorough job.

  As we returned to the church, the pastor mentioned that the building was old, but he didn’t know exactly how old. In fact, he didn’t know very much of its history. We made it our business to do some research in that regard.

  As two of our people continued to interview the pastor, Grant, Keith Johnson, and I set up our equipment in the chapel and the mezzanine above it. We didn’t have to wait long before we started seeing the types of activity the pastor had seen.

  At about 12:45 a.m., the motion detectors we had left in the mezzanine sounded an alarm just as the temperature in the chapel plummeted some twelve degrees. A knocking sound traveled rapidly around the perimeter of the chapel from one end to the other. And soon after, Keith recorded an EVP from the mezzanine that sounded like people marching.

  At around 2:00 a.m., we were all in the church’s rec room. One of our members went into the chapel to retrieve her EMF detector (a piece of equipment that measures variances in the electromagnetic field), which she had left there, and she witnessed three apparitions dressed in outdated clothing—all of them male. We rushed out into the chapel to join her, too late to see the apparitions. But we could hear faint sounds of many people moving about.

  At the same time, one of our members who was checking out the graveyard caught sight of an entity walking through it. It looked to him like a soldier. When he approached it, the entity appeared to dissipate.

  The evidence was mounting that we weren’t dealing with one supernatural entity but many. The question was why. What had happened in that place to tie so many spirits to it? Why were they still there?

  The next day, we began our research—and found some answers. It turned out that the church wasn’t the first one to stand on that property. Another church had preceded it—one that was had been used as a refuge for soldiers returning from the Civil War. Unfortunately, that earlier church had caught fire one night, and many of those sleeping inside it had perished in the blaze.

  Sometime later, the current church was erected, built on the original foundation. That was why we had heard the sound of marching. We were dealing with the spirits of Civil War soldiers. At the pastor’s request, Keith blessed the place and set the spirits free. The activity ceased immediately.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  We maintain a relationship with the Catholic Church, which has priests dedicated to addressing supernatural activity. Usually, we’re calling on the church for help. This time, it was the other way around.

  * * *

  POSSESSED MAY 1998

  When Nora and Timothy Sawyer called T.A.P.S. in a panic because their daughter Emily was cursing a blue streak and throwing heavy furniture around the room, one word kept coming up over and over again: Possession.

  Everyone who has seen the movie The Exorcist knows about possession. An individual is taken over by a demonic entity, often through no fa
ult of her own. The victim may babble, fall prey to seizures, display marked changes in personality, or demonstrate superhuman strength.

  Emily Sawyer was doing all of the above.

  When our T.A.P.S. team arrived at the Sawyer house in Falmouth, Massachusetts, nine-year-old Emily was dragging furniture around her bedroom and swearing like a sailor. It took all four of us—Grant, me, Andrew Graham, and a Catholic priest—to restrain her. It wasn’t easy, either. We didn’t want to hurt her. We just wanted to evict the demon inside her.

  As the priest began the rite of exorcism, Emily was still twitching and spasming, her pupils dilated, her hands curled into claws. Her face was a battleground, reflecting the forces writhing inside her. As fathers, it tore us up to see a child in such torment. Finally, the rite was completed and she went limp.

  By then, we were pretty limp too, our clothes damp with sweat. But our job wasn’t done. It’s not enough to chase the demonic spirit from its host. You have to cleanse the whole house.

  As the priest and Andrew opened doors and blessed all the other rooms in the house, Grant and I sat down with the family, which included another daughter—a sixteen-year-old named Annie. They told us they had been experiencing other phenomena besides Emily’s bizarre rampages.

  There were drastic temperature changes in the house, usually from cold to hot. Growls could be heard in the hallways and in the basement. From time to time, they smelled dirty diapers in the girls’ bedrooms.

  The adults said they had seen objects moving on their own—candles sliding, chairs falling over, and the chandelier spinning in the kitchen. Annie, on the other hand, seemed reluctant to talk about the moving objects. Grant and I got the impression that she was holding something back.