Giving Up the Ghost (31 page)

Of all the haunted places I’ve read about or encountered, Mansfield is by far the place that people are least skeptical about. Given all the horrible things that have happened here and all the terrible people who have passed in and out of its gates, I think people are just willing to accept that fucked-up paranormalness would naturally happen here, if anywhere. In fact, I don’t ever recall encountering anyone who has stepped forward and said there isn’t some kind of lingering presence here.

If there are ghosts anywhere, this seems like the place to find one.

At this moment, Mansfield isn’t feeling as foreboding as it rightly should be. I’m distracted by another presence. Mansfield is less than an hour away from Canton. The place that holds clues to so many of my unanswered questions. Clues that could turn into answers if I could just muster the courage to go there and seek them out.

My family doesn’t live in Canton anymore. They live about halfway between here and Canton, yet I didn’t even tell them
I was making the seven-hour drive to visit the reformatory. Laura’s family still resides there, or so I’ve heard from some people I’ve spoken to. I’d never been able to figure out how to approach them about Laura, what became of her after she left for college, and to start filling in the voids of my understanding about what happened and why. I’d also heard that Laura’s mother was sick with cancer and did not have long to live, so I knew not only that I had to be in touch with them but that it had to be soon.

While I seem to have found the courage to go traipsing around the country scaring myself looking for ghosts, I had a far harder time forcing myself to go to my hometown, to look up a phone number in the phone book, to call, to reach out in any way.

To me, the grand towers of Mansfield are like giant compass needles pointing toward the ghosts I really need to be chasing, inviting me to clear away the fear between me and what I really need to confront but couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Since I began this journey, I’ve started to feel less like a writer and more like a detective: searching for clues, following leads, and ferreting out details among a mass of twisted and confused memories. Throughout my experience as a journalist, I’ve had to root out truth, uncover facts, and sort through contradictions. I never thought that my most evasive subject would be myself.

It’s a weird feeling, contacting people from your past, asking for their help to remember things—often very uncomfortable or unpleasant things—about, well, about you. Whenever I first spoke to someone, I’d almost feel compelled to let them know, subtly, that I wasn’t crazy. I’d talk about my interests or my job—you know, things that normal people talk about. Once that was established, I’d pretty much lay out my quest,
all the nonsense I’d believed back then, and the fact that everyone involved was either dead, couldn’t remember it, or didn’t want to. Then I’d weakly smile and hope they still thought I wasn’t crazy.

At one point I even tried to find Dr. Blumfield, but to no avail. From the hospital records, I learned his first name: Haywood. You’d think with a name like that—especially for someone who hangs a shingle as a therapist—he’d be easy to find. But outside of those hospital records, I could find no references to him, then or now. Even looking back to the directories from those years, I couldn’t find a telephone listing.

But reaching out to the Pattersons had always seemed absolutely necessary, yet absolutely impossible.

Walking through the decrepit hallways of Mansfield Reformatory provides a distraction, or at least a delay. A spooky, frightening, and kind of fucked-up delay.

“Yeah, you spend enough time in here, you’ll see it all,” Scott says as we make our way through the west cell block. “On any given night we’ll see a full-body apparition, hear voices screaming ‘Get out’ or ‘Stay with us,’ cell doors slam open and shut, and sometimes you’ll get smells, like roses.”

Apparently one of the former wardens’ wives—a wife who was accidentally killed here when a loaded revolver fell off a closet shelf—loved flowers. She’s supposedly a regular presence in the residential areas. Sometimes she is seen, sometimes she is heard singing, sometimes visitors just smell floral perfume or roses.

“Yeah … we’ll make sure you get to have an experience tonight,” he adds. “And who knows, we might be able to keep you from getting raped.”

Despite my mixed feelings about being in Mansfield, being raped was definitely not on my to-do list for the evening.

As nighttime approaches and the rest of the prison explorers assemble on the front steps, Scott and I discuss my plans for the evening. I came alone and plan to explore the prison on my own or tagging along with others. If it gets late in the night and I haven’t had a satisfactory “experience,” then he’ll send out some of his crew to, as he puts it, “stir some stuff up.”

As the orientation tours wrap up, Scott takes a long look out the windows lining the back of the building. The sun is setting.

“Looks like it’s time,” he says as he starts to head down the hallway to kill all the lights. “Here’s hoping you have a very interesting night tonight.”

A few weeks before coming to Mansfield, I finally worked up the courage to do something else completely scary and uncertain: Write a letter.

“Dear Mr. and Mrs. Patterson,” I wrote. “I’m sure my name is one you haven’t heard or thought of in quite some time. I was good friends with your daughter Laura before she passed away.”

Approaching the Pattersons to try to understand more about their deceased daughter troubled me greatly. During her life, I had very little exposure to her family, mostly by her choice. I once asked Laura what her family thought of her taking off several nights a week with someone they hardly knew.

“I think they’re just happy that I have a friend” was her reply.

After learning that someone named Patterson still lived at her old house east of Canton—and had the same phone number I used to call two decades ago to speak with Laura—I talked myself into thinking that writing a letter would be a better approach. It was definitely a better approach for me, but I
rationalized it would be better for them, too. That is, if they answered it.

Several of my friends cautioned me against approaching the Pattersons via letter.

“Letters are too easy to ignore,” my friend David offered. “They’ll get it, read it, think about calling you, and then never do it. Could you blame them?”

David’s advice, along with that of several others I talked to about this: Call. Just pick up the phone and call them. That seemed crazy to me. Imagine sitting at home one night watching TV when the phone rings and some stranger from your dead daughter’s past is on the other end, full of questions. Even if I just called to reintroduce myself to them, it still felt like I’d be showing up out of nowhere to pull a scab off an old and deep wound. Laura’s death wasn’t the only tragedy the Pattersons had experienced, as Laura’s younger brother had shot himself several years after she died. I just couldn’t imagine I would be a welcome complication to a long and twisted series of painful events.

Writing the Pattersons felt strange for a bunch of other reasons, too. Like the fact that I’d never contacted them after Laura’s death. Having learned about Laura’s death in such an awkward manner—and two months after the fact—made talking to anyone about it difficult. At first I’d thought about visiting. Then I thought it was too late to visit and that I should call. Then I thought it was too late to call and I should write a letter. Then twenty years seemed to slip in between my good intentions.

I kept thinking about what their reaction would be to receiving a letter from me now. So I sat down one evening, banged out the letter in ten minutes, and walked it down to the mailbox before I had a chance to change my mind. I figured
it would take a few days to reach them, a few days for them to process it, a few days to decide how to respond, and then we’d see what happened. If I don’t hear anything in a few weeks, I’ll follow up with a phone call, I told myself. “Give it some time” was my latest excuse for doing nothing.

But tonight I don’t have to worry about any of this, I reason. There are other ghosts to chase.

From my informal tally of fellow expeditioners I run across in the hallways during my first few hours in the reformatory, there is one report of footsteps followed by human growling coming from a far room in the east wing’s infirmary, one butt-grabbing on a staircase in the warden’s residence, one sighting of a phantom guard sitting in Central Processing (which turned out to be a napping member of Scott’s crew), and one incident of an explorer smelling garbage, which may have been actual garbage (as compared with paranormal garbage). Other than those, not much beyond a few heebie-jeebies. Nothing is happening in my presence that can’t be easily explained.

Most people are exploring the prison with the groups they’d come in with. A group will wander through a section of the building, someone will think that he hears/feels/sees something and point it out to the rest of the group, then everyone else in the group investigates the area for a few moments before losing interest and moving along. With the exception of a pizza break around 11 P.M., the groups pretty much repeat this process over and over again for the first five hours.

Scott is unimpressed with my lack of interactions with Mansfield’s spirit population, so he tells me to follow him. Seven flights of stairs later we’re in the attic above the west cell block retrieving a digital recorder that Scott placed hoping to capture some EVPs.

“So I left this here on the voice-activation setting using this prototype mike I got last week,” Scott says. “No one was up here, yet it recorded … thirty minutes of … something. Let me show you why I like to record up here.” He uses his flashlight to lead me through a small hallway off to the side of the staircase where he placed the EVP recording. “There used to be three more stories up here. You can see the marks on the wall there that show each level. Right? Now, walk through here.”

We walk through a small opening into a large area that I could tell, even in the dark, goes up much higher than the room we just left. Scott stands still and points his flashlight straight toward the ceiling.

“Now look up,” he says.

I shine my flashlight up to meet my gaze. I see three nooses hanging from the rafters directly above us. We’re standing at the bottom of the old prison gallows. Three old, slowly rotting pieces of rope, moving slightly in the air we kicked up by opening the doors. We just stand there for a few moments, watching them sway.

It’s weird and it’s chilling, but it still doesn’t explain the fact that the EVP recorder captured thirty minutes of clanking noises. Could they have been made by a ghost? Sure. They also could have been made by a raccoon or the building roof cooling off after a warm day or someone who snuck up here to mess with the recording.

As I stand there watching the nooses sway in the light of our flashlights, my mind drifts to Canton again. I can just go over there in the morning, I tell myself. I can just leave here, sleep for a few hours, and then go. I’m not entirely sure what I plan to do once I get there—show up at the Pattersons’ front door, march up to the edge of Lake O’Dea. As compelled as I
feel to do it, it seems like a dramatic and ridiculous thing to do. Arguably, spending the night in Mansfield Reformatory is equally ridiculous, but still. The more time I spend in Mansfield not seeing any ghosts, the more I feel compelled to bring this journey to a close.
I wrote a letter
, I say to myself.
Just give it a bit more time
.

Scott drops me with the “three ladies,” as he keeps referring to them—his best ghost provokers.

Cheryl is kind of the “hype man” of the crew, trying to work up both the spirits and those trying to communicate with them in order to facilitate some kind of something. She’s accompanied by Tiffini, who is carrying around a set of dowsing rods and a combo digital EMF meter/thermometer, and Amy, who has a rigged portable radio known as a “Radio Shack hack” that she’s using to try to capture live EVPs. Amy’s radio has been altered so that it constantly scans frequencies on the AM band. It pauses for half a second on a frequency before jumping ahead to the next. Whenever it briefly stops on a frequency, you hear a short burst of noise. Sometimes it’s static, sometimes it’s the audio of a radio station, and sometimes, the crew believes, you can make out the voice of a nearby ghost.

We head to the first-floor staircase in the administration building. The four of us sit on two benches lining the hallway, with the grand staircase rising up at the end of the hall. Supposedly if you sit in this hallway in the pitch dark, you will see full-body apparitions walk down the stairs from the floor above.

Before turning on any of the equipment, we decide to just hang out on the benches for a bit and watch the stairs. It’s amazing how easily pitch black plays tricks on your eyes. Once
or twice a minute, my mind places a swirl of pale motion at the top of the stairs, momentarily convincing me that I’m seeing something materialize and come toward us.

Amy leans against the wall and turns the EVP radio up to its loudest setting. We all gather around her in a circle, straining to hear the tinny bursts of static and noise.

“Zero-point-zero,” Tiffini calls out. This is her way of saying that the EMF meter is picking up exactly nothing. No electromagnetic anything, spiritual or otherwise.

“Okay, are you listening to me? I want you to answer me, now!” Cheryl commands. She’s trying to “get tough” with the ghosts, figuring that some orders barked by
a woman
will get them worked up. We’d moved up a floor in the administration building, at the end of a windowless hallway connecting the administration building to the prison cell blocks behind them. We came here because the One Who Answers in Threes told us to.

The location is very familiar in a weird way. In
The Shawshank Redemption
, there’s a scene where Tim Robbins’s character locks himself into an office and plays an opera record over the prison PA. The guards have to break a window in order to get in and stop him. As we stand in the dark trying to insult a ghost into communicating with us, we’re standing in the room where that scene was filmed.