Chapter 9
Boots on the Ground
My name is Richard Estep. I have been a paranormal investigator for the past twenty-four years, spending time researching some of the world’s most haunted locations and writing about them.
None would affect me quite like Fox Hollow Farm.
Before heading out to Indiana to test the mettle of this infamous place, I made sure to do my homework. The list of strange and bizarre occurrences that were said to have taken place at Fox Hollow Farm during the tenancy of Rob and Vicki Graves was both extensive and fascinating, and I recapped it for the members of my team prior to flying out there.
Paranormal phenomena had been experienced in many different parts of the house and grounds, but by far the most active area seemed to be the swimming pool and its associated pump room, which was directly connected. This should come as no surprise, considering what took place in the pool itself.
When people were swimming in the pool, they often heard knocking on the door. Whenever anybody went to check the door, nobody was ever found standing outside. Disembodied footsteps were regularly heard throughout the house.
On two occasions, Vicki Graves saw the apparition of a young man wearing a red shirt. This took place during broad daylight each time. Rob had seen a shadow figure downstairs in the vicinity of the pool. One day, he was in the pump room carrying out a little routine maintenance on the pump when he felt something very distinctly touch his elbow. Whipping around, he saw the shadowy figure of a human being pass by him, disappearing through the pump room doorway. Despite being a practical, rational man, he no longer liked being in there alone.
Inside the apartment, now the bedroom for one of Rob and Vicki’s sons, the door had been known to rattle as though an invisible somebody was attempting to get out … or in. This was where Joe LeBlanc, the Graves’ lodger, lived for two and a half years and experienced a significant amount of paranormal activity, much of it rather disturbing.
There was plenty to investigate, and I was excited at the prospect of putting boots on the ground at Fox Hollow Farm and seeing if the ghosts would come out and interact with my fellow paranormal investigators and me. We would use every trick in the book in order to try to gather evidence of the haunting—or, for that matter, to rule it out.
Debunking is a large part of what we do as a team. Could some, if not all, of these supposed paranormal phenomena have a natural explanation?
There was only one way to find out.
• — •
My first visit to Fox Hollow Farm took place in November 2016. I took along a small group of investigators with me, all of whom I’d worked with before and trusted to help me get the job done: Jason, Shaun, Erin, Aurthur, and Cletus.
Jason had been a key part of my team for several years, along with his wife, Linda. Between them, they were the tech experts, never leaving home without at least three or four cases of the latest equipment. Reliable, dependable, and experienced, Jason was one of the key members of the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society.
Shaun had served for many years in the Air Force and now spent most of his time visiting haunted locations. He claimed to be a “sensitive” and usually reported getting psychic impressions and hearing clairaudient voices during an investigation. I hadn’t worked with him a great deal before then, but I thought that bringing a different perspective to things might be illuminating.
Coming at it from a different angle was Erin, an investigator who worked primarily out of Colorado Springs. I had wanted to work with her and her colleague, Aurthur, for quite some time, because their team had a good reputation, and I suspected that they could teach me some new techniques that would help me become a better paranormal investigator. It’s good to bring fresh ideas to the table.
Last, there was Cletus. While he was still relatively new to the field, what he lacked in knowledge and experience was made up for by his boundless enthusiasm. He tended to take the approach of a bull in a china shop, always tackling a problem head-on.
The six of us got an afternoon flight out from Colorado and flew into Indianapolis, landing just after dark. After picking up a pair of rental cars, we checked into our hotel and then hit the road bound for Westfield. No sooner had we reached the outskirts of town than the heavens opened, dumping sheets of torrential rain. It was hammering on the roof of our car so loudly that we could barely hear ourselves talk.
Visibility was down to just a few feet. We slowed down to a crawl, peering through the windshield in an attempt to make out the way ahead and trusting the sat-nav far more than I was comfortable with.
The weather was so bad that we came close to missing the turn.
“I think that’s it,” Cletus said, pointing off to the left. I squinted. Sure enough, set back slightly from the road was a large wooden sign that read fox hollow farm.
Slamming on the brakes, we backed up a little and turned left, driving through an iron gate that Robert Graves had thoughtfully left open for us. The driveway itself was long and winding. We passed a stable block on the left, barely visible in the downpour, and a huge garage off to the right.
Then there was the house itself.
My first thought was, Horror movies take place in locations like this …
Looking back on it now, with the benefit of hindsight, I cannot help but wonder exactly how much of the growing sense of unease that began gnawing at my gut could be put down to foreknowledge prejudicing me. I had studied up on the background of the Fox Hollow murders and the subsequent haunting, so the details were already well known to me when we parked our cars at the side of that house and dashed through the rain toward the front door.
If I had visited the house while being completely unaware of its macabre history, would I still have felt so on edge? It’s a fascinating thought experiment. Someday, I’d love to take somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Fox Hollow out to the place in order to see how they react to that dark and forbidding house.
Rob greeted us at the door and ushered us inside. He was a polite and friendly man and one who seemed completely unfazed by making his home in a place where so many young men had been murdered.
“Vicki and I knew what we were getting into.” He shrugged when I asked him about it in as delicate a manner as I could manage. “Not so much the ghosts, I have to admit, but even they don’t bother us too much anymore.”
I had to admire his sheer imperturbability. I didn’t know if I would be able to sleep peacefully if I lived in a house that came with the baggage that Fox Hollow Farm did.
“There are stories out there about Fox Hollow Farm being cursed, something that has nothing to do with the murders. Before us, everybody but Vicki and I—knock on wood—had lost this property due to foreclosure.
“This is a hard place to own and to live in,” he admitted. “After a time, it really wears on you. And I don’t mean the paranormal activity, necessarily; I’m talking about the hours upon endless hours of upkeep that it takes to keep an estate like this running, not to mention how horribly expensive it is to keep it in a state of good repair. It’s practically a full-time job, and take it from me, it’s work—it really is. It takes me six hours just to cut the grass, for goodness’ sake! There’s a physical and an emotional toll.”
Later on, I would be able to attest to that. Every single time that I would see Rob or Vicki around the place, they were working on some Fox Hollow Farm–related task or other task related to maintaining it. Coming from a man who grumbles at the prospect of spending fifteen minutes cutting my own yard, I suddenly had a newfound sympathy for the Graves family.
“How would you like the grand tour?” Rob asked, changing the subject. Considering all that we had seen and read about the place, we were champing at the bit to learn more about it. Rob was kind enough to give us an extensive show-and-tell, taking us into every part of the house and telling us the stories that were associated with each area. All in all, it took around ninety minutes, and I would find out later that there was still a great deal of detail that he hadn’t gotten around to.
Once the tour was over, it was time for us to get down to work. We decided to use the bar downstairs as our base of operations, partly because it was a fairly large open area with lots of comfortable seating and a variety of tables that we could use to lay out our gear. I was also very aware that the swimming pool seemed to be ground zero for the paranormal phenomena that had plagued Fox Hollow in the past and wanted to be as close to it as possible.
Our gear was all packed in a series of heavy plastic cases with foam lining to protect it from the tender mercies of the airline baggage handlers. Now we started to break it out, laying each piece of equipment on top of a table. EMF meters, static and video cameras, thermometers, laser grids, air ionization meters, motion sensors, spirit boxes, and a whole plethora of kit that we hoped would help us gather evidence if any paranormal activity truly did start to go down.
The first order of business was to set up laser grids in the area of the swimming pool, along with a series of locked-off cameras that we could simply set and forget. Just as the name implies, a laser grid is an electronic device that emits a series of brightly colored laser beams in a grid-like pattern. Paranormal investigators deploy them in dark rooms, bouncing the grids off the far walls. If a shadow figure or something similar happens to walk across the room, it will break the beam and be visible to the camera … or so goes the theory, at any rate.
Cletus placed his grid on a sturdy tripod at the shallow end of the swimming pool, covering the far wall with its net. Then he put out a video camera alongside it, aligning the camera’s field of vision with the back wall and the open door to the pump room, which was reputed to be extremely paranormally active.
It had begun to rain again, getting steadily more intense as the night wore on—just the sort of stereotypical dark and stormy night to provide an atmospheric “fear factor” on a paranormal investigation. We were hanging out in the bar, loading fresh batteries into our equipment and generally shooting the breeze. After a while, Cletus went back into the pool room to check on his locked-off video camera. As he did so, he glimpsed something moving for just a split second against the far wall of the pool, darting quickly from left to right and then back again. The bright green laser grid made it easy for him to pick the shadowy figure out against the dark background; it caught his eye because it had broken a number of the laser beams.
Cletus’s video camera had been pointing in that direction and should have caught whatever it was. A number of intense white ground lights surrounded the pool room, their beams shining in through the tall glass windows.
“Let me download that camera footage so we can see it on a bigger screen,” Shaun offered.
We all gathered around Shaun’s laptop eagerly as he took the footage and queued it up on-screen. The video file began to play. The field of view showed the distant end of the pool, which was one big pool of shadow due to the fact that we had switched the lights off in there; only the glow from the outdoor ground light and the hundreds of green polka dots emanating from the laser grid illuminated the back wall.
Nothing happened for a moment or two. Then, all of a sudden, something dark passed across the top of the screen, disturbing the laser field momentarily before going back in the same direction from which it had come.
“Bloody hell,” I breathed, echoing what everybody else was thinking. “What was that??”
“Had to be one of two things,” Jason answered calmly. “Either it was a shadow figure inside the pool room itself, or somebody was walking around outside and got in front of one of those lights.”
“Play it back again,” Aurthur requested. Shaun obliged, and we watched the video a few more times. The only way to debunk it was, we all agreed, to try to recreate the effect ourselves. I sent one of the investigators to go outside and walk back and forth in front of the ground lights while the rest of us stood in the pool room and recorded it. The end result was pretty clear: when a flesh-and-blood human being passed in front of those ground lights, they broke the beam and cast a shadow on the back wall of the pool room that looked exactly like the video footage Cletus had recorded.
“Somebody might have been wandering around out there, then,” Cletus suggested.
I shook my head, ticking off my objections one by one. “In the middle of a rain storm? On private property? At this time of night?”
“What about Rob or a member of the family?” he countered.
“I have to admit, you’ve got a point there. I think they went to bed already, but it can’t hurt to check.” Taking out my cell phone, I called Rob and asked him whether he, or any of his family—including the dogs—had been walking around outside in the past hour or so. He confirmed that they had not.
“What about Erin?” Aurthur wondered. As things turned out, at the time we had recorded the mysterious figure, she was still trying to navigate the unfamiliar streets of Carmel and Westfield and find a fast food restaurant that was still open at that time of night. We didn’t have a reasonable explanation for the identity of our late-night visitor; although a number of primarily nocturnal animals such as foxes, deer, and other similar critters lived in the woods out beyond the farm, few of them ever approached the house itself, much less to within four or five feet of the structure.
It was a mystery that we would never solve.
• — •
Erin came back with an armful of food, which we all gratefully sat down to enjoy. She took the news concerning what she had missed with remarkably good grace, all things considered; if anything, it only further whetted her appetite to get to the bottom of the alleged haunting.
Midnight came and went. All was quiet inside Fox Hollow Farm. Erin, Shaun, and I elected to try an EVP session inside the pool room. Our fellow investigators went outside to make a circuit of the grounds.
“Are you feeling anything in here?” I asked Shaun, hoping that he would say yes.
“Not a thing.” Shaun shook his head. “Everything feels flat in here tonight.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. Nevertheless, he made a circuit of the pool. When he reached the far side, close to the door of the pump room, he said that he was feeling “something” in that area. Deciding to trust his instincts, Erin and I walked carefully over to join him, taking a seat on plastic chairs with our backs up against the wall. There came the groans of three middle-aged paranormal investigators trying to get comfortable.
Starting my digital voice recorder, I set it down on the edge of the pool, trying not to think about the number of poor, unfortunate souls who had lost their lives in there. It was a somber prospect indeed.
We made a point of switching off our phones in order to cut down on extraneous electromagnetic signals. I began to call out to any spirits or entities that might be present, inviting them to communicate with us. I was using the utmost respect; while I didn’t care one whit for the feelings of Herb Baumeister, if he was still haunting the place, I didn’t want to disrespect any of his victims if they were still present (and I dearly hoped that they weren’t).
As the session wore on, Erin and I realized that Shaun had been right—the atmosphere really was flat in there. Even somebody as lacking in psychic sensitivity as myself could tell that. None of our questions yielded any activity or answers in the form of EVPs.
The three of us fell into idle chitchat, talking about some of our recent paranormal adventures and escapades. After a while, Shaun began to hear indistinct disembodied voices, though he found it impossible to pin down their location. Both he and Erin said that they saw a shadow move at the base of the net that spanned the swimming pool, despite the fact that nothing was moving inside the room at the time. Were things beginning to pick up? Erin pointed out that the digital thermometer was reading 66.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which raised wry smiles from Shaun and me.
The laser grid began to dim. No more than a few minutes later, it died completely.
“What the—?” Shaun asked, plainly confused. “Those were fresh batteries, right out of the packaging.”
Erin and I exchanged a knowing look. Unexplained battery drains tend to plague paranormal investigators, and we have a love-hate relationship with them; on the one hand, such depletion tends to be an indicator that paranormal activity is about to pick up (using the missing energy as a power source), but on the other, it does make things very expensive when you’re burning through pack after pack of AA batteries in the space of one night.
Now we had good reason to be optimistic.
• — •
“We need to get the energy levels up in here,” Jason mused, apparently deep in thought. The entire team had congregated around the swimming pool. After much discussion, we finally hit upon the idea of playing some ’80s and ’90s dance music, the sort of tunes that would have been popular in the bars and clubs back then. Cranking up the volume on my phone, I ran it through an external speaker and began to stream some classic dance music, all of it with a distinctly gay-centric theme. The idea behind that was simple: not only Herb but also all the young men who returned to Fox Hollow Farm with him were all very active in the gay nightclub scene. If anything were going to attract them, why wouldn’t it be the songs and anthems that were played in those clubs night after night?
This is how, for the only time in my twenty-one-year career as a paranormal investigator, I found myself running an SB-11 Spirit Box, an Ovilus (a device that uses energy levels in the surrounding atmosphere to speak from a preprogrammed vocabulary of words), and multiple voice recorders alongside the crooning of Gloria Gaynor’s hit “I Will Survive,” while my team and I were gathered around a haunted swimming pool—truly a surreal experience, if ever there was one.
Yet try as we might, we couldn’t stimulate anything in the way of paranormal activity. After the initial excitement of the laser grid blacking out, the battery levels in our equipment continued to drain at a normal, consistent pace.
Either the spirits weren’t interested in interacting with us, they were scared, or … the place wasn’t actually haunted in the first place.
“Who’s that?” Cletus said suddenly, pointing toward the outside window and the ground-lit patio. We all turned to look. I personally couldn’t see anybody, and neither could Erin, Jason, or Shaun; yet Aurthur thought that he had caught sight of a figure moving around out there and agreed with Shaun that something seemed to be playing cat and mouse with us. They duly went outside and searched the grounds but couldn’t find anybody.
I have to confess that my first suspicion was that somebody could have been pranking us—perhaps Robert Graves or one of his family members. I had absolutely no reason to doubt their integrity, however, and the truth was that if they had been responsible for the sightings that we had experienced that night, they were playing a very risky game, because we deployed thermal-imaging cameras during our search of the property and the woods outside. The chances of us catching a living, breathing perpetrator were very good indeed … and yet, we found nobody at all out there.
• — •
While the others continued to search the grounds, Shaun, Erin, and I settled down by the swimming pool in order to conduct an EVP session. We sat on the cold tile with our backs to the wall, letting the voice recorders run and asking the usual questions. It’s important to note that we were facing the outside windows, which meant that we could not see the door to the pool room because it was on the same side of the room as we were.
A few minutes into the session, we heard a noise, coming from somewhere off to our right.
“What’s that?” I asked, craning my head to look. “Oh, somebody’s trying to get in.”
I could see that the door handle was jiggling.
“Come on in,” Erin called out. “It’s not locked.”
There was no answer. Frowning, she got up and went to check, opening the door. The hallway outside was empty. Going further afield, she checked the staircase, the locker room, and the bar—all were equally deserted.
It seemed that we’d had an invisible visitor. I for one hoped that it was just the first of many. When we played back the voice recorder, there were no EVPs to be found, which was a little disappointing.
When our teammates came back empty-handed, we told them what had happened. They wanted to give the pool a try for themselves. I had no objection, so we all took up positions at equidistant points around the room (making sure that we could see the door clearly this time) and settled down to see what happened.
“There’s a presence here,” Shaun said, apropos of nothing. I asked him to describe what he was sensing. “It’s a male energy, most definitely, and it really does not like us being in here at all. This male is right there in the middle of the pool, and … oh wow. It’s a very strong energy. Completely negative in nature and extremely threatening.”
“That doesn’t sound like one of the victims to me,” Jason muttered, sotto voce.
Indeed it did not. That description evoked the image of the former master of the house: Herbert Baumeister.
Sitting closest to the doorway, Cletus mumbled that he heard the sound of a sigh. A few seconds later, he heard it again.
“How do you like the fact that there’s a woman in the room?” he asked, looking directly at Erin. “Is that okay with you?”
“Just heard a whisper over here,” Shaun called out. “I’m sure it said the word yes.”
Excited at the prospect of finally making some headway, we continued asking questions for another twenty minutes, then reconvened in the bar to listen to the audio files. Frustratingly, none of the auditory phenomena had turned up on the recording.
We took a break, digging into the snack foods and discussing what we’d do next. The sound of footsteps on the staircase made us all stop talking. The Graves family had already gone to bed an hour before. Aurthur went to look and found a hangdog-looking Winston (the family pooch) standing at the bottom of the stairs, wagging his tail slowly from side to hide.
“How’d you get out, Winston?” Aurthur wanted to know. Somehow the door at the top of the staircase had been opened. Rob had told us he was locking it up before he turned in for the night, yet now there it was, standing wide open. Aurthur wrangled the pooch back upstairs and took a quick look around the main floor of the house. Other than the sound of a TV drifting down from the upper floor, everything was quiet and dark.
Try as we might, we couldn’t figure out how Winston had gotten loose. Rob confirmed the next day that nobody had come downstairs to unlock the door leading down to the basement. Unfortunately, there was no way the one eyewitness to it all could ever tell us what had happened, and we were forced to chalk it up to more Fox Hollow weirdness. That would happen a lot over the next few days of investigation.
We continued to work through the night, conducting further experiments and focusing the majority of our attention on the pool and its immediate surroundings. The rain eased off, giving way to a cloudy, overcast night sky. It was extremely cold outside, meaning that we weren’t comfortable spending more than a few minutes out there at a time, and so the woods didn’t get much of our time and effort. Besides, there was still a howling wind, the last remnant of the storm, and the incessant creaking of tree branches was contaminating our audio recordings even inside the house itself, rendering any potential EVP evidence basically useless.
Caffeine kept us going, but as the night wore on, fatigue began to overtake everyone. We had all flown in from Colorado earlier the day before and had been on our feet for close to twenty-four hours.
As we were packing up our gear and getting ready to head back to our hotel for some much-needed rest, we noticed something strange. The changing room door had somehow managed to open itself. We had made a point of closing it and keeping it closed throughout the night, as we did with all the downstairs doors. Now, just like the door at the top of the stairs, this one seemed to have developed a mind of its own.