The Beginning
A study from a few years ago showed that three of every four Americans believed in the paranormal, many believing they have experienced paranormal events. I was not one of those people. I loved ghost stories. Even as a little girl I liked to hear stories like the one about a teenager who picked up a girl on the side of the road looking for a ride home. She left her jacket in his car after he dropped her off and when he returned it to the house he went to the night before, the mother informed him her daughter died in an accident years earlier.
Ghost stories were always exciting, thrilling, and chilling, but to me, ghosts were as real as a Stargate where you could be on earth, walk through the force field, and instantaneously be on an alien planet when you come out the other side. It made for a great movie and then television show, but it wasn’t based on reality. The same went for ghost stories and the haunted movies that are always “based on actual events.” They always say “based on actual events” because you can’t prove it didn’t happen … and it makes the story more exciting, like The Amityville Horror. At least, that is what I thought back then.
I never gave the paranormal much thought except on dark and stormy nights when I’d curl up in bed with books like The Canterville Ghost. All harmless fun. Other than that, I was a typical girl growing up. I had my mom and dad, my two older brothers JP and AP. I never understood why my mom didn’t give me a middle name that started with P. I had my inner circle of friends and my beloved pets. I was a good Catholic girl who attended church every Sunday and said my rosary nightly. I went to school, graduated, got a job, didn’t like it, got another. I enjoyed listening to music from Japan and I was a fan of Samurai movies. I got a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, I loved the Renaissance Fair. There was nothing unusual about my life or my interests—at least not until the middle of 2004, when my view on life was turned upside down.
My brother JP was busy working as a police officer in the city I was originally from. AP, a deputy sheriff, had just returned from a ghost hunting vacation in Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, with his then fiancée (now wife). My father was in the hospital; he had another setback in his fifteen-year battle with cancer. By 2004, hospital visits were almost weekly. Most of the time he’d have to stay for days, sometimes longer. It would just be me and my mom home alone at night after visiting hours were over at the hospital. There was nothing unusual about that.
One night JP, AP, and his fiancée, decided to go to a Bastille Day festival taking place thirty minutes away. I didn’t want to go. It was a hot and muggy night; I was more interested in staying home and enjoying my favorite television show, Stargate SG-1. JP was also a big fan and asked me to record the newest episode for him so he could watch when they got home. I went about my night, taking care of my pet rabbit and pet iguana. After a long day of running around the house, they were ready for dinner and then bed. As I put my iguana into her habitat, my mom decided she also was going to go and lie in bed and watch television for a while.
My show was almost on, so I quickly went around the house shutting off unnecessary lights—the living room lamps, the kitchen, and the light in AP’s room, which he left on. I turned it off, leaving his door open behind me. I ran to the upstairs loft where my bedroom was and got into bed. I turned on my show, hit record, and enjoyed one of the best episodes I had seen. After the show ended, I turned my television off and pulled the covers up to my chin, lying down to try to fall asleep. Just as my head hit the pillow, I heard what sounded like a door open and close, then heavy footsteps walking through the kitchen. It sounded like someone wearing boots. I assumed one of my brothers had come home. AP wore cowboy boots frequently, so I assumed it was him.
The footsteps sounded as if they were coming closer. I could hear the steps slowly clop past the stairs. Then, a door closed. It sounded as if it were in my brother’s room. I went downstairs, assuming AP had come home and gone into his room. I wanted to know what the festival was like to see if I wanted to attend the next day. I saw through the crevice under the door that a light was on in the room. So I knocked. The door swayed open slowly on its own and showed me an empty room. The lights were on, but no one was home, so to speak. “Maybe he went to say goodnight to Mom,” I thought. My brothers had a habit of waking my mom out of a deep sleep just to tell her goodnight. I went to my Mom’s room. There she was sitting in bed still watching television.
“Who came home?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, realizing that obviously no one had come to see her.
“I thought I heard someone in the kitchen. Was that you?”
“No, I heard someone go into AP’s room, and I thought he had come home. The light was on and I know I turned it off, so someone was in there.” My next thought was that he had come home to get something and ran back out. I called JP’s cell phone. When he answered, I could hear he was still at the festival.
“Is AP with you?”
“Yeah they’re both here. Why?”
My mom and I looked at each other. We both heard someone in the house walking around with heavy footsteps. The festival was thirty minutes away, so if AP and JP were both there, it definitely wasn’t them. I hung up on my brother after blurting out that someone broke into the house. Without thinking of what we were really doing, my mom and I bolted out of her room. She grabbed a butcher knife as my focus went on the basement door. I took a knife and stuck it in the door so if someone went down there, they couldn’t get back up. I then grabbed a knife and started searching the house while my mom huddled on the couch. No one under the beds, no one in the closets, no one in the shower, no one …
I checked the front and side doors—they were both locked as they were all night. I went from window to window. Locked, locked, locked, locked, locked. Everything was as it should be. Nothing was tampered with; there was no way someone had gotten into that house. My mom and I looked at one another. Were we sharing the same hallucination? How could two people, in two different rooms, on different levels of the house, have heard the same thing? I walked into my brother’s room and turned off the lights. It was an old-fashioned switch. It was a heavy switch that would click loudly when you turned the lights on and off. There was no “in-between” where it could get stuck halfway down, and then pop back up. Off was off and on was on. When I turned the light off again, there was the telltale click. As I turned to leave the room … “CLICK.” The lights were on!
I felt as if I were in a movie … the lights were starting to flicker as I turned back toward the light in slow motion. The switch was in the on position. I felt claustrophobic all of a sudden as I reached to turn the light off again. I pushed it down with a loud click, and held it there. I wanted to make sure it was as down as it could possibly be. The lights were off again. I started walking backwards to the door, my heart pounding. Thankfully, it seemed to be staying down. As I left the room, “CLICK” and the lights were on.
My brothers arrived home less than thirty minutes later. They must have been speeding to get there that fast. They searched the outside of the house. It had rained the night before, and the soft mud was sinking under their feet. They could see their footprints, but that was all they saw. There were no signs of anyone else around the house. JP never seemed to fully believe my mom and me, but AP and his fiancée had a different view. They had brought home a lot of little things from Gettysburg as souvenirs. Rocks, leaves they pressed in books, a little bit of dirt from the ground of a battlefield. AP’s fiancée mused that perhaps a spirit followed them home. “Ridiculous,” I thought to myself. “Ghosts don’t travel … do they?”
I learned that they do indeed travel. A year after these events, I met Jason and Grant from Ghost Hunters, a show about paranormal investigation. They told me that many spirits attach to objects and will follow it wherever it goes. Some become attached to people while others roam from place to place until they find a spot they want to stay, much like we do in life. So a house that may not have been haunted before can become haunted under the right circumstances.
From that first night, strange things started happening. I’d hear my name being called. I’d ask who was looking for me, but no one would know what I was talking about. Things would tip over for no reason, I’d see shadows out of the corner of my eye. One night, I was on the phone with a friend. My remote control for the TV had stopped working, and I was complaining to her that I couldn’t find all the extra batteries and how I didn’t want to have to manually change the channel. We laughed at my laziness till something shot out of my closet like a bullet and hit my bed.
I screamed, but regained my composure and told my friend I would have to call her back. A box was tipped upside down on my floor right next to my bed. This box had been sitting on the top shelf of my closet for weeks. It wasn’t precariously placed in there—I had it pushed all the way against the wall so it WOULDN’T fall off. Then I thought to myself, if it fell, it would land at the bottom of the closet floor, not eight feet away where my bed was. For it to fly eight feet, it would have to have been pushed or thrown. I slowly picked up the box, which spilled all of its contents. There, under the box, were the batteries I had searched everywhere for.
Not long after, my family was hit with a tragedy. May 11, 2005—my father passed away. It was expected, but unexpected at the same time. It took a long time after he passed for things to feel “normal” again. It was hard passing the room where he spent the last three years in a medical bed. The room was quiet without the loud hissing of his oxygen tank. His electric wheelchair sat motionless in the corner of the room.
One afternoon a month after he passed, my mom and I were shopping for groceries. After returning home, a light was blinking on the brand-new cordless phone we purchased a week earlier with a DIGITAL voice-mail machine. We didn’t have caller ID, so I pressed play to hear the first person to leave a message on our new piece of technology. There was nothing but static, a sort of white noise. I thought the machine had malfunctioned. Then I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. I ran and got my mom and told her to listen. She heard the same thing. An hour later, JP came home on his lunch break and we made him listen. His jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” When AP came home we had him listen as well. We all heard it and it shocked us to the core.
It was Dad. It was his voice 100 percent, no doubt in our minds. Through the static, he simply said, “I love you.” There was another voice on the phone that wasn’t my dad’s. It said something about “the light” but the message stopped abruptly. At that moment, so did the unusual activity in the house.
It made me question the paranormal. It made me wonder if there wasn’t really a spirit in that found its way into my house, decided to stay knowing my father was ill and didn’t have much more time left, and followed my dad when it was time to cross over to the other side.
After that moment, I saw things in a way I hadn’t before. The paranormal was no longer an idle enjoyment; it was something I needed to know more about … I needed to understand. I contacted many people in the industry to learn as much as I could. From Noah Leigh of the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee (http://paranormal
milwaukee.com), I learned about the various types of hauntings; residual, intelligent, demonic, and poltergeist. He told me how each different type of haunting could be identified.
I learned about different equipment used and how each piece of equipment is implemented; the K-II meter, the Mel meter, thermometers, video camera, etc. Armed with this information, I began my studies of the paranormal. My goals were to learn more about my experience, to help other with their experiences, and to try to answer the greatest question of all: Why? Why do ghosts haunt? What are spirits really? Why do they linger? Why? I armed myself with a K-II meter, a Mel meter, two Sony digital voice recorders, a Galileo High-Power Telescope, and several video cameras. I learned about each piece of equipment, their pros and cons, and set out.
And here is where the journey begins. A lone investigator roaming the country for answers.