When we left Jackie Hernandez in Part I of this ghost story (page 297), she had finally escaped the terror of that San Pedro house…or so she thought.
YOU CAN RUN…BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE
Not long after Jackie arrived in Weldon, her husband left her. Once again, she found herself alone in a new town. But she wasn’t really alone. It started with a familiar pounding noise coming from the shed behind her trailer at night. Jackie recognized that sound. Then two of her neighbors got the scare of their lives when they were carrying a TV into her house and a face appeared on the screen. When they described its “evil eyes,” Jackie knew whose face it was. Then one evening when she was in her baby daughter’s room—Jackie turned around and the bedspread caught fire for no apparent reason. Had she not been there…
On April 13, 1990, the investigators got a phone call. Jackie was hysterical. Barry Conrad and Jeff Wheatcraft immediately jumped in their car and drove to Weldon. They arrived around midnight, but of course the house was quiet. Conrad turned on his camera and conducted some interviews. Nothing happened. So Jackie had an idea: “Let’s use a Ouija board and see if we can get it to talk to us.” The investigators weren’t too keen on the idea. It wasn’t that they believed the stories that a Ouija board could somehow “open the door” for evil spirits; they thought it was just a toy. Still, they agreed to give it a try.
Conrad trained his camera on the Ouija board while Jackie and a neighbor looked on. Wheatcraft and Conrad sat at the table with the board placed between them. Then the camera shut off. Conrad got up and turned it back on. And it shut off again. Just like that first night in the attic, he couldn’t get it to work. So although there were four witnesses, there was no camera to record what happened next. Here’s what they reported.
Shortly into the séance, the room grew very cold. As the two men asked questions, the pointer moved from letter to letter, sometimes with their hands upon it, other times by itself. It spelled out its answers while Jackie wrote everything down.
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Q: Are you really a ghost?
A: YES
Q: How many ghosts reside among the living?
A: PHANTOMS FILL THE SKIES ABOVE YOU
While Wheatcraft and Conrad tried to make sense of the response, the table began to shake. Then a candle went out. Then another one went out. They resumed the session.
Q: Where did you die?
A: SAN PEDRO BAY
Q: Did you drown?
A: NO, I WAS HELD UNDER WATER
Q: Did you live in the San Pedro house?
A: MY MURDERER
Q: Why do you follow Jackie?
A: ENERGY
As the night went on and dawn approached, the spirit revealed even more: He died in 1930, and he hanged Jeff Wheatcraft because “YOU HAVE THE LIKENESS OF MY KILLER.” Then Conrad asked, “Is there anyone in this room that you hate?” The letters spelled out: “J-E-F-F”.
And then, wrote Conrad: “For in a furious few seconds, Jeff and chair were levitated off the floor and hurled backwards into the trailer wall. The impact was so great that the entire trailer shook as Jeff toppled to the floor, unconscious.” Petrified, Jackie quickly took her two kids out of the house. Conrad was able to rouse Wheatcraft and get him to safety as well. Knowing that she couldn’t escape the spirit and that there was nothing left for her in Weldon, Jackie and her two children went back to San Pedro to stay at a friend’s house.
“The majority of paranormal cases aren’t worth pursuing,” explains Barry Taff. “There’s a lot of invention, a lot of embellishment, and a lot of outright fraud.” But Jackie Hernandez’s ordeal was different. “This is is the first case, out of more than 3,000 that I’ve been on, where the phenomenon went after the researchers.” It even followed Wheatcraft and Conrad back to their L.A. apartment, taunting them by—among other things—turning on the stove burners and placing scissors under their pillows. Wheatcraft said he was even pushed again.
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So who was this malevolent spirit? After the séance, Conrad looked through old newspapers and found an article dated March 25, 1930, about a young sailor named Herman Hendrickson who was found dead in the water at the San Pedro docks. He had a large gash on his head, and foul play was suspected, but there were no witnesses. So police ultimately ruled the death accidental, believing that he probably slipped, hit his head, and drowned. When Jackie read the article, she felt right away, “That’s him.”
And what about the other ghost—the old man? Jackie believes she found out during the summer of 1990, after she moved back to San Pedro. While staying at her friend’s house, she saw a bright light outside one afternoon. Jackie followed it to a graveyard a few blocks away from her old house. It seemed to hover above the grave of a man named John Damon. “It went around and around the grave and just disappeared,” she recalled. Jackie later learned that her old house had been built by that same John Damon.
Barry Conrad produced a documentary movie about the case called An Unknown Encounter: A Haunting in San Pedro. He also wrote a book about it. Barry Taff, still in the paranormal business, says he’s never seen a case like this one, before or since. He doesn’t know why or how this entity was so focused and so powerful, but he believes that it was somehow “feeding off the negative energy emanating from Jackie” in those troubled times. “One theory is that the environment can somehow store information,” he said. “And under the proper circumstances the information is reconstructed so that you can feel it, see it, or hear it.
Jackie Hernandez settled in an apartment in San Pedro. (She had it blessed by a priest before she moved in.) Then she started repairing her life. As things got back to normal—and she stopped bringing the investigators around—the “activity” grew quieter and quieter over the next couple of years. Today, she still lives in San Pedro, and claims that although she hasn’t been attacked since the early 1990s, the ghost of Herman Hendrickson still makes its presence known to her every once in a while. And at last report, Jackie’s old house is still haunted. The present owners have said that no previous tenant lasted more than six months.
To date, no one has ever been able to produce video proof of a haunting. Yet with the Jackie Hernandez case, everyone involved took and passed lie detector tests. In addition, the investigators captured footage of what appear to be floating balls of light, including one that can be clearly seen flying into Jackie’s head. Video experts and insect experts have examined the footage—as well as the still photographs—and all said the same thing: “These are not bugs or reflections or anything else that can be easily explained away. They’re like nothing we’ve ever seen.” That’s not all. Conrad filmed objects that moved on their own, as well as “something” dripping out of the wall. When Taff took the liquid to the forensics lab at UCLA to be tested, it was determined to be human plasma.
So why isn’t the San Pedro case the “smoking gun”—the one that makes everyone believe in spirits? “The problem is,” admits Taff, “these days, anything can be faked. So it’s not truth beyond a reasonable doubt.”
And the search for the proof of ghosts continues.
***
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