KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
A face peeked from behind the curtain of a window on her door.
“Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee,” Jann Goldberg said, holding up her PIM business card. The woman opened her door and let us in.
Her excessively obscene language aside, Jann cleans up nicely. She was dressed for business and looked like she could be a real estate agent. She was there on a different sort of house call.
Ever since this couple, we’ll call them the Smiths, moved into their upper flat on Milwaukee’s east side, they had been having unwanted visitors. Jann was there to do what PIM calls a “walk-through,” an evaluation of a potential client for an investigation. There are a lot of considerations when doing a walk-through: What type of equipment will be needed and how many investigators? Are there simple explanations for what the client is experiencing, like a broken radiator? Is the client mentally ill? Investigations of peoples’ houses, referred to by PIM as “residentials,” differ greatly from setting up in a public setting like the Riverside Theater or Brumder Mansion.
“You have a safety issue you have to be concerned with,” Noah Leigh explained to me when I asked him about it in our interview. “You’re going into someone’s house, and you don’t know who is there and what their actual intentions are. So we have a process in place before we even go to someone’s house. We have an e-mail contact and then a phone contact, and then if there is no red flag from those two things, we do a walk-through, usually during the day so if anything is untoward, it is easier for us to spot.”
Once a safe environment is established, PIM examines people’s attitudes about their ghosts.
“You get people who are hysterical, you get people who are kind of mellow about it, you get people who are very excited, so it’s always very different,” Leigh told me. “So you’ve always got to try to feel them out. You don’t know what their religious background is, so you don’t want to offend them by saying one thing or another, but you also want to be sure that they know where you’re coming from—‘This is how we do this, and if it isn’t what you’re looking for, you should tell me now. If you want confirmation of what’s going on, you’re probably not going to get it from us.’”
Some clients don’t realize that PIM is just looking for potential evidence and aren’t able to do things like throw out ghost traps to capture entities like the characters do in Ghostbusters.
“If you want us to get rid of something, we’re not going to go do that,” Noah said. “How do I go about getting rid of something that I don’t know even exists? So we make sure their expectations are lined up with what we can do. I’ll just say, ‘How can PIM help you?’ and see what they say back. That usually gives me an idea of what they’re looking for.”
And then there’s bad housekeeping. I asked Leigh for major challenges on residentials, and he said that at the top of his list are “smells. There was a place that had like twenty cats in their house. The ammonia, your eyes watered when you walked in,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the memory. “It was horrible. It was in summer, really hot, and it smelled so bad in there, between animals and smoking. Those are issues we have to deal with.”
Mr. Smith told Jann and me that his favorite thing to do in life is light a fine cigar, put on some classical music, and spend time in the kitchen cooking classic Italian dishes.
“I go over here,” Mr. Smith said, swooping his arms in the kitchen, “and I’m in a whole different world. We had a couple clients over a while ago—I made eggplant parmesan, she made chicken marsala, and they said they’ll never be able to eat it again, because it was the real deal. Cannolis for desert, I fried the shells myself. They were going nuts!”
Mr. Smith was a large, bald man, and his stature, cigars, and love for Italian inevitably led Jann and me to draw comparisons with Tony Soprano when we discussed the case later. Despite his intimidating comparison, Mr. Smith was frightened. Very frightened.
Since moving in to the remodeled house about five years before, Mr. Smith had been seeing two different ghosts of women, and his wife had had odd experiences, too.
“This is where she’ll stand,” Mr. Smith said, standing in the doorway to his bedroom, while his wife looked on from the kitchen. “You can hear the footsteps. They’ll go like this,” he said, backing up and then walking slowly, deliberately, for a few paces, stopping at the bedroom door. “And stop here.
“A couple times only, it comes right to me. It’ll stand right here,” he said, moving to the side of the bed, “and …” he paused, reliving the memory nervously, breathing harder, “… and, I’m frozen. I’ll get up and it’ll go out and kinda,” he waved his hand around, “I don’t want to say it disappears, but it’ll be gone!” He looked at us helplessly, then pointed to a comforter on his bed.
“And this blanket—I sleep with no covers on, and …”
“She said you got covered up,” Jann said, pointing her thumb at Mrs. Smith.
“This is the freakiest thing!” Mr. Smith said. “I was laying there, awake, and I saw these covers moving up on me!”
“And you were wide awake?” Jann asked, scribbling in a notepad.
“I was awake, and I was wondering what the hell is going on! It got to my neck and I was like, ‘Holy shit!’”
“Oh, he was scared,” Mrs. Smith added.
“Yeah, I was!” Mr. Smith said, getting scared all over again.
“Well, yeah,” Jann said.
There were more ghost stories. Mr. Smith was getting his hair cut at the kitchen counter by a stylist, who spotted a ghost on an upper landing. Both Smiths had been hearing ghostly bells ringing and footsteps marching up and down the stairs to the flat. “Like a herd of people coming to bust down our door,” Mr. Smith said, breathing deeply. There had been strange knockings and thumpings and feelings of dread. He said he also saw thick smoke in the kitchen, and when he jumped up to investigate, the smoke dissipated into cracks in the floor.
And just six weeks before, Mr. Smith said, he had been watching a hockey game on TV when he saw a “cone thing fanning out in the air.”
The Smiths turned to the Internet and found PIM. “I thought, We might be crazy to call these people, but we got to find out sooner or later,” Mr. Smith said.
“You know, everyone says that to us. Don’t worry, we don’t think you’re crazy,” Jann assured him. “We’re having a meeting this weekend, and we’ll discuss your case and contact you,” Jann said as we departed.
However, they never followed through with an investigation. When I asked Leigh about it later, he couldn’t recall the exact circumstances but said it was probably one of two things. “Either the people have lost interest, we don’t get contact back from them, or they say, ‘No, we think we’re fine, we feel better after you came here,’ especially if we try to give some normal explanations,” Leigh told me. He added that trouble scheduling an investigation, especially with clients who flake out, is also occasionally an issue.
“We had one lady, she was absolutely off-the-wall unbalanced,” John Krahn told me during setup of an investigation. “The first red flag was, I asked her how often things happened, and she said, ‘Every day, all day long.’”
“As we’re talking to her, she says, ‘I see things reaching out to me from the lights.’ She says, ‘I see something up on the ceiling—what is that?’
“And I said, ‘That’s the light coming through the window and reflecting off.’
“And she said, ‘Well, how do you know?’
“I said, ‘Watch this.’ And I stood in front of the window and it went away.
“The house was from the ’50s, and every mark, every stain, every discoloration, she said was done by an entity.
“She said, ‘You can see where something took a sharp knife and was cutting vertical lines in the wallpaper,’ pointing to where the seams were. It was old wallpaper and had started to peel back, and we tried explaining it to her, and she wouldn’t have it. She said, ‘No, no, ghosts did this, I’m telling you.’”
I asked John how he felt about these cases. Were they annoying? Amusing?
“Concerning. I feel bad—as a cop I dealt a lot with mentally ill people. And it’s very difficult for them to get help. The majority of the time, the symptoms can be greatly reduced by medication, but the problem is, the more people tell them they have a problem, the more they think it’s not them but everyone else that has a misperception of reality. And if you could just get them to go to the doctor and take medications, most of this stuff would just go away.”
My next walk-through took place in the harsh cold of January. I trudged through the snow down Nineteenth Street, in a largely Hispanic neighborhood. I met Michael “Gravy” Graeve and Randy Soukup as they did a walk-through of a modest townhouse being rented by a young Hispanic couple. We’ll call them José and Maria. They were unmarried and lived with five daughters from previous relationships.
The three of us stood in their sparse living room—a couch and flat-screen TV, a plastic Christmas tree in the corner, classic portrait of Jesus Christ—The Head of Christ by Warner Sallman—laminated on a piece of wood hanging on the wall.
The couple told us that although they had both experienced things, their major concern was that their oldest daughter, ten-year-old Jasmine, had been having intense experiences spotting the ghost of a little girl in the house.
“She thinks she’s going crazy, but we’ve seen stuff too,” José told us. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and had the word FAMILY tattooed in a loose cursive script on one forearm and FIRST on the other. Maria was wearing black slacks and a Chicago Bears sweatshirt and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
The couple led us from room to room. Gravy took notes on a clipboard while Randy swept each room with an EMF detector. (Randy, a pharmacist, would soon be leaving PIM, citing not enough time between work and family. He offered to lend his pharmaceutical knowledge to the team if they needed it for a case.)
In the bedroom, José declared, pointing to his bed, “I woke up in the middle of the night and something was choking me!”
“OK, have you ever been tested for sleep apnea?” Gravy asked, looking up from his clipboard.
“No.”
“You might want to do that. It’s one possible explanation.”
Incense drifted through the room, coming from an incense stick stuck in a nail hole in the wall. A rosary hung from a nail nearby.
“I also heard a whisper from the closet. It sounded like ‘Ohhh,’” José said, pursing his lips.
“She says that she is dressed in a dirty white dress, with black hair hanging in her face,” José later said of Jasmine’s ghostly companion. We were in a small bedroom that two of the daughters shared. Jasmine had reported seeing the girl standing at the foot of her bed and sitting in the closet.
“Does she watch a lot of scary movies?” Gravy asked, perhaps thinking the same thing I was—that the creepy ghost girl sounded remarkably similar to the starring spirit of The Ring.
“She does, but she knows how to differentiate,” José shrugged it off.
“Has she ever tried talking to the girl?” Gravy asked.
“No, she’s terrified of her!” José replied.
Another of the girls, who had a small bed in the couple’s room, had also experienced Jasmine’s unwanted friend. “One night I heard her whisper, ‘Stop it, no, I don’t want to get hurt,” José told us, fear creeping into his voice. “I asked her who she was talking to, and she said that the girl was laying by her bed, pulling on her hair.” José physically shuddered at the thought. “It’s giving me the chills just thinking about it!”
“I get the feeling of something watching me while I’m down here doing laundry,” Maria later told us. We were in the kitchen, located in the basement level of the house, next to a small laundry room. The couple said that area had been agreed upon by all as the creepiest room in the house. Jasmine spotted the girl ghost down there, too, and the kids refused to go downstairs. The couple’s pit bull stared and whimpered.
“My mom and brother get a bad feeling down here, too,” Maria said. She was certain that ghosts dwelled there. “I want them gone!” she exclaimed.
Gravy made notes on his Reported Activity sheet.
José said he had had supernatural experiences in the past. He told us that one time he had a job mowing lawns at a cemetery. An empty hearse was parked near a mausoleum, and he spotted three large, black Doberman pinschers barking hysterically at the hearse. After making a pass on the lawnmower, he looked again and they were gone. When he reported it to his boss, he was informed that the only nearby residents were not dog owners.
“I told him I think he has a black shadow following him from that,” Maria told us.
With the claims documented and Randy’s EMF readings noted, Gravy tried to get a sense of what the couple hoped to get out of the investigation.
“I need to find out for the sake of my kids,” Maria said. “[Jasmine] thinks she’s going crazy, and it breaks my heart to hear my ten-year-old girl say that.”
“I want to find out if it’s me, or something attached to me,” José said.
“Reassure Jasmine that she’s not going crazy,” Gravy said. “Maybe have her confront the girl and tell her to leave her alone. We’ll have Missy contact you early next week. Until then, keep documenting anything going on, time, date.”
Outside, after the walk-through, Gravy loaded his equipment into his trunk. We discussed the case for a few minutes, our breath billowing in the cold air.
“What did you think?” I asked him.
Gravy had his doubts. He thought the family’s home environment might lend itself to the kids seeking attention by letting their imaginations take over. Once there is speculation that a ghost is in the house, the whole family feeds off each other’s stories, which makes tricks of the mind easier. Gravy was interested in investigating, but as a skeptical investigator, the couple had not yet convinced him to be a believer.
Gravy was raised in a Catholic family and lived on a farm in Iowa until his father transferred to a sales job in Wisconsin. Gravy went to school in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield.
Gravy is unlike most of the core PIM members in one significant way: he is not a believer. “I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now,” Gravy told me when I sat down to interview him in a bagel shop. “It started out, going to church all the time as a kid, I believed everything I was told, kind of like we all believed in Santa Claus. We tell kids Santa Claus exists so they’ll behave all year round. Well, we tell adults God exists so they’ll behave all year round, ya know? Or at least all week until they go to church again,” Gravy laughed.
Gravy attended the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he settled on studying communications, but it was an unrelated class that would change his life. “When I got to college, I took a philosophy class, and one of the first questions they asked was: ‘Does God exist?’ And I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, rewind! You’re telling me I can ask this question? Aren’t I going to get struck by lightning?’ Because I felt something doesn’t fit right in this world, this doesn’t make sense to me. And after that class it was like a switch turned on. From there, I was like, ‘Holy cow, I never really thought of what it would be like if there wasn’t a God, and that is an actual possibility.’ It all stems back to that basic lecture hall Philosophy 101 class.”
From there Gravy took a Greek Mythology class, which further led him to believe that God was a metaphor instead of an actual being. “I am more agnostic than atheist, because I want to believe, I just don’t have the answers. It can be depressing when you don’t believe there is something out there, but at the same time it makes you cherish life that much more, because if I cross the street and die … that’s it. I fear death more than anything else in this world,” Gravy told me, adding that this was the reason he didn’t ride roller coasters.
Gravy found interest in ghost stories as a youth, and this was rekindled when he was working at a local Menards hardware store. One of his coworkers, Tony Belland, was also a future PIM teammate.
“For years I didn’t give it much thought. God didn’t exist to me, ghosts didn’t exist to me, nothing had happened to me, paranormalwise. I was working at Menards one day, and Tony told me, “You should check out this show Ghost Hunters, it’s a really cool show.”
Gravy found it intriguing. “I thought maybe I could get into this and find answers. Maybe when I die, I do come back as a ghost, and then I can play pranks on my friends and family and have fun,” Gravy joked.
Tony signed up for the team, but Gravy’s work schedule was too hectic at the time, so he joined about a year later. I asked how his status as a heathen was received by the group.
“I think they’ve accepted it, and I think it’s good to have someone with that mind-set in the group, because I have no bias. I know Noah says ghosts could be anything, but I think there is a little bit of bias if you’re religious because you believe in the Holy Ghost. Whereas me, to me it could be anything.”
Gravy said his goal with the group has mostly been “to help people understand what they’re experiencing.” He said he gets satisfaction from showing frightened people that their ghost problems are often mundane, worldly explanations—noisy pipes or uneven floorboards.
Gravy lives outside of Milwaukee in the town of New Berlin with his wife, a real estate appraiser, and his two “future ghost hunter” sons.
“The biggest toll is on the home life,” Gravy told me. “Me and my wife have had our share of fights about it. She doesn’t like me spending money on it, and ‘Oh, I need to borrow the van for the weekend’ and stuff like that. Sometimes I have to choose my words and timing very carefully when it comes to my wife and the group. Everyone’s spouses handle it differently.”
Since he was raised in a religious household, I wondered how his hobby went over with the rest of his family.
“My dad isn’t accepting of it, but he’s not accepting of tattoos either,” Gravy told me over coffee, displaying a forearm covered in a leaf motif tattoo. “Now he just kind of jokes about it—‘Got any ghost hunts this weekend?’—then he shakes his head.”
Perhaps it is this skepticism about spiritual retaliation that makes Gravy comfortable using a technique that some paranormal investigators frown upon and one that PIM uses only on occasion. It’s called provoking. The idea is that if you anger a spirit enough, it will react to you.
“Our policy is, ‘Whatever works,’” Leigh explained to me later. “I’m from the standpoint that if you’re doing it nicely and don’t get anything you’re able to detect, then there’s no reason not to go to the next step. I have not come across anything that suggests if I provoke, something terrible will happen. Some groups say these are human spirits and you need to be respectful to them. That’s an assumption in my mind, but that’s what they believe, and to each their own.”
Leigh added, “Maybe the only way to get them out is to say the F word six times. Who knows? That’s why we do it, unless the client has specifically asked that we don’t.”
At one PIM investigation (I’ve been asked to keep the location confidential), I witnessed Gravy launch into a taunting soliloquy to a ghost: “I know I said earlier that we didn’t want to harm you or make you leave, but you’re really beginning to piss me off. I’m about to throw down! I’m going to kick the shit out of you. I don’t know how, but I’ll figure a way. I might be punching air, but at least I’ll feel better. So I demand you show yourself. Right now!”
Peaceful silence.
“Hit Gravy. He’s all talk. Go get’m,” Tony suggested.
There was a click noise, and then someone in the dark asked the most frequent question I heard during all of my paranormal investigations and expeditions: “What was that?”
“It was me,” someone responded.
Gravy continued, “You dead people are alike—dead. I’m right here. You can come up to me and do anything you want to me. You can push me, shove me, punch me, I don’t care. There’s probably nothing I can do back to you but verbally abuse you, you piece of shit.”
No response.
“I dare you to come after me.”
Nope.
“You’re nothing. You’re useless!”
“Are you going to take that from him? I’d go rip his hair out!” Jann urged.
No response.
“You don’t have the nerve,” Gravy said, “or the guts—because you’re dead.”
No response.
“I think when I die, I’m going to come here and kick your ass then … unless you do something about it right now.”
Silence.
“Kick that table in the room right over there and make that device light up, and I’ll stop.” No light.
“Or better yet, slap one of us in the face,” Tony said, taking over the role of provoker.
“We asked you to do a few simple things, and you completely ignored us. You’re too late now. I think we’re going to flatten this place,” Tony said with disgust. “We’re going to get a bulldozer and flatten [this place].”
Jann let out a burst of laughter.
“That’s Jann,” Gravy tagged.
“Sorry,” Jann said.
“How does it feel to know that no one even knows that you ever existed?” Tony challenged. “No one alive remembers you at all.”
The provoking continued for a while but yielded no response.
José and Maria’s case was on the agenda for PIM’s next meeting, which also doubled as their annual holiday party in January 2014. It was held at a small bar not far from Leigh’s house called the Jock Stop. PIM had done an investigation of the second floor of the building years ago but didn’t find it to be active. Since then, the bar had become an unofficial meeting spot, where members of the team gathered to share drinks and discuss business and pleasure. Besides paranormal investigation, the team had other shared activities that some members enjoyed. They occasionally got out and played Frisbee golf together, and a favorite show among the team was the raunchy cable sitcom The League, about a fantasy football league.
An array of pizzas, bought with money in the PIM account, snacks, and homemade desserts was spread on a table next to the pool table. Gravy, Krahn, and Missy Bostrom brought their spouses; Tony, Chris Paul, Leigh, and PIM’s friend Professor Marc Eaton were also present. Eaton was working on a thesis about paranormal investigations and had joined PIM on several investigations. The plan was to eat, go through PIM business, then drink and play team darts.
As the group gathered around Leigh, having drinks and pizza, he went through his agenda. A new webmaster who wanted to join the team had fallen through because she was “experiencing hard times.” Recent investigations of the Milwaukee Public Library and a farm residence in Fredonia, Wisconsin, were reviewed.
José and Maria’s was mentioned as having an investigation date of January 24. Upcoming investigations of the Times Cinema theater and a hotel in Pembine, Wisconsin, were discussed, and the investigators marked their calendars.
Jann was missing from the party—she was visiting family for the holidays. From Florida, she was exchanging a testy string of e-mails with Gravy, who was complaining about her not turning in an evidence review from the Milwaukee Public Library investigation. She was also firing off texts to Leigh about an upcoming media appearance, and tension was building between them. I would find out details on this soon, and the situation would come to a head. But for now, people were enjoying some social time.
The last entry in my notepad from the night was a quote from Missy and reads: “Tea, quit taking notes, this is a party!”
I complied and got a drink.
“OK, time is … seven thirty-seven and eight seconds. Milwaukee residential,” Gravy said. Leigh didn’t hear back from José, but it happened that on the same date that the investigation was supposed to take place, another request for a residential came in, not far from José’s house, on Eighth Street.
Leigh and a new member—Denys Blazer, who had actually been a guest at the Brumder Mansion investigation—went out to do the walk-through, and a follow-up investigation was booked for that same night with Gravy, Denys, and me.
When we arrived, the client, Sarah, talked to us briefly about her claims, before packing up her cats to go stay at a friend’s house while we investigated.
On the second floor, in the bedroom she shared with her boyfriend, Sarah said she had felt a ghostly presence sit down on the bed next to her. She had also seen a shadow walk past the bathroom door and now refused to go upstairs. In the basement, Sarah reported that a ghost tugged on her hair and that a randy ghost pulled her teenage daughter’s bra strap and poked her buttocks.
Sarah had two suspects for potential ghosts. Her boyfriend’s grandfather, Tom, died in the house in 2001. Her ex-boyfriend, Jessie, died of a drug overdose, and she suspected his spirit might have an attachment to her and was following her.
After Sarah left, my job assignment was to walk around the house, blacking out anything that emitted light, so I placed black electrical tape over the clock on the coffee maker and glowing power switches. Gravy and Denys set up equipment and time-stamped it.
Gravy decided to put an array of trigger objects on the couple’s bed upstairs and made note of them on a sheet—cigarettes, an airplane bottle of whiskey, an issue of Playboy. He opened that last item to the Miss January centerfold, hoping the vices might elicit a response from Tom or Jessie or whatever other entities might be around.
The initial investigation was uneventful. We moved from the upper floor to the living room to the basement, conducting EVP sessions, the same usual questions, the usual silence in response.
“That’s me,” I tagged, after coughing.
With not much more to go on, Gravy decided to invite Sarah back to sit in on a session in each room with us to see if she could stir up anything.
The H1 picked up Gravy’s phone ringing Sarah, and a train in the background.
“Hey, it’s Gravy. Hey, we are … it’s pretty quiet here, so we wanted to see if you would come back here and sit on each floor for about an hour and see if anything else happens while you’re here. How long? OK, it’s completely up to you if you want to do that; I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. OK, then we will … I’ll leave the front door unlocked and we will be upstairs.”
Sarah showed up about fifteen minutes later.
“Nothing, huh?” She asked me.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t think so.”
Gravy went over EVP rules with her, and she took a seat next to me. She told us that she had had a psychic do a walk-through of the house, and she had only added fuel to Sarah’s fears.
“She told me my ex-boyfriend was staying in the bathroom; that’s where he spent most of his time before he died. He’d lock himself in there, and I guess he was getting high. He had drug problems, so he’d be in there for hours. When she walked into my house, right off the bat she pointed to the bathroom and went off about this thing that was in the bathroom and da da da da da,” Sarah told us nervously. “She told me all kinds of stuff; she told me that the spirits are trying to talk to me and I should listen.”
Gravy decided to get the EVP session rolling. “We’ve got Sarah here. Maybe now that she’s here, you’ll feel more comfortable talking to us. Could you please tell us your name?”
Silence.
“Why do you stay here?” Gravy asked.
No reply.
At around 1 AM Gravy said to Sarah, “I’m going to call it unless you have something you want us to try.”
Sarah paused for a moment in the dark. “No. Can I talk shit to it? I’m kidding.”
“If you want, go ahead,” Gravy said.
“I mean seriously, dude!” Sarah sputtered out angrily, all of a sudden. “Can you please do something? This is the last chance you have!” There was so much emotion in her voice, I was afraid she might have a breakdown. She took some deep breaths.
“You’ve brought me to tears,” she said, sounding more sad and frustrated than angry now. “I feel like you’re trying to give me a message … please … please, say something now, or don’t bother me anymore! Don’t make me look like a fool! Oh, mm-mmm.”
We waited in the silence.
“I would like to help you, I don’t mean to shout at you. I’m sorry, I’d really like to help you. I’d like to help myself.” She sighed loudly. “Maybe next time.”
We sat in silence for a minute.
“End investigation,” Gravy stated.
As Gravy drove me home after the investigation, he concluded that the last session, where Sarah was able to vent, was a therapeutic moment. Denys, Gravy, and I reviewed our audio and they reviewed their video, but nothing unusual turned up.
The last residential I investigated was one with some significantly strange claims of poltergeist activity. PIM had originally adhered to the thought that poltergeists were not caused by ghosts or malicious spirits but by a “human agent,” usually a girl going through puberty with psychokinetic powers. Upon further research, the group changed its stance on the subject. As posted on the PIM website:
Update!: PIM has recently found additional information through research that poltergeist cases are most likely all hoaxed, mainly by the “human agents” themselves. Upon questioning most of these individuals (usually children) admit to causing the activity when adults weren’t looking or were not present in the room. The reason for why the hoax was conducted was always some need for attention. As such, it is the official PIM stance that there is no such thing as poltergeist hauntings.
As such, when Gravy and I showed up to do a walk-through, we weren’t sure what to make of the incredible claims. The woman living downstairs had called PIM, although the majority of claims came from the tenant living in the small upper flat. There, he claimed he had twice found a framed picture of his daughter upside down, discovered his television moved to the middle of the room and turned upside down, heard ghost footsteps, and seen a shadow moving in one of the rooms. Most strangely, his dishes had been moved from the sink and placed into his oven.
The woman’s reports about the downstairs flat were much milder. She claimed to have heard the ghost footsteps when she was certain no one else was home.
“And there’s no cats?” Gravy asked.
“No.”
After the walk-through, Gravy and I conferred outside by his car. Our suspicions fell immediately to the upstairs tenant’s eight-year-old daughter, whom the tenant had partial custody of. The sparse, small apartment seemed to be almost abandoned—no food in the cupboards, a mattress and TV the only furnishings. Certainly a ploy for attention was a possibility. But because of the unusual claims, PIM decided to arrange an investigation.
After coordinating with Missy, we set up an investigation for two days later with Missy, Tony, Denys, and me as investigators.
“Eight thirty-one and fifty-four seconds. We are at the Tosa home [referring to the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa] on April 11, 2014,” Tony time-stamped. “Game on.”
PIM began setting up cameras, audio recorders, and other ghost detecting equipment around the house. I was given the task of walking around the rooms taking “baseline photos” with my digital camera. These photos are taken as a reference in case any object does happen to move during an investigation. I wandered room to room, and while I was in the upstairs tenant’s bathroom, I noticed that the medicine cabinet was missing a slat of the door, so I could see inside the cabinet. I spotted a couple of prescription bottles. My curiosity getting the better of me, I opened the cabinet door.
“Tony, come up here,” I called down the stairs. He bounded up the stairs and gave a wide-eyed look to the open medicine cabinet. There stood a long row of tall, translucent orange plastic bottles.
“Holy shit,” Tony said.
There were heavy medications for pain, like oxycodone, antidepressants, and meds like Lunesta for insomnia. All potent and with a wide range of possible side effects.
“Well, I guess we can pack our stuff up and get out of here,” Tony said while the rest of PIM laughed. “Debunked! He’s on a drug cocktail that would kill a horse.”
Speculation was that the pharmaceuticals could easily have led to sleepwalking, which could explain things like pictures being turned upside down and dishes being moved from the sink to the oven.
Although the drugs were a likely explanation for some of the goings-on in the house, PIM decided to continue the investigation as usual, because there were the claims of the downstairs neighbor hearing ghostly footsteps when the upstairs tenant was not at home. The equipment was set up, and an EVP session started in the downstairs living room.
“Nine nineteen and nineteen seconds,” Tony time-stamped. “Is there anyone in this house that wants to make themselves known? Could you make a noise for us and let us know you’re here?”
Later, we spread out in the upper flat. I was sitting on the kitchen floor. “We’re only curious as to why you’re staying here. Can you help us out and interact with us, make loud noises, talk to us, slam doors, anything to let us know you’re here?” Tony questioned.
“It’s like regular hunting,” Tony explained casually. “You’re not going to get a trophy every single time.”
At somewhat of a loss for what to do next, we decided each team member would spend some time alone in the client’s bedroom to do his or her own EVP session while the rest of the team stayed in the downstairs living room. Missy stayed upstairs and Tony, Denys, and I headed downstairs.
“Whaddaya say, ten minutes or so, Missy?” Tony called over as we approached the stairwell. As we sat downstairs, we could faintly hear her muffled voice, asking questions to the spirits alone in the dark upstairs. Tony went next. Then it was my turn.
I walked into the upstairs tenant’s dark bedroom and sat on the floor next to his bed.
“Hello, my name is Tea Krulos. I’m a writer, actually. I’m here with my friends the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee, and I’m really just trying to have an understanding of who you are, so if there’s any information you want to pass to me, please do so.”
Ten seconds. No information.
“Can you tell me what you think of this place? It seems kind of depressing to me.”
Ten seconds. No thoughts shared.
“I’m working on a book, so if you have a message for me, I’ll share it in my book. Just let me know what you want to communicate.”
No response from a potential ghostwriter.
Like most of the PIM investigations I went on, there was nothing. Just silence and darkness. I had come to find ghost hunting to be a relaxing experience, sitting in the dark, thinking about life and the hereafter in often old and intriguing environments. I was to encounter things with PIM that I couldn’t explain, but in cases like this, the reality seemed to be all too mundane.
I was interested in hearing PIM’s discussion of the case at their meeting, but I was out of town on that date. Leigh recorded their discussion for me to listen to later.
“Basically he was on knockout juice—everything that can take you down, he was taking,” Tony explained to the rest of the team.
“About fifteen bottles of newly prescribed medication,” Missy added. She was tasked with writing the report on the investigation for PIM’s website. “On the refrigerator he had a list of appointments with his psychiatrist.”
“Our theory is, he’s sleepwalking, getting up and not knowing what he’s doing,” Tony said, explaining the drug-induced poltergeist behavior. He added that the only thing that didn’t fit the theory was the downstairs neighbor hearing ghost footsteps.
“But that could be her feeding off his claims and misperceiving building sounds as footsteps,” Krahn interjected.
“There’s a lot of building sounds, pops and cracks,” Missy agreed.
PIM discussed how to present the findings and decided to write the report sans drug references but to present that information privately to the house owner who called PIM for the investigation.
Leigh wrapped up the item. “In conclusion, we didn’t find evidence there,” he told the team. “We think the majority of claims are caused by a medication-induced state that this person is not realizing in some shape or form. I’ll also say—I’m sure it already says it in the report—continue to journal things that happen. If things pick up, we can look into it further, but please make sure that the gentleman upstairs notifies his doctor of these happenings, because his doctor might say, ‘This is common with the drugs you are on. Don’t think you’re getting haunted.’”