Chapter 7
Attacked
Our boys have always loved the pool at Fox Hollow Farm. They don’t really give too much thought to the terrible things that once went on in there, preferring instead to focus on the positive—such as how awesome it is to have a swimming pool of their own in the basement of their home.
One evening, both boys were swimming in the pool with Joe and one of his buddies. Everybody was having a good time, and ghosts were the last thing on anybody’s mind.
Joe swam under the water toward the deep end, skimming the floor of the pool. When he surfaced, he rested against the poolside for a moment to catch his breath.
Without any kind of warning, he felt a set of fingers close around his neck from behind, snaking around on either side of his chin in a way that was almost sensuous. The hands were ice-cold and man-sized—too big to belong to either of the boys. Joe was understandably startled. Spinning around, he fully expected to find his friend treading water behind him, laughing at the prank he had just played.
A lot of paranormal activity has occurred in the indoor pool at Fox Hollow Farm.
His friend was twenty feet away at the other end of the pool. So were the boys. There was no way any of them could possibly have covered that much distance in a split second.
Pushing out from the side of the pool, Joe took a few strokes into the middle of the water. His mind was working on overdrive, trying to figure out an explanation for what had just happened to him. He was drawing a blank.
Suddenly, the hands were back, and this time they were locked around his throat, squeezing it in a grip that was as strong and powerful as a vice. Joe felt himself being dragged underneath the water. Holding his breath, he struggled for all he was worth, thrashing and kicking out. He tried to pry the hands away from his throat, but there was nothing there for him to grab onto.
Then, just like that, they were gone. He was free. Joe pushed himself to the surface, taking in huge gasps of air. His friend and the two boys were looking at him in an odd way. They would tell him later that they all thought he was just clowning around, but what had just happened to Joe was no laughing matter. It was absolutely terrifying.
Joe climbed out of the pool and began yelling that everybody needed to get out of the water right away. They could all tell from the panicky tone of his voice that he was absolutely serious.
To this day, Joe has never been so frightened of anything in his entire life. The first touch of the unseen hands was a teasing caress; the second, sheer brutality. When we interviewed Joe during the writing of this book and asked him about the paranormal assault, he found the process of reliving the experience to be extremely upsetting.
After that, he refused to swim in the pool at Fox Hollow Farm again … and frankly, who could blame him?
• — •
After Joe was attacked in the swimming pool, things actually settled down for a while. There were no more ghost sightings, and although he would still hear the sound of unexplained footsteps in the apartment late at night, there were no more late-night knockings at his door.
Joe was starting to let himself believe that the paranormal activity was beginning to die down. Unfortunately, that did not turn out to be the case.
He was sitting at his computer desk one evening, close to the front door of the apartment, when a scraping sound drew his attention. It seemed to have come from the area of the kitchenette. Heading over to take a look, he found that his set of kitchen knives somehow had been taken out of their storage block and were laid out in a row inside the sink.
Joe looked around, but even before he checked, he knew that nobody had come into his part of the house. Someone or something obviously wanted to scare him.
They were succeeding.
As he turned to look behind him, Joe saw something that he had never noticed there before: a series of gouges had been cut into the wall, as though somebody had slashed at it with the tip of a sharp knife. Had the knife marks always been there, or were they new? He didn’t like the implications of either answer very much, and he was worried that perhaps the young man whose ghost he had seen running through the apartment may have been stabbed to death up there.
Although he was by no means experienced, Joe had seen his fair share of ghost hunting shows on TV. Rather than live in fear, he decided that it would be better to try to get to the bottom of the paranormal activity that was taking place inside his home. To that end, he dug out a voice recorder that he owned and carried out an impromptu EVP session inside the apartment.
What he found out from running that experiment almost blew his mind.
An EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) is a strange occurrence in which disembodied voices somehow imprint themselves on recording media such as magnetic tapes or the hard drives of digital voice recorders. There has been much debate about origin and mechanism of EVPs over the past few decades. Some believe they are no more than ambient background noise that went unnoticed during the recording or stray radio waves (ignoring the fact that EVPs have been recorded in EMF-free Faraday cages), but many paranormal investigators believe that they are evidence of discarnate entities communicating with us.
Joe hadn’t set out to do anything fancy. After switching off all the mechanical and electrical devices in order to prevent noise contamination, he had simply set the recorder running and began asking questions, wandering about his living space as he did so.
After a few minutes had gone by without anything strange happening, Fred began to growl, staring off into space at something that Joe couldn’t see. He no longer felt as though he were alone in the room.
Joe stopped recording and sat down to listen to the playback. He could hear his own voice coming out of the speaker, asking if there was anybody else in there with him and then inquiring who it was that he could hear walking through the kitchen at night.
He was shocked to hear a male voice answer his question, uttering three words that shocked him to his core: the married one.
We have no knowledge of any of Herb’s victims having been married, but he himself certainly was. So far as Joe was concerned, the conclusion was obvious: the apartment was being haunted by the ghost of Herb Baumeister.
Class A EVPs are crystal clear, and it is very easy to make out the words that are being spoken. Having reviewed the EVP ourselves, we must point out that it is a Class B recording—in other words, a little too muffled and indistinct to be absolutely, unmistakably clear but of remarkable clarity nonetheless. The voice speaking is undeniably that of a man, and it was not Joe’s voice. Nor were there any other people present in the room when it was recorded.
So far as the interpretation of the words themselves go, it is possible that the phrase spoken was actually the merry one, but we listened to it over and over again, and the word in question does seem more like married than merry.
For his part, Joe remains convinced to this day that the paranormal activity that plagued him in his apartment and the force that attacked him in the swimming pool were none other than Herb Baumeister himself. When we take into account the fact that Joe was a young, single man, it certainly fits Herb’s established pattern.
He believes that the spirit of Herb Baumeister still haunts Fox Hollow Farm to this day.
As time went on, Joe would catch glimpses of strange figures walking in the woods behind the farm. These weren’t repeat sightings of the red-shirted man; the figures Joe was seeing were dark—he describes them as being “blacker than black”—and it wasn’t long before other visitors began to see them too.