Ghost Hunting (18 page)

ROLLING HILLS ASYLUM JULY 2005

T
he Rolling Hills Asylum in Batavia, New York, has been the site of misery, insanity, and the deaths of more than a thousand inmates over the course of its 180-year history. It was a prime place for a haunting if we at T.A.P.S. had ever heard of one.

We were invited to investigate Rolling Hills by Lori Carlson, its owner. But the building had had a tortured history long before she got involved with it. It opened its doors in 1827, offering refuge to the unfortunates of Genesee County, New York. Its original residents included orphans, transients, unwed mothers—anyone who couldn’t support and care for himself, including the insane.

New York State had a law back then that if people were homeless, they were automatically wards of the state. As a result, they were taken off the street and thrown into asylums. There, they were given the chance to grow their food on the hundreds of surrounding acres owned by the county.

However, if the legends can be believed, there were sinister occurrences within the brick walls of the asylum. The people in charge of the place practiced devil worship and black witchcraft, secretly tortured their innocent charges, and made sacrifices of human infants.

By the 1950s, the building had been turned into a nursing home, and it remained that way for about twenty years. Then its residents were moved to a new facility nearby, and Rolling Hills fell into disuse. For two decades it sat empty. Then it was refurbished and reopened as Carriage Village, a collection of small shops. It became Rolling Hills Country Mall in January 2003, a far cry from a house of madness and despair.

But the grimmest features of the place remained intact over the years—for instance, the army of grass-covered mounds that still surrounds it. These are unmarked graves, filled with the bodies of a thousand John and Jane Does.

Inside the building, you can still see the morgue where the bodies were examined prior to burial. Rolling Hills slaughtered its own animals, so it had a large meat locker. When the morgue was full, the administrators used the locker to store additional corpses—or so the story goes.

When we arrived at the place, we were a team of six that included Grant, me, Dustin, Paula Donovan, Steve, and Dave. Carlson and her manager, Jim Swat, came out to welcome us. They were eager to share the list of claims people had made, which included ghostly voices, doors opening and closing on their own, and chairs moving about.

People had smelled strange smells, felt their hair tugged, and heard noises where there shouldn’t have been any. And then there were the apparitions. One person had glimpsed a couple of kids walking through the place. Another had seen a woman being carried by her elbows.

The asylum had had three floors. The first was where its offices had been located. The second was where its doctors had practiced electroshock therapy. On the third floor, we were introduced to a room where teenagers broke in from time to time and performed black magic rituals like those in the old Rolling Hills stories. We’re talking candles, weird paintings of cats, bats and skulls on the walls, and pentagrams.

For me, this was something of a homecoming. I had spent the first part of my life about half an hour from Batavia, in a town called Canandaigua. Fortunately, Rolling Hills was nothing like the place where I had grown up.

I was reminded of that as we were setting up our equipment and we spotted a car way off in the distance. It was just sitting there with its lights on, as if watching us and waiting for us to leave, even though our hosts had kept our investigation a secret.

We asked them if they knew anything about the car, and they said they didn’t, so we drove over there to see what was going on. Before we could get there, the car sped away. To this day, we don’t know who was in it or what he wanted.

In any case, we had an investigation to carry out. Steve and Donna began their part in the basement, where there was a strong and unmistakable smell of feces. Anybody who thinks ghost hunting is a glamorous deal should spend a few minutes down there. As it was, Steve and Donna could barely wait to escape.

Dustin and Dave took the second floor. They weren’t getting anything unusual on their instruments, which was leading them to believe that the claims about the place were exaggerated—until Dustin felt something grab his ear.

It wasn’t a light brush, either. Not the way he described it to us later. It was a firm, two-fingered tug.

At that point, Grant and I were in the furnace room carrying out a thermal scan. Let me say this without reservation: we love our thermal-imaging device. It opens up ways of looking at the paranormal that we never had access to before.

Unfortunately, we weren’t picking up anything with the thermal imager. If there’s nothing there, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your equipment is. Then, just like Dustin, I had an experience.

It wasn’t a tug on the ear, though. It was more ominous. The furnace door, a metal monstrosity about two inches thick, suddenly swung closed on me.

My first thought was that Grant had closed it on me as a joke, but he denied it. Unsure about what to make of the incident, I pushed the door open. This time, it swung closed even harder, pinning me for a moment.

Okay, I thought, something’s going on here. Shoving the door off me again, I took a moment to examine it. As far as I could tell, there was no reason it should have swung anywhere. I tried kicking it, but it didn’t move an inch. And yet it had swung closed with no apparent provocation.

Suddenly, it swung open again. And as it did, I heard a hissing sound. The next thing I knew, Grant and I were drowning in a river of flapping bat wings, and I did the one thing no self-respecting ghost hunter should ever do—I yelled.

Evil person that I am, the bats gave me an idea. A few minutes later, we found Dave and Dustin. With a straight face, I sent them down to the basement—where, like us, they were swarmed over by a wave of bats. Except in their case it was worse, since Dustin is very particular about his hair. The thought of bats pulling at it made him freak a little.

And we weren’t done yet. After all, Steve and Donna hadn’t gotten the bat treatment yet. Before long, we heard their yells of surprise and disgust. Mission accomplished, I thought gleefully. In fact they had to brave the bats twice, because they forgot to take their cameras with them when they went running the first time.

We sure had fun that night. But the next day, when we went over our recordings in a nearby Holiday Inn, we were disappointed—both for ourselves and for the owner of Rolling Hills. We couldn’t find a shred of evidence to prove the place was haunted.

On the other hand, Dustin had felt a tug on his ear and I had had a furnace door close on me, so there is some sort of activity there. We just weren’t lucky enough to document it.

THE WINCHESTER MYSTERY JULY 2005

T
he Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, was about as weird a place as you can imagine. But then, it hadn’t been built according to any plan. For thirty-eight years, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, workmen simply added rooms onto what was originally a six-room farmhouse, making it up as they went along.

You see, a psychic back East had told Sarah “Daisy” Winchester that her husband and daughter had been killed by the ghosts of all the Native Americans who had fallen victim to the Winchester rifle, the most famous weapon in the Old West. If Daisy herself didn’t want to perish, she had to build a house out West and keep on building. Never mind that it didn’t make sense. Daisy fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Construction stopped when Daisy died of natural causes in 1922 at the age of eighty-three, but not before her house had grown to include 160 rooms. Forty of them were bedrooms. The place also boasted ten thousand windows, forty-seven fireplaces, and forty staircases, most of which led nowhere. Some doors led nowhere as well. As I said, the workers made it up as they went along.

Before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Daisy slept in the room still known as the Daisy Bedroom. However, after the quake made part of the structure unstable, she boarded up the Daisy room and thirty others.

The house still exhibits its owner’s preoccupation with protecting herself from the malevolence of evil spirits. Spiderweb designs, which she considered good luck, show up over and over again. The same goes for the number thirteen. A chandelier that originally had twelve candle holders was changed so it could hold thirteen candles instead. Clothes hooks around the mansion are also arranged in multiples of thirteen. A stained-glass window boasts thirteen colored stones—and so on.

Over the years since Sarah Winchester’s death, all kinds of paranormal activity had been reported in the house. That was why it was on the Top Ten list of sites Grant and I wanted to investigate. You can imagine our excitement when we got a call from Donna saying that we had been asked to go out to San Jose and scour the Mystery House for ghosts.

Grant and I put together a team that included Andy, Steve, Donna, and Dave Tango to make the long drive across country. When we arrived, we were greeted by Cheryl Hamilton, the mansion’s marketing coordinator. The first thing she showed us was an array of glass showcases full of Winchester rifles, the weapon of choice in the Old West, from the 1866 model known as Yellow Boy for its brass receiver to the 1892 carbine that John Wayne carried around in his films.

Next, Hamilton took us to the Daisy Bedroom, where guests had felt drastic temperature changes—presumably because Daisy’s ghost still inhabited the place. She also showed us the Goofy Staircase, a hundred-foot-long configuration of forty-four steps that took seven turns to go up a total of seven feet.

The Grand Ballroom was big and elegant, its intricately designed parquet floors so well preserved that we had to take off our shoes to walk on it. People in the house had reportedly heard the ballroom’s organ playing when there was no one there. On another occasion, a team of workers in one of the basements (the mansion has two!) had spotted a man standing by the boiler dressed in coveralls. When they tried to get a closer look at him, he disappeared.

Because of the way the Mystery House was built, not to mention its sheer size, it was a difficult and stressful setup. Steve got cranky about the fact that Dave and Donna weren’t as familiar with the equipment as he was. Then we learned that we would lose power to our instruments as soon as we turned off the lights.

Despite it all, Steve muddled through. He coolly and methodically rerouted our cables to the parts of the house beyond the scope of our investigation, where the power would stay on. Before too long, we were able to go dark and begin ghost hunting.

As one of us commented, it was like walking through Mrs. Winchester’s mind. A bizarre place, no question about it. And yet, it was more fun than almost anything else I can think of.

Grant and I started our investigation in the basement, where people had heard odd banging sounds. We heard them as well. However, as plumbers, we had heard such noises before. More than likely, they were the result of a plumbing problem rather than a haunting problem.

Steve and Dave heard banging also, except they were exploring the ballroom. They also ran into a phantom smell there—in other words, one that couldn’t be explained. The theory is that spirits express themselves through these smells, though it’s seldom easy to figure out what they’re saying.

Outside of these experiences, it turned out to be a fairly uneventful investigation. However, we still had our analysis to look forward to. Packing up our equipment, we thanked Cheryl Hamilton and said we would be back.

In this instance, it wasn’t just the usual suspects—Andy, Steve, and Dave—going over the data. Donna, who wanted to learn another facet of what we did, pitched in as well. After a while, her head was spinning. It was harder than she had ever imagined.

She gave Steve and the others a lot of credit. But then, that kind of work isn’t for everyone. You’ve got to be a little crazy to spend your entire day in a hotel room staring at a video monitor.

Unfortunately, the team failed to turn up a single piece of verifiable evidence. At that point, it was up to Grant and me to give Cheryl Hamilton the news that we hadn’t found anything conclusive. She took the information very much in stride.

We were relieved. After all, you never know how that’s going to go. And with only twenty percent of our cases indicating paranormal activity, we end up giving out that kind of report a lot.

Anyway, the Winchester Mystery House was certainly mysterious. It’s not hard to see why people think it’s haunted.