You come home late one night exhausted from a long day at work. You throw your keys down on the kitchen table and start down the long hallway to the bedroom. Suddenly, you hear a noise behind you and stop. It is the sound of someone dragging their feet across the carpet. You look, but no one can be seen. An arctic air blows past you just as you look over and see a massive shadowy figure standing next to you. Then you feel the cold brush of a hand grab your arm. You spin around to confront your attacker, only to find no one is there. You hear the distant sound of a door in the house slamming shut just as the room returns to normal.
This is one of the many different types of paranormal encounters that literally thousands of people across the United States experience in their lifetime. Explanations for these encounters are what bring me to locations and the people that experience them. For almost two decades I have been seeking out paranormal activity for research and documentation purposes as well as helping people understand and live with whatever may be residing in their home with them. It’s never easy for someone to hear that their home or place of business is inhabited by spirits. Most would flee just from the idea that there are invisible invaders watching them at every turn. Some, however, flock to those locations and wait for a supernatural encounter.
With the popularity of ghosts and the paranormal today, there has been a huge demand for genuine haunted locations. Throughout the country, haunted hotels, businesses, and abandoned buildings are open to the public for tours and overnight stays to anyone interested in having a paranormal experience. However, many people don’t have to even leave the house to have experiences, as they’re living in their very own haunted house. But what exactly is a haunted house? Some can drive through a neighborhood, look at a house, and say, “That house is haunted.” But it takes more than a dark and creepy-looking old house to make it haunted. Most houses have paranormal activity that is not the “run out of the house screaming for your life” type. In fact, the activity is sometimes so subtle that without proper investigation, you would never know it was haunted. There are those few-and-far-between cases, however, that have more extreme activity, and a few of them are documented in this book.
Throughout the course of this book, I will be walking you through some of the most memorable and fascinating cases I have been on and the evidence I have collected from them. A few of them are some of the most haunted locations throughout the United States and have had activity recorded and experienced by visitors for many years. The entire content of this book will be written through my perspective as the events are taking place. This is not an official report or case log, but simply my own personal diary of each location visited.
Before we begin, I feel it is necessary to tell you a little bit about myself, my history with the paranormal, and how I became involved with parapsychology. At a very young age I was exposed to paranormal activity and what I now believe to be spiritual encounters. Being as educated as I am today, I can better understand some of those experiences with the supernatural, but still to this day many of them remain unexplained.
The first extreme encounter I had with the paranormal was when I was just eight years old. My mother and I had vacationed at a resort in eastern Oklahoma. On the long trip home, we stopped at the Fountainhead Lodge, a lodge unlike anything I had ever seen before. The building was huge and rounded. We pulled up to the building, gathered our things, and headed inside.
The first thing that was to frighten me was when my mother asked me to go down the hallway to the ice machine and fill the ice bucket. Our room was at one end of the floor, and the ice machine was all the way at the other end. I made my approach to the ice machine and gathered the ice. As I started back, I paused and looked back toward the machine. There was a shadow of a figure on the wall directly across from it. The shadow appeared to be a silhouette of a slim man just under six feet tall. I started walking back to the room, kept looking back, and noticed when I started to walk, the shadow started taking small steps in my direction to follow me, only at a slower pace. I kept turning back around occasionally to see if it was still moving. I looked back only to see the shadow had stopped. I took a few more steps then stopped as well. Then it broke into a run right toward me.
I took off toward the room. When I finally made it to the door, I threw the bucket on the floor, which caused the ice to tumble all over the carpet as if someone burst open a bag of marbles. I started banging frantically on the door and yelling for my mother to open it and let me back in. I backed up against the hotel room door and waited for whatever was going to happen. The running shadow made its way to me, and when it was exactly across from me cowering in front of the door, it dissipated in almost a smoke-like way. My mother eventually opened the door, and I fell on the floor in the doorway of the room. She looked down at me and the ice spilled on the carpet floor.
As I told my mother the story of the phantom, she laughed at me and said, “You should have better things to do than chase your own shadow down the hall.” She told me to get up and go get more ice from the machine. I politely refused. She picked up the ice bucket from the floor in the hallway and walked down the hall to get it herself.
Later that night, there were three loud knocks on the door. My mother checked the peep hole and saw no one outside. She opened the door slightly and said, “That was strange,” as she closed and relocked it. About ten minutes later, the three loud knocks manifested again. My mother once again checked the hallway, only to find it void of any human occupants.
After this series of knocks, she decided to hide behind the door where she could not be seen and as soon as the door knocks happened, she would open the door immediately. She stood behind the door and, sure enough, the knocks came. She grabbed the door and jumped into the hallway. There was no one there by the door and no one in the hallway. She took a few steps back into the doorway of room and stood by the door, holding it open with her left hand. As the door stood open and my mother gazed into the hallway, a series of louder knocks came upon the door as she held it open.
We again huddled to the back of the room. Then, suddenly, we could hear a distant wind howling. Eventually, the wind had escalated to the point that the windows were almost shaking back and forth. The outside environment, however, was totally calm. The trees were not moving nor was anything being blown around. After about five to ten minutes of this, it stopped. Then, out of nowhere, the window started to fog up in a twelve-by-twelve-inch square on the window glass. I then discovered that the “fog” was on the outside of the window. The very last thing I remembered seeing in that room was the blank patch of fog there and seeing the words you’re dead slowly appear in the fog. The activity was convincing enough for us to leave for the evening.
Eventually, I grew tired of experiencing these things and not knowing anything about them. I started my research into the paranormal just out of high school. Growing up, I had always watched TV shows and read books about the paranormal. When the internet was introduced, I found it a valuable asset for furthering my research into the paranormal. After several years of book and internet research, I began going out on investigations to try and capture evidence of the afterlife. When I had first started, I was armed with only an EMF detector, a 35mm camera, an audio recorder, a flashlight, and several books on the paranormal that guided me in collecting evidence. Today, I have much more advanced equipment to help me investigate the paranormal, including audio and video tools.
Over the past seventeen years I have had the privilege of being part of numerous paranormal teams, including those I started myself. Now, I am the director/leader of a small group that I run locally and work closely with a few local individuals as well as professionals in the field. I have met many great people and made numerous friends in the field as well as fell in love with one of the most amazing and beautiful women in the world. I have also had the chance to work with several TV productions, magazines, and newspapers.
It is my goal and passion to educate the public about the paranormal and related phenomena as well as share my experiences with them in the process. Most people have a common misunderstanding about the paranormal, and I want to be one to show them the reality of the phenomena. I will be including some of the history and stories about each location along with my own experiences to provide background on why the place may or may not be haunted. I will be documenting all anomalous activity as well as personal impressions. Let me explain a few things that you will encounter in this book that you might find questionable.
First, all the experiences I have documented are true. None of the information or stories has been fabricated or exaggerated for this book. Some of the stories you might find unbelievable, but I can assure you all the events happened and all the evidence is real. Next, all my theories about the paranormal and investigative methods are my own. I don’t follow a specific guideline for investigations. I utilize several pieces of equipment used by parapsychologists around the world and document their readings. When you read through this book, you might find several things I do questionable, but please keep in mind that I have reasoning for my actions, most of which will be explained.
I hope you will find this book entertaining as well as educational. I took great pleasure in conducting these investigations. I’m not trying to convince you of anything—I ask only that you keep an open mind when reading and draw your own conclusions. I chose these locations not just for their past reputation for being haunted, but also for their power to convince even the strongest of skeptics to believe that the existence of the paranormal is possible. With that said, let us begin.