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  When we pressed her, she admitted that she and her friends had begun using a Ouija board and dabbling in black magic. However, she said, she hadn’t gotten her sister involved in any way. Her parents went nuts, demanding to know the extent of what she had done and why she hadn’t told them about it.

  As they argued, Grant and I saw dark masses appear and slink around the hallway and the bottom of the stairway. The temperature in the room was rising noticeably—nearly fifteen degrees, according to our instruments. Up in her bedroom, Emily began to foam at the mouth.

  Calming everyone down, Grant and I explained to Annie what she had brought into the house. When it comes to the occult, the younger members of a household “belong” to the older members and can be placed at risk by the older members’ actions. So when Annie had taken part in black magic, she’d dragged her sister in with her, and it was Emily who was paying the price.

  It was critical that Annie stayed away from the occult from that point on, or her sister would be placed in jeopardy again, exorcism or no exorcism. Responding to what was essentially a wake-up call, Annie agreed to steer clear of black magic. She just hadn’t realized the demonic trouble she’d been inviting.

  Unfortunately, the trouble wasn’t gone yet. It continued to rage as our friend the priest blessed one part of the house after another. The chandelier in the kitchen spun around, all the doors in the hallway swung open and closed, and two more black masses appeared in the corners of rooms.

  Finally, the priest had blessed every area in the house except the girls’ bedrooms. As he got to work there we experienced heightened activity, including crazy temperature swings and difficulty breathing. At one point, I was slapped in the shoulder by something I couldn’t see. Grant was grabbed around the middle.

  The priest was feeling the entity’s resistance as well. However, he hung in there and finished with his blessing. As the entity left, there was a loud growling sound and the room seemed to shake. Then everything was still. Emily fell into a sound, untroubled sleep and, according to her parents, hardly got up for the next two days straight.

  Grant and I got Annie to give us her Ouija board, and we removed it from the house. We’ve remained in contact with the Sawyer family, and we know that the demonic activity that plagued their family has ceased. The exorcism worked.

  At T.A.P.S., we get “possession” calls all the time. Ninety-nine percent of them turn out to be bogus. This one was all too real.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  When we experiment with the occult, we’re not just endangering ourselves—we’re endangering those around us. We can say all we want that we’re not our brothers’ keepers. But when it comes to the supernatural, we are.

  * * *

  SQUEAKY TOYS SEPTEMBER 1998

  Usually, dogs and cats react to spirits in a negative way. It’s difficult to say why. Maybe they’re sensitive to the paranormal in ways most human beings aren’t. But in the ghost-hunting field we never say never, because we’re constantly coming across exceptions to the rules.

  One of them was in Toms River, New Jersey, in the condominium home Jim Coors shared with his dog Benny. We knew that the condo had been a flour mill at one time, so we kept that in mind during the investigation.

  The problem, as reported by Coors, was that his dog liked to play with squeaky toys and the sounds of these toys kept him up at night. As a result, he had taken to stowing Benny’s three toys in a closet outside his bedroom. This seemed like a logical measure—until one day, Jim woke to the sound of squeaking and found Benny playing with his toys.

  Thinking the closet door might not have locked, he went to check it out, only to find that it was closed. A curious situation, to say the least. The next night, Jim put Benny’s toys away in the closet again—and found them in Benny’s possession the following morning. As before, the closet door was shut, and Coors couldn’t imagine how Benny had gotten the toys.

  Still trying to puzzle it out, he took his regular morning shower. As always, his bathroom mirror steamed up. There was nothing unusual about that. But when he got out of the shower, he saw handprints in the steam—small ones, like a child might have made. Freaking out a little, Coors tried to wipe off the prints, but they wouldn’t go away…because they were on the inside of the mirror.

  After that, Coors noticed his dog playing with something he couldn’t see. This began to happen on a regular basis, making Coors wonder what was going on. But it didn’t actually scare him until he saw Benny playing with what appeared to be a small boy. A single man without any children, Coors went over to investigate and saw the boy dissipate like smoke on the wind.

  It wasn’t the last time he would see the boy, either. The child turned up on Jim’s stairs, walking down them as if headed for the living room. Again, as soon as Coors approached him, he vanished.

  And the squeaky toy problem kept getting bigger. The more Coors tried to keep the toys from Benny, the more they multiplied. New toys showed up alongside the old ones, though Coors hadn’t bought them. By the end of October, he found himself shoving as many as twenty toys into the closet at night. By the next morning they were out again—and the closet door was still locked.

  At his wits’ end, he called in T.A.P.S. Grant and I showed up with Keith Johnson, Heather Drolet, and our usual complement of recording equipment. Heather was a single mom with three kids, who also happened to be a practicing pagan. When she first joined the group, we put her in charge of personnel, but she wanted to do more.

  As we started bringing her along on investigations, we discovered that she was an uncanny interviewer. She could be as nice as you please but get just about anything out of anybody. She would ask a question five different ways until she finally got a reasonable answer.

  In this case, however, we wanted her to learn more about the equipment, so while Grant and I interviewed Coors and calmed him down, Heather and Keith walked through the home and set up our instruments. Then we began our investigation.

  The whole time, Benny looked at us with his big, innocent eyes. If he knew the truth of the situation, he wasn’t telling. One thing was for sure, though: he wasn’t skittish. If there was a spirit in the house, it didn’t bother him in the least.

  The first thing I did was kick the shower on full blast at its highest temperature. When the room steamed up, it bore out what Coors had been saying. There were child-sized handprints on the inside of the mirror, and they wouldn’t go away no matter how much I wiped at them.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t pick up any other evidence of the paranormal that night. But those handprints were clear proof that something was going on in the condo. Packing up and taking a couple of squeaky toys with us for analysis, we embarked on the research phase of our investigation.

  It turned up some interesting information. Apparently, a ten-year-old boy had died of pneumonia in the immediate area, and the child Coors had seen playing with Benny looked to be about that age. We wondered if the boy’s spirit was the presence Coors had been experiencing.

  As I mentioned, animals are usually stressed out by the paranormal. But if Benny was only seeing a small boy, he might not have felt threatened, regarding the boy as a playmate.

  The one aspect of the case we couldn’t explain was the proliferation of squeaky toys. However, we offered the homeowner Keith’s services as a priest if he wanted to cleanse his condo of its resident spirit.

  As it happened, Coors wouldn’t have any part of it. Now that he knew he was dealing with a child-entity and an apparently benign one, he felt much more comfortable with the situation. Even the squeaky toys didn’t seem to bother him so much—but he did give up on locking them up at night.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  People often get weirded out by supernatural activity. It’s only normal to fear what we don’t understand. But when our clients see what they’re dealing with, they sometimes—like Jim Coors—choose to embrace it rather than chase it away.

  * * *


  INCUBUS JULY 1999

  Everyone in Rhoda Long’s historic Newport, Rhode Island, neighborhood thought she was crazy when she said she had been violated by an invisible entity.

  At first, she had only seen shadows that shouldn’t have been there and heard noises she couldn’t explain. Then, in the middle of the night, she woke to the sound of growling and a feeling that someone or something was holding her down. At the same time, she felt a terrible pressure between her legs, an insistent pushing that she desperately wanted to stop.

  But she couldn’t. In fact, she couldn’t move at all. She could barely even breathe, the air was so thick and heavy around her.

  The feeling lasted for only twenty seconds, but it felt like a lifetime. When it finally ended, Rhoda sat up in bed and gasped for air. Her husband, Roger, alarmed by her behavior, asked her what was wrong. When she told him, he didn’t know what to make of it. Eventually, they went back to sleep and tried to forget about it.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t Rhoda’s last such experience. A few days later, she was coming out of the shower when she got the feeling she was being groped. Again, it only lasted for about twenty seconds. But this time, she was left with more than a memory. She had red marks all over her torso—the kind a pair of grabbing hands might have made.

  Needless to say, Rhoda was scared out of her wits. And it got worse that night, when she felt pressure again in the same place, and again she couldn’t move to try to make it stop. It was as if she was paralyzed, if only for a few seconds.

  Rhoda told people what had happened to her, but no one seemed to believe her. She became a nervous wreck, dreading the idea of falling asleep. She began chain-smoking cigarettes, though she had seldom smoked them before.

  And the violations kept occurring.

  After a while, the nightmare expanded to other parts of Rhoda’s life. She would leave her kitchen in perfect order and come back to find all the cabinets open. At least once a day, she heard banging sounds coming from her basement.

  Finally, she called in T.A.P.S. Hearing how troubled she was, Grant and I put together a team and responded as quickly as we could. Because of the nature of Rhoda’s experiences, we brought along a woman team member, Heather Drolet.

  When we arrived, Heather sat down with Rhoda to interview her and reassure her while the rest of us explored the house. Heather found that Rhoda had occasionally used a Ouija board, which can give demonic spirits an excuse to enter a house. It wasn’t a good sign.

  In the meantime, Grant and I checked out the basement, where Rhoda had heard banging sounds. Being plumbers, we were able to come up with an explanation for the noises. The city of Newport has notoriously high water tables, and the Longs were running a sump pump to keep water from flooding their basement. However, the pipes in the basement weren’t braced, so when the water table rose and the pump came on, the pipes would bang. Nothing supernatural there.

  But the banging had been the least of Rhoda’s problems. As we continued our investigation, I entered the Longs’ bedroom and lay down to get the feel of the place. Before long, I felt a weight on my chest—exactly what Rhoda had described. When I tried to get up, I couldn’t.

  It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. And as I lay there, I thought I saw someone leave the room. But at that point, my fellow ghost hunters were elsewhere. I should have been all by myself.

  A few seconds later, the feeling passed and I was able to get up. But I’ll never forgot the feeling of helplessness I experienced. I began to get an inkling of what Rhoda was going through.

  Grant and I talked about it and admitted the possibility that Rhoda was being tormented by an incubus—a demonic spirit that lies down on sleepers, especially women, in order to have sexual intercourse with them. The incubus is also said to drain energy from its victim in order to sustain itself.

  On the other hand, there was a scientific explanation for her troubles—a phenomenon called sleep paralysis. Sufferers find they can’t move, get the feeling that someone is on top of them, and sometimes see shadowy figures. But I had felt the same thing in the Longs’ bedroom, and I had never been prone to sleep paralysis before.

  In the end, we weren’t able to document Rhoda’s experiences. However, in light of what had happened to me and the intensity of Rhoda’s feelings, we had Keith Johnson perform an exorcism. We stayed in touch with the Longs after that, but they never again reported any experiences out of the ordinary.

  Most of the time when we run into a paranormal entity, it’s a benign one. If there was an entity plaguing Rhoda Long, it was what we call “negative” or “inhuman.” That’s the kind we don’t play around with.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  One of the reasons people reach out to us is a need for assurance that they’re not insane. Rhoda Long’s experiences were horrible enough without her having to doubt her sanity. Fortunately, we were able to help her on all counts. In our field, that’s a home run.

  * * *

  WHAT A CHILD SEES AUGUST 1999

  When an adult reports the sighting of a spirit, all kinds of questions arise. When the reporter is a child, and a very young one at that, there are even more questions—from her parents in particular. Is their child crazy? What should they do to make the sightings stop?

  Four-year-old Selena Taylor told her parents, Louis and Delia, that she talked to “Grandma” on a regular basis. Unfortunately, her grandmother had passed away several months earlier. Louis and Delia might have chalked this up to their child’s imagination except for the fact that Selena seemed to know things only her grandmother could have told her.

  Beyond that, objects were disappearing in the Taylor house, a single-family duplex in Franklin, Massachusetts. There were noises at night and sometimes during the day. And both adults in the house reported catching glimpses of a human-looking figure.

  When T.A.P.S. arrived at the Taylor residence, at about four o’clock on a sticky summer afternoon, both the Taylors and their daughter were present. While the rest of the team went around the house and looked for places to set up equipment, Keith and I interviewed the adults, who told us about the entity they believed might be the ghost of Louis’s mother.

  The entity hadn’t given any indication of being hostile or aggressive. The reason the Taylors contacted us was that they wanted to make sure that they—and their daughter, especially—weren’t in any danger.

  Next, we interviewed little Selena. She sat in her big red chair and refused to talk to us until we played a while with her beany animals. Only then did she start to open up to us. We found her to be very articulate, and not at all afraid of what was happening to her. But then, she was still young enough to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so to her anything must have seemed possible.

  By six o’clock, we had two camcorders with infrared capability running upstairs, one in the girl’s bedroom and one in her parents’ bedroom. According to the Taylors, the entity had appeared in both places. If it existed, there was a good chance we would catch it on videotape.

  Nothing happened until a quarter to eight, when Selena informed us that she had seen her grandmother while walking upstairs to her room. The entity had walked past her into one of the house’s two spare bedrooms. Changing tack, we redeployed our equipment. In a matter of minutes, we had installed infrared cameras and motion sensors in the bedroom the girl had indicated.

  About half an hour later, the motion sensors went off. Rushing up to the room to see what had happened, we checked the infrared cameras. Unfortunately, there was no visual evidence of anything.

  At 9: 30, Selena was put to bed. But by 10: 00, she was back downstairs to tell us that her grandmother had spoken to her and said she wasn’t in the house to harm anyone—only to watch over the family. We asked Selena why her grandmother hadn’t passed over to the other side. She said her grandmother just wasn’t ready.

  The Taylors were comforted by this information. They told us that if the entity was in fact their g
randmother, they didn’t want to push her out. They just wanted us to gather evidence and document her activity.

  At 11: 15, the motion sensors went off again. This time, the infrared cameras captured some apparent orbs, but nothing more. At midnight, we heard someone moving about in the kitchen, though neither the Taylors nor any member of our team was supposed to be in there. When we checked, the kitchen was empty.

  Grant and I asked the Taylors if they would like us to bring in a clairvoyant, or a sensitive, to try to communicate with the entity. The Taylors liked this idea and gave us the go-ahead. By 5: 00, we hadn’t picked up anything else, so we packed up and left—with the understanding that we would be back.

  Five days later, we returned with the same team that had worked on the case previously, as well as Bethany Aculade, the sensitive who had worked with our group in the past. Bethany met with the family, discussing the things she would say to the entity and also what she would not say.

  The Taylors stressed to Bethany, as they had to us, that if the entity was Louis’s mother, they didn’t want to make it leave. Bethany acknowledged that wish and began preparing for a communication with the entity in Selena’s room, where it had been seen most often.

  At 9:00 p.m., there were seven of us in the girl’s bedroom: the three Taylors, Bethany, Grant, Keith, and me. Bethany started trying to communicate with the entity by means of clacking—the tapping together of two sacred stones in an attempt to speak with the dead. It has been said that the energy from the impact and the resultant noise helps the spirit to communicate and sometimes even show itself.

  Almost immediately, the temperature in the room dropped. This was especially surprising considering there were seven people in a 12-by-15-foot enclosure, and common sense would tell you it would get warmer in there. Bethany interpreted the temperature change as the spirit’s way of trying to communicate with us.