Chapter 3

A Dangerous Soul

Long Neck, Delaware

Probably the all-time most bizarre case I’ve ever worked on was the Long Neck house investigation. It started with an impassioned voice mail, and then another immediately after, by a man named Scott. Scott was upset. Scott was panicked. Scott was … freaked out. And he wanted to talk to me. He wanted to talk to me right now.

I had just finished a long day at work and was heading home to make dinner for my family. However, I took a deep breath, took out an investigation request form and dialed the number.

I got Scott immediately, and he was very happy to hear from me. I usually like to control interviews, take my time, get the details, and try to get to the bottom of what was going on. But that simply wasn’t going to happen this time. When people hit a certain level of frightened, it’s just fight or flight. And Scott was at that point.

The Backstory

What I got from Scott was that he was working on his girlfriend’s house. He was an electrical contractor by trade and in his spare time was helping Louise with a major renovation of a home she had purchased right next to Scott’s father’s house. She had purchased the home via an estate sale in 2015. Since the home was run-down and in need of major upgrades and repairs, she hadn’t actually moved in until April 2016. When the renovations began, much of the activity also began.

The house itself had been built in 1972 by the previous owner, Wilhelm, who had passed away a year and a half ago, in the very house that he’d built. Wilhelm had been the first to buy in the neighborhood. Apparently, being a man who had prized his privacy, he’d purchased the lot the house sat on and the adjoining lot, which Scott’s father later purchased before building his own home. Wilhelm lived in the house with a woman listed as his wife, Mary, for many years, and Mary died two years before Wilhelm passed. According to the neighbors, the very day Mary died in the hospital, Wilhelm came home and threw her adult son out of the house. Apparently, the young man had not been his son, though the couple were listed as being married for twenty-some years, and the son in question was eighteen at the time. There are times that legal records leave something to be desired. Reading between the lines, I guessed that this wasn’t a home of domestic bliss.

Wilhelm continued living in the residence by himself for the next two years. In poor health, he was wheelchair-bound and spent most of his days and nights in an old recliner. A female neighbor would often look in on Wilhelm. He didn’t appear to have any other caregivers.

Having no family of his own, or family that he would claim, when Wilhelm passed away, the house and the adjoining lot next door became the property of an acquaintance, Jeanette, in accordance with his will. Louise recalled that Jeanette was every bit as rough as the late Wilhelm in reputation. The mysterious Jeanette never took up residence in the home and failed to pay the property taxes. Thus, the home stood vacant and eventually fell into foreclosure, at which time Louise was able to purchase it, along with what was left of Wilhelm’s personal possessions. Louise had shrewdly purchased the run-down home in the resort community, probably realizing that it was an excellent investment. She had left Wilhelm’s furniture in place during the renovation, not wishing to soil her own, with the intention of dropping it all in the dumpster once the sawdust stopped flying.

Scott’s father had similarly purchased the lot next door and built his own home when the adjoining property went up for foreclosure. Thus, neither Scott nor Louise had ever known the late Wilhelm except by reputation, the subsequent facts being filled in by neighbors who had also lived for years in the development.

Louise closed on the home in October 2015 and started overhauling it immediately. She met Scott when she began working on the property. Again, the paranormal rarely meets our expectations of what a haunted house should look like. There were footers poured already for expansion of the building, though at the time of the investigation the couple was at work on the original structure. Louise told me later that the paranormal activity began with the renovations, and it was the most active when work on the house was in full swing. Sometimes work would cease and then the activity would quieten. The couple assumed that it was the late Wilhelm who was responsible for the odd happenings, as he had been the only owner of the home, and a very private, if not particularly unlikeable individual.

But whatever or whoever was responsible, it was beyond a doubt that something weird was going on in the house. Things were being moved. There were signs showing up in the drywall dust that he couldn’t account for. There were also a lot of electronic disturbances. In a later conversation, Scott and Louise explained to me in more detail about the odd electronic malfunctions. Louise recalled a strange occurrence with the doorbell. She’d purchased a doorbell with a remote sensor, but she’d never actually mounted the doorbell by the front door. She had plugged in the unit that hung on the interior wall, however. The doorbell was in the cabinet in its box, awaiting mounting. One day Louise distinctly heard the doorbell. She thought it was on TV, but she looked at the screen and noticed that it was playing a courtroom drama. Another day Louise contended that Scott was gone and she again heard the doorbell ring three times. That was enough for her. She unplugged the unit from the wall.

One day Scott and his mom were in the house. He recalled coming out of the bathroom and found that the TV was on. He asked his mother if she had turned it on. She said no; she thought he had turned it on. Neither could explain how the TV had turned on by itself.

The new lights throughout the house were operable by remotes. The remote for the dining room light was always kept on the shelf in the kitchen. Scott recalled he would try the remote several times and the lights wouldn’t come on. He explained, “One time I came under the lights to check and see if they were working, and they just came on.” The remote had been sitting on the kitchen counter at the time. Other times he would approach the lights because all the tools were in a cabinet along the far wall of the dining room. He’d step under the lights and they would go off. That happened six or seven times. “Finally, I said, ‘Screw it, I don’t need the lights to go get the tools,’ and I stepped over here and the lights would turn on. That happened quite a few times.” Lighting anomalies in the dining room happened to Louise as well.

Apparently, lights and doorbells weren’t the only electronic devices toyed with. Phone anomalies were also at play, in what appeared to be a diabolical plan to cause discord between the couple. Scott recalled that he would call Louise when she had been away visiting her daughter in California. When they were talking late at night, Scott would only be able to hear every third word she was saying, and then static would fill the line. At the same time, Louise would hear every word clearly. While this might be a simple matter of a poor connection on Scott’s end, what was odder was the fact that Louise would be alone in her bedroom at her daughter’s house late at night talking to Scott, and Scott would hear other voices on the line. Louise said her daughter and her daughter’s husband were asleep upstairs during these episodes.

Scott would say, “Who is there with you?”

“No one,” Louise would reply.

“Well, I hear someone talking.”

“They’re upstairs … in bed.”

Scott later confirmed the odd conversations. “I heard distinct words, talking, like, ‘shhh,’ ‘shut up.’ Stuff like that.”

“He swore I was talking to someone, and there was no one there,” Louise added.

Odd markings in the drywall dust were a constant—fingerprints, messages, words in some case. Scott couldn’t fathom how they got there, as it was just the two of them working on the house together.

They both admitted to seeing a dark shadow in one of the back rooms when they were sitting in the bedroom across from the bathroom, as well as a similar dark figure in the family room by the hallway entrance.

Louise had at times acted strangely. And Scott admitted that he had at times acted even more strangely, acted in a way that was completely out of character with his gentler nature. Normal exchanges between the couple had escalated, sometimes for no reason whatsoever, to near violence. He’d never been a violent man, not a man prone to bouts of rage. But since he’d begun working on the property, he’d experienced odd personality changes for which he could not account. He’d flown into rages at the least provocation. Sometimes he couldn’t remember periods of time, and then he’d come to and find himself in the act of something inexplicable. They’d had a fight apparently, just a day or so before his impassioned voice mail. The argument began in the house, and Louise admitted it escalated quickly. Fearing Scott might become violent, Louise had tried to leave, heading to the door and getting into her car. Scott admitted that it was at this point that he lost himself, and when he came to, he was jumping up and down on the hood of Louise’s car. He had been screaming at her, demanding her not to leave. He had no recollection of how he got there or why he had been so dangerously angry. Not surprisingly, when he did hop down from her car, Louise left in somewhat of a hurry. He implored me to come immediately.

Later I would ask Louise for verification of the fight. Louise recalled the battle, which ended with Scott on her hood. “I remember thinking, I don’t know this person. I went to the car to get away from him because he was getting angry. It didn’t matter—it wasn’t about anything in particular. He was just angry, so no matter what I said, it was just wrong. It was nasty, and he was scary. Scary, you know—he would puff his chest out. So I wanted to get away. Just run. I ran to the car, but he caught up. And he hopped on the hood and held on. I remember thinking, I don’t want to hurt this guy, but I also don’t want to be anywhere near him. He never did anything like that before. I said to him in the middle of another terrible argument, ‘Who are you?’ I looked in his eyes, and it was such hate and vengeance. That’s not the way he typically looked at me. That’s why I think he was possessed.”

I asked, “So he would be acting normally and then he’d just flip?”

“Yeah, and it wouldn’t take much.”

“And would you remember these episodes?” I asked Scott.

“Yeah, afterward. I was like, what in the hell was I doing on your hood? What was I going to get out of that?”

This hadn’t been Scott’s first brush with the paranormal. He’d lived in a house in Pennsylvania where he’d experienced paranormal activity. He admitted that in his previous house he would “see things all night, back and forth, back and forth. And my one daughter sees things. She saw a black shadowy thing.” He hadn’t experienced the strange personality shifts before, but he would sometimes “remember things I didn’t know.” But this situation was far more serious, far more sinister than simply seeing a shadow figure flitting about a room.

Apparently, the ghost of Wilhelm wasn’t the only ghost that Scott was concerned about. He had also witnessed innumerable times the full-bodied apparition of a woman. During the course of an evening when taking a break from renovations, Scott would relax for a few minutes in the recliner. From his position in the chair, he reported that she always seemed to come out of the back bedroom to the left, cross the hall, and enter the back bedroom on the right. Scott would see her almost nightly, sometimes several times in a night. She appeared in period clothing with skirts, a high, buttoned collar, and hair bound up in a bun. He always saw her in the hallway moving in the same direction. According to Scott, from his position in Wilhelm’s old recliner, he could see a portion of the hallway to the rear of the house. She was oddly out of place, dressed in Victorian-style garb, in a house built in the ’70s. An older woman, Scott confided, she had oddly high cheekbones and a look of seriousness on her face.

Finally, Scott said he felt there was a third spirit, that of a small female child. Some of the drawings in the dust were childish in nature. Rudimentary letters and words appeared, like a child practicing her handwriting. Other times they found what appeared to be pictures. One time it looked like a crude alligator had been drawn on the television, and the couple couldn’t account for it. Sometimes it was just swirls and curlicues or small fingerprints. These things appeared to be benign in nature, though bizarre.

I knew that starting the investigation wasn’t going to happen immediately, as it was the middle of a work week for me, but I did assure him I’d be down in a couple of days to take a look around.

In the meantime, I suggested he stay out of the house and certainly not sleep there. I also suggested he buy and wear some type of protective necklace or other jewelry depending on what faith he followed, such as a Christian cross or the Jewish Star of David. I picked up the phone immediately after and contacted my dependable comrade in arms, Renne, to see if she would be available. I was concerned about walking into this alone.

The Initial Walk-Through

Renne and I arrived on a sultry June afternoon with humidity thick and heavy, as summer days can be in Delaware. We’d no sooner got out of the vehicle when Scott came running over from next door. The heat wasn’t slowing him down: he was as animated as he’d been on the phone. He asked me to dial his girlfriend’s phone number, noting that she had been awaiting my call. I got Louise on the line immediately. A levelheaded woman, Louise just wanted to speak with me and assure me that I and the team had her blessing to examine the home, even though she was out of town. I assured her I would call her later after my walk-through and speak with her further about her experiences and what we had found on the walk-through.

It was a typical ’70s ranch-style home, devoid of any charm or architectural detail whatsoever. Three bedrooms were off the one central hallway leading from the family room. One centrally located bathroom served the entire house. The couple had nearly gutted it, and it felt somewhat like a war zone, as intense renovations can. Louise owned another home in the area and often stayed there when not working on the remodel. Scott lived next door with his father, a man with whom he was very close. Louise was a levelheaded person, as I said earlier, so the first room she’d gutted and remodeled was the bathroom. Fully refurbished and functional, it was the only room in the house that felt ordered at the time.

During the renovation, Scott and Louise had often lived rough, working on the house until exhaustion struck and then bedding down for the night on the dusty, old furniture that remained. Then they’d get up and do it all over again. If you’ve ever lived through a renovation, you know that it can get really messy really fast. And to do a total overhaul on an entire house while living in it meant the couple lived in the midst of a disaster zone. Drywall dust covered everything, a stack of wood resided in the family room behind the couch, a large table saw sat square in the middle of one of the back bedrooms. The new flooring had not yet been installed, so we walked on raw wood, dodging the rolls of ancient carpeting that awaited hauling out to the garbage. The bathroom had already been overhauled, with all new cabinets and fixtures, but the other rooms were still covered in dust and tarps.

Scott led us in the front door into the family room, where we assembled around a large coffee table. Almost immediately after we walked in, Scott reacted violently. The coffee table was completely covered with a layer of dust, and it looked like someone had taken two small fingers and dragged them across the tabletop.

“That wasn’t there before,” Scott exclaimed. “I was in the house earlier, and I swear that wasn’t there. See, this is what I told you about. Stuff just shows up in the dust, like fingerprints or pictures.” The fingerprints and doodles had started first. Then one day Scott said he’d started finding handprints imbedded on the dusty red couches in the family room. According to Scott, “They were huge handprints, an inch and a half bigger than mine. I called my dad and said, ‘Come over here. You’ve got see this.’ I asked the neighbor about Wilhelm, and she said that he was a very big man. And I started seeing these handprints that were an inch and a half bigger than mine, like someone had punched the couch with force.”

Scott continued, “And it wasn’t just one handprint. I started bringing my dad over. There were two handprints on the couch, and one had a star and the other looked like just a circle was written in the palm, or it was jagged. I took pictures of the handprint on the couch. And my dad tried to recreate them. We pushed in with all of our might, and we got only half as much as that. So we’d brush them off, clear them off, and we’d go away for ten minutes, and they would be there.” One time he recalled that the hand appeared reversed. “You know how you push yourself up out of a couch? Well, it wasn’t the right hand on the right couch arm, it was the left hand, so it would have been really awkward.” It was this handprint in which a star was imprinted. Scott had taken photos of it on his cell phone. However, he couldn’t show them to me because the photos had inexplicably disappeared.

During the initial interview, I had pulled out my small handheld video camera so that I could record the event. Oddly, the machine repeatedly malfunctioned. I would hit record and then commence speaking with Scott, only to look down a couple of minutes later to find that the machine had turned off. This happened several times that day, and in total I only came away with a few minutes of video. After the video recorder shut down a few times, I shot Renne an inquisitive look, which Scott detected. He exclaimed, “See, that kind of stuff happens all the time around here.” Unaccountable computer malfunctions, phone malfunctions, and lighting fixtures not working properly appeared to be regular occurrences.

I admit that I wasn’t overly impressed with the two finger marks on the table. I doubted that his memory was that good. How often have we touched items in our living space without even realizing it? However, I let it go, asking him to show us the rest of the building. He took us down the hall to the bedrooms. The bedroom across the hall from the bathroom was where the couple often slept. One old, tattered recliner and a loveseat were in the room, along with an ancient boom box and a dusty TV. Scott noted that marks had shown up on the dusty screen of the TV as well. Then he pointed at the old recliner. This particular recliner had belonged to Wilhelm. It looked ready for the city dump: the arms were frayed, the seat was worn, and all over there were cigarette burns.

When Scott stayed the night, this is the chair he used. He said the weirdest thing happened to him when he sat down in the chair. Almost immediately, he would feel drowsy and drop off to sleep, inevitably dropping the cigarette he’d been smoking, which accounted for the burn marks. He couldn’t explain why he immediately fell asleep in the chair, but it was becoming downright dangerous. On this point I had to agree with Scott wholeheartedly.

And then, he began to explain to us how he felt he was becoming the victim of other odd personality disturbances, as he had alluded to before. He had the blackout while Louise was leaving the other day, which he’d told me about over the phone. He’d actually done this twice, he confessed. And there had been another instance while standing on the front porch with Louise. They were having a routine conversation when suddenly something she said had sent him into a rage. He could not explain why he’d been so enraged, as the discussion had been innocuous up to that point.

Scott had also had a fight with his father, a man with whom he had a wonderful relationship. Right on the porch, he’d been so driven to rage that he’d actually punched his father, throwing the poor man off. Scott said that nothing like that had ever happened to them in the past. The female neighbor who had looked in on Wilhelm in his last few years happened to be walking by this particular evening and witnessed Scott’s tussle with his father. Later she would confide to Scott that he’d sounded exactly like the late Wilhelm during the incident; she had said as much to her husband that very evening. The two events were eerily similar, she concluded.

I later interviewed the couple and asked them about the incident with his father. Louise admitted that the fight with Scott’s father was starkly out of character.

Louise said, “Scott is really close to his dad. For him to have punched him out like that … That’s not like him.”

Scott agreed, “I’ve never punched my dad out in my life.”

“And this went on for a number of months. Scott was just not himself.”

“It made me think that I was being screwed with. That she was cheating on me or that my dad was lying to me.”

“He accused me of sleeping with his father. Like we were making love on the front yard or the back yard. It was the furthest thing from the truth.”

“Something was playing with my mind.”

Wilhelm was a man with a dark history, a man who may have committed sins that surpassed simple domestic disputes, or so another neighbor informed Scott. The team’s inquiries into Wilhelm’s past were inconclusive. The records indicated that he’d lived his entire life in the town and worked some type of blue collar tradesman job. His obituary said volumes in what it didn’t say. It may have been the shortest obituary ever written. It listed the day of his birth, the date of his passing, and that he’d lived in the town of his birth his entire life. Apparently, Wilhelm hadn’t been beloved by many.

Scott couldn’t account for his uncontrollable fury. He was scared about what he might do. And he was even more afraid that he might be possessed by the former owner, Wilhelm, to whom they owed that lovely piece of late twentieth-century furniture. Could the rages and the sudden bouts of narcolepsy be something dark left over from the former owner? According to the female neighbor that sometimes took care of Wilhelm, she would at times find him in a diabetic coma, sitting in the very same recliner.

Scott also admitted that his eyesight was declining, everything getting dim. Apparently, Wilhelm had been legally blind. And then Scott reported that his joints started aching, especially his hip and knee joints. The same malady was reported by Wilhelm, who had been wheelchair-bound in his last years. It was only when he stayed a long time in the house that Scott had these experiences; when he was away from the house, he felt just fine.

He then took Renne and me to the back bedroom, where he reported feeling uneasy by the closet. Scott told us about what he felt to be a small female spirit, which was active all through the house but most active in this room.

It was in this bedroom too where he had found Louise one day kneeling on the floor. Louise, who was every bit as active in the renovations as Scott, had actually had one leg amputated below the knee earlier in her life. With a prosthetic she walked normally, but she did find getting up and down on her knees difficult. However, there was Louise, kneeling on the floor and humming to herself, and spread around her were pictures on cheap beige craft paper painted with a child’s watercolor set. The paintings looked like those of a small child. On one was a crude rainbow, and on another some rudimentary words had been painted. The art supplies were purchased for a granddaughter who sometimes visited, only Louise’s granddaughter hadn’t been to visit for quite some time, as she lived in California. So who had painted the pictures, he wondered? Scott asked Louise what she was doing, but according to Scott, she seemed out of it and couldn’t account for how she had gotten down on the floor or where the paintings had come from.

He got her up and out of the room, and then he went back in to feel the paint brushes that were in a jar. They were wet. It proved to Scott that Louise had been the painter. When I asked Louise later at the investigation if she had in fact painted the pictures, she admitted she had no recollection of doing so. Scott showed us the pictures, which were remarkably odd, and I took video of the event.

We then proceeded up to the attic, which was sweltering. Here also Louise acted oddly, according to Scott. They had been working up in the attic, but at times she would be up there for hours, humming to herself.

Scott concluded that all of it—from the strange rages to the whispered telephone messages to the huge handprints in the drywall dust—seemed to be part of a master plan, a plan devised by the late Wilhelm. “He was trying to make Louise and me fight. Because when we did, the work on the house would stop for a month. No construction for a month because we would break up. I’d go over to my dad’s, and work would stop. That’s what he wanted.” Louise later agreed with that summation. She admitted that when the work stopped on the house, the activity would also quieten, becoming far less sinister.

Renovations are often cited as the impetus for paranormal activity. In this case, work would progress on the house, the activity would increase, the couple would start fighting, and then they’d break up. Scott would be away, and the activity would cease. The male entity appeared to target Scott for the brunt of his abuse, perhaps because Scott was more sensitive than Louise, by Scott’s very admission.

Scott led us back out to the hall where he repeatedly saw the apparition of the woman in period garb. He described the situation further for us when I pressed him for details. Scott admitted he knew she was an apparition. “I could see through her. She wasn’t solid. I definitely could see through her.” He never pursued her, though he was curious about where she had been going. He said it happened too quickly and that she moved with determination. “She wasn’t standing there looking at me. She looked like she was going somewhere,” Scott explained.

When I inquired, Scott admitted that the spirit didn’t appear to be walking, that her head didn’t move up and down as someone who was walking would. Instead, she seemed to be floating past, in a movement that Scott described as more like someone riding a moving sidewalk.

She never acknowledged Scott or seemed to interact with him. She would simply appear to come out of the room, cross the hall (which is when Scott would see her through the two-foot opening of his own door), and cross into the other room. “It almost seemed like she didn’t know I was there.”

Without a doubt, Scott’s first priority, however, was the aggressive male spirit he believed was Wilhelm. The changes in his personality that seemed to clearly parallel Wilhelm’s, the uncharacteristic bouts of rage, the periods of time when he seemed to lose himself—all of these had Scott unnerved. Although the couple never saw Wilhelm’s physical likeness in clear detail, Scott said that sometimes he’d witness a hulking dark figure in the family room late at night near the hallway entrance. Other times he had witnessed the dark shadowy shape in the back bedroom, the very bedroom where he also witnessed the female apparition. He felt the apparition was male by the very size of the thing. But it had dark, indistinguishable features. It appeared more a lurking shadow.

The female apparition, on the other hand, he witnessed in stark clarity. She wasn’t as threatening, as she never appeared to interact with Scott or even acknowledge his presence. However, Scott said Louise would sometimes act very strangely. “I would say, ‘Dad, look at her, she’s not acting right.’” They’d be working on the house when Louise would start to speak out of character. According to Scott, the soft-spoken Louise would start to act more assertive. “Louise isn’t a smart-ass, but suddenly she’d start speaking like that. She was acting very blunt, which is not her normal reaction to things. And I’d look and her cheekbones would be higher. And I’d try to get her to look at her eyes in the mirror, but she wouldn’t look. Her pupils would grow and shrink, grow and shrink. That was the only time they would do that.”

At this point of the tour, Scott left us to get a feel for the place on our own. We spent some time in the attic but didn’t really get much of an impression, and it was just simply too hot to stay up there for any length of time. Renne and I wandered around the rest of the building, including the attic, three bedrooms, kitchen, and family room. We didn’t really get much in the way of impressions, and we took base EMF readings, not finding anything anomalous. No one else was in the house. We honestly debated taking the case, as we got minimal impressions from the property beyond Scott’s rather wild assertions.

Scott returned and we convened in the family room around the coffee table to discuss timeframes and other details. That’s when all three of us noticed that while we’d been in the building, several other markings had appeared in the drywall dust on the table. These looked like scratch marks and little curlicues. One near the edge looked as if it might have been two fingers drawn across the table. It being summer, of course we couldn’t rule out bugs, but we didn’t see any insects on the table. Likewise, as we were standing there discussing the case, we’d sometimes look back down at the table to find even more marks. I must admit that I had been very skeptical of much that Scott had been telling me, but I couldn’t deny that the marks were there, that they were multiplying, and that none of us had noticed them before. What was going on? Renne started snapping photos. Then we set up a time to come back, packed up our equipment, and got ready to leave.

We were outside by the car when I made a hesitant suggestion to Scott. It wasn’t Scott’s property but Louise’s, after all. Therefore, anything in the house belonged to her. But I had an uneasy feeling in particular about the recliner. It is believed that objects, just like buildings, can retain something of their former owners. Often these objects are something with sentimental value, such as a portrait of the person or a religious medal. Then other times the objects themselves can be quite mundane, like the bed someone slept in … or the recliner in which someone had passed their last grisly days.

“Would it be possible to get rid of the recliner?” I asked.

Scott, who was only too happy to make the strange phenomena stop, asked immediately, “What, like burn it?”

Now I was truly fumbling. Louise was going to return home to not only find furniture gone but also discover it had been burnt to a crisp on her front lawn.

“No, no, I don’t mean burn it—just park it on the corner and let the trash collectors take it permanently to its new home.”

“But what happens if someone stops and picks it up and takes it home?”

“Well, I suppose they’ll get more than just a free chair if that happened,” I said, dreading the thought of someone else stumbling upon that sinister item but still not wanting to advocate the destruction of Louise’s property. True, the recliner, as I said before, was hardly a figure of majestic stature, but still it belonged to neither Scott nor me. The suggestion of getting rid of the chair around which so many frightening events had occurred struck a chord with Scott.

As Renne and I approached my car in preparation to leave, Scott was already running for the house. And as we pulled out of the driveway and drove off Renne and I could see Scott jackrabbitting across the yard with the recliner, heading toward the firepit. We didn’t hang around to witness the event, but, as you probably already guessed—yep, he burned it. He doused that thing down with lighter fluid and burned that chair in a big ole bonfire. I figured I’d have some ’splainin’ to do when I talked with Louise that evening.

As it turned out, Louise was only too pleased to have that ratty chair out of her house permanently. If Scott was the figure of panic, Louise was the voice of reason. Yes, there’d been the fight in which Scott had jumped on her car. Yes, there had been the pictures Scott had found for which she had not an explanation or recollection of having painted. Yes, Scott had gone into rages of late with very little provocation. Yes, she noticed markings in the paint and the dust that she could not explain. Yes, she’d occasionally seen a dark figure in the family room, but just out of the corner of her eye—never full on. She hadn’t, however, witnessed the female apparition that Scott reported seeing almost nightly. She believed that there were odd things happening in her house that she could not explain, but she felt that as long as they kept their distance, she was okay with them being there.

She went on to explain her odd mood changes. Spending so much time in the house, with so much energy spent, was taking a toll. One night in particular she recalled chugging an entire pitcher of Kool-Aid in order to gain some energy.

Scott had said that she had been on her feet rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, like a child. Louise admitted she’d done that because she’d been on a sugar high.

This very plausible explanation made many of Scott’s claims questionable. Like so much in this case, separating the fact from the fantastical was a challenge. If Louise had been up working for a long period of time in the sweltering attic, she may have been suffering from heat exhaustion. And those claims of the drawings in the drywall dust seemed remarkably easy to ignore until we saw them for ourselves.

The very next day, my email exploded. Scott had burned the chair and couldn’t believe what he’d seen. He’d whipped out his phone and took video of the burning but couldn’t get the file to upload. He insisted I needed to see the video immediately. He said that he and his father had been standing at the firepit watching the chair burn when they both saw the figure of a man and a girl in the flames. Was it Wilhelm and someone he may have harmed? Then the chair split in half and the flames divided and arced up in devil’s horns. I did eventually get hold of the video footage. A careful frame-by-frame analysis showed no man or child in the flames that I could see. I did see the devil’s horns that Scott had reported, but I believe there was a perfectly natural explanation for the effect. When the chair split in two, the fire also split in two. The rush of oxygen down the middle caused the flames to spike up suddenly and, voilà, devil horns.

Between the time of our initial walk-through and the team actually getting back out to the site for the investigation, Scott contacted the pastor of a local church and had him come out to the house to perform a house blessing. Whether it was the cross that Scott had begun to wear religiously, the chair being burned, the house being blessed, or the combination of all three, Scott reported that the most sinister of the activity—namely, Scott’s taking on the personality of a dead man—had stopped. When we returned, Scott was much calmer.

He also wanted to explain that the electrical devices continued to malfunction in the building. And then his cell phone inexplicably disappeared. It was remarkable, he said, as he never went anywhere without it. He had been forced to purchase a new one. Then he started getting odd calls. An unfamiliar number would appear on the screen. He’d answer the call, and there would be no one there. He wouldn’t get a dial tone or a recording or a voice; it would just be dead air. He would hang up and attempt to call the number back, but he always got a recording saying that the number was not in service. If he tried the number on the landline, the number would ring through to a clicking sound. Apparently, all he would get was a strange clicking sound that would continue for as long as he stayed on the line.

Again I was skeptical. Telemarketers came to mind. But I decided to call the number and see for myself. What happened next was truly odd, even for someone who works with the odd all the time. I dialed the number on Louise’s landline, and while I was waiting to see if the call went through, my investigator Brian’s cell phone rang. It was an unknown number. He answered the phone and got dead air. I got a recording saying the number was not in service. Brian and I merely stared at one another completely perplexed. What in the world, I thought, just happened?

I had long been open to the idea that the dead can make contact with the living using an electronic device, such as a telephone. I’d just never experienced it firsthand, nor had I met anyone who had. Still, I wasn’t convinced and decided to do a little more research before claiming it was paranormal. As I said, telemarketers came to mind, as they often try to mask their true identity. Oddly, when I did an online search into whether a phone number can function (call) in one direction only, one of the first articles to pop up was about this phenomenon being paranormal. Scott’s experiences actually met the criteria for the most often reported scenario: mainly, a spirit tapping into the low level of energy in a phone line or cell phone and manipulating the device to make it ring. In the majority of the cases, one would answer it and just simply get dead air. The premise of the article was that while a spirit didn’t find it all that difficult to make a phone ring, they did find it difficult to actually speak through it.

The Investigation

Maya, Brian, and I began the setup process as Louise and Scott departed to do some shopping. We set up the camera surveillance system to record footage in the back bedroom where the couple had reported seeing the shadowy figure. One covered the family room/living room area, in particular the coffee table where we had witnessed the weird scratch marks. With permission from Louise, we very carefully washed and dried the coffee table. Then we covered the table completely in flour in as uniform a covering as we could manage. We trained a camera on the table and couches so that we could see any changes in the flour as they occurred. We placed another camera in the back bedroom where Louise had apparently completed her painting masterpieces. We set up audio recorders in various locations and then went to work.

Being such a small team, we separated, Brian staying back to watch the surveillance camera feed located in the kitchen while Maya and I did a thorough sweep of the house. Then we swapped and Maya watched the feeds as Brian and I investigated. Probably the most remarkable occurrence we witnessed that night was when we stepped outside to take a break. Maya’s EMF detector spiked outside around the footers poured for the new addition. She took off on a crusade with EMF detector in hand, reporting that she had detected EMF anomalies within a hundred-foot radius around the building. The fields seemed to fluctuate as well, meaning that the detector would spike and then plunge back to zero as if something was moving about.

We conducted sessions in all the various rooms over the course of the next couple of hours, but our meters detected very little, as did we ourselves. Then Maya suggested we call Louise and Scott back to the location. Perhaps they had spent so much time in the building and connected with the entities to the point that nothing would occur without them also in the building.

Nearly on cue, the couple arrived at the house, wondering how the investigation was going. We invited them in and asked them to participate in a session with us.

I had wanted first to present a plausible explanation for the shadowy figure Scott had witnessed in the back-right bedroom. We had noticed during the investigation that when someone stood in the hallway by the door, backlit by the hallway light, they would cast a very strong shadow on the back wall of the bedroom/workshop. I had thought we might have debunked the shadow man, but Scott proved me wrong. He and Louise had witnessed the shadow along the interior wall by the breaker box, not the back wall where our shadows had cast.

We began the session now with Scott and Louise in attendance, and Scott started by confirming that Wilhelm had died in the house, in the family room where the red carpet rolls were awaiting their fate: “The room with the red carpet—that’s where he died.”

Scott implored the spirits, “Just like the last time I told you, bud. Now is the time to show yourself.”

Immediately, Maya reported an EMF spike of 9.4 as she stood in the hallway near the entrance to the family room. It was the same area where Scott reported seeing the black figure.

Scott also tried to talk to the child spirit who had “left her initials on one of the drawings.”

About this time, with all of us in the side room bedroom across from the bathroom, Maya reported a 2.0 spike on her EMF meter, again in the hallway, followed by a 0.9 and then a 0.4. Before Louise and Scott returned, we hadn’t been getting any EMF spikes, so the night seemed to have gotten somewhat more interesting.

Then Maya reported feeling chills in the hallway. “We’re not here to hurt you; we’re here to help you communicate. I implore something to put a fingerprint in the flour,” she called out. “Steadiest reading I’ve had—0.3.”

Maya asked Louise and Scott, “What was the timeline for when you started noticing things?”

“It happened just as soon as I walked in. I started seeing shadows at the left side of the cabinet peeking in at me,” answered Scott, referring to the family room. “As I said before, Louise had left Wilhelm’s existing furniture in place until the renovations of the house were complete.”

He continued, “We would be on the couches sleeping. All night she sat there, and I was there, and I started seeing shadows peeking in all night. I would see shadows peeking around the [TV] cabinet. And we had drywall stacked there, and I would see shoulders and a head peeking out at me all night. She would see me looking at it, and I would act like it wasn’t there.”

Scott then referred to episodes he’d had in the recliner. “I would be sweating, sitting on that chair, and then I’d be freezing.” These odd shifts in body temperature might be attributable to someone suffering from an illness or disease. “And my vision started going bad in the last eight weeks. The neighbor said Wilhelm had been nearly blind. And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Did I tell you about the two and a half hours I’d pass out? They said he would sit in that chair in a diabetic coma for hours. I started doing it. I’d be in that chair passed out for two and a half hours.”

Scott admitted that all the happenings had “cost me huge, huge,” referring to the emotional and physiological output associated with channeling the spirit whether wittingly or unwittingly.

Maya cut in, “Robin, I just felt like something touched me on the side of the leg. It was just below my knee. I was feeling something on my leg.” She turned to Scott and Louise. “Robin will come back and give you a report on her findings. But one thing that I found helps is that you’ll have energies or spirits that don’t necessarily know they’re spirits. They don’t know why we don’t pay attention to them and don’t know who you are, and so you’re in their space. And time—time is really only a concept for the living. So get their attention by saying you love this house, you love this space. You want to make it a home. You want to improve it. I’ve moved into homes where there was an energy, and … they’re afraid of us. That tension will build up, and it’s like it gets upset, and you get upset—back and forth. So it’s best to say, ‘Hey, I love this space. I’m happy here.’”

We wrapped the session, packed up our gear, and headed out. Before departing, Maya and I discussed how to properly cleanse a house by smudging it with sage and suggested Louise do it daily for a while, decreasing the frequency slowly over time to once a week, and finally once a month.

The Evidence

Below is an excerpt from the evidence file. This evidence was recorded on the audio recorder that was placed in the rear bedroom/workroom before Scott and Louise returned. The group’s self-proclaimed medium, Maya is kept in the dark about any of the details of an investigation so that she can go in with an open mind. I’ve sometimes found her to be eerily spot on and other times to be far off the mark. In this case, at twenty minutes in on the recording, she said something very interesting.

19:59	EMF spike at 4.0 on Maya’s gauge while she and Brian do a round in the back bedrooms. Robin is at the surveillance cameras.
20:43	Maya asks, “You like the crawl space, huh?” Recall that Scott had reported to me that Louise would spend hours in the attic, despite the extreme heat, and would often act oddly up there. I had purposely not shared any of that information with Maya.
21:59	We depart the house to take a break when suddenly Maya gets very unusual EMF spikes in the back yard in a 100-yard radius of the house. Team spends several minutes outside exploring the area.
39:40	EVP of a female whispering, “Yes.”
40:00	Maya reports having “major chills.”
45:28	EMF spike of a 9.4 at the spot where Scott reported often seeing the apparition of the woman in the back hallway by the two bedroom doors.
46:48	Indistinguishable whispering.
51:58	Maya has a 9.4 EMF spike in hall; Robin’s detector in the room is a 0.
52:00	Maya reports EMF spikes of 0.9 and 0.4. (The hallway and bathroom lights had been turned off when the team discovered during setup that they registered on our EMF gauges when on.)
53:46	Maya reports chills.

Throughout the night, not so much as a bug landed in the flour on the table. There wasn’t a mark, a scratch, a fingerprint—nothing showed up in the flour. We also captured no shadowy entities poking their heads around corners. We did get a short EVP with a male voice responding to the question “Is Wilhelm here?” with a short but definitive “no.” So it was impossible to say if the entity wasn’t Wilhelm or if it was Wilhelm being difficult.

But we did record several EVPs by what sounds like an adult female. In one very clear EVP, we could hear her say, “In crystal.” We had no idea what this meant, but the EVP was very distinct.

Then, in two separate and remarkable EVPs, the same female entity seems to repeat the same message twice:

First EVP. Indistinguishable whispering and then, “I can’t see. Here, but seen in the eye before. Can’t go out again. It’s been five months in Delaware.”

Second EVP. Again some indistinguishable whispering and then clearly, “In the eye before. I can’t see. Didn’t go out again. It’s been five months alone.”

Final Assessment

The two EVPs described above are the most remarkable and haunting EVPs of my career, for a number of reasons. First, the two EVPs are exceptional for their sheer length. Most EVPs are whispered one-or-two-word phrases. These were several sentences in length. They were also extremely similar in message, almost as if the entity were repeating a personal mantra, explaining to herself why she could not go out again. I wondered if the reason she couldn’t leave was because she was blind or if she saw everything in the material world as somewhat hazy. I’ve often speculated that for spirits, the world at large appears very murky and that they have as much difficulty communicating with us as we do with them. Whether this is because they exist in a kind of semiconscious state or whether it’s because our physical makeups are so different, I’m not certain. I have concluded that clear, concise communication between the two worlds seems difficult at best on both sides of the veil.

I did wonder why she felt trapped in the house, unable to leave. Was it some type of personal seclusion, which is what the EVPs suggested, or had she been held against her will? Was it the fact that she had been there so long that she now felt it necessary simply to stay, or so she tried to convince herself ? Why couldn’t she see, and why did she allude twice to something in her eye?

We started the investigation thinking we would find Wilhelm, and instead we found a woman who felt trapped within the confines of the Long Neck house. It was just another of those mysteries that seem to shroud anything to do with the paranormal.

A third EVP we captured was again a female voice rasping out what sounded like “marksssss.” Honestly, until this moment in time, I hadn’t thought much of the EVP, as it didn’t really seem to pertain to anything. But then an awful thought crossed my mind. Perhaps the “marks” were on her body. Did she have marks either from abuse or self-harm? Perhaps this was why she no longer felt she could leave; perhaps the marks would give her away.

Was the voice we heard the older woman? The child? It sounded distinctly to me to be that of a young woman. In fact, we captured no EVPs that sounded like a small child at all that night, nor did we come across any evidence, such as marks in the flour or elsewhere, that evening to suggest a child spirit.

Near the very end of the evening, as we were wrapping up the combined session with Louise and Scott, Maya was walking about with her EMF detector in the family room when we caught a curiously clear EVP. Again a soft female voice implored, “You can leave now.” I think perhaps we had exhausted her resources for the evening.

Postscript

I met with a calmer Scott and Louise for a post-investigation interview for the writing of this book. They admitted that they were both slightly reluctant to meet with me again. There had been no activity in the house for months, and construction was nearing completion. They weren’t sure meeting with me wouldn’t stir things up again. After the burning of the chair, the couple had very meticulously hunted every item that had belonged to Wilhelm and had either thrown it away or burned it. Louise had also very carefully followed Maya’s instructions to ritually cleanse the dwelling with sage. The house was calm now, peaceful. Why jinx it? But after a few emails back and forth, they agreed to fill me in on events both past and present.

Now able to look at the situation much more rationally, Scott admitted that the worst of the activity had happened as soon as Louise left to visit family in California, as if the male spirit were targeting Scott in particular. “I don’t think it wanted me to finish the house.”

But after burning the chair and having the house blessed, Scott never again had the odd episodes. The rages, the passing out for long periods, the strange physical maladies, the big handprints—all of what seemed like Wilhelm’s manipulations—all ceased.

The woman and the child spirit remained longer in the house, although they apparently were forced to vacate eventually, either due to the frequent cleansings or merely due to Louise’s actions in the cleansing ritual, which indicated that their presence in the house was not welcome.

The Victorian woman departed a month or so after our investigation, and when she did, she made her displeasure known to Scott quite plainly. He got into his father’s truck one day, closed the door, and glanced into the rearview mirror. There, sitting in the back seat, was the woman of the high cheekbones and serious mien staring back at him. He immediately turned around to look into the back seat, but she was not there. He turned back to look again at the rearview mirror, but no woman. As she had never seemed to interact with him when he saw her in the house, I asked him how she had acted when he saw her in the car.

“She wasn’t looking out the window or anything. She was looking right at me. And she didn’t have a happy face on. She seemed like one of those women who said, ‘You better do it my way.’ She might have been a strict mother or grandmother … very stern.” That was the last time he saw her either in the house or on the property. It was almost as if she showed herself to Scott in the car as a way to acknowledge that the couple had won and she had vacated the property but that she wasn’t happy with the situation.

But while it seemed the lady in the Victorian garb and Wilhelm had both departed, the child spirit seemed to linger for some time in the home. “We would have little pictures, drawn by little fingers. More pictures of alligators, someone drowning, crudely drawn, like the drawings of a six-year-old. The alligator images might be a type of symbol of danger in the water, though Delaware is too far north to have alligators.”

The images of drowning are also interesting. Scott confided to me that while alone with my investigator Maya, she had mentioned to him that she felt the child spirit was that of a six-year-old female who had drowned. Maya, who is by her own admission sensitive, has been asked not to give her opinions on such matters until the evidence has been reviewed. Apparently, she felt compelled in this case to make this claim to Scott. He admitted she had asked him to keep it to himself.

Scott continued, “I felt fingers moving on my legs all the time.” He demonstrated by moving his fingers up and down his lower leg from ankle to knee. This would occur all over the house, but in particular in the back-left bedroom—coincidentally, the same bedroom where Louise had painted the pictures.

After the investigation was over, a large cabinet with tools was removed from the dining room, baring a large blank temporary wall. The footers for an adjoining family room area were poured, but construction had not begun on this section of the house. In the interim, a piece of drywall had been installed temporarily over what would someday be the walkway between the two rooms. Just for fun, Louise had taken a marker and drawn a smiley face on the raw drywall one day. She thought it would be cute, and apparently the child apparition thought it fun as well.

“For the next several months, all over the house were smiley faces drawn with a finger. In the dust, in the dog hair, on the TV screen, on the windows—there were smiley faces everywhere,” Scott said. He even picked up a mattress that was lying on the floor in the back bedroom to find a smiley face drawn underneath. “And I would ask Louise, did you do this? She’d say no. And I would say, well I didn’t do it either. I think that she was mocking us.”

Louise chimed in, “So one day he decided to paint over it.”

“I didn’t just paint over it. I sanded it off the drywall, because the paint wouldn’t cover it.”

Scott recalled a strange episode in the shower one morning. “I was in the shower, and, you know, the water hits you and splashes down. This morning it was hitting me and splashing two ways.” Scott demonstrated with his hands that the stream of water was dividing in a V-shaped pattern. “And the shower curtain kept blowing and moving. And we didn’t have the heat or air on. And I said, ‘Come on, can’t I get a shower by myself ?’ When I opened the shower curtain, there were already little wet footprints walking out on the rug and the tiles. I hadn’t gotten out yet, and Louise was still sleeping. I had seen the shower curtain move, but not really open. But does the shower curtain really have to open for someone to get into or out of the shower?”

Then one day the couple was sitting on the couch making up when the front door opened. Scott described it: “The front door just opened, like ten, twelve inches. And it’s latched—it’s latched right now—I would never have a door that didn’t latch by itself. So it unlatched, opened just wide enough for something to walk out, and then it closed. Why would it blow open ten inches? Why, if the wind blew it open, wouldn’t it blow open all the way? It just opened this much and then click. Never felt anything in here, saw anything in here, never any designs anymore.”

It appeared that the door opening and closing was the final scene for the ghost child. She heralded her departure from the house with her final supernatural feat. Louise concurred that the door opened and closed, and that was the last she time she’d ever had experiences in the home.

Post Postscript: “They live outside now.”

Our investigator Brian left on a trip not long after we wrapped the investigation. Sitting next to him was a woman he did not know but who, it appeared in retrospect, had a message for him. They were conversing with some light banter during the flight, and the woman asked him what he had been doing in his free time. He hedged at first, not wanting to admit that he was a paranormal investigator. The woman seemed to be determined, however, and continued to ask pointed questions about his hobbies. He admitted that he’d done some undefined work for a couple and that the work involved a house. Finally, she asked what work he did, and he was cornered into admitting that he had done an investigation with a paranormal team at a house that involved a couple. Satisfied, the woman delivered the message that she had wanted him to know. “They live outside now,” she said.

Brian was dumbfounded. Where had this information come from? Obviously, the woman was a rather powerful medium.

My final interview with Scott and Louise indicated that the message the woman on the plane had delivered to Brian appeared to be true. When I relayed the story to Scott and Louise, they were dumbfounded.

Louise’s first words were an astonished “She said what? ‘They live outside now’?”

Then the couple agreed with the summation. The Victorian woman had been seen one final time, in Scott’s rearview mirror. She had never again been seen inside the house. And the child spirit appeared to unlatch and open the storm door, as if departing.

Now the couple reported that they often found markings on the outer side of the windows. The new master bedroom Louise had built has vaulted ceilings with windows placed at ceiling height. These would be approximately thirteen to fifteen feet above the ground outside. The couple reported finger marks appearing on the glass where someone simply couldn’t be standing unless on a ladder. The finger marks worried Scott, who would grab a ladder and carefully wash the windows. A few days later, inexplicably, he’d find fingerprints again on the windows.

The hardest part of the couple’s turmoil was the emotional drain and strain that it caused them. Even now when no paranormal activity was occurring in the house, Scott admitted that at the time he felt as if he was going crazy.

“When this was all going on, I thought I was going nuts,” he said. “So I was so glad you guys came out here and found something. Because at first, I couldn’t get Louise to believe me. But then she started seeing all the pictures in the couches. You can’t fake that. That’s why I would run over to my dad to show him. And he would say, ‘Okay, let’s brush it off, and we’ll go for a little bit.’ And we would come back and it was there.”

Despite the fact that there hadn’t been any paranormal activity in the home for many months, Louise had listed the house for sale but then had taken it off the market. Pressed for an explanation for why she had considered selling the house, after nearly all the renovations were completed and the difficulties were behind her, she said that the house itself had exacted too high a price in pain and emotional strain. “But, I’ll probably keep it now,” she added. “It’s cost me so much.”

[contents]