Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (5 page)

There’s no question, spirits will draw energy from anything they can get their hands on. How can you argue with what happened at Ohio State Reformatory when we were walking around and had five different pieces of electronic equipment fail and be drained of their power at the same time that we felt physical changes and paranormal activity kicked up.

Higher emotion equals higher energy. When you become angry you sweat, you stammer your words, and your skin gets hot. Now imagine the vortex of emotions when there’s a murder, rape, or traumatic death. All those emotions now become supercharged. It’s like running the RPMs in a race car into the red zone. It doesn’t have to be the last emotions before death either. The extreme loneliness and depression of a broken heart can put your emotions in the red zone also. An inmate at Ohio State Reformatory set himself on fire in his cell. That was a supercharged emotional event like no other. I believe that the atmosphere becomes imprinted with that severe energy and it becomes ripe for residual hauntings. That’s why you hear screams in haunted places from the supercharged emotional state.

It’s important to understand this principle because most paranormal investigations rely on it—in order to manifest itself into sight or sound, a spirit has to pull together all its dissipated energy to make a human form and/or language and many times has to borrow energy from another source to complete the process. On numerous occasions I’ve had freshly charged batteries suddenly die and audio equipment fail unexpectedly just before I captured a piece of paranormal video or audio evidence. This is why using a single video camera is not a good idea, because the spirit could drain your only source of data gathering. It’s also why having fresh batteries on hand is a must in paranormal investigation.

Schools, Reformatories, and Children

For most of us it’s second nature to reach out to those less fortunate than ourselves or the victims of bad circumstances, especially when those victims are children. For millennia, virtuous people with deep pockets and influential connections have built institutions to care for the poor, the destitute, and the abandoned. Hundreds of schools and reformatories have been built to care for the youth of the world, almost always with the best intentions, but rarely immune to bad tidings.

One of the saddest aspects about these types of institutions is that children were frequently dropped off and abandoned by families who could not care for them. Especially during the Great Depression and decades after, families who could not afford to care for their own kids would simply leave them on the doorsteps of the local reformatory to live a life with others who were placed there by the state for their crimes. So you had a situation where violent youths lived alongside abandoned kids who did nothing wrong, other than being born into a family that couldn’t care for them. That’s a recipe for suffering.

Schools and reformatories seem to pop up on everyone’s list of most haunted places, but to be honest, I have a hard time believing that the spirits of children are left behind after death. Kids don’t have the ability to decide whether they go to heaven or hell. They don’t understand what those places are until around ten years old and even then they’re just told that heaven is good and hell is bad. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that spirits of children are still roaming the Earth, because what’s more innocent than a child? What unfinished business would a child have that would keep its soul trapped here?

At the Villisca Axe Murder House, where several children are known to have died, I couldn’t find any evidence to support a child haunting. I might be convinced to believe in the child spirit who still looks for her mother at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum because there is some documented evidence that suggests she actually lived and died there and did not know who her mother was. But then again, I tried very hard to make contact with this child and was unsuccessful. I didn’t have any luck finding a spirit of a child in the basement of the Houghton Mansion either.

Many believe the spirit of a small child was already residing in that basement when the Houghton’s built their property on top of it. Several encounters down there with a mischievous ghost have been reported, from voices to giggling to shirt tugging. There’s even a story of a ball that moved on its own after being set in the middle of the basement.

I sat in the frozen, still basement trying to make contact. Usually there’s some sort of ambient noise during an investigation or even a wisp of air, but this cellar was absolutely still. Not even my rickety metal chair squeaked. I placed a small plastic ball in the middle of the room and asked a few leading questions, hoping it would move or that I’d capture a giggle or shirt tug. Instead I got the sound of a pair of old coke bottles being clanged together, like something out of the end of the movie
The Warriors
. This place was deathly quiet, so the noise was loud enough that it startled me.

I jumped out of my chair and ran toward the ball, but it hadn’t moved. It was exactly where I left it, as still as could be. I looked around for anything that could have caused the noise, but found nothing. There was no glass, no metal, no manmade objects that could have been the source of the noise. I was mystified, and to this day, I have no idea who or what was down there with me, but I don’t think it was the spirit of a kid.

Child hauntings are challenging because they can be a couple of different things. They can either be haunting in the traditional sense or a demon trying to use the sounds of children to confuse us. When you hear about a child haunting, it almost always involves laughter, which evil entities are very good at mocking. I think it’s possible that darker, bullying spirits uses child spirits like bait. But it is also possible that there could be a building with a demon and no child spirits at all. I’ve investigated buildings that echoed of laughter, but had no reported history of kids living or dying in them, which leads me to believe that there aren’t really kids in there.

Trigger Objects

If someone stole my iPod, I would probably be enraged. It’s something that I use every day and an object that I covet because I am so influenced by music. That’s the philosophy behind trigger objects. The ball at the Houghton Mansion was an inanimate trigger object. It’s a simple tool that can be used to elicit paranormal activity through the emotional attachment that the spirit had to the object. It can be anything the spirit once owned or just admired—a vase, a picture, an old football trophy— anything it felt a connection to while it was alive. It’s like putting a treat on the floor for a mouse and hoping he comes out of his hole to investigate it.

Like I said, my iPod is my personal trigger object. I live through my music and use my iPod every day, so I think if I were roaming the Earth as a dispossessed soul and saw someone holding it, I would have an emotional reaction and my spirit would make a noise or even manifest as a mist or apparition. That’s the goal behind using them.

Probably my most successful trigger object was a teddy bear that we used in the Edinburgh Vaults in Scotland. The Vaults are the definition of creepy. Dark, damp, smelly, and musty, they have seen some of the worst humanity has to offer after centuries of the poor and violent living in their bowels. Death was common in the Vaults, and it was one of the most active paranormal places I’ve ever been (and one of my favorites, but that’s a different story).

Many people have seen or heard the spirit of a child in the Vaults, so during our investigation there, I took a teddy bear to the room where the spirit’s voice has been heard often and left it there. I set up a static night vision camera along with an EMF detector and left the room to investigate a different chamber. Minutes later the video camera captured the teddy bear moving with no one in the room. The teddy bear didn’t just move a little, it moved a lot, far too much to be caused by wind or a simple imbalance. It also turned in two ways on two different axes. First it spun slightly to the right and then it tilted backward as if acted on by an outside force on two different sides. Could it have been the spirit of a child trying to pick it up to play with it?

Besides the object’s movement, there were other pieces of evidence to bolster the belief that this was paranormal. At the exact same moment that it moved, a high-pitched voice was captured in the room on the camera’s audio and the EMF detector spiked. So one electronic device and a meter captured evidence at the same time. It was one of the best moments of paranormal evidence captured on three different electronic devices at the same time. Those are the moments paranormal investigators live for, and it happened because of a trigger object.

Was it a child? I don’t know. I can’t say whether it was a kid trying to pick up a toy or an adult trying to kick it away. Maybe I don’t want to accept that kids could be spirits because the thought of a deceased child reaching out to play with a toy stirs a personal sadness in me. That’s one kid who never got a chance to be a kid. He never grew to experience life, to feel the uncertainty of casting himself out into the world, the immense joy of a first date, and the comfort of close friends being there when things go bad. Accepting this notion also means they’ve experienced the pain of death, which I have a hard time stomaching. That sadness can be just as life altering as the violent demons that have attacked me.

Another form of trigger object (and one that is more effective) is the human being. It stands to reason that if a ghost has an emotional attachment to an object and can be goaded into manifesting when it sees or hears that object, then contact with a person it knew or cared for in life will cause the same reaction. The presence of a human can be just as effective as an inanimate object and sometimes even more so. Imagine you have died and find yourself unable to leave the house you lived in for ten years. Suddenly, you see your now grown-up daughter walking past the exact spot where you died. You would have a severe emotional reaction and would probably gather enough energy to be seen or heard. That’s the goal of using humans as trigger objects.

Of course the drawback is the risk to the person involved. In the scenario above, a woman who feels the presence of her deceased dad could fall into emotional trauma of her own, which is the last thing I want. They could also be attacked by the spirit with whom you’re trying to make contact if it’s not who or what you thought it was.

While investigating the Villisca Axe Murder House in Iowa, I spent time with some people who had lived there when they were young and who had seen firsthand the apparitions of the children who were murdered within its walls. Just being back in the house shook them to their core and it was clear that the emotional state of those former residents was too fragile to use them as human trigger objects, so I never even considered it.

Some spirits have a connection to all people in general instead of one particular person. I’ve encountered spirits who like to grope women and others who like to be in the company of men. For these ghosts, it’s not one specific person like a mother or brother that causes them to manifest, but any person who ventures into their sphere. These types of spirits are a little easier to bring out into the open because they show a desire to make contact.

One of my more infamous encounters with a human trigger object was during an investigation at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. We took a woman named Sarah who volunteered at the prison and sent her alone into one of the darkest cellblocks of the building where many tales of men being attacked and females being groped had been reported. My reasoning was simple—the one thing men miss the most while incarcerated are women, so it made sense that the former inmates would react to her. Every time I use a female as a trigger object in a place like this, I get a response, and with so many stories of women having personal experiences in this prison, it made sense that a lonely female would incite a response. I was right.

Before she even left our side, Sarah felt breathing on the back of her neck and captured two EVPs with a digital recorder in her hands. One was of heavy breathing while the other one said, “Run Sarah.” Looking back on it, I believe this was a warning from a responsible spirit who knew what would happen to her if she stayed too long in the prison alone.

Sarah then walked through the cellblock without us. I commended her for her courage and willingness to help our cause, but I was also a little concerned for her safety. Sarah was like a tasty minnow blindly swimming through a pool of sharks. Sooner or later one (or more) of them would bite.

“Was that you that brushed the back of my hair?” she asked strolling by herself down the rows of rusty and worn cells while I waited with Nick and Aaron about thirty feet away.

“Sorry, Sarah. Sorry,” came a disembodied response that we discovered on her digital recorder later. Minutes after that, as Aaron was experiencing his own paranormal activity, we heard Sarah yelling for help. “Could someone please come down here?” her voice echoed off the walls with the distinct ring of suppressed fear. We ran to her.