Ghost Hunting (11 page)

HEADQUARTERS FEBRUARY 2005

E
arly in 2005 we moved into our new headquarters. From the street it looks pretty much like any storefront, with vertical blinds covering the windows on either side of the front door—keeping the inquisitive from seeing what’s inside. It could easily be the office of an accountant or a real estate broker or a bail bondsman.

Except for the fact that
T.A.P.S.
is stenciled on the glass.

Because we usually park in the lot behind the place, we don’t use the front door much. Instead, we enter from the alley that runs between our office and the Chinese restaurant next door, where a previous tenant did himself in by guzzling battery acid.

In our business, we hear of a lot of grisly deaths, but battery acid…? You’ve really got to have some demons to even consider that as an option.

Not that our headquarters don’t have their own checkered past. In the office behind our conference room, which Grant and I share, a guy once blew his head off. It’s a miracle we don’t have a haunting of our own.

The front end of the office, which sits behind the door we seldom open, is mostly filled with desks and filing cabinets. However, there’s no mistaking that this is T.A.P.S. territory. You can tell by the blown-up photos of a graveyard, a lighthouse, a prison—all places we’ve visited on one occasion or another.

We’ve also got a few humorous posters on the walls. One is a checklist of what to bring on an investigation: a flashlight, an EMF detector, spare batteries, a camera, and an extra pair of shorts. Other posters say, “We scare them back,” “I love the smell of ectoplasm in the morning,” and “When Uncle Fred just won’t go home…”

My favorite part of the office is the wall where we keep our dartboard. It’s got three red-fletched darts in it, all near the bull’s-eye, where I planted them. Alongside them is a shuriken, perhaps better known as a throwing star. I used to be into martial arts, and I’m pretty good at flinging that sucker. Not perfect, as the chewed-up patches of wall around the dartboard will attest, but good.

And of course, what would any office be without an ample supply of hand disinfectant? Hey, we’ve all got our personality quirks. Mine is I can’t stand germs. I’m so bad I won’t even touch the buttons in an elevator. And shaking hands? Don’t get me started.

I know what you’re thinking. How can a plumber, a guy who works with waste pipes, be so queasy about germs? Believe me, you’re not the first person to ask. I just wish I had an answer.

Anyway, it’s not the most luxurious place on the planet. I wouldn’t have a cocktail reception there. But it sure beats working out of my basement, which is what we used to do.

THE MYRTLES FEBRUARY 2005

O
ne of the first conversations I had with my partner, Grant, in the conference room of our new T.A.P.S. headquarters was really a reprise of an old conversation: what to do with Brian Harnois. But then, Brian’s antics had been a recurring theme in our lives for some time.

The latest problem was that Brian had missed a meeting because he said he had to work. It was a lie, of course. He often resorted to them when he was backed into a corner. And I
knew
it was a lie because his boss was a friend of mine. In fact, I had gotten Brian the job.

I tell you, Brian left us scratching our heads sometimes. I considered him a good person and a close friend, or I wouldn’t have given him so much leeway in the past. But I was kicking myself in the butt for that decision now.

Time and again, he misplaced or completely lost valuable equipment. Three times before, we had said good-bye to him only to grudgingly let him back into the group again. We couldn’t do that anymore. As far as I was concerned, his days with us were numbered.

Fortunately for Brian, Grant had a soft spot for him. By the time we called him into the conference room later that day, I had been talked into taking a more flexible position—one I had a feeling I would come to regret. But Grant sounds so reasonable sometimes, it’s hard to disagree with him.

Brian entered the room like a child who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “You’re hurting the whole group,” I told him. “We were going to let you go, but we’ve reconsidered.”

Up to that point, Brian’s promises to do better had been sealed with a handshake. That wasn’t going to fly anymore. We presented him with a code of conduct that laid out everything he had to do or steer clear of in order to remain in the organization. The penalties for diverging from the code ran the gamut from Brian’s being disciplined to his being dismissed.

It was the only way we could keep him on this time—we emphasized that. Then we asked him to read and sign the code of conduct. “Screw up and you’re gone,” I advised him, just for good measure.

You could see that Brian was shaken up. T.A.P.S. was his life, he said. He even had a T.A.P.S. tattoo on his arm. He had spent six years with the organization. He didn’t want to see all that go up in smoke.

Meanwhile, we had gotten some terrific news from Donna. The owners of The Myrtles, a former plantation turned bed-and-breakfast hotel in the Louisiana bayou, had asked us to come down and test the claim that the place was haunted.

Grant and I could barely contain ourselves. The Myrtles was known as one of the most haunted places in America. It was every paranormal investigator’s dream to check the place out.

We asked Brian to come with us because he would have killed us if we hadn’t. But given the magnitude of the case, we hedged our bet. Instead of putting Brian in charge of the equipment, we asked Steve to assume that role.

Steve was only too glad to take on the added responsibility, but he didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. “What about Brian?” he asked. “Don’t worry about him,” I said, knowing Brian would agree to pretty much anything at that point.

It was a three-day trip down to New Orleans by car. Steve and Brian would take our new mobile command center, a van outfitted with all the monitors and hard drives we would need in an investigation, which allowed us to eliminate a good half hour of setup time.

Jen Rossi would drive one of our other vehicles. What better place for her to get more field experience than The Myrtles?

We would also send Paula Donovan and Kristyn Gartland down there. Kristyn was a field researcher for T.A.P.S. We had originally met her seven or eight years earlier when her house was plagued by a poltergeist. Paula was a research scientist, who was by nature a bit more skeptical. We figured Paula’s analytical mind would be an asset in this investigation. Kristyn, with her understanding of both people and equipment, had proven herself a valuable member of the team as well.

Soon after Grant and I arrived at the airport, we began the three-and-a-half-hour trek to The Myrtles, which was in St. Francisville, Louisiana, about halfway between New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi. It was beautiful in the bayous. The time flew by so quickly that we were at the gates to the old plantation before we knew it.

It was about as elegant a place as I had ever seen, with its classical statuary, its towering oak trees, and its 120-foot-long veranda. As we drove up, we were met by Teeta Moss, the owner. She welcomed us to the main house, which had been built in 1794 and was on the National Historical Register.

The Myrtles had become known as a haunted property, Moss said, but she wanted concrete evidence, and T.A.P.S. had gained a reputation for credibility in the field. We promised to check the place out as thoroughly as we could. To be honest, I was just hoping we didn’t break any stained-glass windows.

Though The Myrtles had eleven guest rooms, none of them had a television or a radio. The plantation hadn’t changed in more than two hundred years. It was stuck squarely in the past.

Hester Eby, who had spoken to Donna on the phone, was the manager of the property. She took us to a flagstone path between two buildings, where she said an all-but-transparent figure had been seen. People have identified the figure as Cloe, a slave back in the days when The Myrtles was a working plantation.

According to legend, Cloe was the plantation owner’s mistress. When he ended their affair for reasons of his own, she began spying on his family. Eventually he caught her and punished her by cutting off her ear. Then he sent her into the fields to work like all the other slaves.

In time, Cloe managed to work her way back into her master’s good graces, so when a family birthday came up, she was the one given the responsibility of baking the birthday cake. But along with all the other ingredients, she put in a small amount of poison. In one version of the story, she did this to get her revenge. In another, she wanted to make the master’s children sick so she would have to return to his house to take care of them.

In any event, the master’s wife and two children ate the entire cake and instantly fell ill. Ironically, it was Cloe who was asked to care for them and nurse them back to health. However, the poison proved too much for them. All three of them died.

Cloe was put to death for her crime, but not at the hands of the plantation owner. As the story goes, she was hanged by her fellow slaves, who feared their master’s wrath. It was said she still hangs around the plantation owner’s house, hoping to be readmitted into his good graces.

But she wasn’t alone. The ghosts of the plantation owner’s wife and two children were believed to haunt the place as well. According to witnesses, they showed up not only on the property but also in the house.

Hester took us inside to tell us about a couple of other ghostly legends. For instance, a mirror with metallic-looking smudges. Photographs of it supposedly showed the shapes of two small children in the top left corner. Were they the ghosts of the children Cloe had killed? No one knew.

Next we walked through the lady’s parlor. One time, when Hester was leading a tour there, she felt the tug of a child on her arm. But when she turned to see who it might be, there was no one there.

Outside, there was a pond covered with a solid-looking layer of tiny green leaves. It was an innocent enough scene. But photos of it had revealed what looked like a Confederate soldier standing at the water’s edge.

And then there was the story of William Wincher, a West Virginian infantryman during the Civil War, who, when a guest at The Myrtles, was shot in the chest by an unidentified assailant. Crawling into the main house through the side door, he tried desperately to find his wife, Sarah. Wincher made it as far as the staircase’s seventeenth step, but no farther. Fortunately, Sarah heard his calls and embraced him before he expired.

Footsteps had been heard on the stairs from time to time. Did they belong to the ghost of William Wincher? We hoped to shed some light on the question.

Other activity at the plantation included the spirit of a French woman who wandered from room to room, an entity who played the same chord over and over again on the grand piano, a portrait that changed expressions, and an apparition of a girl who only appeared before storms.

One thing we didn’t show in our TV coverage of The Myrtles was a photograph someone had taken—one of many in the owner’s files—that showed evidence of the supernatural. In the photo, we could see what looked like the ghost of a female slave standing between two of the plantation’s buildings.

The Myrtles people wanted the image of the female cleaned up so it could be determined what she looked like. They ended up sending it to a “paranormal guy.” His job was simply to make the ghostly image more distinct.

But he did more than that. He tampered with it.

When he was done, you could see not only the image of the woman but something else as well—the shadows of two children sitting on a branch, just to the right of the apparition. Except there were no shadows of any kind in the original photo. There was just a clapboard surface.

More than likely, the guy was trying to help The Myrtles maintain its reputation as a haunted house. Instead, he cast doubt on what had been a pretty compelling piece of evidence.

Obviously, there were a lot of stories to prove or disprove at The Myrtles. Grant, who can be like a kid sometimes, was stressed because he didn’t want to miss any of them. But we had to be realistic. We decided to focus on just the spots with the most reported activity.

Hester left us with an ominous remark: “Many guests have left us before the night is over.” We promised her we would be there until morning.

First off, G.W. and I looked at the mirror Hester had shown us. It looked like it had been handled quite a bit, which would mean it had been exposed to the acids in people’s fingertips. That might be what had created the mysterious shapes beneath its glass surface.

Then it was a matter of what people saw in the shapes. Matrixing is the tendency of the human mind to fill in details where there are gaps, making us see things that aren’t there. We guessed it was this phenomenon that made the children seem to appear in photographs of the mirror.

While Jen sat down in our mobile command center to watch the monitors, Paula and Kristyn explored the grounds and the slave shack. At the same time, Steve and Brian finished setting up the cameras. Then they went to the dining room of the main house to record some audio impressions.

After they left, Grant and I went into the house to scan the place with our thermal camera. In particular, we wanted to check out the area around the stairwell, where people had heard footsteps. It turned out to be a good idea.

As we stood at the top of the stairs, something moved past our camera—something warmer than its surroundings, judging by its yellow thermal color. We couldn’t make out any details, but it seemed to have moved up in front of the lens and then to our right. With luck, we would get a better idea of what it was when we analyzed the footage back in our hotel room.

In the meantime, Paula and Kristyn were investigating the area around the side door where Wincher had been shot. Their EMF readings started out low but quickly climbed when they got to a particular spot. Kristyn, especially, was excited about their results—until she realized there was an electrical box in the vicinity. “Damn it,” she muttered good-naturedly, “I hate when that happens. Stupid electrical box.”

By eleven o’clock, Steve and Brian were out walking the grounds of the plantation, approaching a gazebo where a couple of phenomena had been reported: the sight of a Civil War–era soldier strolling the grounds as if he were still alive, and the voices of kids playing. They both sounded like a residual haunting—the kind that repeats over and over again. In any case, Steve was playing his flashlight up ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of something.

At the same time, I was checking out the slave shack with Grant. We noticed that there wasn’t any camera in it, even though we had given Brian specific instructions to set one up in there. Grant gave Brian a call, letting him know about his oversight.

To Brian’s credit, he promised he would address it right away—and did. But that left Steve to go on exploring the grounds by himself.

Normally, no one goes off on his or her own during an investigation. The T.A.P.S. rule is that we proceed in pairs or threes, but never by ourselves. In fact, when this case aired as a television episode, we got all kinds of e-mails about the inadvisability of Steve’s little solo adventure.

Remember, though—if you can see him on television, he’s not alone. There’s a
cameraman
with him. So in reality, Steve wasn’t breaking any rules. He had all the company he needed.

But after a while, he got a little more—in the form of a flitting shadow. Without hesitation, he pursued it through the darkness, trying to get a video recording of it. Unfortunately, it ducked behind a tree and got away.

When Brian rejoined him, Steve told him what he had seen. As they continued their pursuit, Brian saw something as well. But as before, it proved elusive.