Ghost Hunting Read online

  People had also seen a woman in a light blue dress with her hair wrapped up in a bun. She would stroll past the doorway, enjoying the place like any living patron. But when someone pursued her, she disappeared.

  Built in 1859, the Topton House was originally used as a restaurant and inn by people using the nearby railroad line. During the Prohibition era it was a speakeasy, an illegal public house. One of the beams in the basement is charred from a fire many years ago—more than likely the result of an illegal still.

  We were brought to the investigation by Rick Bugera, president of the Berks Lehigh Paranormal Association, a T.A.P.S. family member. Rick and his group had conducted an investigation of Topton House on their own, with inconclusive results. He wanted to see if we could find anything definitive.

  Even if we did find evidence of the supernatural, Gore didn’t want the spirits evicted. She wanted them to remain part of the ambiance of the place. She told us about a customer who had walked into the restaurant, announced that there were twelve spirits in evidence there—which, apparently, was too many—and walked out again. However, most patrons seemed to find the possibility of ghostly presences charming.

  For this investigation, Grant and I had brought along a bigger group than usual—not only Brian, Steve, Andy, and Keith but also Amy Andrews and Sheri Toczko. Amy was a Reiki master, Reiki being the art of healing through energy manipulation that had sensitized me to the paranormal when I was younger. Of course, most people don’t have the reaction I did.

  We had included Amy because we knew she would bring a different perspective to the investigation. Sheri was a novice who wanted to learn more about ghost hunting. She was also fast becoming Steve’s girlfriend.

  That was fine for Steve and Sheri, but it was a problem for T.A.P.S. It’s difficult enough to remain focused throughout an all-night investigation. When your love interest is sitting right next to you, you’re too likely to miss the three-second phenomenon that might make the trip worthwhile.

  To be honest, we hoped the relationship would fizzle out before it went too far. If it didn’t, we were going to have to talk with Steve and Sheri. Life is full of choices. We just hoped they would make the right ones.

  The easiest claim to check out was the one about the glass of soda. We put a glass full of Coke on the bar and trained a camera on it. If it moved any time during the investigation, we would know it.

  The smell of roses in the cellar was a little trickier. However, when we went down into the cellar, we saw a hole lined with leaves that gave access to the outside. Obviously, a smell or combination of smells might have made their way through the hole into the basement.

  On the other hand, there weren’t any rosebushes near the hole. There were some in front of the restaurant and in the florist shop across the street, but those places were too far away to be of consequence. So why would we concern ourselves with the hole?

  The answer lies in the concept of matrixing, in which the mind creates sensory impressions when it tries to interpret certain stimuli. Sometimes somebody smells a campfire when there’s nothing around but bug spray and lemon meringue pie. We believed that kind of thing was happening in the cellar of the Topton House.

  It was Grant who came up with the idea of testing the possibility that the smell might be coming from outside by taking a bottle of cologne and spraying it in the garden. The Gore daughter who had smelled the roses joined us in the cellar for our experiment. When Grant sprayed his cologne, we could smell it in the cellar—no doubt about it. Now, the smell of cologne is stronger than the smell of roses, I’ll grant you. But even a faint smell can be detectable if it’s manufactured over the course of days or even weeks.

  Francine’s middle daughter told us she was sensitive to supernatural occurrences, and that she had experienced something in the cellar as well. On Friday nights, she was sometimes called on to bring up a case of beer for the bartender. She wouldn’t even get halfway down the stairs before she got the feeling she was being watched. As soon as she went back up the stairs, the feeling would be gone.

  We sent Steve, Brian, Sheri, and Amy down to the cellar with the girl in the hope that she would attract the spirits she usually attracted. Unfortunately, they got mixed results. Every time the girl felt something, it would disappear—as if the spirits in question didn’t want to be detected.

  Brian suggested that they break a rule we have in T.A.P.S. and split up to examine different rooms in the cellar. In this case, it was excusable. No one was going to be more than ten feet away from the next person. Still, they didn’t find any evidence of the supernatural.

  Having broken one rule, Brian decided to break another one. He asked the young girl to come down the stairs the way she usually did—this time with an audio recorder in her hand—and see if she got the same feeling. “Are you a happy spirit?” she asked as she descended. “Why are you here? Are you afraid of something? Are you afraid of me?”

  Nothing much happened. However, we had another audio recording to go over when we got home. That might prove to be valuable.

  While we were there, we asked Amy to perform Reiki on the middle daughter, as a way of testing her claim that she was sensitive to the spirit world. Amy observed that the girl had great energy in her. And afterward, Amy said she felt calmer and lighter for the experience.

  When we checked on the glass of Coke, we saw that it hadn’t moved. Having covered pretty much all the ground we had hoped to cover, we called it a wrap. Thanking Francine Gore and her daughters, we headed home.

  Brian and Steve conducted our analysis back in Warwick. They found a weird shadow on the wall, which could have been the result of an internal adjustment in our infrared camera. Unfortunately, that was it.

  We believed that we had debunked the smell-of-roses incidents, and we couldn’t come up with documentation of any of the other claims at Topton House. So while we couldn’t say the place wasn’t haunted, we hadn’t found any evidence to say that it was. All that remained was to apprise Francine Gore of our findings.

  We wondered how she would receive them. Not well, we expected. Grant is better at handling delicate situations, so we decided that he should be the one to speak with her.

  Discussing our findings with clients—what we call the “reveal” stage of an investigation—is sometimes a problem for us. After all, most ghost hunters “find” ghosts wherever they go. We, on the other hand, end up debunking eighty percent of the cases in which we get involved. In other words, eight out of ten times we have to tell our clients their place probably isn’t haunted.

  In some instances, people are relieved to hear that. More often, they’re disappointed, because they want some validation of their experiences. They don’t want to have to consider the possibility that they’re crazy, or at least misguided.

  In cases like Topton House, there’s an economic consideration as well. Hotels and restaurants can often bring in more business if there’s credible evidence of a haunting there. And the people who own these places are almost always people we would like to help out.

  But we can’t base our results on whom we would like to help, or how we would like to help them. We find what we find, and we report accordingly. Which is what we did when we met again with Francine Gore.

  As we predicted, she wasn’t pleased, and she expressed her disappointment that we hadn’t found anything. However, she was every bit the lady we’d hoped she would be. We were able to leave feeling good about our investigation, which is really all we can ever ask for.

  Incidentally, Sheri didn’t stay with us too much longer. She was a sweetheart, but she had an interest in graphic arts that she wanted to pursue. Steve still keeps up a relationship with her, but only as a friend.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  Why am I the one who’s always got to give people the bad news? Because, of the two of us, I’m the one with all the patience. Or so my partner keeps telling me.

  * * *

  THE ARMORY OCTOBER 2004 />
  Like people, ghosts have their own rules. Abide by them and they may leave you alone. Break them and you may wish you hadn’t.

  The Armory in New Bedford, Massachusetts, had seen its share of guilt, despondency, and despair. Built in 1903, it had welcomed soldiers home from a half-dozen wars, each man carrying his unique backpack full of horrors. One might have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, one might have discovered that his wife had been cheating on him, and one might have felt he just didn’t fit into society anymore. Every soldier’s story was different, yet they were also very much the same.

  Too often, the burden proved to be more than the guy could carry, and he sought relief the only way he could. In the office, a first sergeant hanged himself from the ceiling. Another poor soul hanged himself in a back room. Yet another guy was depressed because he was separating from his wife, so he went into his office and blew his brains out.

  The most famous story involved a general who was really rough with his troops. The thing he hated the most was horseplay. If a soldier played a prank, the general would discipline him hard. Apparently, he was hard on himself as well, because he committed suicide one night on the armory drill floor.

  It wasn’t surprising that guardsmen had reported paranormal experiences over the years. Guys had seen footsteps appear in puddles of water. They had gotten shoved by unseen entities. In the hallways they had heard and seen figures that disappeared under close scrutiny.

  T.A.P.S. was invited to investigate the place by the local National Guard battalion, the idea being to prove or disprove the stories once and for all. Our team of five was shown around the armory by Sgt. Joe Rebello, the battalion’s medical section chief. In addition to the usual core group of Steve, Brian, Grant, and me, we had along Mike Dion, a seasoned investigator from the T.A.P.S. group in Massachusetts.

  Rebello had had some experiences of his own, which he described to us. One night when he was alone, he heard a door slam on its own. When he looked into it, he couldn’t figure out how it had happened. On another occasion, a hot night in August, he suddenly felt cold and his breath froze right in front of him. In fact, cold spots turned up in the building all the time.

  We were eager to begin our investigation. However, since we had arrived earlier than usual, we took a lunch break first. None of us blinked when Frank DeAngelis, our sound technician, tripped one of our cameramen. It was the kind of practical joke we play on one another all the time.

  But Rebello and Sgt. Steve Thrasher, another armory officer, seemed to cringe. When I asked why, they reminded me about the general who hated horseplay. Apparently, his spirit wasn’t tolerant of it either, as soldiers who had been pushed around at night could attest.

  As we finished lunch and began setting up our equipment, we agreed to take the warning seriously. We had brought along our newest toy—a thermal-imaging camera that would show us variations in temperature in more dramatic terms than any electronic temperature gauge.

  Grant and I headed for the room where the first sergeant had hung himself. At first, our thermal camera didn’t pick up anything unusual. Then what looked like a mist passed in front of the lens. What surprised us wasn’t just the presence of the mist—it was the fact that it registered as warmer than the surrounding air. Normally, mists are colder than the air.

  Meanwhile, Steve, Brian, and Mike Dion had moved onto a catwalk that overlooked the building’s big, hangar-like drill floor. It had been described to us as a place where a disproportionate number of cold spots had been detected. The guys were able to corroborate that by detecting some of them with their instruments.

  They were trying to see if the cold spots were attributable to drafts when they realized their camera battery was draining at a ridiculous rate—as if something was sucking the energy out of it. They knew that supernatural entities need energy to manifest themselves and that they’ll take it from any source they can find. Was their battery being used for that purpose?

  Before they could draw any conclusions, something completely unexpected happened: Frank DeAngelis’s feet went out from under him and he fell right on his back. Steve, who’s a police officer, didn’t know what had happened, but he was at Frank’s side in a heartbeat.

  “You okay, man?” he asked.

  Frank didn’t look like he could move. In a thin, terrified voice, he answered Steve’s question. “No.”

  As he lay there, tears running down the sides of his face, Frank described what had happened to him. It had begun with a feeling of extreme cold. Then he’d felt something come up through the core of his body and yank his head back.

  Right now, his chest felt like it had a weight on it, and his back hurt, and he was caught in the grip of a cold sweat. Steve, Brian, and Mike took their shirts off to keep him warm, knowing he might be going into shock—or worse.

  A moment later, Rebello responded and took Frank’s blood pressure. His breathing was quick and his heart rate was well into the hundreds, but it was gradually coming down. To everyone’s relief, Frank wasn’t in any serious danger.

  When Grant and I got there, he was lying on his back, looking pale and sweaty and scared half to death. When we trained our thermal camera on his face, it showed inflammation under his chin, as if he had been struck by someone.

  Finally, Frank felt well enough to get up. Grant and I took him to a room where we could debrief him in private. Naturally, the investigators in us wanted to know exactly what had happened. But that wasn’t our only reason for speaking with him.

  Frank had been through a harrowing experience. He needed to talk about it, to get his feelings out in the open. To obtain some perspective.

  After he had had some time to gather himself, he said it was an entity he had felt inside him. In his brief contact with it, he could feel what it was feeling, and it was full of negative emotions. He felt as if all his worst fears had been realized, as if doomsday were descending on him and there was nothing he could do about it.

  At that point, it was six hours into the investigation. We called it a night. As we left, we told Rebello that we would be in touch as soon as we had a chance to go over the data.

  When we did, it was nothing short of startling. Frank had said that he’d felt his head being jerked back. But in fact, he’d been hit by his audio equipment bag. Without warning or explanation, it had jumped up and slugged him under the chin.

  We checked to make sure Frank hadn’t inadvertently pulled the bag up with his hands. But we could see his hands and they were otherwise occupied. Besides, it was a heavy bag, and it wouldn’t have been easy for him to yank it up that way.

  When we returned to the armory, we met with Sergeant Rebello and his superior, Capt. Winfield Danielson. We told them what we had discovered. For one thing, we had detected the cold spots they mentioned. For another, we found that warm mist in the room where the first sergeant hanged himself.

  However, the biggest piece of evidence was what had happened to Frank, all of which had been captured on videotape. In fact, it was the most violent documentation of the supernatural that either Grant or I had ever seen. Clearly, the Armory was host to legitimate paranormal activity.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. I still wanted to talk with Frank back at headquarters. Though from a medical standpoint he wasn’t suffering any lasting effects, it would be naive to think he hadn’t been damaged in some way.

  “You may be changed by this,” I told him. “I just want you to know that we’re here for you.”

  Frank thanked me but decided not to go with us on any more investigations. He had had enough.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  What’s scary is that what happened to Frank DeAngelis will eventually happen to all of us who pry into the paranormal. It’s only a matter of time. We just have to hope that when it happens, we’ll have the support we need from our families and colleagues to get through it.

  * * *

  LINGERING OCTOBER 2004

  Though we use
a lot of different instruments when we check a site for paranormal activity, we also depend on our instincts. After all, we’ve been at this for a while, and we can usually tell when something’s going on even without our collection of recorders and cameras and computer systems.

  Then there are times when we’re completely fooled. For instance, the night we visited the house of Adam Zubrowski in northern Connecticut.

  Zubrowski, a friend of one of our cameramen on the show, was a pleasant enough guy with what sounded like a haunting problem. Every so often, he would hear a woman’s voice in his house, even when there weren’t any women present. This was especially true in the room where he kept his pool table, which had been his grandparents’ bedroom before their deaths in 2000 and 2001. Zubrowski’s grandparents, you see, had been the house’s original residents. After they passed on, Adam became the sole owner of the place and all its contents.

  But his grandparents hadn’t just lived there. They had built the place, and gone on to build some of the furniture as well. What’s more, their ashes were sitting in a container in the living room, so there was clearly a strong and intimate connection between Zubrowski’s grandparents and his house.

  Recently, he had woken up in the morning to find a bunch of bric-a-brac lying around his feet, nestled in the folds of his bedcovers. What freaked him out was that the stuff had been standing on his headboard when he went to sleep the night before. How had it gotten there? He hadn’t the slightest idea.

  His friends didn’t either, but they knew enough about the place to stay away from it. One of them told us about the time he had stayed over in the back bedroom, where Adam’s great-grandfather had died some years earlier. When the friend got a weird vibe in the middle of the night and heard a woman’s voice whispering to him, he bolted from the house and refused to sleep over ever again.