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  Selena confirmed it: her grandmother was in the room with us. Our EMF meters were showing marked fluctuations in the room’s magnetic field, adding credence to the idea there was a supernatural presence among us.

  We watched as the little girl carried on one end of what seemed to be a two-way conversation. Every so often, she relayed a message to one of her parents or a member of our T.A.P.S. team. However, we had no hard-and-fast evidence that she was in contact with her grandmother—only her word for it.

  Abruptly, Selena stood up and asked, “Are you sure?” We didn’t hear an answer. Without warning, the girl walked out of the room.

  Curious, we all followed her. She led us downstairs, all the way to the basement, where we watched her dig through some cardboard boxes at the back north end of the room.

  None of us knew what she was doing. We just stood there, looking at each other.

  Finally, Selena pulled out a small wooden box, turned to look past us, and asked, “Is this the box, Grandma?”

  She must have received a reply in the affirmative, because she said, “Okay,” and opened the box. There were pictures inside—old ones, from the look of them. And something else.

  A diamond ring.

  Handing it to her mother, Selena said, “Grandma wants her ring.”

  It was one of the eeriest moments I have ever experienced. And though one question seemed to have been answered, it gave rise to another one. If Selena’s grandmother had indeed requested her ring, how were we to get it to her?

  Sitting around the Taylors’ kitchen table, we talked about it. The family decided that they would go to the deceased woman’s gravesite in the morning, dig a hole over her coffin, and put the ring in it.

  A week later, we contacted the Taylors to find out how things were going. They told us that they had indeed buried the ring and that the spirit’s appearances in the house had ceased.

  We are still in contact with this family, and they haven’t had a single paranormal experience since.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Sometimes people have no idea whose spirit may be haunting them. In this case, the Taylors had an idea of that long before we got there. Our job was only to confirm it—and help them figure out what to do about it.

  * * *

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS SEPTEMBER 1999

  More often than not, the paranormal events we encounter are the results of tragedies that occurred a long time ago. But in some cases the tragedies are much more recent, and it requires some sensitivity on our parts if we’re to conduct an investigation.

  In this particular instance, we were called down to southern Connecticut to help a well-to-do couple plagued by a number of odd events. Vases had toppled over and broken without explanation. Necklaces and other valuables had gone missing, only to be found later in another part of the house. The wife, whom we’ll call Lisa Edison to ensure her privacy, had been awakened by voices in her bedroom. Both she and her husband, whom we’ll call Robert, had seen fleeting apparitions throughout their home.

  Also, the stereo in their daughter’s room had been discovered blasting in the middle of the night. This was especially disturbing because their daughter, Jennifer, had been killed in a drunk driving accident on her way to school on graduation day. Her parents kept her ashes on the mantel in the living room.

  Because the family couldn’t deal with a full-scale investigative team, Grant and I approached this case on our own. As soon as we spoke to Lisa and Robert, we could tell that Jennifer had meant everything to them, almost to the point where they couldn’t live without her.

  Grant spent a lot of time with Robert, listening sympathetically to how much the man missed his daughter. I used that time to talk to Lisa. She showed me Jennifer’s diary, which she had found after her daughter’s death. It said that Jennifer had been miserable, that she had been closer to her friends than her family, and it spoke of how she would escape to the beach whenever she could. That was when she was happiest—when she was sitting in the sand, surrounded by her best buddies.

  We interviewed both Lisa and Robert pretty extensively, all the while being careful not to add to their pain. Then we walked around the house with a camera, an EMF detector, and an audio recorder. Unfortunately, we didn’t experience any activity.

  The next day, Grant and I went over the recording of our interview with Lisa and Robert, hoping it would give us an idea as to how to continue our investigation. What we heard knocked us off our seats. In addition to the voices of Lisa and Robert, there was a third voice—one that was distinctly female. As we listened to it, we heard the names Joe, Aaron, and Melissa.

  Returning to the Edison house, we played the interview for them and asked them if the names were familiar to them. Lisa said they were Jennifer’s closest friends, though Lisa wasn’t very fond of them. At our suggestion, she agreed to invite the three kids over the next day.

  Joe, Aaron, and Melissa all showed up, but they were obviously pretty weirded out. Unlike Jennifer’s parents, they didn’t want to get to the bottom of what was happening. They just wanted to put their friend’s death behind them and move on.

  As we talked with the three of them, we found out a couple of things. First, the song that Lisa had heard blasting from Jennifer’s stereo had been their theme song as friends. Second, Jennifer and her friends had all made a pact: when their time came, they wanted to be buried somewhere near the ocean.

  Grant and I suggested the idea of having a ceremony on the beach and casting Jennifer’s remains into the water. Her parents were reluctant to do that, however. After all, this was their only child and her ashes were all they had left of her. It was certainly understandable.

  But later, when Grant and I played back the interview with Jennifer’s friends, we heard a female voice again. This time it said, “Water,” and “Get out.” When we told the Edisons about this, they relented.

  Sometime later, they had a ceremony on the beach and entrusted their daughter’s ashes to the waves. They experienced no more activity from that point on.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Spirits are limited in the ways they can communicate with the living. They can’t always tell us outright what they need or want. But if we open ourselves up and listen closely enough, we can hear them.

  * * *

  GHOST LOT NOVEMBER 1999

  A few years after we started T.A.P.S., a woman named Maura, who lived not far from Grant in western Rhode Island, told him that her grandparents were hearing and seeing strange things in their two-bedroom home.

  What kind of things? Unearthly growls from somewhere inside the house. The sound of gravel crunching in the driveway outside. Doors opening and closing on their own. Blurs and shadows in almost every photograph taken in the house. Every so often, Maura’s grandmother, Helen, saw a scraggly-looking figure standing outside her bathroom or in the backyard.

  But the most unsettling incident was one that involved the family cat, which had gone missing. When they found it, its torso had been ripped away, leaving only its exposed spine to hold its upper and lower halves together. You can imagine how upset they were.

  Grant and I checked out the house on our own. It was a good thing he knew the area, or I might never have found the place. It was dark out, and the area was too rural to have streetlights. When we got close, I could see that the house was built on a hill, with a gravel driveway curling around beneath it.

  Maura and her grandparents were nice people. That much was obvious. They were also troubled by all the goings-on. You could see it in their eyes.

  We all sat for a while in the living room, talking about what had happened and how we were going to proceed that night. Then we set up our equipment and went to work. For the rest of the evening, we heard what sounded like footsteps, but we didn’t hear growls or see any apparitions.

  Then, around 12: 30 in the morning, we heard the crunch of gravel outside the house and the thud of horses’ hooves. Shooting to our feet,
Grant and I peered out into the darkness from the family’s enclosed porch. The sound of hooves had abated, but we heard the scrape of boots and people talking.

  Without our coats, we went outside to see what was going on. But when we got out there, there was nothing to see. No horses, no people, and no explanation for what we had heard. We went back inside.

  For a while after that, it was quiet both inside and outside the house. We listened for a repeat of what we had heard before, but there wasn’t any. After a while, we wondered if that was all we would get that night.

  Then we heard three amazingly loud growls from under the dining room table, which was only about six feet away from us. After we caught our breath, we agreed that the sound had come from a particular spot in the floor. Examining it, we found loose floorboards. With some trepidation, Helen told us it would be all right to pull them up.

  When we did, we found a trapdoor.

  Grant and I exchanged glances. We knew the answer to all the house’s troubles might be down there under that door. Preparing ourselves for what we might find, we swung it open. Underneath there was a hole of some kind, choked solid with rocks. They had some kind of markings scratched into them, but we had no idea what they meant.

  While Grant was looking at the rocks, I happened to glance in the direction of the bathroom—and saw a tall, shadowy man dressed in scraggly clothes standing there and watching us. By the time I pointed him out to the others, he had gone back down the hallway. We pursued him, but we couldn’t find any sign of him.

  Helen hadn’t seen the apparition this time, but she agreed that the description I gave her was the figure she had seen before. She seemed relieved that I had caught a glimpse of it too.

  As it turned out, we weren’t done hearing sounds that night. But the ones we heard next weren’t at all like the others. They sounded like someone pounding the underside of the floor. When we checked it out, we found evidence of a leaky pipe.

  Now, we may be ghost hunters when we’re investigating claims of the paranormal, but we’re also plumbers. When we see a leaky water line, we can’t just ignore it. We have to fix it.

  In this case, that was easier said than done. The only practical way for us to address the problem was to lay in a new ten-foot piece of copper pipe and solder it into place, and we only had a small, unlit crawl space in which to work. What’s more, there was hand-blown insulation above and below. If we hit the insulation above us with the flame from our torch, the house would go up like a Roman candle. If we hit the insulation below us, we would go up.

  So we had to be extra careful. First, as we made our way through the crawl space elbow over elbow, we sprayed down the insulation with our water bottles. Then we laid a foot-square fire blanket under the section we would be soldering, so we wouldn’t drip any molten metal on anything flammable. It was a tough job, but we had come to help—one way or the other.

  By the time we were done, it was almost dawn. We packed up our stuff, told Helen we would be in touch with her, and headed back home. But we were eager to see what we had picked up on our equipment.

  When we ran our analysis the next day, we saw that our cameras hadn’t recorded anything interesting. It was a pity. We were hoping to have gotten some footage of the scraggly figure near the bathroom.

  However, when we went over our audio footage, it was a different story. To our satisfaction, we had captured some EVPs. Nasty ones.

  The first had been recorded when those three loud growls had come from under the dining room table. As it turned out, there were nine growls altogether, three before the ones we had heard and three more immediately after.

  The second EVP came up when we found the trapdoor and saw the man in dirty clothes watching us. As he retreated into the hallway, we heard a voice saying something like, “Now, now, now, dirty folk…mean.”

  Of course, the job wouldn’t be done until we had conducted our research. Grant and I spent the next couple of days poring over records and visiting the local historical society. Finally, we struck pay dirt.

  The house had been built in the middle of a “ghost lot”—an area marked on old maps to denote a territory held sacred by its original Native American inhabitants. Such places are thought to be haunted by Indian spirits. Not a good place to build, you would think.

  And yet, someone had—a man named Jeremiah, who had owned not only the ground on which the house was built but also any number of acres around it. Apparently, the entities that haunted his land, which he’d referred to as “dirty folk,” had driven him crazy enough to burn his house down.

  The police had responded to the blaze in horse-drawn carriages, and they’d taken Jeremiah away. In the end, he’d accomplished only part of his purpose. He’d burned down the house, all right, but its foundation had been preserved. It was on this foundation that Maura’s grandparents’ house had been constructed.

  Armed with this knowledge, the couple made the decision to have the entity removed by their clergyman.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  We were probably a little crazy to try to lay that copper pipe in that little crawl space. One wrong move and we would have been ghosts ourselves. But our business is helping people, and we do that any way we can.

  * * *

  GOOD SPIRITS AND BAD DECEMBER 1999

  People have all kinds of personalities and dispositions, good and bad. So, apparently, do ghosts. And sometimes, you get both kinds at once.

  Pia and John Devine lived in a two-bedroom bungalow in a suburban community in central Rhode Island. The first inkling they had that something was amiss was when their two-year-old son, Jack, woke up screaming in the room he shared with his younger brother Joshua. When Pia went into the room to see what was the matter, the hysterical Jack pointed to his rocking chair.

  It was empty, but Jack kept pointing to it as if there had been someone sitting in it. Pia did her best to soothe her son, then she put him back to bed.

  She was still pondering the incident the next day when she caught a glimpse of a strange figure in her kitchen—a woman wearing white. It shook her up. And soon after that, she felt a male presence in her basement and a female presence elsewhere in the house.

  She didn’t know where to turn. Eventually, she heard about T.A.P.S. and gave us a call. Four of us—Grant, Keith Johnson, Andrew Graham, and I—visited her house to see what we could find.

  By then, the Devines had experienced other disturbing phenomena. Pia had heard a female voice singing lullabies in her children’s room. John had felt an uncomfortable presence in the master bedroom late at night. And Pia had discovered what sounded to us like ectoplasm on the children’s unused changing table.

  She had inadvertently captured yet another phenomenon. Pia, who was an accomplished violin player, had recorded herself playing one day. When she played back the recording, she could hear faint voices calling her name.

  T.A.P.S. wound up spending two weekends collecting evidence at the Devine house. We found what appeared to be three distinct supernatural entities. One, a female, was clearly interested in the children. A second seemed to wish only to be left alone in the basement. The third, a spiteful spirit, seemed intent on agitating the entire Devine family, as well as the female spirit.

  While we were conducting our investigation, both Jack and Joshua were in hysterics, and neither of them would go to sleep. However, they were fine once they left their bedroom. At one point, Pia went into the children’s room and came out petrified. When Grant and I went to see what disturbed her, we found that the room was five degrees warmer and the air was difficult to breathe.

  We addressed what we believed was the mischievous entity, and the room went pitch black. The air seemed to become even thicker, and the temperature shot up another sixteen degrees. We couldn’t speak for a moment, it was so oppressive in there.

  Finally, we were able to find the words to call Keith, who blessed the room. After the blessing, the children seemed to have no trouble going to sle
ep. However, to rid the Devines of the mischievous entity, we would have to bless the entire house.

  In the end, Pia and John decided to remove the spirit that was tormenting their children while letting the two benign spirits remain. We had no problem with that. To date, the unfriendly spirit hasn’t come back, and the Devines are enjoying their other two guests.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  During our stay with the family, it seemed to us that Pia was becoming sensitive to supernatural phenomena. Having had our own experiences with sensitivity, Jason and I advised her as to how to deal with it. We were able to give her some perspective on what could have been a very troubling time in her life.

  * * *

  THE PERSECUTED HUSBAND MAY 2000

  Like living people, ghosts have their own agendas. Some people fit into them and others don’t. And if you’re one of those who don’t, they can make your life a hell on earth—as they did for one poor guy in eastern Connecticut.

  In this case, a haunted house situation, we were brought in by Maine Paranormal Research, a member of our T.A.P.S. extended family. Four of us went to check it out—Grant, myself, Keith Johnson, and Shelley King. Shelley, who was an early member of T.A.P.S., specialized in finding EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena.

  What we found when we arrived was a two-level home with two bedrooms, a large walk-in closet, a bathroom, a kitchen, a dining room, an attic, and an unfinished basement. Nothing out of the ordinary—or so it seemed.

  The couple that lived there had an unusual relationship in that neither the husband nor the wife was home much of the time. Then again, they didn’t have any kids—just a big, friendly mastiff. Erica, the wife, worked for a hotel company and traveled a lot to other countries, while Frank, her husband, worked for a construction company in Florida building high-rises eight months out of the year.