Chapter 1

A Family Affair

Middletown, Delaware

Our team had the honor to investigate a family-owned company with deep roots in Middletown, Delaware. Danny Burris is the owner and operator of PHB Inc. General Contractors, which specializes in home and light commercial projects. The company also boasts an on-site millwork shop that produces custom cabinetry and moldings. The Burris family has deep ties with the company going back to 1963, when Danny’s father, C. C. “Toby” Burris, began working for Phillips Home Builders. The name changed in 1993, when the Burris family took over the operation. According to Danny, when his father first started working for Mr. Phillips, there was very little to the operation. Danny’s office was Mr. Phillips’s originally, and, aside from a back storage room, that was all that the building entailed.

PHB Inc. now encompasses a sprawling compound with several buildings and a fenced-in lot. The original PHB structure has been enlarged and added onto several times. Danny recalled how it all began.

“Dad came to work for Phillips in ’63 and then in ’72 we got into making furniture and millwork. And Mom and Dad built this [onto the existing structure] for storage. We repaired furniture, sold furniture. So my family built this,” Danny said humbly, waving his arm at the larger open building outside his office.

The exterior of PHB Inc.

What the family created from old barn wood and scraps and pieces of torn-down buildings is a remarkably unique open-concept structure with a showroom below and a full kitchen and meeting area on the second floor. Throughout the building are antique pieces they’ve found. Hung on every wall is a collection of old tools—old saws and hammers, files and hatchets. A collection of old barber chairs is sprinkled throughout. Large standing placards display pictures and drawings of past projects the company has completed, including majestic mansions overlooking the Chesapeake Bay and even a car dealership of glittering glass and metal. It’s apparent that PHB isn’t your typical throw-up-a-house-a-week construction company, despite Danny’s self-effacing demeanor.

Truly unique, the building invites discovery. It’s also quite obviously a labor of love and a second home to the Burris clan, all of whom had at one time worked for the company.

The Backstory

Brian, our investigator, conducted the original interview with Danny, recording it on videotape. When I listened to the tape, it quickly became apparent that, while prosperous and close, the Burris family had also seen their share of loss and tragedy. Both of Danny’s parents had died, albeit of natural causes, but what was truly appalling was the number of fatal automobile accidents the family had endured. A brother, two coworkers, and a sister-in-law, a twenty-three-year-old mother of two, all died in auto accidents. If any family might have a lingering member or two, this seemed to be the one.

Danny decided to forgo the preliminaries and got straight to the point: there were strange things going on at his home and his business, and he wanted an investigation done. It turned out that he’d been contemplating such an action for a number of years and only just finally decided to pursue it.

He began his account by describing fairly typical activity. He reported hearing footsteps on the first floor and on the stairs. He noted also that sometimes people had reported smelling cigarette smoke in isolated areas of the building where no smoking was permitted. Both of Danny’s parents had been smokers.

Sometimes the sounds of breathing or sighing were heard. And oddly loud sounds, like banging on the walls, were sometimes heard. Danny confessed that he’d never actually seen an apparition or a mist form, but from his office door (which has a view of the stairs going up to the second floor) he often heard the sound of footsteps. When he looked up at the sound, he also sometimes caught the flash of movement over the top step, as if legs were going by. He specified that he didn’t actually see legs, but more a flash of movement. All these things are fairly typical of locations with paranormal activity.

But then Danny’s story became more interesting. “It’s a family business,” Danny reiterated, suggesting that the ghostly activity is tied very closely to the company and the Burris clan. Indeed, Danny said it all began in 1997, on a tragic December morning, when his brother Dave and another employee, David Robinson (often referred to by his last name in order to lessen confusion), died together in a fatal automobile accident while heading out to a job site. Danny continued, “Everything that we’re talking about started happening after that. It started right after that. At the time, my brother’s office was upstairs, and my office was downstairs. Robinson’s office was across the street in the millwork building. We started hearing noises or hearing things—upstairs, downstairs, and in the millwork building—and we’d always say, ‘Oh, it’s one of the Daves.’”

Danny was careful to point out that none of the activity ever felt malicious or sinister. Instead, the things that occurred to any number of employees or family members always seemed lighthearted or prankish in nature, which was in tune with the type of personality his brother Dave had possessed. “It’s not harmful or hurtful. In fact, we [the office staff] all laughed about it.”

“Maybe,” Danny continued, “it’s our rational minds making it this and this and this. But after Dave was killed, all these weird things started to happen. I came in one day and the intercom button was lit up on my phone.” Danny said he tried several times to turn off the intercom button, pressing it futilely again and again. The intercom button stubbornly stayed lit. This was a problem because in intercom mode the phone couldn’t be used to answer or make calls. Obviously, the intercom feature worked only with other phones in-house. So, to what phone was the intercom connected, Danny wondered? Upon checking the other phones throughout the buildings, Danny realized that the intercom buttons were also lit on what was Dave’s phone in the office upstairs and on what had been Robinson’s phone in the office across the street. None of the other phones in the building were lit. More aggravating, none of the three phones could be disconnected from the intercom.

“So, I called the phone company, and the guy came out and disconnected the system, reprogrammed it, and turned it back on. He did it probably four or five times.” The phone repairman couldn’t get the intercom feature to turn off either. Danny said that his phone appeared to be irrevocably tied to the phones of the two dead men in an endless conference. “We ended up getting a new phone system installed because those three phones were locked out with the intercom.”

Danny admitted that the odd occurrences happened periodically and were not just specific to family members. All PHB’s employees have at some point also experienced the odd things. Carol, an office employee, had told Danny just a few weeks prior that she had been alone in the building. Someone walked up the steps, and when they got to the top step, they exhaled. Carol said, “I came around the corner and found that there was nobody there.”

Joe, whose office is on the ground floor, often reported to Danny that he heard strange noises when alone in the building as well. Joe reported hearing what sounded like two or three people upstairs walking or even running about. Invariably, when Joe investigated the sounds, he’d find no one in the building with him.

Danny’s wife, Tina, recounted an eerie incident to Danny. One afternoon she had been standing near the front door of the building when a sheet of paper floated down from the second-floor office, seemingly out of nowhere. Upon picking up the piece of paper, she found that it was a note written by Dave. The note wasn’t personal, just a few jotted notes about a work project, but seeing something written in his handwriting was rather unnerving. And how had it come to be in her hands?

The main building wasn’t the only site of strange happenings. In the millwork building, where Robinson’s office had been, April, an employee, also reported strange phenomena. Danny said, “We told the employees that you would be coming and would be filming. And one of the questions you asked was if there was any activity across the street, and we said no.”

Apparently, that was when April refuted that claim. April recounted that the door to a closet would periodically open on its own. What was more interesting was that the door didn’t just swing open, which could easily be explained by a faulty latch on the door or a vacuum of air when an outer door was opened. What was weird about the closet door, April said, was the fact that the door knob actually twisted before the door swung open. The apparently unflappable April had kept what she’d witnessed to herself. She’d been briefed about the odd occurrences at PHB Inc. and thus chalked it up as another day at the office.

Danny then recalled the day when the copier repairman, Joe, came to service their machine. Apparently, Joe had other skills beyond simply repairing office machines, because he’d only been in the building a few short minutes before he started asking some pointed questions about the building’s unseen inhabitants.

Joe had walked in and said, “I’m here to service your copier.”

“That’s fine. It’s right over there,” Harry, an employee at the time, had replied.

Joe entered the room and started working on the machine. A few minutes later, he came back out to Harry and asked, “Are there other people here?”

Harry explained that there were two women working upstairs. Joe hesitantly admitted that he wasn’t asking about other employees in the building. “I don’t mean that,” Joe said. “I work with the paranormal, and there’s other people here.”

“Oh yeah, there’s other people here,” Harry agreed.

“I could feel it as soon as I walked in the door,” Joe admitted.

The episode came to Danny’s attention. His interest piqued, Danny had conversations with Joe on a couple of occasions and fully intended to invite Joe out to the building for a reading. Somehow, he never got around to setting up the meeting. When Danny finally got serious about having Joe come out, he found out that Joe himself had passed away.

With an enormous grill out the back door and a full-sized kitchen and dining area on the second floor, it’s easy to see that PHB would be a wonderful place for employees and guests to gather for a repast. Danny admitted that many a Friday afternoon had been spent in just such a way with employees and friends of the family. “I used to have happy hour here every Friday, and I’d cook for everybody.” One Friday evening there were eight men gathered upstairs with Danny, enjoying barbecue and drinks. Everyone present heard the front door open and then close downstairs. Footsteps crossed the floor and eventually climbed the stairs. All the heads in the room turned to see what new guest had arrived. They waited for a long moment, anticipating …

“And no one was there,” said Danny. Eddy, a friend of Danny’s, apparently didn’t share the opinion that phantom footsteps and doors opening and closing by themselves were all in good fun. On this particular evening Eddy told Danny vehemently that he’d heard the front door open and close, as had the other guests, and he heard someone walking up the stairs. If that someone didn’t arrive soon, Eddy told Danny, he was leaving the party, by the back door. Eddy did just that a few moments later. He’s apparently abruptly departed the building two or three times since the fateful happy-hour episode.

Conversing with a friend in his first-floor office one afternoon, Danny was behind his desk, his friend in a chair facing the showroom with a view of the front door. Again the front door opened and closed on its own, and then they heard footsteps clearly crossing the floor. His friend was stymied. “Danny, no one came in.”

“It’s probably Dave. Don’t worry about it,” Danny had said to him.

They laughed about it, because that’s how Dave was. Dave had been a prankster who loved to play jokes on people. “He and Robinson were happy-go-lucky people,” Danny explained to Brian.

But playing pranks on people may not be the only reason Dave remained, Danny speculated. When he died, he left behind five children from two marriages. A teenage daughter from the first marriage took the death particularly hard. She hadn’t been all that close to Dave, and then he died without a reconciliation. Danny admitted that his niece had gone through a very angry period. “She was in a bad way, bad time, bad whatever. She wasn’t that close to her father. She went to the cemetery and turned his headstone over.” Perhaps Dave felt compelled to linger because he felt he hadn’t properly said goodbye to those he loved, made peace with a teenage daughter who felt he’d wronged her.

Dave may not be the only spirit to wander the building, Danny contended. “We had a young fellow from Hodgson Vo-Tech’s drafting department working for us.” The young man, Gabe, interned and later worked at PHB for a couple of years while finishing high school at Hodgson. He’d apparently had a real talent for drafting, winning awards for it at competitions. Eventually, he’d graduated high school and left for college in Rhode Island. He completed his first year of college and returned home in the spring.

One morning during Gabe’s break, a horrific and baffling crashing sound shook the whole PHB building. Danny recounted that the sound was so unbelievably loud and so violent that they believed at the time that a vehicle had crashed into the structure. “Joe actually got up from his desk and ran outside to see what had happened. He found nothing.” There was no car, no crash site, no visible damage, and no way to account for the horrific sound. The sound of the crash wasn’t the only disturbance that day, either. For the rest of the day, employees reported hearing rattling and shaking sounds. The sounds of muffled voices could be detected just out of range. And something or someone could be heard moving about the building. Danny received the call later in the afternoon from Gabe’s brother: the young man had died in a car crash that very morning. He’d had the accident at the exact time that the unaccountable sound had occurred. “After that, other things were abnormal, so we figured that maybe Gabe was now with us.” At this point during the interview, Danny threw up his hands as if to say the more the merrier.

But then the tenor of the conversation changed. Danny suggested that Gabe might have considered PHB his home as well because “he’d had no parents.”

“No, let me rephrase that. Gabe …” Danny stopped at this point, obviously emotional. For a few moments he paused, peering down at his desk, before he continued. “Gabe was a …” Danny looked away, again discomfited, eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he said brusquely. Brian said nothing, letting Danny collect himself. “Gabe was a special guy,” he concluded vaguely and then abruptly changed the topic back to his brother. A few minutes later, Danny again returned to the topic of Gabe.

Gabe’s father had died in a motorcycle accident when Gabe was two years old. When Gabe was ten, his mother was also killed in a motorcycle accident while driving home from a funeral. “So Gabe was twelve, his older sister was eighteen, and his older brother was twenty.” Gabe’s older brother applied for custody of his younger brother and raised him from then on.

“Great kid, nice kid, smart kid. Good-looking boy. Smart, talented. He took number two in the county in [an] architectural drafting [competition]. Talented, talented fellow. Just as nice … and he was everybody’s friend, and just a happy-go-lucky, good guy … You know, when that accident happened and that noise happened, it just made [sense]. You don’t question what the noise was because Gabe was killed that day and that was what the noise was. That’s how we rationalize half the shit we encounter around here.” Apparently, if Gabe had come to join the crowd at PHB Inc., he was more than welcome to stay.

The House

The paranormal activity didn’t actually limit itself to the family business, Danny informed Brian. Intermittently since Dave’s death, Danny and his family had started to experience paranormal phenomena in their home as well, much to his family’s chagrin. While Danny took a cavalier approach to the paranormal activity, his wife, Tina, daughter, Michelle, and his mother-in-law, Janet, in particular, were not as pleased. Tina had been so unnerved by the happenings in her home that she would not allow the team in to investigate, fearing that an investigation might agitate the spirit or spirits and cause an increase of activity.

The building in question is not old. Danny described his home as “a brand-new house on a piece of farm dirt, built in 1996. After my brother Dave was killed, we started having things [occur] at the house. It was the same thing, noises …” Michelle, who had been a child at the time, appeared to take the brunt of the attention. “It seemed to hover around her,” Danny explained. She was lying in bed one evening when a water bottle on her dresser started compressing and expanding as if unseen fingers had been squeezing it and then releasing, squeezing and releasing. There was a picture in Michelle’s room that hung over her dresser. She heard a banging noise one day and went to investigate, only to find that the picture had come off the wall. It wasn’t lying on the dresser but on the carpet. “It didn’t fall down,” asserted Danny, but fell out.

Michelle also had strange malfunctions with her computer, which would turn off and on by itself. And one day Michelle saw a white form or mist coalesce before her very eyes.

Tina has also witnessed such wispy mists. She told Danny that she’d seen the mist out of the corner of her eye one day as it quickly sailed by. Both Tina and Michelle also reported seeing movement out of their peripheral vision at times, for which they could not account.

In a later interview I conducted with the family, Tina admitted to also seeing orbs, a fairly rare phenomenon. She reported that it had only happened twice, once when she was a young girl and the second time only a week before I spoke with her. Tina described the ball of light as floating about the room with apparent purpose before it exited under her bedroom door. Tina immediately opened the door, which led out into the hall, but saw nothing more. The ball of light had simply vanished.

The human inhabitants weren’t the only ones affected by the apparent phenomena. Tina noted that the family dogs would be walking down the hall in a straight path and then suddenly take a detour, as if moving around something that Tina couldn’t see. Other times the dogs would be on the bed, intently staring at something—again, something only they could see. Then quite suddenly the dogs would catapult themselves off the bed and run pell-mell down the stairs as if being pursued.

Both of Danny’s children are now grown and have moved away. When his son, Daniel, vacated his bedroom, it became a guest room in which Danny’s mother-in-law, Janet, would sleep when she came for periodic visits. At least, Danny noted, that was where she used to stay. She found the nights spent in that room ran the gamut from mildly alarming to terrifying. “She said, ‘There’s something in the room, there’s people in the room, and I can’t be in there.’ To this day she won’t even walk into that room,” Danny noted.

To be amenable to Janet’s discomfort, Danny and his wife elected to put her up in his daughter’s room. But that arrangement wasn’t without its complications either. She had visited the family no more than two months before the interview, and in the week that she was there she reported distinctly feeling the bed shaking on two nights. Then one night as she was sleeping on her side, she felt the covers lift up behind her and then the depressing of the mattress as if someone had gotten into the bed with her. She lay there for a long moment in terror. When she finally got up the nerve to look behind her, she saw no one there. She related that moment of terror to Danny, recounting that she’d literally been too frightened to even scream. “I was going to scream,” she said, “but I had no breath to scream.”

Janet came again the weekend before the interview, and, according to Danny, she came downstairs on Sunday morning with a new tale of the macabre.

She asked Tina, “Why did you move the bed?”

“What do you mean?” Tina asked.

“The entire bed has been moved,” Janet said.

Upon inspection of the bed, Danny and Tina had to agree with Janet: the evidence was irrefutable that something or someone had moved the bed. The markings in the carpet where the feet of the bed had been compared to the location the bed was now in indicated a move of around three inches, by Danny’s estimation. “It’s a big bed, and you couldn’t just bump it and move it.” Tina stoutly refuted moving it either. When she visits, Janet now sleeps on the couch downstairs, where for some reason she isn’t disturbed.

Danny recalled that workmen called to the home were not immune to pranks by the unseen. The whirlpool tub in the master suite had failed, and he was having a new one installed by members of his own staff. “Twice one morning I had guys in the bathroom when the fan came on … by itself,” he said. Danny clarified that at least one of the workmen witnessed the switch to the fan actually flip up by itself. Just the day before the interview, another workman had been finishing the job when the fan came on again. “He turned around and asked my son, Daniel, if he had flipped the switch and Daniel said, ‘No, I didn’t touch anything.’”

Danny’s daughter, Michelle, has set up and now runs a beauty salon on the second floor of the family’s detached garage building. Tina was in the kitchen one day talking to Daniel when his sister called from the salon and directed him to come up immediately. He came upstairs and asked her why he was there, and she directed him to be quiet and listen. They both distinctly heard a violin playing. The violin music was loud enough that the women having their hair done also heard it and commented on it. Danny reported that his grandmother had played violin and that he still had her instrument.

Between the initial interview with the Burris family and the actual investigation, I came home one night and found a text from Danny with a video attachment. Alone in her salon, Michelle had once again heard music and been able to record it on her phone. On the short recording there was an audible sound of some type of musical instrument that sounded very much like a harmonica.

Traveling Cigarette Smoke

During Brian’s interview, Danny brought up a new phenomenon that wasn’t tied to any specific location but appeared to follow him around. He admitted that he often smelled cigarette smoke in the unlikeliest places. Sometimes he smelled smoke while at the office, in a building where it is forbidden to smoke. He’d also smelled it at other locations. He had smelled it while attending a church service. Sometimes he’d smelled it at his house, though neither he nor Tina smoke. “I’ve been all different places and smelled it,” he concluded. He admitted that both of his parents had smoked, and he often caught the smell in unusual places, and invariably it would remind him of them. Olfactory phenomena are not at all unusual in hauntings, as a distinctive scent is immediately evocative of a person, our scents being extremely personal. If a person had worn a certain cologne, smoked cigars, or had a scent that was unique to them, it serves as a calling card to announce their presence. It seems as if this particular calling card was left for Danny to remind him that his parents were often close.

Dave’s Former Residence

Dave had owned a house a block over from the office. It was sold after his death to a man who moved into it with his daughter. One day the new owner came by the office to deliver a box of Dave’s old papers and also brought a message for Danny. It seemed that, while Dave had departed and the house was sold, Dave himself hadn’t gotten the eviction notice. Even before the final purchase of the house, the next-door neighbor had told the new owner that he had sometimes spotted Dave staring out a window of his former home.

Once residing in the house, the new owner started sensing Dave’s fatherly presence. Dave, who had left behind five children of his own, now watched over the homeowner’s daughter, helpfully shutting doors she left open or turning off lights she left on.

“Yeah, he looks over my daughter,” the man said. “You can’t believe. He’ll close the door and make sure she’s okay. And we talk to him …” Deciding to test his theory, the homeowner performed an experiment. He asked the entity, “If you’re here, turn the light switch on.” Apparently, the light switch flipped on. It convinced him that all these things weren’t just merely coincidences after all.

Can an entity haunt more than one location? It certainly makes sense that Dave, perhaps not knowing he’s dead or perhaps not knowing what else to do, is performing the same routine he did while he was living. He goes to work during the day and travels home at night. And then occasionally he may go out to Danny’s place with the intention of scaring Janet, a woman Danny admitted Dave loved to tease when he was living.

The activity at the office coupled with the carefully orchestrated harassment of Janet and the activity reported at Dave’s former residence all appeared to strongly suggest that his brother Dave was trying very hard to inform his family of his continued presence. I was hoping that the results of the investigation would prove that point.

The Investigation

We arrived at PHB with a full cast of characters, seven in total. Maya, Renne, Gene, and I had been on numerous investigations in the past, but with us were three new recruits, Brianna, Karl, and Sarah. I was hoping it would be a good investigation to also conduct some training. We set up at the facility, running surveillance cameras on the main floor, the staircase (where Danny had reported seeing what he described as legs moving up the stairs), and a wide angle of the second story. We also had handheld video cameras and audio recorders placed strategically around the building. On the second floor and main floor, we honestly recorded nothing of note. In the office space, which is part of the original building, we did record a couple of relatively strong EVPs.

As I said before, I brought a team of seven investigators, thinking the building large enough to accommodate the numbers. I quickly regretted that decision. All the old planks and boards that Danny had salvaged and that lent such a lovely patina to the building quickly proved to be a sound hazard. A team upstairs that moved even minimally would cause creaking and squeaking floorboards that resounded throughout the rest of the building. The same could be said for the first floor. Anytime any person moved the entire building reverberated with the noise. Evidence review became a misery of creak, creak, creak, groan.

This might, obviously, be a contributor to the sounds of footsteps that the owner reported hearing over and over. Could the wood settling and moving in different weather conditions and humidity be causing what sounded like footsteps coming in the door and moving up the staircase? Certainly, it couldn’t be ruled out.

Audio recorders in the older part of the building seemed to have caught the clearest evidence. One EVP we caught was a male voice that responded to our request for its name. Of course, in the way of things, he didn’t actually answer us with his name but instead offered a noncommittal “Do it.”

In the probable highlight of the evening, the team composed of Renne, Brianna, and Karl was able to interact, using EMF detectors, with a seemingly unseen participant. These exchanges are fairly rare but always welcome when they occur. The investigators asked a number of yes/no questions, and the entity was able to answer in the positive by lighting up one or more of the detectors and seemed to move about from one detector to another. It wasn’t a surprise that the conversation was focused on building construction when the positive responses began. The team did an excellent job of connecting with the spirit by speaking his own language.

Below is a portion of that transcript recorded on the first floor of PHB Inc. that evening. It should be noted that each team member had an EMF detector with them during the exchange, either in their hands or placed in various locations nearby, and that more than one device responded throughout.

Renne: We are downstairs in Middletown, Delaware, at the architect’s office.3 Do we have anyone down here? We seemed to have someone upstairs.

Brianna: It’s so creaky in here. (A couple of creaks are heard as Brianna moves furtively around the room.) There is no being quiet in here. If someone’s here, can you make the meter flicker? (The lights flicker on the EMF detector in Brianna’s hand.) Thank you. Can you do that again?

Karl: (To Brianna) Did it make your meter flicker?

Suddenly the team’s attention was piqued. It had been a fairly noneventful evening up to then.

Brianna: Yes. Can you make it flicker one more time? Please …

Renne: If you’re here, did you work as an architect?

Renne: Are you an apprentice? Or are you maybe attached to the objects in the room, like a barber chair? Or one of the old tools? Can you tell us your name?

Brianna: Can you tell us how you passed away?

Renne: How old are you?

Long pause. The team slowly assembles as a group near the center of the room.

Brianna: Upstairs there seemed to be someone playing with my lights. They seemed to really like the lights (referring to her handheld EMF detector). Do you want to make them flicker? (To the team) Did you see that? (To the room) Can you make them flicker again?

Karl: I’m getting a strong EMF spike.

Karl’s meter also starts flickering.

Brianna: Thank you. Do you like the lights?

Karl: Can you do that again, please?

Brianna: Can you bring it to a yellow, please? 4

Karl: It’s trying.

Karl and Brianna: Thank you.

Apparently, one of the meters lights up all the way to yellow. The meter had shot up quite forcefully.

Karl: Wow, thank you. That took a lot of energy to do that.

Brianna: Can you make my meter go to yellow, please?

Renne: Is this the same person who was upstairs, or is this another person?

Karl: All right, thank you.

Karl: (Whispering) It’s cold right here. Do you feel that?

Renne: I do, actually.

Brianna: It’s cold on the left side of my left leg.

Renne: It’s my feet. My feet and my ankles [are cold].

Karl: Yeah, mine too. And the back of my neck. It feels like it’s breathing on me.

Karl: Right here (indicating where he’s feeling the cold on his leg).

Brianna: That’s where mine is (rubbing her left leg).

Karl: Is that you?

Brianna: Did you come down to be with us and talk to us?

Karl: Are you with us right now?

Renne: Can you stomp on the floor? Jiggle a doorknob?

There is a creaking noise overhead.

Renne: That’s upstairs.

Karl: Did you hear that?

Renne: It’s upstairs. They’re walking.

Brianna: Can you hold it on yellow please?

Karl: It just did it.

Renne and Brianna: Thank you.

Renne: Can you show us in some way that you’re here? Like whoever upstairs did. If you’re the same person, can you pull? Pull our pants legs or …

Karl: Move my hat.

Renne: Pull my hair or touch my shoulder?

A pause of several seconds occurs.

Renne: You have all these people walking around. Do you like all these people? Do you feel like you’re at work again? You can tell us to get out. Tell us in that little recorder over there. Tell us to get out.

A pause of a few seconds occurs, and then one of the meters lights up.

Karl: Wow.

Renne: Thanks for lighting that up.

Karl: It really lit up when you said that.

There is a pause of a few seconds, during which creaks are heard from the floor above.

Renne: That was up above. You cannot walk up there without the floor squeaking, creaking.

Brianna: You’re right, there’s no way. (Pause) Is your name Gabriel? Or Gabe? 5 My friend had a home improvement company like twenty years ago.6

Renne: That’s all right. You still know more than we do. I worked for a builder for a few years and I still …(Addressing the spirit) When you build these houses, what type of insulation do you use? What’s the R factor?

Brianna: Karl was raised around construction. So you may have that in common. Can you light up his meter, please?

Karl: It just went to yellow.

Brianna: It went to yellow?

Karl: Yeah.

Brianna: Can you do that again please?

Karl and Brianna: Thank you.

Karl: I grew up on job sites. Did you? It went up a little bit. Yeah.

Renne: I used to work for a builder. I used to order the insulation and the lighting.

Karl: It’s going … nuts.

Renne: The Dryvit, the siding. That’s what they used to use.

Karl: Yeah.

Renne: That was back in the nineties.

Karl: Yeah.

Brianna: I’ve got a chill going up and down my shoulder. (Whispering in excitement) This is so great.

Renne: I used to get the Dryvit, and there was something else. There was another one they had besides Dryvit, and I can’t remember what it was called.

Karl: It was a synthetic stucco. It lit up when I said that. Like it knew.

Renne: Typar, I used to order the Typar and the Tyvek.

Karl: (Laughing) Yeah, when I said that it went …(Indicates the meter going up and down with a hand motion.)

Renne: I remember the builder I worked for. He had to pour the foundations and make them waterproof.

Karl: Wow. Did you see? (Meter goes off again.)

Renne: Did you have to do that? Was that all part of your architectural plans?

Karl: Wow.

Notice how many more EMF spikes occurred when the team started talking about building materials. Materials would have been something that, as a builder, Dave would have dealt with every day. Case in point: I was in the dentist’s office having some work done recently, and as I sat in the chair incapacitated, the dentist and his enthusiastic young assistant talked animatedly about the pros and cons of dental supplies for what felt like a small eternity. We are our careers, the work we do, and the labor we train for and we take pride in. I credit the success of the EMF conversation to the crew, who did a good job of tapping into that.

The Evidence

This is an excerpt from the evidence log of the EMF exchange between Renne, Karl, and Brianna. Renne’s audio recorder was stationed on the first floor in the main business area. The time denotes hours and minutes.

2:03	Brianna reports a KII spike.
2:03	Karl’s KII meter spikes to a yellow.
2:06	KII spike to yellow on stationary KII.
2:07	Group reports feeling cold around the feet and ankles, later around the neck and shoulders.
2:08	KII spike into yellow stationary KII.
2:10	KII spike to yellow, and then again immediately after stationary KII.
2:12	KII spike.
2:13	KII spike.
2:38	Karl’s KII spikes to yellow.
2:39	Mel Meter EMF stationed by stairs chirped.
2:45	Indistinguishable whisper recorded.
2:46:09	KII hit.
2:46:41	KII hit.

The amount of evidence the team collected was not outstanding. While the EMF session was interesting, I wouldn’t consider it conclusive. I would have liked an accompanying EVP or moving shadow caught on film to help confirm that something had been truly going on.

I interpreted the one clear EVP caught that night, the male saying “Do it” in answer to our request that he tell us his name, as an entity convincing himself to tell us his name. Sadly, he didn’t.

Contamination, my old nemesis, was an issue. Even the smallest movements by the team caused the floorboards to creak loudly. I listened to hours of creaking, groaning, squeaking, squealing floors until I peeled the headphones off in disgust. It made me wonder, what might we have caught if not for the contamination?

Final Assessment

The frustrating truth about investigating is that if the activity is of a residual nature, it will only happen when the environmental factors are right. If it’s an intelligent haunting and it’s avoiding you, then you may get nothing as well. And of course the third alternative, one that should be carefully considered, is that the so-called activity has a natural explanation. Certainly, reports of footsteps in this particular building with its creaking floors were suspect. Multiple people, all fully awake, hearing the front door opening and closing followed by footsteps moving across the floor and up the stairs—well, that’s another story.

My gut feeling was (though I’d like far more evidence to prove it) that Brother Dave haunted PHB Inc., sometimes went home to his place of residence, and sometimes traveled out to Danny’s house to harass Janet. Why? It may very well be the fact that his death was abrupt. He was in a work truck going out to a job site one moment and dead in another. It may be that Dave had no idea what happened and therefore wasn’t aware of the fact that he’s now deceased.

Then again, it may be that Dave had too much unfinished business. He died leaving behind five children of various ages, a family business, brothers, a wife … Perhaps he simply couldn’t let go. When a person has a wasting disease, they have time to become accustomed to the fact that their time is limited. They have time to say goodbyes and square up, for example, with an angry adolescent daughter with whom they’d had a misunderstanding. That isn’t the case when death meets us unexpectedly.

The reason I suggested it was Dave and not one of the others was that the activity seemed mischievous and good-natured, which matched his characteristic tendencies as described in his own brother’s accounts. His fatherly inclinations toward the young girl who now lived in his house seemed to affirm his parental leanings.

Gabe, I speculated, was more of what we would consider a crisis apparition. Crisis apparitions occur directly at the time of death or very soon after. It is the departed’s way of signaling that something terrible just happened. I speculated that if they had noted the time of the horrible sound of a vehicle smashing (supposedly into the building), that sound that sent Joe racing out of the building, they would have found that it correlated exactly with the moment that the fatal accident occurred.

That is the way that crisis apparitions work. It is in effect a telepathic distress call to the living that something horrible just happened, something that needs immediate attention. The fact that Danny had mentored, probably fathered in many ways, the young man and that they shared a deep emotional attachment was obvious. We can’t always choose our family … but then sometimes we can. I’ve already mentioned the fact that the young man’s obituary is framed and hung prominently on the wall on the second floor of the building—so prominently that one of my investigators found it, read it, and included it in an EVP session without any prior knowledge of the situation. That spoke volumes. The oral disturbances that followed the rest of the day, I speculate, were Gabe’s way of trying to communicate with Danny about the tragedy.

The cigarette smoke that seemed to follow Danny around to various odd locations may just be annoying people with a cigarette habit. Or it could be a form of after-death communication (ADC). ADCs are a type of phenomenon that happen when deceased family members attempt to communicate with living loved ones. They do not constitute conventional hauntings but are short visits of our departed loved ones in essence checking in to say, “I’m okay. How are you?”

These phenomena can take various forms, from oddly lucid dreams, to familiar symbols, to feelings like a person is being touched or even embraced. Olfactory phenomena are extremely powerful. Our sense of smell is connected to the oldest part of the brain, the amygdala, or primal brain stem. Thus, a smell can elicit an immediate sympathetic response.

Case in point: I was swapping stories with a painter at her art studio in Beaufort, South Carolina, one lovely afternoon. In the course of our conversation, she informed me that she had been at home one evening when she had unmistakably smelled the scent of her grandmother’s perfume. She was alone, sitting on a couch, when this overwhelming scent caught her attention. The power of the scent and the fact that its presence could not be accounted for in an empty room left her so unnerved that she ran out of the house. She spoke about the incident later with her sister, who admitted that she had had a similar experience. Grandmother, apparently, was checking up on her granddaughters.

The fact that Danny smelled the very distinctive smell of cigarette smoke, a scent clearly connected with both his parents, seems to indicate that one or the other was checking in. This was a very closely connected clan, a family that was running a multigenerational company, a business that connected both parents and four brothers—truly a family not to be separated from one another even by the gulf of death.

Postscript

As I said before, the evidence we caught wasn’t terribly illuminating, and it left many questions unanswered. Honestly, I would have liked to have returned to do another investigation. It’s wonderful when we get the chance to do multiple investigations at one location. With multiple investigations, the evidence yield has the potential to grow. However, after our investigation wrapped, Danny and his family instead solicited the help of an area psychic. During her reading of the building, according to Danny, she said that she had connected with the spirit of Dave. She said he was something of a smart aleck who liked to tease people. And she brought up several details that Danny confirmed only Dave could have known. Apparently, the topic of feral cats was one such detail that convinced Danny she had actually made contact with his deceased brother.

Danny relayed the story to me. His mother had started feeding a few feral cats that were roaming about the property. The promise of a free meal was trumpeted around the neighborhood, and the number of homeless cats quickly grew to twenty-five. Realizing that they had a problem, the family contacted a cat rescue group who came and crated up twenty-four of them; the last cat evaded capture. They took all the cats to a vet, who performed twenty-four sterilization operations. Then the group brought all twenty-four feral cats back to the Burrises. Finally, a friend of the family who owned a farm with a mouse infestation agreed to take the cats. All twenty-five feral cats were caught, crated, and moved to a new home. According to the psychic, Dave was recalling this comic episode in their shared lives.

I interviewed Danny a final time when I was gathering information for this book. He confirmed that the paranormal activity continued unabated at both the business and the house. Just that weekend, Tina’s two-year-old great-nephew had been at the house for a family get-together. He started climbing the stairs, which is dangerous for one so young. Everyone present had implored the boy to stop, which he did when he reached the landing. He had turned around and looked back down the stairs when his mother called to him. But before she could run up the steps and scoop him to safety, he turned back around to face the second floor and began waving as if at a person. When the boy’s mother arrived, she looked up the stairs to see who the child was waving to but saw only an empty hallway. The child’s behavior had been so strange that everyone at the get-together had discussed it at some length. Obviously, the child had been going up the stairs to meet someone, the same someone he had greeted with a little-boy wave. But who had he seen?

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3. I’m not sure why Renne assumed that the company was an architectural firm. However, I do tend to keep the details of cases pretty close to the vest. I don’t want the team to go in, especially those who feel themselves to be more sensitive, with preconceived notions.

4. On the meter, different colored lights signify higher levels of EMF. Green lights indicate the lower range of 1.5 to 2.5 milligauss, yellow signifies the middle range of 5 to 10 mG, orange indicates 10 to 20 mG, and red is 20 or more mG.

5. I hadn’t told the team about the possible connection with Gabe, but Brianna had unwittingly read his obituary, which was prominently mounted in a frame on the wall on the second floor.

6. Brianna is trying to explain her lack of knowledge of the building industry. One of the best things to do to encourage activity is find a common bond with an entity. If they were in the construction business, you talk construction. If it’s a child, you tell them a story, and so on. I’ve often found that when I have managed to make that connection, my success is far greater, the evidence of better quality.