Ghost Hunting (16 page)

PUSHING THEM OUT MAY 2005

T
he Worthington family had been in their house for a year, and they didn’t want to stay one more minute. The kids, especially, had had it with the place. Fourteen-year-old Josh claimed he had been slapped in the face by an unseen presence while listening to CDs in his room. His sixteen-year-old brother, Nathan, had felt a presence standing next to his drum set and couldn’t sleep as a result. And their mother, Cheryl, had sensed something watching her in her bedroom.

Cheryl’s two daughters, who were younger than their brothers, had seen dishes fall and heard voices telling them to “get out.” Once, they saw what looked like a man standing outside the bathroom.

The family felt especially vulnerable because Cheryl’s husband worked nights. They wanted to know what was going on in the house they had been so eager to buy, a vintage structure built back in 1890.

Mike Dion, a member of the extended T.A.P.S. family, had investigated the place previously. His people had felt the touch of something they couldn’t see, but they hadn’t turned up any concrete evidence of a haunting. However, Mike felt the family’s accounts were credible enough to warrant a reinvestigation.

So there we were in Keene, New Hampshire, following Mike’s recommendation. The team, in addition to Grant, Mike, and me, included Dustin, Steve, Andy, and Dave Tango. Shortly after we had said good-bye to Dave in New Jersey, he had called asking to come on another case with us.

This one, we felt, was a good opportunity for him to become more familiar with our methods. A training cruise, if you will. Though Dave was obviously fascinated by the supernatural, he had never had any personal experiences with it. That made him pretty much unique in our group, where nearly everybody could point to something in his or her past.

The first investigator with whom we hooked Dave up was Andy, so he could develop an appreciation for Andy’s methodical debunking style. They went to the kitchen to check out the claim that dishes were falling off the counter. As it turned out, the countertop was loose, so we didn’t have to look to the supernatural for an explanation.

In the meantime, Grant and I went up to the boys’ bedrooms and got comfortable—me in Josh’s room and Grant in Nathan’s. As much as we discount our feelings when it comes to documenting the paranormal, we don’t ignore them. Very often, as my partner will point out, our best tools are our human instincts.

About 11: 00, Steve, Mike, and Dave moved into the master bedroom to take some still photos. Dave was taking the shots. Knowing a flash could be disturbing, he announced each one. Steve told him he didn’t have to do that. He and Mike knew the flashes were coming.

Steve, Mike, and Dave left the master bedroom to go into the hallway when they heard an exclamation. It had come from Grant. He was standing at the threshold of Nathan’s room with a snare drum lying on its side at his feet.

I got there a moment later. “What happened?” I asked my partner.

Grant said he had heard the approach of Steve’s team and was leaving the room to meet them when something hit him in the back of the ankle. When he looked down, he saw the snare drum from Nathan’s drum set.

G.W. was a bit unnerved. He hadn’t detected a temperature change in the room or anything else that might have served as a warning. He had just heard a sliding sound and felt the impact of the drum.

But then, moving objects make me a little crazy too.

Steve and Mike remained in the room to see if they could get something on camera. “Did you knock over the drum?” they asked any spirits that might be in the vicinity. “Are you trapped? Can you make a noise for us?”

They were there only a few minutes before they noticed that their batteries were losing power precipitously. Was an entity trying to manifest in the room? If so, it would need energy, and the juice in their batteries would be a good source of it.

However, nothing manifested.

As seriously as we take our business, we can sometimes get a little loopy staying up all night and creeping around in the dark. It’s not unusual for us to play tricks on each other. When there’s someone new to the group, those tricks start to look like fraternity initiations.

But then, in the literal sense, we are a fraternity. A brotherhood of ghost hunters.

In this case the new guy was Dave. Steve and Andy saw their opportunity when they found a princess’s tiara in one of the girls’ rooms. Putting it on Dave’s head, they led him to believe it was a headlamp.

He wore it for hours, periodically fumbling around in an attempt to find its “on” switch. Steve and Andy could barely keep a straight face. Finally, Grant and I joined them. What the heck is this? I asked myself as I removed the tiara from Dave’s head.

Even in the dark, I could see Dave blush. Turning to Steve, I asked, “Is this professional?” I was trying to sound stern, but inside I had to laugh. That tiara on Dave’s head was the silliest thing I had seen in a long time.

About five hours into the investigation, Dustin and Mike entered the master bedroom with an audio recorder. The family had heard sounds there, voices and rumblings, and we needed to check it out. At first, the place was quiet. Then Mike heard a cough, which sounded female to him. “Is that you trying to give us a sign?” he asked.

There were no other sounds.

Shortly after that, we wrapped up. We had to be quiet because the kids were all asleep by then. We assured Cheryl that we would speak to her within the week. As the first hints of dawn appeared on the horizon, we got on the road back to Rhode Island.

This time, it was Steve and Dave who went over the data. After all, Dave had said he wanted to get involved in all aspects of the investigation. But it wasn’t just a matter of our helping Dave. Before long, he made a contribution by finding an EVP on one of our audio recordings.

It had taken place in one of the bedrooms, right after Steve and Mike had posed a question. You could hear a female voice saying “…keys…” or “…kitties…” On the other hand, we weren’t sure where Cheryl had been at the time, so we couldn’t say for sure it was a legitimate piece of evidence.

The cough Mike and Dustin had heard would have been a nice piece of documentation as well—except we couldn’t find a recording of it. That left us with Grant’s experience, a questionable EVP, and an unrecorded sound.

Instead of making the trek back to New Hampshire, we called the Worthingtons from our conference room. Needless to say, Cheryl was eager to hear about our experiences and how we interpreted them. All things considered, we said, it seemed there was some activity in the house but we couldn’t prove it.

However, we went on, the family didn’t have to let a supernatural entity push them out. By getting together and taking a stand, they could show the spirit who was boss and reclaim their home. Others had done it with lasting effect.

But it sounded like Cheryl was leaning toward leaving. “Why stay?” she asked. “It’s not fair to the kids.”

Whatever she and her husband finally decided, we sympathized with them. We were parents too.

THE HOUSE WITH A HISTORY JUNE 2005

A
s I’ve noted, I had a problem with visions when I was in my early twenties. It was a constant source of pain to me in that I wondered if I was losing my mind. I don’t know how I would have survived the experience if not for the patience and compassion of a ghost hunter named John Zaffis.

Zaffis steadied me and assured me that I wasn’t going nuts. He told me that I was just sensitive to paranormal phenomena. He was the one who suggested I find people with similar problems and that we turn to each other for support. That’s how I founded RIPS, and then wound up cofounding T.A.P.S. with my friend Grant.

So, when you come right down to it, I have John Zaffis to thank for my status as a ghost hunter. And it’s his example that has allowed me to become a good one. But over the years, Zaffis and I have become more than colleagues in the pursuit of the paranormal. We have become close friends.

That’s why I always jump at the chance to include Zaffis on one of T.A.P.S.’ ghost-hunting forays. It doesn’t happen that often because he’s got a load of his own cases, and his approach tends to be different from ours. But on one particular investigation, I really wanted Zaffis to come along.

I first learned about it when Grant and I—in our day jobs as plumbers—were taking out a dishwasher from a fish-and-chips restaurant. We got a call on my cell phone from Donna, who told us we had been invited by Norma Sutcliffe to visit the home she shared with her husband in the northern part of the state. I was jazzed because the place had a history of paranormal occurrences.

Twenty years earlier, a previous owner had allowed it to be investigated by Ed and Lorraine Warren, who had been chasing ghosts since 1952. The Warrens, who claimed to be sensitives, said the activity in the house was off the charts, an eleven on a scale of one to ten. But as always, they went strictly by their feelings. There was nothing scientific about their approach to ghost hunting.

At T.A.P.S., any instincts we might have with regard to the supernatural are just the beginning of our investigation. We don’t say a place is haunted unless we have backup in the form of documentation. So we had to take any conclusion reached by the Warren group with a grain of salt.

Which brings me to the reason I wanted to include my friend Zaffis in the case. As it happens, Zaffis is the Warrens’ nephew. If we were going to examine the same premises they’d examined, it seemed right to bring him along.

In addition to Zaffis, Grant and I recruited Steve, Dustin, and Donna to visit the Sutcliffe house with us. It had been built in the mid-1700s, even before the War for Independence, when houses were all made of wood and had lower ceilings than we do today. You couldn’t walk in and not feel the history in the place.

Legend has it that the original owner got drunk in his barn one night during a blizzard. At first, he tried to wait it out, but eventually he got too cold and tried to make it back to the house. It wasn’t far—less than a hundred feet—but he never made it. He was found the next day lying face-down in the snow, frozen to death.

Previous owners had heard footsteps and voices and seen entities, including gray mists, dark shadows, and so on. They had seen doors open and close on their own. Pretty much the gamut of paranormal activity.

I was eager to hear what kind of experiences the Sutcliffes had had.

Mrs. Sutcliffe took Grant, John, and me to a part of the house where she and her husband had seen a door rattle and shake until he finally opened it. In the study, which was full of books, she showed us a chair that vibrated when her husband sat down in it. Then she escorted us to the master bedroom, where she said the bed had shuddered for a minute or two on several occasions.

Zaffis wanted to check out the study and its vibrating chair. Sitting down in it, he opened himself up to the room, trying to get a sense of the forces at work there. I like to do the same thing, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have.

Zaffis had his first brush with the paranormal at fifteen, when he encountered an apparition of his grandfather. From that point on, he couldn’t learn enough about ghosts and the way they manifested themselves in our lives. His approach to ghost hunting was a little less scientific than the one Grant and I had adopted, but we valued his sensitivity and experience.

As Zaffis maintained his vigil in the study, Donna and I checked out the master bedroom, where the Sutcliffes claimed their bed had vibrated. While Donna reclined on the bed, I sat in a nearby chair. After a while, I felt it vibrate, if only just a little—at exactly the same time that Zaffis felt his do the same.

Then something else happened. As Donna and I were talking, we heard a door in the room unlatch and open. But when we examined it, we saw it was still closed. We were surprised. It had sounded
exactly
as if it were opening.

I turned the handle and opened the door—and with a shock, saw what looked like someone on the other side. To my relief, it was just a hanging jacket. There was a mattress there too, which made it difficult to get past the door into what looked like a walk-in closet.

When I slipped inside, I saw another door at the closet’s far end. As it turned out, the closet connected the master bedroom to a second bedroom. It occurred to me that one of our guys was playing a prank, but everyone except Donna, Zaffis, and me was outside the house.

I called Steve and Dustin in the mobile command center and asked them to rewind their recording of what had happened to Donna and me, as captured by the equipment in the room. When they did so, they could hear the door unlatch, just as we had. They marked that portion of the audio for special attention.

By that time, Steve and Dustin were eager to get some time in the house themselves, so we let them out of the van and unleashed them on the study. As they were walking around the room, Dustin felt something grab and squeeze his hand. Afterward, he felt a coldness there, as if his hand had been bathed in ice.

It’s a common side effect of physical contact with a paranormal entity. In Dustin’s case the feeling didn’t last that long, but it can stay with you a while. Of course, everyone’s experience is different.

Steve and Dustin also took readings upstairs in the master bedroom. Like Donna and me, they heard the closet door open. When they checked it out, they found that the door on the opposite end was open—even though they had made a point of closing it a few moments earlier.

Not too much later, I made the decision to pack up. At that point, Grant was in the other bedroom—the one that shared the closet with the master bedroom—sitting on the bed and doing some EVP work. The cameraman who was with him stepped out of the room for a moment, leaving Grant by himself.

After a while, Grant realized that something had changed. Using his iPod for a light source, he saw that the closet door to his right was wide open. He hadn’t heard it move, but there it was. So he experienced the door phenomenon as well.

When we were done packing, we said goodnight to Mrs. Sutcliffe and began loading our vehicles. We were halfway done when a bat flew into one of the SUVs. Dustin said he didn’t care about the bat—unless, of course, it got caught in his hair.

Later that day, Steve and Dustin began their analysis. The first significant footage they came across revealed what appeared to be an orb in the study. However, on closer inspection it turned out to be a reflection from our camera. Then they found something
really
interesting.

As you’ll recall, Donna and I had heard the closet door unlatch in the master bedroom. Then, to our surprise, we had seen that it was still closed. Well, later in the investigation the door
did
open itself, right there on one of our cameras. And not a little—it opened a couple of feet.

Then, still on camera, the door closed. But it wasn’t done performing for us. Twenty-two minutes later it opened again, this time all the way. Finally, it closed, locking itself. You could hear the latch plain as day.

There was no one in the room. In fact, our quad footage, which allows us to monitor four cameras at once, showed us we were all eating at the time. So whatever was happening seemed to be doing so without human assistance.

Being my usual skeptical self, I had to wonder if there wasn’t a draft coming through the closet from the other end. And even though the Sutcliffes and our T.A.P.S. team were all accounted for, I couldn’t completely rule out the notion of human intervention. We needed to get back to the house and take another look.

When we returned to the Sutcliffe residence, Grant and I examined the closet door more closely. I went inside the closet and tried to open the door, but it wasn’t easy. There was no way a draft could have done it.

Also, there was a mattress standing on its side in the closet, restricting movement in there. Anyone opening the door from inside the closet would have been forced by the mattress to come into view of our camera. That ruled out “foul play.”

When we met with Norma Sutcliffe, we showed her the video of the door and told her about our experiences. Something had happened to each and every one of us in her house. All things considered, Grant and I had to agree that the place was haunted.