12
“Maybe The Ghosts
Just Don’t Like Her … ”
Later on, my small team of paranormal investigators and I elected to try another human pendulum session. This time, however, we chose the master bedroom as our venue. With the exception of a large inflatable air mattress and a single wooden chair, the room was completely empty. As I played the beam of my flashlight around the room, causing it to glint against the mirrors on the fitted wardrobes and cabinets, I couldn’t help but imagine Vanessa lying here on that very same mattress, all alone and terrified in the darkness.
The master bedroom.
Caroline wandered over to the window, the same window from which the figure of a skeletally thin old woman has been seen peering out past the thick curtains at the traffic and pedestrians moving along Colchester Road. Vanessa told me during one of our many conversations that she had been contacted by an angry driver once who told her disapprovingly that she really ought to remove the mannequin from her upstairs window.
“What mannequin?” Vanessa had asked, puzzled. The driver went on to describe something out of a horror movie: a wizened, emaciated old crone with long, stringy gray hair that framed a blank, expressionless face.
The upstairs window where ghostly figures have been seen.
Apparently more than one villager thought that Vanessa had planted a creepy-looking Halloween decoration in her master bedroom in order to scare the life out of those who saw it.
Needless to say, Vanessa had no idea what she was talking about. She didn’t even own such a mannequin. Would the spirit of the old woman come through the human pendulum and speak to us tonight?
I wanted to add an extra measure of control to our human pendulum sessions, which included putting headphones in the subject’s ears and piping in music from an iPod. For maximum annoyance, I’d gone for the soundtrack from The Lego Movie at maximum volume. That way the person acting as pendulum shouldn’t be able to hear a thing, and therefore shouldn’t be influenced by the questions themselves.
Once again, Stephen and Caroline recorded the proceedings while I asked the questions. Lesley volunteered to be the pendulum, and after a brief statement of intent that was designed to protect us from unwanted spirit entities, we were off to the races. Lesley began to tilt almost immediately, responding to questions in a way that suggested that a male spirit was present in the room with us.
She rocked backward into her no position when I asked whether the spirit had died inside the house, but then tilted forward in response to the question, “Did you live inside this building?” Which raised the possibility that we were talking with either a former tenant of the house itself, the jailer, one of his cronies … or a prisoner.
“Were you a prisoner?” The pendulum indicated that it was not. “Were you happy in this building?”
The response was such a forceful no that Lesley was almost knocked off her feet and had to throw out her hands to steady herself. “Somebody was pushing on my shoulders at the front!” she exclaimed, gesturing excitedly. It had been a very powerful shove indeed, and in my experience, such occurrences were quite rare. Usually the forces involved with the human pendulum technique were a little more subtle, almost gentle, the majority of the time. Not so tonight, here in the Cage.
“Do you like having people here?” A very definite no.
“Are you the reason that Lesley went cold downstairs, when she was sitting in the chair?” This time, the answer was an equally firm yes. All four of us looked at one another with a growing air of unease. We were all thinking the same thing: an unhappy male entity that didn’t like having company claimed that it was alongside us tonight inside the Cage, and it was willing to shove Lesley around in order to get its point across. What else might it be prepared to do in order to get its way?
This was beginning to remind us all of Vanessa’s warnings concerning the dark man. On the other hand, perhaps this could also be the spirit that referred to himself as Heinrich. After all, Heinrich had not been a resident of the Cage itself, nor a jailer or an inmate (if he was to be believed); rather, he claimed to have been a local shepherd who decided to communicate by Ouija board with the four investigators for reasons known only to himself.
After discussing it with my colleagues, I decided that the best policy was to simply ask the spirit whether it meant harm to any of the four investigators. The resulting answer came in the form of the most aggressive shove yet, one that quite literally slammed Lesley backward and off her feet. Her arms windmilled desperately in the air as she fought for balance. Fortunately, she managed to keep herself from falling flat on her back.
“This feels horrible!” Lesley said with a nervous chuckle, trying to laugh off the unnerving sensation of being handled by something that none of us could see. Nobody was buying into her false bravado, but Lesley was no quitter, and she resolutely insisted on continuing the session so the team could try and uncover more information. Although it was slightly reassuring to be told that the entity that was speaking through Lesley meant them no harm, we were all too aware that one shouldn’t put too much trust in the veracity of information received through any occult technique. Stephen reminded us that we would be wise to keep our guard up at all times.
“Are you,” I asked, deciding to cut right to the chase, “or were you … a witch?”
Yes.
And then, yet again, our contact with the entity was cut off abruptly. No more answers were forthcoming, no matter who stepped into the role of pendulum or questioner. We tried rotating everybody through each of those roles, all to no avail. With a frustrated sigh, we concluded that this particular well appeared to have dried up for the evening. If we wanted answers, then we would have to look somewhere else.
But not tonight. The sun was already coming up, and our beds were calling.
The following day’s investigation kicked off at just after two o’clock in the afternoon. Stephen, Lesley, Caroline, and I had snatched a few precious hours’ worth of sleep in our nearby hotel rooms. The hotel beds were a real luxury when compared to the lumpy couch and cold floors of the Cage, where all of us had taken a safety nap at one point or another during the week.
It was amazing just how much difference a shower and a change of clothes could make, particularly when they were topped off with some hot tea (or coffee, for our visiting American friend). The team was looking forward to the coming night’s investigation, ready for anything that the Cage might throw at us.
True to form, the February air was cold, with only a very light breeze to rock the bare branches. I inserted the key into the lock and turned it, then pushed the creaky back door open slowly. As always, it seemed much colder inside the Cage than it was outside. Caroline immediately set to firing up the electric heaters, while Lesley made a beeline for the kettle.
Before we had left the Cage at sunrise that same morning, Stephen had asked any entities who may still be present inside the Cage to move something around while the house was empty. Why not, the priest had suggested politely, stack some of the equipment on the wooden tabletop? Now that we were back, we were all disappointed to find that, contrary to the priest’s request, none of the objects and equipment that had been left strewn across the table that day had moved even an inch. It seemed that the spirits of the Cage were not willing to perform on demand—not unless it suited their own purposes, anyway.
Moving with a practiced smoothness born from three nights of carrying out the very same routine, we fired up our laptops and began to place all of the equipment that we would need for the coming night on charge. We had noticed that, as with so many haunted locations, batteries seemed to drain very quickly inside the old prison. Many paranormal investigators believe that the drained electricity is being used as a power source, one that allows ghostly phenomena to manifest.
Once all of the equipment was either fully charged or had gotten factory fresh batteries inserted, Lesley popped outside to take a quick smoke break. As the only smoker among the team, she preferred to exit via the back door and stand outside in the small enclosed yard, keeping an eye on the exterior windows and taking the occasional peek along the length of Coffin Alley.
Lesley had been outside for less than five minutes when the back door slammed shut with a loud thud, one that could easily be heard over the noise of the traffic rumbling along the busy Colchester Road.
All three of her colleagues were located within eyesight of one another, sitting in either the kitchen or around the table inside the Cage itself. Even if there had been any question of fraud (which there wasn’t), there was absolutely no way that any one of us could have snuck out and slammed the door closed behind Lesley—at least, not without one or both of the others noticing. It would also have required all three of us to be in collusion with one another, in what would have been a prank conducted in the poorest of taste, and contrary to all of the rules under which we had agreed to operate.
To be clear, a sense of humor is a very helpful attribute for a paranormal investigator. The nights can be both long and boring, and the occasional lapse into a silly joke helps the dead time to pass a little more quickly. But for the professional paranormal investigator, one who is truly serious about his or her trade, practical jokes are an absolute no-no. The problem is that once a piece of so-called paranormal phenomena has been faked, even though it is simply just for a laugh, and the joker confesses to it afterward, all trust and credibility has now been lost. It is then extremely difficult, if not impossible, for it to be regained.
As the nights wore on inside the Cage, and the four of us grew increasingly exhausted, every single one of us had gotten a little punchy on at least one occasion, and we all ended up giggling and cackling at some pretty terrible jokes. At one point, when all four of the team members were gathered around the table, somebody—nobody can quite remember exactly who came up with the idea—half-seriously suggested the idea of making a TV pilot episode that would be a mash-up of ghost hunting and the London gangster scene, as popularized by Guy Ritchie in such movies as Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The proposed title for this cultural masterpiece is a little too offensive to list here, but suffice it to say that when the three Brits on the team tried to induce Stephen to speak like a Londoner, they were soon reduced to tears and howls of laughter when the American priest gamely made his best effort at imitating Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
But that was as far as the joking went. At no time did anybody play any practical jokes inside the Cage. To do so would have crossed a line that would have compromised trust and integrity. In order to maintain an acceptable standard of professionalism, the four of us had agreed at the very outset of the case that we would not play tricks for any reason.
After unlocking the back door in order to let Lesley back in (the lock kicks in automatically when the door closes, and can then only be opened from inside the Cage, or with a key from the outside), the nonplussed team clustered around it and began to search for a logical explanation.
We began by pushing the door mostly shut, but left it ajar by roughly three inches, which had been how Lesley usually pulled it behind her when she took a smoke break. Then we started to experiment with actually closing the door, starting out with gentle pushes, and ending up with fairly violent, forceful slams (which sounded exactly like the noise the door had made when Lesley was trapped outside). Our ultimate goal was to determine exactly how much force it would take to close the door firmly and securely against its frame so that the lock would automatically engage itself. The answer, as it turned out, was quite a lot. It required a hearty shove with one arm at the very least in order to get the warped old door to sit somewhat snugly against the jamb.
The most obvious explanation for the door suddenly appearing to close itself was, of course, that of a breeze. Could a sudden gust of wind have been responsible for slamming the door? On the face of things, it seemed rather unlikely. Lesley had left the door ajar, open by perhaps two or three inches, she explained, which had become a habit over the course of the week. The hinges were positioned in such a way that the door swung outward against its frame when it was shut, which meant that in order to close it, the motive force would have had to have come from inside the house. Air flow from outside the Cage would have blown the door farther open, not closed.
Besides, there was barely any wind at all outside. The branches of the trees were not swaying, and nor was the grass in the pub’s beer garden moving at all. Then the team went from room to room inside the house, checking on each and every one of the doors and windows. Most of the doors and absolutely all of the windows inside the building were closed. When the investigators checked more closely, not even a slight breeze was blowing through the house—just the usual minor drafts, none of them even close to being strong enough to slam a door. (They assessed this by using the time-honored, highly technical method of holding a sheet of paper up to each doorframe and recording how much or how little it was blown—in most cases, the answer was not at all.)
“Besides,” I pointed out, my brow furrowed in consternation, “this is our fourth night here. Lesley takes seven or eight smoke breaks each night. That means that on the first three nights, she would have been outside for, what … roughly twenty-one times? And in all those times, not once does the door slam shut behind her.”
“And last night was a lot windier than tonight,” Stephen pointed out, gesturing toward the few leaves left on the trees, which were hardly even rustling, let alone swaying. “There’s barely even a breeze tonight. What about vibrations from the passing traffic, though? There are some heavy trucks on the road, and they pass by the Cage pretty fast.”
“That’s not a bad theory.” Thinking about it for a moment, I positioned myself directly behind the door and began to jump up and down as hard as I possibly could. I had to be careful not to bang my head on the low plaster ceiling overhead. Weighing in at some 270 pounds (plus the clothes and heavy boots that I was wearing, which were probably good for another ten pounds), nobody could have accused me of being a lightweight; yet the constant thud-thud-thudding of my thick soles on the floor failed to move the door even fractionally, let alone slam it shut. It soon became obvious to us all that the vibration theory just wasn’t going to fly either.
We unanimously agreed that neither a sudden gust of wind nor the vibrations from a passing vehicle provided a satisfactory explanation for the manner in which Lesley had gotten locked out. When I texted Vanessa with an update on what had happened to Lesley, her reply offered as good a reason as any other: maybe the ghosts just don’t like her …
I couldn’t hide my grin when I showed Lesley the text message. The instant Vanessa’s words sunk in, she visibly blanched. It looked as though we could be in for an interesting night.