Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (18 page)

It takes a lot of energy to make an object move, which is why you don’t hear a lot about poltergeist activity. Graduating to that level takes time and probably some outside help, making poltergeists a rare find. So why do you have a poltergeist in one building, but across the street there are seventeen weaker spirits? Why do some of these ghosts have the ability to move stuff while others can only muster a voice or a cold chill? Power drains might hold the answer. Poltergeist activity is frequently preceded by local power drains. They need energy from humans, batteries, or equipment to move objects, so when your freshly charged batteries suddenly go straight down to zero, it might be creepy time.

So why do they move stuff around more than other ghosts? Because they can. Imagine if you died and thought you were going to heaven or hell but got stuck here. It can be maddening or even boring, like
Groundhog Day
. Some poltergeists try to harm or scare people because that’s their entertainment. If you had the ability to walk among the living and not be detected, but could mess with them, would you? Some people would, some wouldn’t. In that sense, poltergeists could be spirits who have learned to use available energy, but are too irresponsible to handle that power.

I think if all ghosts could be poltergeists they would. I firmly believe the spirit world is as it was portrayed in the movie
Ghost
. In that movie there’s a scene where Patrick Swayze tried and tried to kick a can but couldn’t because he didn’t have a body and didn’t know how to channel his energy to make it move. Then an experienced ghost shows him how to channel his energy and make the can move with his mind instead of his body.

The convergence of ley lines may have something to do with it. The Goldfield Hotel and the Ancient Ram Inn are built on top of ley line convergences and both have mischievous spirits residing inside. It’s possible that the underlying geomagnetic energy of the ley line increases their ability to draw energy and manifest to the point that they can move stuff around.

Ley Lines

Ley lines are the lines drawn on a map between places of geographical interest, such as Stonehenge and Westminster Abbey. The concept of ley lines were first introduced in 1921 by archaeologist Alfred Watkins in his book,
The Old Straight Track
. Watkins theorized that these lines were natural flows of spiritual energy that humans instinctively followed and built monuments and dwellings on top of. Just like birds follow the magnetic field of the Earth when they migrate, humans use these invisible geomagnetic lines to guide us to the most crucial item we need to survive—water.

Ley lines were expanded upon by the British Society of Dowsers when they saw the potential for them to predict the flows of underground rivers and aquastats. It has been theorized that the intersections of ley lines may be points on the Earth where spiritual or psychic energy is enhanced. I’m a believer in ley lines and the flow of geomagnetic fields. I believe that where ley lines intersect there is a vortex of spiritual energy that ghosts can use to manifest.

Few places in the world can boast as much paranormal weirdness as the Ancient Ram Inn in Gloucestershire, England. Built in the twelfth century on top of a five-thousand-year-old pagan burial ground, the Ancient Ram Inn is the oldest building in its area and has a distinguished list of at least fourteen named spirits that still reside there. The building has witnessed countless murders and ritual sacrifices since before recorded history, making it one of the world’s most haunted places.

We know the Ancient Ram Inn has been around since 1145—almost as long as William the Conqueror and modern England itself—and may have been built before that. The Inn has been a church house for an unknown period, a Mason’s lodge, a slave’s quarters, a brewery, and possibly an orphanage. Historic maps suggest the original building could have been three times as large as today’s structure, begging the question, “what happened to the other two-thirds?”

The building is something straight out of Harry Potter’s Daigon Alley: a mishmash of added-on rooms in different architectural styles from different centuries with no clear reason. Walls lean like they’ll fall over at any moment and multicolored bricks make the exterior look like a checkerboard of construction. A tunnel from the back of the main fireplace burrows down into the Earth and emerges at the nearby Saint Mary’s Church, and another leads to the Lacock Abbey, most likely for smugglers, which adds to its dubious history. The inn has had eight reported possessions, lies squarely on the intersection of two perpendicular ley lines (just like the Goldfield Hotel), and has verifiable evidence that it was once the site of devil worshipping and the ritual sacrifice of children, making it an irresistible den of spookiness.

The building’s caretaker only adds to the weird ambience. When I first met John Humphries, I felt like the Scooby Doo Crew when they rip the mask off the villain and reveal someone they met earlier in the episode. It was such a strange place that I wasn’t really surprised when I stepped inside and the putrid odor of an antique store greeted my nose and lungs. It was beyond mere must and funk. It reeked.

As if all that was not enough, the Ancient Ram Inn held a spirit that I had never before or since encountered. It’s called a succubus, and according to the legend, it is a female demon that takes the form of a human woman in order to seduce men, usually through sex. It’s not as cool as it sounds. It’s believed that the succubus steals the life force of the human male in order to regenerate herself. The male version is the incubus (not the band) and it’s said that repeated intercourse with either can result in deterioration of health.

“Old Man Humphries” thoroughly believed that the Ancient Ram Inn was haunted by a succubus who could only stay alive through intercourse with him. To protect himself he wore condoms at night, and used wrappers littered the Inn. He wore them at night to keep the succubus from taking his semen. I knew I was going to have to face this spirit, although I was secretly apprehensive. The last thing I wanted was to get an involuntary erection on camera.

Opening a Portal

At the Ancient Ram Inn, I decided to lure the succubus out with an old pagan ritual. Spirits need an opportunity to be seen and heard, so it’s the responsibility of the paranormal investigator to create the conditions for that to happen. Spirits, no matter how emotional or disturbed, sometimes need the living to open a portal for them to step through, so I like to experiment with local rituals and untested technology to give them the best chance at making their presence known. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and there’s always the possibility that you’ll open a door for an undesirable spirit (and no, I don’t recommend Ouija boards).

Paganism goes back thousands of years in this area, and the Inn itself is believed to be on top of a pagan burial ground where children were ritually sacrificed to their Gods. On one end of the Inn an altar adorned with a goat’s head stood in front of a massive stone gothic hearth, so we took advantage of it and enlisted the help of local pagan witch called “Lady Snake.”

She brought us into a circle and called upon her deities. “I call on the element of air,” she said holding a dagger into the air. “I call upon the elemental of sylph. Please come in to our ritual tonight. I call upon the element of fire and the elemental of salamander.” This might seem ridiculous, but when you’re trying to find answers to some of life’s most elusive questions, it’s necessary to try anything.

To be honest, I was hesitant because I was getting a bad feeling about this place and this ritual. When Lady Snake informed us that she could no longer continue because she feared for her own life, I seriously considered calling it off. I thought we might be going too far.

“I’ve done a part of the ritual for you that specifically states that you will give a gift,” she told us. “And that gift has to be you.” She made a case for us already being past the point of no return.

But Aaron wasn’t having it and countered with the reasons why we should stop. “You know what follows us home,” he said, referring to the spirits that have attached themselves to us and appeared at our own homes.

“So what’s one more spirit following us home?” I pointed out.

“The major motherload of all is what,” Aaron protested. He was right to be concerned, and in the end it’s always good to have a dissenting voice when it comes to something risky like this. He was just looking out for all of us. But we’d come too far to back down. Something was waiting for us to make contact, and no matter how dangerous it was, I was going to see the ritual through.

Lady Snake instructed me to lie down on the floor in front of the fireplace with my legs spread eagle like a sacrifice. A deep growl arose from the altar as I lay supine on the floor. I had never felt more like bait. I felt the distinct feeling of hands moving up my thighs and my breath suddenly became visible. It had not been cold enough all day for our breath to be visible, and even that night the temperature did not drop low enough to make it happen.

“She’s in,” Lady Snake said.

“In what?” I responded. At that moment another loud growl came from the altar. What seemed like a laughable skit earlier now turned deadly serious. You can wave this off as impossible, but the reality is that this pagan witch called upon a spirit, offering me as a gift. Something took it.

Lady Snake became fearful and refused to finish the ritual. She asked a goddess for protection and stopped. “In the next few days something will happen to you, and I wish you luck.”

I didn’t understand the severity of the ritual at the time. After the investigation I had a violent nightmare in my London hotel room. During the dream, a lady with extremely long fingernails was scratching at my face as I tried to fight her off. I woke thinking it was over, but it wasn’t. The next morning Aaron noticed something on my neck and when I inspected it, there were three scratches running down the side of it. It was very strange.

The Ancient Ram Inn isn’t just any old location out in someone’s backyard. This is one of the oldest civilizations known to man and a nearly nine-hundred-year-old building where dark entities have been called upon thousands of times. It was powerful, but in the end it was worth it. That evening we had a lot of paranormal activity at the Inn. We even caught EVPs in British accents (female voices). I don’t ascribe all our activity to the ritual, but I think it certainly opened a door for spirits to wander through.

Indigenous ceremonies like this one help me connect to my target entities. It’s like Neo plugging in to the matrix, and it hyper-sensitizes me to the environment like a sniper. I’m programming my body, which is my most important piece of equipment, with the culture of the people I’m investigating. I continually modify and improve my body by plugging it into the environment. I don’t recommend people do this on their own. This is my life. It’s what I do.

I had a similar experience at Magnolia Lane Plantation. I’d never been to Louisiana, so I was anxious to see if all the tall tales of voodoo and witchcraft had any credibility or were just fanciful pseudoscience. Located in the backwaters of central Louisiana, Magnolia Lane Plantation was constructed in the early nineteenth century and became an operating cotton plantation around 1830. For over one hundred years the Plantation grew assorted crops until the majority of its workers migrated away from the countryside to urban cities. Today the expansive estate is a National Park with twenty-one intact buildings, including eight red brick cabins that once housed slaves and tenant farmhands.

The plantation has a bloody past. An overseer was shot and killed in the front yard of the main house during the Civil War and buried where he fell. In the basement of the house, iron leg shackles still sit in the same place they did when slaves were bound for days at a time for punishment.

Many of Magnolia Lane’s slaves practiced voodoo and placed curses on the plantation’s owners throughout the years. Half of the students of the University of Houston anthropology department refuse to go to the plantation at night because they feel it’s just too creepy. That’s what I like to hear. If there’s a place that people are too frightened to venture into, call me.

Three scratches on my neck
received during a violent nightmare in my London hotel room after luring out a succubus with an old Pagan ritual at the Ancient Ram Inn.

Like the Ancient Ram Inn, this investigation gave me an opportunity to push the boundaries. I feel you have to identify with the spirits you’re after. One of the spirits said to haunt the slave cabins is that of a high voodoo priestess, which made me wonder—if she was in tune with the spirit world when she was alive, would she still be familiar with the boundaries between the two worlds? If she knew how to open the door when she was alive, would she still from the other side?

I decided to indulge in a local voodoo ritual to find out more about this misunderstood culture and hopefully pave the way for active spirit communication the next evening. Under a grove of giant oak trees dripping with Spanish moss, we met with the voodoo queen of Louisiana, Bloody Mary, after the sun went down. It’s probably the only time I’ve worn a white T-shirt and doo-rag, but you do what you have to do when it comes to ghosts.