Conclusion:
Making Sense of It All
Broadly speaking, there are generally three types of haunting: haunted places, haunted objects, and haunted people. When paranormal investigators are called in to try to establish just what is going on, they usually find that the answer fits one of those three categories. Yet in the case of Fox Hollow Farm, it can easily be argued that this particular haunting crosses all those boundaries.
There are many possible reasons for why a place might be haunted. Usually, where one finds strong emotion—whether positive or negative in nature—one also tends to find ghosts. The horrific events that took place at Fox Hollow Farm during Herb Baumeister’s tenancy in the 1990s certainly fit the bill, and they would generate a huge amount of negativity, which explains the theory that a parasitic inhuman entity had been attracted to that dark energy.
On the other hand, Fox Hollow is now a family home and a place of great happiness. The Graves family enjoys living there, despite the brushes with the paranormal, which seem to be happening less frequently as time goes on. It may be that the haunting is slowly winding down, or at least running in cycles of feast or famine. Nevertheless, despite the unspoken arrangement that they have with the entities at the farm, the Graves family and their visiting friends do still experience phenomena on a regular basis, usually when they least expect it.
In the aftermath of the murder investigation, many of Herb Baumeister’s personal possessions were stolen or sold, some of them turning up at online auction sites, where they commanded high prices from private collectors of murder memorabilia. The house stood vacant for a while after the Baumeister family moved out and was a prime target for looters. Despite all that, some of Herb’s personal belongings still remain at Fox Hollow Farm to this day, items such as his Land Rover owner’s manual, various fixtures and fittings, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, the pool hose which was allegedly used as a weapon in many of the murders. One has to wonder what kind of energy may have been imprinted upon those objects and if they have any kind of spirit attachments associated with them.
Last, we come to the people themselves. It was Joe LeBlanc’s belief that if Herb Baumeister still remained at his old home in some form, it was because he watched over the Graves family, an unseen protector who had developed a kind of fondness for them, as creepy as that may sound. “I think that Herb and Rob would have gotten along famously,” Joe said during one of our many interviews.
Rob Graves has a deep and abiding interest in Herb Baumeister. While in no way condoning the abhorrent things that he did, Rob nevertheless finds the psychological aspects of the case to be fascinating. What exactly is it that drives a man to commit the kind of atrocities that Herb did? Was he simply “born evil,” as some choose to believe, or were there outside influences that affected him during his childhood—in other words, are monsters born, or are they made?
While some might find his fascination with a serial killer to be macabre and a little off-putting, it must be pointed out that Rob is surrounded by reminders of what happened there on a daily basis. He sleeps in the same room as Herb did, uses the same bathroom (and bathtub, for that matter), cuts the same grass, and drives the same driveway as Herb Baumeister. It would be highly unusual if Rob didn’t want to delve deeper into the mind of the man in whose footsteps he walks every day.
For his part, Rob believes that Baumeister’s ghost still haunts his former home, although he concedes that the serial killer may be more of a visitor than a permanent resident, dropping by whenever it suits him. He is remarkably unperturbed by the idea, reasoning that as long as Herb keeps to himself and doesn’t mess with his family, then no harm is being done.
Others, such as Brian the psychic medium and Tony Harris, contend that Herb Baumeister is either an infrequent visitor at best these days, or that he no longer haunts Fox Hollow Farm at all—if indeed he ever did—and even go so far as to claim that a malevolent inhuman entity likes to impersonate him for its own nefarious purposes. Based upon my own experiences investigating Fox Hollow Farm, I find it very easy to believe that such an entity haunts the place; the guttural, animalistic growl I heard made me a firm believer, though I am less convinced where the reports of an elemental spirit haunting the woods outside are concerned.
When we put all these factors together, we have all the component pieces of a very complex, multifaceted haunting, one that centers upon not just a person, place, or object, but rather a combination of all three. While Fox Hollow Farm is quieter these days than at the height of the haunting, which seemed to go into overdrive when Joe LeBlanc moved in, I suspect that the place will never truly return to normal. Too much of a negative nature has happened there, which must surely leave a psychic scar of some form, for it ever to recover completely. It may be that the haunting is growing dormant, simply waiting for a catalyst to fire it up again. The history of psychic research is replete with instances of hauntings that go into a form of hibernation, often for years or even decades, until something comes along—sometimes a specific person, but also structural alterations or repair work—that triggers a fresh wave of paranormal activity, one that is usually every bit as intense as the original outbreak.
I find it very encouraging that the man in the red shirt is no longer seen at Fox Hollow and that the Graves’ son does not experience similar nightmares to Joe’s now that he occupies the old in-law apartment. Although our investigation turned up some anomalous findings in there, such as the small stick figure that was picked up by the SLS camera, it seems that if there were spirits of Herb Baumeister’s victims lingering at Fox Hollow Farm, most of them now appear to have moved on, leaving the Graves family to their own devices.
Now that I have closed my Fox Hollow Farm case file for what I hope will be the final time, I can only hope that each and every one of Herb Baumeister’s victims will truly find peace.
They have more than earned it.