Ghost Hunting (14 page)

GHOST SHIP MARCH 2005

T
.A.P.S. has investigated some pretty impressive places, but the World War II battleship USS
North Carolina
was still a heck of a challenge for us. Not only was it five hundred feet long but it also went down four decks—and unlike some other places, there weren’t any elevators. Depending on how deep you were in the bowels of the ship, you might need forty-five minutes to find your way out.

The guy who met us at the
North Carolina
was Danny Bradshaw, the night watchman, who spends six out of seven nights a week on the 35,000-ton ship. He told us he had seen a ghost on board on three separate occasions.

The first time, a porthole curtain moved aside and a face stared out at him. Then the curtain shut. The second time, his television cut out and an apparition appeared—a figure with a blank look on its face and white flame on its head instead of hair. The third time, Bradshaw was in the mess hall when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, wondering what had gotten hold of him, and saw something human-looking standing next to him, the light shining right through it.

Bradshaw screamed. And the human-looking thing made a face, as if to say, “Don’t do that.” Then it disappeared.

Bradshaw was confident that he had seen something supernatural. However, he needed proof of it. That was where we came in.

Because of the size of the place, we had set aside two nights for the investigation. Even then we would only be able to hit the areas of reported activity. To really give the ship a thorough going-over would have taken weeks.

Our plumbing background often comes in handy in investigations of the paranormal. This case was no exception. Before we descended four stories into parts of the ship no one had visited for years, we scouted each descent with a Roto-Rooter camera. Normally, we snake it down into drain lines to look for breaks. In the
North Carolina,
we used it to look for missing steps and other dangerous conditions.

Shortly after that, I gave the order to “go dark”—in other words, to turn off the lights. Unfortunately, the power for our equipment went off too. The only way to darken that section of the ship and still have juice for our makeshift command center was to unscrew all the lightbulbs in the vicinity.

While Jen kept an eye on all our camera positions from our command center, Steve, Dustin, and Dave went to explore the crew library. Normally, we have to take into account power line activity, appliances, and so on when we conduct an EMF sweep, but not this time. With the power off in that section, those guys were working with a baseline of zero, which made it all the more surprising when they got some EMF spikes.

Grant and I took the opportunity to just wander through the ship, with no particular destination in mind. It was like running an obstacle course with all the pipes jutting out and all the dark, yawning openings in the floor. My father-in-law spent a number of years on a naval ship; I didn’t envy him in the least.

Back in the crew library, the temperature was starting to drop. Not only was it evident on our instruments but our team could feel it as well. Dustin identified one corner in particular that was getting colder than the others.

We didn’t find anything else that night. After a while, we called it quits. But we weren’t disappointed. We still had another night ahead of us.

The following evening, we had the benefit of having all our wires and equipment in place already, so we were able to start investigating as soon as we arrived. The night before, we had focused on the aft part of the ship. This time, we were going to concentrate on the bow.

Steve and Andy made their objective the starboard lavatory, where an enemy torpedo had ripped through the hull. Unfortunately, crewmen had been using the shower at the time. I can’t even imagine what it was like to die that way.

Of course, the lavatory was three decks down into a hell-hole of dark, creaking metal. Steve is afraid of heights, but he reminded himself that he was going down, not up. As long as he kept that distinction in mind, he was okay.

Remember that scene in
Star Wars
when Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo fall into a garbage compactor? That’s what Andy and Steve felt like with all those stained metal walls around them. Except, luckily for them, the walls didn’t start closing in, and there wasn’t a hungry alien trying to drag them under.

Finally, they reached the lavatory and the adjoining shower room. In scanning it with his EMF detector, Andy encountered a spike of 2.2. It was quite a number, considering the fact that the power was off. A baseline reading in that area would have been 1.0.

At the same time, Dustin, Dave, and Jim were checking out the mess hall. They had been down there only a few minutes when they heard a crash and looked at each other. Where had it come from? No one knew. They tried dropping lids on pots and jostling the other cookware, but they couldn’t produce the same kind of sound.

Grant and I were wandering through the ship again, exploring corridors untouched since the 1950s. At one point, we heard a bang. It sounded pretty close to us—within ten feet, maybe. I couldn’t see anyone, but I had a feeling we had become the butts of a practical joke.

Turning to our cameraman, who was right behind us, I asked him if one of our people was down there screwing around. The cameraman swore that we were alone. Frowning, we moved on—and heard the banging sound over and over again.

It sounded as if someone was throwing things at us. We could hear footsteps as well, and voices. But we didn’t see anyone. “I’ll be pissed if someone’s down here,” I said, loud enough for a prankster to hear me. A moment later, we stumbled on the ship’s brig.

We could hear the
North Carolina
groan like a wounded whale, as if the brig was a place it would rather have forgotten. Had something happened there? Was that why we kept hearing the banging?

As I asked myself the question, a portal closed behind us—just like that. A moment later, I saw a shadow up ahead. Grant saw it too. We pursued it through the long, echoing darkness of the corridor until we saw it duck inside a room.

Okay, I thought, now we’ve got you.

It took us a few seconds to reach the place. Triumphantly, I swung inside—only to find that the room was empty. Whatever we had seen was gone.

It didn’t seem possible. There was only one way in or out of the room, and I was blocking it. I turned to Grant and shrugged my shoulders.

We were lost, cold, and uncomfortable. It was time to call it a night.

To the chagrin of Steve and Andy, our motel accommodations in Raleigh were a little cramped for the purpose of data analysis. They had to share one little table. Still, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

Despite their dedication, only one piece of evidence presented itself to them. As they went over the footage from the infrared camera we had placed on the bow, they could see the camera move up and down a couple of times and then fix itself again. It was as if someone had played with it, but all our people had been inside the ship.

Steve and Andy were almost finished when Jim showed up with an audio recording of the time he’d spent with Dustin in the brig. When they played it, they could hear Jim say something and then someone else’s response. They assumed it was Dustin speaking—but it wasn’t. It was an EVP.

When they played it for Grant and me, we thought we heard the second voice say, “the ship” or “long ship.” Where had the voice come from? None of us could say.

On our return to the ship, we met Captain David Scheu, a retired naval officer. He had come to sit with Bradshaw and hear our verdict on the
North Carolina.
Was it haunted or not? That was the expression on his face.

We said that we had experienced and documented activity on the ship. First, we had recorded EMF spikes up to 2.2 in the vicinity of the showers. Second, Grant and I had heard objects crashing near us and seen a shadow that had looked vaguely human. Third, our infrared camera had moved up and down without any of our people moving it. And fourth, we had picked up the EVP in the brig.

We had to conclude that something was going on—something supernatural, though that was all we could say for now. Bradshaw seemed happy that he had gotten some corroboration of his experiences. He no longer had to wonder if he was crazy.

We were happy too. We had gone where few paranormal investigators get to tread. And for Dustin and Jen, who had been disappointed earlier, it was an exceptional training experience.

A CHILD’S FEAR APRIL 2005

W
hen six-year-old Zach Tanguay told his parents, Denise and Joseph, that his bed shook at night, it was understandably a matter of some concern to them. When he told them that something was yanking at his feet and poking him in the head, their concern grew by leaps and bounds.

Then Denise started having experiences as well. When she went down to her basement-level laundry room, she felt sick to her stomach. Her husband checked out the situation and felt sick as well, yet there was no smell to which they could attribute the feeling.

The last straw was when Denise woke one night to see a bunch of swirling red lights. As she watched, spellbound, in her bed, the lights coalesced into a face. When she shook her husband awake, the face vanished. But after that night, she couldn’t go to sleep for fear of the face returning.

Desperate for help, the Tanguays called T.A.P.S. Grant and I put together a small team this time, including Steve, Andy, and Kristyn Gartland, because we were going to work while the boy was sleeping and we didn’t want to be too obtrusive.

Kristyn’s son had had an experience a lot like Zach’s, though he was younger at the time. Because we were able to help him with it, she wound up joining our group. Now she had an opportunity to do for the Tanguays what we had done for her family.

Normally, Grant and I didn’t have to worry about Steve during an investigation. He would do his job so smoothly and inconspicuously that he was almost invisible. This time, it was different. With Brian gone, we had promoted Steve to tech manager. We knew he was capable of rising to the occasion, but we would keep an eye on him just to make sure.

When we arrived at the Tanguays’ house in Springfield, Massachusetts, Denise was distraught. Zach, on the other hand, was too distracted by video games to exhibit any real anxiety. While Kristyn sat down to speak with Denise, the rest of us looked around the house.

Being parents ourselves, Grant and I are always especially eager to help children. We were going to do anything in our power to get Zach past his problem. We assured him of that.

Between the Tanguays’ bedroom, Zach’s bedroom, and the laundry room, Steve set up five cameras. Also, Andy put a carbon monoxide detector in the laundry room. He had a suspicion that the Tanguays’ experiences there might be attributable to a mild case of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Pretty soon, Zach went to bed and fell asleep. At 10: 35, we turned off the lights, and Grant and I went down to the laundry room with an EMF detector. We wanted to get a sense of the magnetic fields down there.

There was plenty of EMF activity. However, that was to be expected, considering the proximity of electrical lines and major appliances. As Grant likes to point out, any consistently high EMF reading is man-made. What we were looking for were spikes and dips.

We didn’t find any. Pulling up a couple of chairs, we kicked back. After all, we might have to be there for some time. I smiled at Grant and said, with my usual polish and sensitivity, “Whoever vomits, loses.”

He chuckled. “You’re on.”

Eventually, the discussion turned to Brian and the circumstances under which he had left T.A.P.S. He had been with us for so long that it felt funny doing investigations without him. I was sure he was going to reappear some day and ask for his old job. But after what we had gone through, I couldn’t see taking him back. I just didn’t think I could deal with him anymore.

Steve, meanwhile, had left the van, where he’d been monitoring the various cameras he had set up. He tiptoed into Zach’s room with an EMF detector and managed to take readings around the boy’s bed without waking him, no easy feat considering how restlessly Zach slept. But there was nothing unusual to record—just a steady baseline level.

By 1: 30, we had gotten everything we could. We packed up and promised to call the Tanguays as soon as we went over the footage. When we left, Zach was moving restlessly but was still asleep.

Steve and Andy spent the next day going over the data. When they were done, they called Grant and me, and we sat down with them. They showed us the video recording of the laundry room when Grant and I had been sitting down there. At one point, we could see a flash of light, but it looked like a reflection off the water heater.

“What else?” I asked.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything else.

As we had promised, we called the Tanguays and arranged a meeting. We had to tell them that we hadn’t found any evidence of the paranormal in their house. We also hadn’t detected any carbon monoxide in the laundry room. However, the high EMF readings there might have had something to do with their nausea.

As for Zach’s experiences at night, we showed the Tanguays a few minutes of video that we had taken in their son’s room. Even over that short span, he had tossed and turned several times. Obviously, he was a restless sleeper.

As we were setting up our cameras, we noticed that the boy played his video games pretty close to the TV screen. Research shows that the part of the brain that responds to video games stays active for a long time. With that in mind, we recommended that Zach end his gaming earlier in the evening.

The Tanguays thought that made sense. They said they had instituted a quiet time during which they read Zach a story, but maybe it wasn’t long enough. From that point on, they would see to it he was relaxed before he hit the sack.

We couldn’t tell the Tanguays for certain that their house wasn’t haunted. However, our lack of findings seemed to be a relief to them. Denise said she might finally get some sleep.

The only question that remained was how Steve had done on his first night as Brian’s replacement. In general, Grant and I were pleased.

We looked forward to working with our new tech manager for a long time.