Chapter 2
Hartly, Delaware
Nestled on a wooded lot, the little cedar-shake house in Hartly, Delaware, hardly fits our picture of a haunted house. But if there’s one thing I’ve found about the paranormal, it’s that it rarely fits the Hollywood picture. In the previous chapter, I commented that it is always desirable to do multiple investigations of a property in order to establish a broader evidence base from which to work. This little house in the woods is the perfect case in point.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with homeowners Lindsey and Aaron for four years now. I performed not only three investigations at their home but also two investigations at a property where Aaron was the general contractor. By the way, both of the properties in question were undergoing major renovations, which often leads to an increase in paranormal activity. It’s such a prevalent factor in hauntings that it’s one of the first questions I ask during my initial interviews with prospective clients. If we believe that entities have some intelligence, a reaction to the commotion would probably not be surprising. They see the structure as their home, and suddenly some stranger is tearing out walls and breaking up the floor.
The exterior of the house.
When the team started to look into the history of the home and its former owner or owners, we found that the whole situation was rather unique. The former owner of the property was Phillip Goldberg, who turned out to be a rather astounding figure for backwater Hartly. He’d attended an Ivy League university but had left before graduating to run his family’s business, steering them through the turbulent years of the Great Depression. He had done a tour of duty during World War II and had been awarded several medals for bravery.
After the war, he returned to college, eventually completing a PhD, and ended his career as a professor at various local colleges. Among his many pursuits, he’d also been trained in hypnotherapy.
At some point he acquired a large piece of land. Always the entrepreneur, Goldberg had divided the larger property into smaller lots along a backcountry road and then moved (instead of building) small existing houses onto the lots as rental units.
Lindsey and Aaron’s home had actually been two houses moved there and placed via crane in 1953. The two separate buildings were connected, end to end, making the structure feel somewhat like a jigsaw puzzle. One building appeared to have been a very small 1940s-era two-story home, with one bedroom in the loft area. The second building was a one-story building bearing few architectural details, which made the age of the building hard to determine. Because of the odd connection, the long central hallway had a decided jag in the middle. Doors opened to the outside in odd places. There were in essence two front doors, neither of which faced the road, but a side door off the bedroom hallway did. A small closet that probably started its life as a hallway closet had one opening into the hall and another to the rear of the closet that opened into the master bedroom.
Neither the owners nor the team have been able to ascertain where the two homes had originally stood or who had owned them, making the origin of the haunting even more of a mystery. Did the ghost or ghosts come with one or both of the houses? Was it something that resided on the land and had since taken up residence in the home after the buildings were placed there? We simply do not know.
As county records and title searches only establish owners of a property, and not renters, we were also not able to establish who had rented the home throughout the years. What we were able to establish was that the Goldberg family never lived in the building but had owned a larger home up the road. Goldberg’s wife was killed in an accident in her seventies, and Goldberg followed her a couple years later from natural causes. The couple left behind two grown children. Presumably desiring to cash in on their inheritance, the family placed the rental properties up for sale. The housing market being stale at the time, many of the houses did not sell for years. In fact, the house next door to Lindsey and Aaron’s was still vacant when last I visited. Their house stood empty for eight years before the enterprising young couple decided to take on the project of bringing it back from the brink. Seeing it as a quiet place to raise their children, they made an offer and closed on the property in 2012. Aaron, a contractor by trade, wasn’t deterred by the ramshackle condition of the house, though the building was in very rough shape, and started making repairs immediately. Unfortunately, he worked long hours running his own construction business and was often gone, leaving the repairs unfinished. Indeed, Lindsey recalled a time early on when there was a gaping hole in the dining room floor that she attempted to keep her toddler daughter from falling into.
Certainly, the first two or three years must have been difficult for the couple, with Aaron gone on jobs and Lindsey home alone in the old building with her young daughter and later an infant son. It also rather quickly became plain, at least to Lindsey, that there were others residing in the home as well, residents who were not necessarily visible but were making their occupancy clear in rather remarkable ways. In the beginning, the strange things that happened appeared to be benign. But as the renovations began in earnest, the activity seemed to both increase and change in tenor until one fateful night when Lindsey saw something that changed her mind about the friendly nature of her unseen guests and set her on the path to seeking help. She also found the information about Goldberg during her search on the history of the property. She found his background in hypnotherapy extremely interesting. Who better to haunt a building than someone trained in hypnotherapy? she wondered. I surmised that Lindsey equated hypnosis with ESP as ways to tap into a person’s unconscious mind. While I’ve often been skeptical of the idea that the Goldbergs, or Mrs. Goldberg in particular, haunted the property, Lindsey remains steadfast in her conviction that such is the case. In fact, in a recent email to me, she recounted the Goldberg’s daughter had stopped by the house to discuss some business with Aaron. While there, she was playing with the children. Lindsey recounted that she began feeling an overwhelming sense of happiness and peace in the house, which strengthened her conviction about the identity of their unseen inhabitant.
I tell all my clients when they first contact us for an investigation to establish a log of events to keep details straight, as human memory is a fickle thing at best. Of course, by the time my organization is contacted, a family may have been experiencing anomalous events for a number of years. It then becomes a guessing game about whether they witnessed the dark shadow in the hallway before or after they heard the ghostly piano music on the baby monitor. This is the case with the Hartly house, as the family had been living in the house two years before they contacted me. Thus, it’s difficult to impossible at this point to establish a perfect timeline of events. What I’ve tried to do instead is link like evidence with like and build to the crescendo that finally convinced Lindsey to seek outside help.
The Backstory
It started, as these things often do, with electrical disturbances. The fact that lights would flicker on and off was perhaps not surprising for an old house with old wiring. Radios and TVs would also flicker or change stations. Aaron was slowly replacing worn fixtures and worn wiring to correct the problem, to no avail. The electrical malfunctions had continued. On our third investigation, Lindsey described strange TV behavior. One evening she woke up to find the program playing on their bedroom TV in fast-forward, though their cable device did not have this functionality. Wondering if there was a problem with the cable service, she went into the family room to look at the TV there. In the family room the program was playing at the proper speed. Now she was confused. How could programs on cable run at different speeds on different TVs? A trip back to the bedroom confirmed it: the TV in the bedroom was still playing at a different speed.
TVs in the home had a history of mystifying misbehavior, apparently. Aaron recalled a day when his son was in the family room watching snow on the TV. Very young at the time, Romeo appeared to be communicating with something in the room, waving his hands and jabbering away in baby talk. Watching from the porch, Aaron witnessed his son babbling happily as he watched nothing on the TV. What happened next had Aaron perplexed. A confounded Aaron watched the TV change from snow to a cartoon with no one touching the remote. Had Romeo been communicating with an unseen spirit, imploring him or her to change the channel?
Lindsey also noted that the family would often hear strange banging or crashing noises, but upon investigation of the sound, they would find nothing out of place. Lindsey also said she had sometimes seen a shadowy mass moving in the hallway as she was lying in bed looking into the bureau mirror across the room. Then too there was the odd shadow that they caught out of the corner of their eye when watching the family room TV. This TV hangs on the stairway wall. This same wall has a square cutout so that someone sitting on the couch facing the TV can see across the staircase and into the dining room. In the same corner, visible from the couch is a wood-burning stove that the family installed. On many evenings, Aaron or Lindsey would see a shadowy figure moving about by the wood-burning stove in what Lindsey described as a pattern-like motion. In other words, the figure would always be seen moving in the same direction, moving from the center of the room and heading toward the wall. Speculating that this might be residual activity, I examined the wall, thinking I might find evidence that there had been a door there once. I did not find evidence of that, however, as the window in the wall appears to be original to the structure.
On the team’s first investigation of the property, we caught a strange mist in that area that appeared in one photo but was gone by the next. All the doors and windows were closed at the time, it being winter. We didn’t see the mist with our eyes, so it didn’t become apparent until we were in evidence review. We had taken multiple photos of the same area since and had never been able to re-create an image with a mist.
But strange mists are not out of the ordinary at the Hartly house. An odd mist was reported by a visitor to the house who was unaware of the house’s haunted reputation. He had entered the bathroom one day when he came face to manifestation with a strange fog simply hanging in the air. No one had showered recently, and the entire room wasn’t fogged—just a small dense area had this foggy mist. It was so odd that the visitor reported it to Lindsey and Aaron.
Lindsey also noted that she herself had witnessed in her hallway closet what she described as a substance that looked like waves of heat rising from a hot road. This shimmery heat-wave substance appeared to be floating in her closet at eye level. She had seen the same substance on the video feed off Romeo’s baby monitor in the past. She noted one night that Romeo appeared to be interacting with the heat waves and at one point appeared to part the cloud with his hand.
More recently, Aaron had started seeing a small, shadowy figure by the kitchen when he was in the family room. The figure was small like a child. The first time it happened, Aaron thought he’d caught his daughter in the act of sneaking out of bed. He didn’t find her in the kitchen when he investigated, and a trip down the hall proved that she was in bed asleep as she should have been. He’s since witnessed this small apparition multiple times.
Then one fateful night, Lindsey awoke to a truly terrifying sight. Standing in the doorway of the hallway closet (recall that the back of the closet opens to the master bedroom) and seemingly gazing in at her was the dark figure of a man. He stood there for some time as Lindsey lay there too frightened to make a sound. It was as if the figure wanted Lindsey to see him, as if he wanted her to know that he was there watching her, spying on her, passing judgment. The figure finally faded away, but her terror remained. She began researching the property the very next day. When asked, she admitted that they had been in the middle of refurbishing the bathroom across the hall from their bedroom when this sighting occurred.
Lindsey isn’t the only one to have witnessed the dark, male figure. A visitor to her house also saw him, unwittingly. Lindsey wrote in an email to me, “We had a friend of ours just last week who had no background knowledge about our energy here. He said that he was walking down the hallway to use the restroom when he saw a shadow in the shape of a human figure that walked into our master bedroom through the hallway closet. He came back and told us, and he had been pretty shaken up.” The fact that the friend had no knowledge that the house was haunted, and therefore no preconceived notions, made this account stronger from an evidential standpoint. One doesn’t expect to go to a friend’s house, turn the corner, and see an unexplained shadowy figure walking into a room.
When Lindsey first contacted me, she told me quite plainly that she sensed there were two entities in the house, a male and a female. The male entity was more standoffish, while the female was more interactive, perhaps even downright friendly. Lindsey recalled a day when she was in the kitchen and she and Aaron were having a heated discussion. The argument was building in volume when suddenly Lindsay felt a push on her shoulder, a shove that literally propelled her out of the kitchen. “All right,” Lindsey had said, “Apparently you don’t want me in there.” The preternatural push did what it had been intended to do: break up the discussion.
Aside from diffusing marital disputes, the female entity appeared to have adopted the role of family protector as well, a role that has saved the family at least twice from house fires. In an email sent to me, Lindsey wrote that she had awoken out of a sound sleep one night and smelled smoke. The smell was so strong she got out of bed to check the house but found no source for the odor. Lindsey felt that the smell of fire where no fire could be found was precognitive of the two events that happened shortly after.
The first incident started benignly enough. Lindsey wandered out to the wood-floored attached porch one day and realized a rug on the floor would be nice. She had just the thing, she recalled: an old rug of her mother’s that she had stored in the back storage room. One of these days, she thought, she’d have to find it and try it out there. Throughout the rest of the day, at odd times Lindsey would find herself thinking again about the old rug. Thoughts of that rug kept creeping into her head at the oddest moments. She just couldn’t stop thinking about that rug. Finally, she gave into the pressure and went to find the rug. When she got to the storage room, she had an unexpected revelation. An overheated lamp had fallen onto the rug and had left a singed spot. If she hadn’t found it then, it very likely would have started a fire. Had the female spirit been trying to communicate the danger to her telepathically all day long?
And fire was the theme in another bizarre episode. One evening Lindsey had gone out to greet Aaron, who was coming home from work. While standing at the truck door conversing with him, she happened to glance into the side-door mirror. Reflected in the mirror was a sight that left Lindsey in a panic. She quite clearly saw flames. The flames were so shockingly real in fact, that she spun around to look at the front of the house, specifically at the chimney, to see if her house was ablaze. She saw nothing. However, now somewhat in a panic, she ran into and through the house to the attached porch on the other side. On the porch she found the ashtray ablaze. In our initial interview, Lindsey concluded, “There was no way his truck could have shown a reflection of the porch, but something made me run out there to check on it, and if that didn’t happen, we would’ve had a fire.”
One of the characteristics that makes Lindsey one of my favorite clients is the fact that she’s so down-to-earth about the odd things that happen in her home. She’s not calling in a priest and sprinkling holy water every time something weird happens. She’s more interested in knowing what is going on.
The family’s daughter, Savanna, hasn’t had a lot of encounters with the spirits. She did tell her mother once that she had seen a woman outside her bedroom window. And once while we were there for an evidence reveal, the girl admitted to me that she heard things out in the hallway sometimes. But in retrospect, Savanna appeared to have the least contact with the spirits of the house. That is not the case, however, with the couple’s son, Romeo.
From the start, the little boy seemed to have caught the interest of our female spirit. Toddlers and infants often keep odd sleeping habits, but Romeo’s were odder than most. He would be up until all hours of the night babbling in his room. He seemed to be interacting with someone or something that only he could see. And Lindsey and Aaron reported that they sometimes would hear piano music on the monitor. In the house was a piano that Lindsey’s mother had painstakingly scrimped and saved for. This heirloom instrument had originally been purchased for her son when he was a child, but Lindsey had inherited it when her mother passed away. It stood by one of the front doors at the other end of the hallway from Romeo’s room. Nowhere near Romeo’s room stood the piano, and yet the two bewildered parents would hear piano music when it was impossible for there to be anyone playing it. And I’ve already mentioned the heat-wave anomaly Lindsey and Aaron sometimes witnessed on the baby monitor hanging over the crib in Romeo’s room.
While the house has been investigated four times, the first investigation was performed by another area group. That team performed a quick two-hour investigation while Aaron and Lindsey sat out on the porch. The investigation netted a couple of EVPs, which, while not an astounding amount of evidence, was enough to pique Lindsey’s interest. She contacted me shortly after the initial investigation to ask me to perform another.
It should be noted that, while Lindsey believed early on that the house was haunted, it took longer for the skeptical Aaron to accept that there was something odd about the building. The faulty wiring and the thumps and bumps he could rationally argue away. He also didn’t spend as much time in the home as did Lindsey. Aaron told me that it wasn’t until the night of the first paranormal investigation that he actually accepted that certain things that happened in the house had no rational explanation.
The very first time the couple had their house investigated by a paranormal team, they put Romeo to sleep and then waited close by on the porch, listening while the team did their sweep. The group then gathered their gear and left, and Lindsey and Aaron went back inside. Before turning in himself, Aaron headed to the children’s rooms to check that they were sleeping. When he got to Romeo’s room, he was befuddled to find that something was barring his entrance into the room. At first he couldn’t figure out what. The door itself wasn’t locked, yet when he pushed on the door, it would only open a couple of inches. When he knelt down and examined the opening, he realized that the drawers of a small filing cabinet in the boy’s room had been pulled open from within and were now blocking ingress into the room. Romeo was in his crib, and even had he not been, he was too small to have pulled the drawers open on his own. Had the ghost-hunting team done this upon leaving the room? How could they? Once the drawers were pulled open, their egress would have been blocked as well.
A confounded Aaron went to the kitchen and grabbed a screwdriver, which he then used to methodically push the drawers closed. Once inside the room, he approached the crib only to find the infant was wrapped up in a blanket. Wrapped very tightly, in fact. Aaron quickly unwrapped the tyke, and then, as he explained, “as soon as I unwrapped the blanket, he just took this big gasp of air and then started breathing normally again.”
Try as he might, Aaron could find no logical explanation for the event. How did the drawers get opened from within the room? How had Romeo gotten wrapped so dangerously in his own blanket? Aaron was shaken by the event, so shaken that he consented to another investigation.
When our team investigated the room, we found that the floorboards by the door had some play in them. It is an older structure and the floors are, not surprisingly, springy. Even so, walking in and out of the room and even jumping up and down in the doorway did not cause the drawers of the filing cabinet to open. We could not get the drawers to roll out on their own. Had the motherly entity Lindsey reported tried to protect Romeo from the strangers she thought were threatening him? If so, she had come dangerously close to smothering the child.
Our First Investigation
When Lindsey first contacted me, I came out and did a walk-through of the home and conducted a fairly lengthy interview with her. I admit I was somewhat skeptical of her claims. As with every case I investigate, I try to go in with an open mind, looking for logical explanations first, before believing that all things are paranormal. While she was adamant about her claims, I thought she might also be prone to belief in the paranormal. Many people develop what I call the “haunted house effect.” When they believe a building is haunted, whether it is or not, then everything that isn’t immediately explainable is attributed to the ghost. Lose your car keys, the ghost took them. Hear a thump, it must be the ghost. With all the television “reality” shows on the paranormal, belief in or at least awareness of the paranormal has been on the rise, resulting in a type of hyperphasmaphobia.
Full investigations absorb a lot of time, energy, and resources—my resources. I admit I’m often hesitant, sometimes too hesitant, to make the commitment if I feel there will be no payoff in the end. Lindsey also told me that most of the activity happened between the wee hours of the morning, between two and three a.m. Despite my love of paranormal investigating, I am not what you would call a night owl, and, thus, staying up all night was not all that tempting. My team typically arrives in the early evening before sundown so that we have some natural light during setup. Setup can take one to two hours, depending on the size of the building and the amount of equipment we have to set up. We often only investigate for three hours before breaking down and departing. We’re usually heading out of an investigation around eleven. This may not sound like a lengthy amount of time. However, if we run four video cameras, each recording three hours of footage, and a like number of audio recorders, we then have a whopping twenty-four hours of material to review. Thus, even a short investigation requires a herculean effort on the part of the investigators.
But when I first heard about the investigation, I was only too eager to get my hands dirty. On our first investigation, I brought Gene and a new investigator named Shay. We brought minimal equipment, as it was a short investigation. The first time we investigated the home was in the dead of winter, and the family was present, as were the dogs and the cat. The infant was in his crib wide awake and babbling to himself the whole time. I’ve already mentioned the child’s strange nocturnal habits. Having no wish to disturb the child, we were never able to check out the room, but we spent the majority of the evening in the family room while Aaron and Lindsey departed to the master bedroom in order to give us some privacy.
Contamination was obviously a factor. I never like to investigate a building with that much human and animal activity going on. But putting the family out of their house on a cold winter’s night just wasn’t an option. Still, when analysis of the audio and video was done, I came away with two possible anomalous sounds: one a clear, audible sigh caught in the kitchen, possibly one of the dogs, and the other a male voice answering “What is your name?” with what sounded like “Wade.” That and the picture of the unexplained mist in the dining room were enough incentive to do another investigation. What I especially liked about the mist picture was that there was a picture taken beforehand that didn’t show a mist and a picture shortly after that that also showed no mist.
The “Wade” EVP was interesting. Rarely do we get an answer when asking the entity’s name, which makes our job that much more difficult. Was Wade someone who rented from Goldberg? Then again, the two homes were moved from unknown locations, and we haven’t been able to check the deeds of former property owners to confirm a Wade.
However, the voice might also have been saying something else that just sounded like Wade to me. Just once I’d like a voice to answer, “Well, my name is John Parker III, and I died in this house in 1914.” Until that fantasy comes true, I have to caution my clients not to read too much into what is said and to spend more time trying to figure out what is happening versus who is doing it.
Our Second Investigation
I was still intrigued enough to return for another investigation. There’d now been two investigations that had both provided some evidence. This time I decided we’d do a lengthier investigation and really try to get to the bottom of the activity. It was late summer and the family was decamping to the family summer cottage. Even the dogs would be absent, and we would have the house all to ourselves. We returned with a four-person team, a wonderful number for a small residence, as two could investigate while the other two manned the surveillance camera system.
It was a dark and stormy night when we returned to the Hartly house. No, really, it was a thunderous night with sheeting rain and lightning. Just the kind of dreamy night of ghost hunting I love. It’s not because of the ambience, although investigating in a storm does set a mood. No, it’s all that energy that is released into the environment that helps fuel paranormal activity. A thunderstorm releases a plethora of negatively charged ions, little electrically charged particles. These particles get absorbed almost immediately in the environment, but while they’re present, they’re available as a possible source of energy for a spirit, or so the theory suggests. It’s believed that a spirit is willful energy, but like humans, who require food to fuel our bodies, ghosts require energy. They can acquire this energy from man-made sources of electromagnetic energy, hence the often-reported battery drains in video cameras or flashlights. However, they can also acquire it from natural sources, such as the latent energy available in air humidity and the ions that are released during a thunderstorm. This may be the reason why so much more paranormal activity occurs around sources of water.
Other groups have experimented with ion generators, hoping to mimic Mother Nature by creating and releasing ions, but they have not recorded a demonstrable uptick in paranormal activity. Ion generators also lead to an increase in particulate matter—thousands more “orbs” on your infrared (IR) camera to watch. Like everything in the paranormal field, there never seems to be a clear and concise answer.
We were still setting up our equipment when the activity started. In particular, we were placing the voice recorder and setting up a surveillance camera in the vicinity of the hall closet when we noticed the hair on the back of our necks was standing on end. It’s one thing to creep yourself out during an investigation and another to have it happen when you’re not paying any attention, when you’re just going about your business, so to speak. And it happened to me as well as the others. I’m about as sensitive as a stone, and I tend to be skeptical in nature. So it’s odd for me to have an attack of the heebie-jeebies, especially of the magnitude I was experiencing—repeatedly.
We had set up our equipment and were preparing to head out the door for a quick dinner when we obtained our first EVP of the night, which we discovered on evidence review. It was a female voice we would hear many times on tape, asking, “Why?” We captured it in the hall closet. I’m guessing she was questioning why we were there. The entire team was in another part of the building at the time.
On the second investigation, I brought two brand-new investigators along, Renne and Maya, and Shay, who had only one investigation under his belt, the previous trip to the Hartly house. The team was running around with their ambient thermometers recording every single degree drop or gain. They were very new at the time and demonstrated the overexuberance typical of beginning investigators. I was new myself once as well, so I understood the desire to find anything at all. Finally, I got a little exasperated and decided to show them what a significant temperature change actually entailed. So we gathered in the family room for a session with my IR thermometer. Unlike ambient thermometers, which read the air temperature in the room, IR thermometers bounce an infrared light beam off solid objects and gauge the temperature of solid objects. That’s why I don’t typically use them to find cold spots in a room any longer. I have found them interesting to use in temperature experiments, however. I chose a spot on an interior wall, a wall without plumbing. It was summer, and the house did not have central air. The windows were closed due to the rain.
As much as possible, I try to limit the amount of contamination that can come from running heating or cooling systems. Even if it means sitting in a sweltering family room in summer. I sat down on the floor, pulled out my IR thermometer, and announced to the room, “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”
With Shay’s gasp of disbelief and the giggles from the women in the room, our recording commenced.
“All right, I’m at 75.5 degrees,” I said. I was over by the voice recorder and indicated where the IR beam was recording temperature. “I want you to take it down to 75.0. Can you take it down to 75.0?”
Shay reported on the record that his ambient thermometer, which was sitting on the coffee table in front of the couch, was reading 74.3 degrees.
With the IR thermometer set in a specific location, I asked the spirit to take the temperature down in small, half-degree steps. The overall temperature in the room didn’t change—it was just in the area at which my beam was directed. I was looking for a significant decrease of 8 to 10 degrees in the end, not the 1-to-2-degree fluctuation that goes on all the time in a room. But I’ve found if I do it in half-
degree steps, I’m able to control the drop with my voice commands.
I’ve been very successful with this approach. It appears that, when it works, the spirits can control either the temperature or the meter in very precise ways if they’re not asked to do too much too quickly. Notice for example that my gauge was not reading 74.3 (like Shay’s) but showed a multiple of 0.5. I’ve had this experiment work only on a handful of investigations, but when it does work, it is rather remarkable in its accuracy. However, when we placed an ambient temperature gauge in the vicinity of where I was getting the readings, it indicated that the spot was the same temperature as the room, which led me to believe that it might not have been the temperature that was being manipulated but the actual gauge itself. I believe that spirits, being willful energy, find it rather easy, once they get the hang of it, to manipulate electronic equipment.
The group put their meters on the coffee table so that they could monitor the temperature during the experiment. This transcript excerpt, which begins a few minutes into the recording, illustrates the significant drop measured on the temperature gauge, which had started at 75.5 degrees.
Robin: Please and thank you. 69.0, please. 69.0. It’s 69.0. 68.5, please. 68.0. (Pause) 68.0, thank you. 67.5, please. 67.0. 66.5?
Maya: Please and thank you.
Robin: Please and thank you. 67.0. Can you take it to 66-point—ah, there we go. 66.5, 66.5. 66.0? (Almost immediately) There we go.
Maya: Wow, that’s amazing. You’re amazing.
Robin: Ah, 66.0. Don’t lose it, don’t lose it, don’t lose it.
Maya: Go on, you can do it.
Robin: 66.0.7 There we are, 66.0. For the record. 65.5, please. 65.5, please. 65.5, 65.5.
Maya: Please and thank you. Beautiful.
Robin: 65.0, please. 65.0, please. [It’s] 65.0. 64.5? (To the group) Now that’s what I’m talking about. 64.0. (Almost immediately) There we go. 64.0, 64.0.
Maya: For the record, what does your temperature gauge say?
Renne: Ah, mine says 75.7.
Robin: 64.0?
Maya: What does mine say?
Renne: Yours says 75.3.
Maya: Shay, what does yours say?
Shay: 74.3.
Maya: And what is your infrared saying right this minute?
Robin: 64.0. Beautiful. What [temperature] did we start at?
They are now seven minutes into the experiment, and none of them can remember the exact starting point.
Maya: You have it on video, don’t you?
Robin: Yeah, I do. 63.0? 63.0? We’re stuck at 63.5. Come on, baby. Come on, baby.
Maya: I’d say 10 or 11 [degrees difference], maybe even 12.
Robin: It’s a bloody good show, that’s what it is.
A few minutes later, the temperature on Robin’s gauge has continued to drop, while the temperature on the ambient thermometers has actually risen a couple of degrees.
Shay: Mine is still at 74.3.
Robin: Shit. (Maya immediately corrects her.)
Robin and Maya together: 62.5. Thank you, and I’m sorry if I offended you.
Maya: They’re very amused. Renne, what is the temperature on yours?
Renne: It’s still 75.7 on mine and 75.1 on Shay’s.
Robin: [The owners of the house] told me that this was the room where all the action happened. I guess they weren’t kidding.
The starting temperature on my IR gauge was 75.5 degrees Fahrenheit and the ending was 62.5, a total of 12.5 degrees of change. Throughout the experiment, the average temperature in the room didn’t change more than a degree or two.
During the course of the evening, we captured numerous EVPs, most of which appeared to be of the same female speaker. I also had a clear exhale captured in an empty room, which gave some credence to the sigh I had captured on the first investigation.
One of the theories about ghosts is that they are a type of imprint of a personality in an environment. It may be as simple as leaving DNA in an area, which we do all the time. Touch a doorframe and you leave a fingerprint of skin cells. Every cell in our bodies contains a complete set of our genetic DNA, a complete blueprint of ourselves. And there is evidence that one of the jobs of DNA is to act as a receiving mechanism for information.
For example, scientists have studied organ recipients who have reported personality changes after receiving an organ. Sometimes it’s subtle: for instance, suddenly liking foods they hadn’t before. Other times the change is profound, with the recipient adopting the personality of the deceased. DNA is powerful and also not fully understood. Much of the DNA strand, what scientists have so far dubbed “junk DNA,” may actually have another purpose, the purpose of receiving outside information. If we accept that consciousness may exist outside the body versus in the brain, then DNA may act as a type of satellite receiver.
When we die, our life force—that low-level energy that animates our bodies, moves our muscles, pushes impulses across our synapses—departs. As we know from science, energy is never created nor destroyed, though it can change form. What if that freed energy now used the DNA in the environment as a type of transmitter?
Thus, this remnant of a person might start acting in ways that are similar to the whole self, as if it were simply a copy. In this way, we can compare a spirit to a digital file. Some files get interrupted during the copying process, and as a result, only some of the file is transferred. Our lowest-level residual haunt would fall into this category. The haunting phenomenon happens when environmental triggers cause the file to play. And like a CD or DVD, when it does play, it always plays the same file. Hence, the phenomenon is always the same, and it does not interact with people or even acknowledge the presence of them. The shadowy figure Lindsey reported seeing is an example of this type of phenomenon, as it always moved from the center of the room toward the window in the same pattern.
The more complete a copy the more interactive the spirit might be and the more intelligent it might seem to appear. Even at their most complex, however, ghosts don’t really seem to be living beings. They might be able to answer simple questions. For example, you might ask “Are you happy in this house?” and get a “yes” response, but they don’t adapt and change as a human does. They don’t appear to have a firm understanding of the passage of time, for example. Whatever seems to reside in the hall closet may be stuck in the closet because it can’t fathom that the house is now joined with another building.
It seemed that Lindsey and Aaron’s female spirit was a far superior spirit in that she could interact with and sense changes in her environment. A very chilling EVP at the height of the storm demonstrated just such an intelligence. Our one male investigator, Shay, was in the master bedroom with Maya. Through the rushing rain, a female voice caught on a recorder in the hall closet said, “Yes, I see him,” as if talking to someone else. The fact that there was only one male in the building that night and that he was at the time in the master bedroom to which the closet opens demonstrates a remarkable awareness on the part of the female spirit. Indeed, it was this EVP as much as anything that happened that night that unnerved Shay. Well, that and a personal experience he had in the master bedroom that he described as being “punched in the stomach by a push of energy.” So unnerved was he by the house that he quit the team immediately after the investigation.
After several hours of investigating, we decided to bed down for a few hours of rest, with the idea that we would resume during the two to three a.m. timeframe, when the homeowners insisted they had the most activity. Two of us rolled out sleeping bags in the master bedroom. Shay lay down on the family room couch and immediately fell asleep. Maya, our team night owl, set up her computer and started working on her laptop. At some point late in the night, with everyone else asleep, she reported that suddenly every clock in the house started ticking loudly, preternaturally loudly. And then, without warning, the rocking chair across the room creaked as if someone had just sat down. Maya acknowledged that something had tried to alert her to its presence.
Upon evidence review, we found that throughout the rest of the evening our female resident chimed in on conversations about music and horses, often launching right in over the conversation, although we didn’t know it at the time. Renne and I were finishing our last session in the baby’s room at around three, and I had just announced we were done and going to be leaving. Right before stopping the recorder that was in the crib, we captured an excited voice saying, “Hey, okay.” I think she’d had enough of us for one evening.
Our Third Investigation
Again Aaron and Lindsey had decamped for the weekend to their summer cabin. Again we would have the house to ourselves. By the third investigation, we were ready for the Hartly house. However, the energy on this investigation was not nearly as palpable as it had been on the second. Still, we captured evidence that was solid.
It was a hot September evening in a house with no air conditioning, and Brian, our newest, token male investigator, and I were heading down the hall to do a session in the master bedroom. Both Maya and Renne, rounding out our team, clearly saw a staticky, misty substance seem to follow us down the hall and into the room on the surveillance camera. Subsequent review of the footage, however, proved disheartening. Unfortunately, the quality of the camera footage was not such that we could see anything clearly enough to actually call it evidence.
We had a few instances that evening of what I’ll simply dub “evidence layering.” Layering is when you seem to have more than one type of evidence going on in one session. For example, Maya and Renne were in the hallway conducting a session and they were talking about music.
“Do you like classical music?” Renne asked.
On an EVP later found by the team, a very distinct female whisper that sounded like “bar-ee” was captured. While both clear and distinct, it didn’t really appear to make much sense. But then a moment later, Maya reported a personal experience and then an EMF spike.
“I just got a chill up my arm—0.2,” Maya said. She referred to the EMF gauge they had with them, indicating a sudden change in the electromagnetic field. “And it’s steady.”
They paused for a few seconds. “And it’s blank,” Maya reported.The meter had gone back down to 0.
“We’re trying to see if we can play just a little bit of music,” Renne offered, “if you want to stay around and listen.”
This exchange is exciting because we have a personal experience (the chill up the arm), the measurable EMF change in the environment, and a documented disembodied voice. This type of layering makes me a very happy investigator.
Another such exchange occurred in the storage room when Brian and I conducted a session. I had my dowsing rods out and they appeared to be reacting to my questions. Sometimes I can seemingly employ them as a means of communication. I don’t present my “findings” with the dowsing rods as evidence to homeowners. I use them more to get a feeling or impression of an area, although I’ve been impressed over the years by their seeming accuracy. They don’t work that neatly in every location, but in the Hartly house, they always do. In fact, I’ve had much the same conversation with the same female spirit every time I investigated the house, and the fact that she has always answered my questions in the same way is rather remarkable, if not reassuring.
In the video clip I presented to the homeowners, I again found an interesting layering of activity going on. Below is the transcript. While it might seem as if I’m peppering the spirit mercilessly with questions, in reality I pause between questions for eight to ten seconds—or more if the rods seem like they’re going to answer a question. I reported a barometric pressure of 101.8 in the room and began.
Robin: Are you here with us?
The rods turn in a lazy fashion.
Robin: Can you speak your name into one of the cameras? Either the one on the desk or the one in Brian’s hand? What is it you want us to tell Lindsey and Aaron? Is the woman here? Can the woman come and talk to us? We know you’re here … I would love it if you made one of those devices go off (referring to a dual EMF and temperature gauge).
Robin: I’m feeling you on my leg, I think. (To Brian) I’m feeling chills. Are you getting chills?
Brian: Huh?
Robin: I said, are you getting chills?
Brian: Ah, not really.
Robin: Okay. I’m getting major chills all along my leg.
Feeling the static electrical sensations, she stops and moves her EMF-
temperature gauge closer to her legs to see if it registered anything. It didn’t, so she continues.
Robin: Are you here with us? Maybe it’s just the night air coming in.
She picks up the rods and they resume their gentle spin.
Robin: Is the woman here?… Yeah, I thought maybe you were here. I never did get a straight answer. How many children did you have? Do you remember? Are you looking for your children? Do you miss them? Is that why you remain in this house—are you waiting for your children to come? They didn’t abandon you, did they? Is that why you like the little boy so much? 8
The rods continue to do a noncommittal, gentle spin.
Robin: Did you maybe lose them—did you lose your children? Maybe you woke up one day and couldn’t find them?9 Are you mad with me? Can you walk up to one of the devices and make them go off ? You’re starting to get annoyed or upset? About your children? Is it about your children? (The left rod starts to pick up some speed.) Did they go away and leave you? Or did you lose them? Do you think maybe you died and that’s why you couldn’t find them anymore? Had you thought of that? Do you like the family that lives here? Do they remind you of your family?
There’s a long pause and the rods slow down, resuming their gentle circles.
Robin: Are you trying to tell me something? What is it you want me to know?
The rods continue to slow.
Robin: I’m getting a strange sensation on my right shoulder. And I’m getting this strange krrr krrr sensation in my right ear. It’s an electrical charge. (The left rod stops entirely and the right swings slowly back and forth to the right.) It’s weird.
Robin stops to shake her right shoulder and shake out the rods.
Robin: Are you still there? Are you trying to talk in my ear? Tell me more about the children. How many children did you have?
The left rod stops moving entirely, but the right spins slowly and lazily in full circles.10
Robin: (To Brian) Maybe it was something to do with the rods, but I don’t recall ever having that feeling before.
Suddenly, the left rod starts spinning with some vigor.
Robin: (To Brian) That’s not me. We seem to get the most reaction when I’m talking about the children. (To the spirit) Tell me more about the children. Were they good children? Did they treat you with respect? Were they bad children? (The rods spin with more vigor.) Did they grow up and leave you? Or did they just go and find their own lives? It’s painful when that happens, isn’t it? Did you have grandchildren?
Brian turns around and looks out the door as Maya’s voice is heard. A moment later, Maya appears in the doorway.
Maya: Hey, we’re getting some activity up front.
Robin: Okay.
Maya: We’re picking up stuff.
Robin: On the monitors?
Maya: Ah, we saw a couple of things. Something in the middle of the hallway here. And something tickled Renne’s ear and pulled her hair.
Robin: Huh.
Maya: And we got a spike of a 2.5 [on the EMF gauge] and things like that.
Maya departs back to the kitchen.
Robin: (Jokingly) Why don’t I ever get a spike? But I was definitely getting that … strange feeling. Maybe it’s the night air. Oh, but the window is not open.
It was at this point I realized that the strange sensation on my leg and ear couldn’t have been caused by the night air coming in the window as the window was closed. I isolated this section of the video to show to the client because I thought it was interesting. I experienced some odd sensations that I had at first attributed to a draft. Perhaps when I proved unresponsive to the sensations, the spirit had sought the attention of the other ladies. Remember how at one point my rods had all but stopped moving.
As I isolated the clip on the final DVD I burned for the client, I had a little surprise. When I had asked the entity to go up to one of the cameras and make its presence known, a soft female voice responded, “Okay.” I hadn’t heard it on the first review. It appeared she had gone out of her way to do just as I had requested.
By the end of the investigation, in the wee hours of the morning, I think we had worn out our welcome with our unseen acquaintance. We were preparing to break down the equipment when we got an EVP, a female voice that commanded us to “get out.” Then, about twenty seconds later, she reiterated in an exasperated tone: “Get out. Get out now.” Both EVPs were clear and easily understood.
We dragged our weary selves out of there, just as my friend requested, at around five a.m.
The Evidence
This compilation comes from the evidence report of our second investigation, the investigation that produced the most evidence. This is just the material that I later presented to Lindsey and Aaron along with time stamps, and I didn’t include myriad clips that I threw out as not being strong enough evidence or suspect.
Setup
• Maya’s audio recorder was on the crib mattress recording throughout the night.
• Renne’s audio recorder was recording in the master closet most of the evening. All EVPs she recorded were from the closet.
• Robin’s audio recorder was set up for several hours in the family room but was also used handheld at times.
• Shay’s audio recorder was handheld.
• Four stationary cameras were recording all night long, one shooting into the dining room from the family room, two shooting hallways, and one shooting the baby’s room.
Baby’s Room EVPs
“I don’t know.” Robin and Maya were doing some EVP work in the master bedroom when this EVP was caught on Maya’s recorder, which was unmanned in the crib. No one was in the baby’s room at the time.
“Hey, okay.” This was captured on Robin’s audio recorder at around three a.m. during Renne and Robin’s last session before breaking down. The EVP was captured just as they decided to start breaking down.
Family Room EVPs
Robin and Maya were investigating the other side of the house. Renne and Shay were at the kitchen table monitoring the surveillance cameras. While the two were conversing, there appeared to be a female spirit who desired to get in on the conversation—all three EVPs are during the same hour.
Whispering. There was distinct whispering as Renne talked about getting chills.
“Yes.” Shay was talking about wearing some type of protection, such as a cross or rosary, and the voice seemed to agree with him.
Indistinct whispering. Renne talked about her daughter and horses, and the voice was heard again and seemed to be talking about horses as well.
Master Closet
“Why.” During setup, crew in the other room talked about ordering dinner. The recording caught a distinct “why” and then “what.”
“I can see him.” When this was recorded, Renne and Shay were in the master bedroom while Robin and Maya were at command central.
Exhalation in empty room. Renne and Shay were at command central, and Robin and Maya were out on the back deck.
“Goin.” Robin and Maya announced they were starting a session, and Renne and Shay were at command central.
“Has it.” Robin and Maya were in the baby’s room doing the session, and Renne and Shay were at command central.
Final Assessment
The Hartly house landed us a bounty of EVPs over the years. Mostly, the speaker on the recordings was female and sounded like the same female. As I said before, she appeared to have intelligence and left us EVPs on a host of different subjects, from horses to children. She seemed acutely aware of her environment. She even commented on Shay’s attendance, saying, “Yes, I see him.” I find this EVP fascinating because there was only one male at the investigation or anywhere on the property that night. The EVP was captured in the master bedroom, where Shay was conducting a session at the time. Even odder was the fact that it sounded like the female spirit was speaking to someone else, perhaps the male apparition that is witnessed in this limited area of the building.
The female apparition also appeared to have a will of her own. During the third investigation, Brian asked, “Are you the one who took care of the little boy?” In an EVP she appeared to respond, “Don’t ask me that.”
She was also capable of mood changes. Earlier in the evening of the second investigation, she appeared to be conversing with Shay and Renne about horses and later with Maya and Renne when they were talking about shopping, in a rather lighthearted way. Later in the wee hours of the morning, she became exasperated with us when we simply wouldn’t leave, and commanded us to depart, with two remarkably clear EVPs, one saying, “Get out,” and one slightly later saying, “Get out now.”
The male spirit was more elusive. We were never able to catch him on film or video, although we did have the picture with the mist that was captured in the dining room. And we’ve only ever captured two EVPs with a male voice. The first one occurred on the first investigation and seemed to answer “Wade” to my question about his name, as I said before. The second male EVP occurred as we were breaking down our third investigation. Brian had just gone to the back of the house and disconnected a cable running to one of the surveillance cameras. We could hear him on the audio walking back down the hall to the dining room and kitchen. He had just departed the area when the voice was recorded. It was a distinctly male voice and whispered something that was unfortunately indistinguishable.
My final assessment of the Hartly house is that it is indeed haunted. The female spirit appeared to have intelligence. She could detect people in her environment, detect dangers in the house, and interact, at times in a remarkable way, such as the time she shoved Lindsey out of the kitchen. The male spirit may be less intelligent and thus less interactive. He seemed more confused. For one thing, whereas the female spirit appeared to be able to move anywhere in the dwelling, the male spirit seemed rather stuck near the environs of the hallway closet, master bedroom, and small area of hall.
Let me spend a moment talking about the hallway closet with the odd ingress and egress. To be clear, it’s the same closet in which Lindsey saw the heat-wave mist and the dark figure staring at her one night. And it’s the doorway in which their friend witnessed the figure walking through into the master bedroom. During the second investigation, we would be doing mundane activities in the closet, setting the camera up or checking to see if an audio recorder was still functioning, and experience several sudden, unexplained, staticky electrical sensations—in other words, the rather cliché experience of the hair standing up on the back of your neck for no apparent reason. Voice recorders placed in the closet never failed to record unexplained voices.
For some unknown reason, that same closet seemed to be the focal point of much of the activity that occurred in the house, at least the activity that is of a surlier nature. It begged the question, what’s up with that strange closet?
The closet was located at the juncture where the two buildings were joined. One of our investigators and self-proclaimed sensitive, Maya, speculated that the closet located where one building ended and the other began acted as a type of barrier to the male entity. Perhaps because the other structure was not there when the entity resided in the home, it now could not cross the threshold. It’s as logical an explanation as we have for why the entity appeared to be almost territorial in his inhabitance of the space.
Postscript
During my four-year working relationship with the family, young Romeo has grown from an infant to a precocious child. (I, oddly, have stayed exactly the same youthful age as I’ve always been.) While he may have accepted his matronly protector out of hand as an infant, as he’s grown older, he’s also grown wiser. Almost immediately after our third investigation, he apparently had a ghostly encounter that left him fearful of being alone in his room at night. Recall the incident of the blocked door directly after the first investigation. I theorize that our female entity is extremely protective of Romeo, and for whatever reason fears for his safety from strangers.
I received a disturbing email from Lindsey a couple of months after our third investigation of the house. She said that the activity in the boy’s room had taken a turn for the worse. He had awoken one night screaming that he had seen a ghost and demanding to be let out of the room. For long nights afterward, he insisted on sleeping with them in the master bedroom and refused to enter his own room even during the day. What was she to do? I suggested she try to speak with the boy calmly so as not to scare the absolute bejesus out of the tyke, and she should try to talk about his experience without influencing him in any way. What she did next I thought was brilliant: she made it into a game.
Using a pool soaker—the kind that has a noodle body and sucks up the water only to shoot it out in a long stream—she told her son that they were going to play ghostbusters. Walking through the house, he was to tell her where he had seen ghosts and she would suck them up. He dutifully showed her where he had seen entities, and she sucked them up. Incidentally, the boy indicated the same spots that we had determined to be active in our investigations. And yes, he most decidedly indicated the hall closet.
This activity did a number of things worth noting. First, it pointed out to a concerned mother where her son was seeing apparitions. The fact that they appeared to correspond with her experiences and with investigation results is validating. Second, she took her son seriously, neither encouraging him to make things up nor discouraging him from communicating with her. But third, and I think this is the most important, it gave mother and son power back. I’m sure they both felt like they were much more in control after the activity.
Additionally, Lindsey’s exercise was a good way to communicate with the spirit. I have always felt that if a spirit is in some way an essence of a deceased human, then they are bound by the same upbringing and courtesies with which they were raised. In other words, you can communicate and attempt to set parameters with an unseen houseguest. I think Lindsey’s game also went a long way toward doing that, indicating to the spirits that they had been seen, that they had overstepped their boundaries by frightening the boy, and that such behaviors were not acceptable.
It wasn’t immediate, but Lindsey eventually got the little tyke sleeping in his own room again and, as far as I know, peacefully. Last time I communicated with Lindsey, she also reported that the paranormal activity had greatly decreased as well.
7. I’m noticing that it’s starting to slip as if something is running out of the energy that it takes to maintain the change. I’ve found usually that 8 to 10 degrees is about as far as the entity can maintain it.
8. The woman and I are old acquaintances by now. We’ve had much the same conversation several times, and she always seems to give me the same vague responses. She was older when she passed away. She’d had children who had grown and left her. Now she was lonely, but she cared for the family in whose home she now resided and especially liked the baby boy.
9. I’m working off an idea that maybe she passed away and didn’t realize why she could no longer find her children. If you’ve ever watched the wonderful movie The Sixth Sense, you might understand the premise. I speculate that sometimes people pass quickly or unexpectedly, and their spirit, that imprint that’s left behind, has no clear idea what’s going on. As Cole Sear, the young character in the movie, says, “They don’t know they’re dead.”
10. Note that I’d indicated it was on my right side that I’d had the experience in my ear.