Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (24 page)

Josie remembers the day of Eileen’s surgery perfectly, even nearly two decades later. It was a bitter autumn day in New England. As she opened the door to her house, leaves began to swirl around her, although she hadn’t noticed any wind as she walked from her car to the house. The sounds of the outside world faded away and she got an eerie feeling. Like a movie on pause, time stopped. Then the phone rang inside the house. “And I just knew it,” Josie said. Eileen had died of an asthma attack in the recovery room.

Josie does not like to speak ill of the dead, but she said Eileen was never a friendly or warm woman. Most people who knew her thought she was a sad person, even before the drinking became an all-consuming part of her life. Josie thinks about this when she tells what happens next, unsure if the sign her mother-in-law left behind was to bring peace to people or to let everyone know what she gave up for her son.

That day, Josie and Frank went to her house. Josie was the first to notice the picture of Eileen and her husband from their 25th wedding anniversary, where a halo had formed around Eileen’s face. She thought it was just coincidence, laughed to herself, and tried to forget about it.

As the funeral approached, the picture grew darker. Josie kept returning to the picture to see if it had changed. Each time she did, it was darker.

“I pointed it out to Frank and he started to cry. He said it wasn’t there before, and the picture was not that old. I told him it had changed, and he just slowly nodded his head at me. I don’t think he really wanted to accept it.”

In the weeks following the funeral, they washed the frame and cleaned the picture, but it continued to get darker until it became a bright orange-yellow. At the same time, Frank went into remission without chemo or any further treatment.

Since 1982, Frank has lived cancer-free and with no serious health problems. He keeps the picture of his mother displayed as a sign of what she sacrificed for him.

Josie herself is now battling cancer, made even more dangerous by other health complications she has lived with for years. She is not sure if there is someone like Eileen in her life who would trade places with her when her time comes, but she finds comfort knowing her mother-in-law was able to make contact.

“There is definitely something out there after we die. Whenever I get sad or scared, I think about that picture. It used to scare me, but now it makes me feel hope.”

Masking Evil

“Evil comes to all us men of imagination, wearing as its mask all the virtues.”
—Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats

For as long as man has been conscious of his own image, he’s also felt the need to conceal it. Whether for purposes of entertainment, concealment, or reverence, masks have been used whenever there was a need to express something that the actual visage could not. As an expression frozen in time, a mask provides power and force that no mere face can equal. Sometimes that force is evil, and can remain attached to the mask long after whatever dark ceremony forged it has subsided from memory.

In November 2007, Jeannette, a longtime paranormal investigator and demonologist, and her family moved into their dream home in an upscale country club gated community in Palm Springs, California. They moved there to be closer to Jeannette’s brother, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Even though the circumstances for the move were less than ideal, the house was perfect.

For a little while, anyway.

As a housewarming gift to herself, Jeannette purchased two Haitian masks from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. They were large and heavy, beautifully carved of solid mahogany, and Jeannette adored them. She had long been a collector of masks from around the world, and now that she had her perfect home, these masks would be the centerpiece of it and of her collection.

The room where the masks took center stage.

The masks that caused much turmoil for the family.

But right from the beginning, something wasn’t right about these masks—even before they’d been removed from their original shipping crates. Jeannette’s husband, Bob, packed his truck with boxes to move to the new place, including the box containing the masks. While driving on the freeway, the truck began to accelerate on its own. No matter what he tried, Bob couldn’t slow it down; it was as if the brakes were disconnected and the truck just kept going faster and faster, even shifting into neutral. With some quick thinking, Bob drove up a steep exit ramp and jammed the emergency brake as hard as he could, stopping the truck.

“He was quite shaken up by the incident,” Jeannette said. “He had the truck checked out a few days later, and the mechanic found no problems with it.”

Once the masks were unpacked in the new house, Jeannette gave them a wall of their own. She hung them in the dining room, the biggest and most central room of the house. That didn’t sit well with her then 12-year-old son, who never liked the masks and didn’t want to see them hanging on any wall, let alone one he’d have to look at every day.

The family’s dog was well trained and behaved, yet once the masks were hung on the wall, she refused to cross the dining room. It was a strange behavior she had never exhibited before, and hasn’t since. The family had to carry or push her across the floor just to get her from one side of the room to the other.

“I’m still not sure if she was afraid of those masks, or if she could just sense or hear what we couldn’t,” Jeannette said.

It wasn’t long before strange phenomena started occurring. At first, Jeannette didn’t think anything of it—paranormal activity always seemed to find her family, no matter where they lived. But soon, the weird things taking place went beyond just regular ghostly goings-on.

One day Bob was at work and Jeannette and her son were in the backyard playing on their trampoline. When they came back into the house, they found broken glass strewn across the floor, making a nearly 70-foot path from the back door to the kitchen counter, where a heavy drinking glass had originally been placed. Though not easily breakable, the heavy glass had shattered, its path of shards trailing around two corners. Jeannette started cleaning up the mess, and when she got close to the front door, she noticed a dead bird sprawled on the floor in the entranceway—even though the entire house was locked, except for the back door, and the security system was armed. There was no way the bird could have made it into the house without anyone knowing.

A couple of months later, Jeannette’s oldest son came home from his third deployment in Iraq, bringing along a large group of friends and fellow soldiers who were going to spend their 30-day leave participating in paintball tournaments in the area. They were all hanging around the dining room and kitchen area when another one of the heavy drinking glasses, sitting on the dining room table, exploded. It broke with such force that the shards covered the entire 25-foot-by-30-foot dining room floor. It freaked out everyone in the house.

“These were experienced combat soldiers, and they all slept together on the living room floor that night or huddled in pairs,” Jeannette said. “And they slept with all the lights on.”

Shattering glass was only the beginning as the phenomena began to escalate. Soon, a loud banging started rattling the walls, first in the kitchen and then on the inside and outside of her youngest son’s bedroom. The activity took a turn for the worse when the youngest son was awakened by the feeling of being slapped by unseen hands at the same time the banging was taking place. One time, he was hit with such force and from such an odd angle that red, upside down finger marks appeared on his forehead.

“It looked like he had been slapped hard by someone or something very tall,” Jeannette said.

When the family realized the bangs were occurring with some regularity, Jeannette decided to time them. For months, they happened every day at 10:19 a.m. One morning, Jeannette decided to leave a digital audio recorder running on the kitchen counter while she went to get her son from school. Nobody was in the house, but when she played the recording back, she was shocked to not only hear the loud banging, but also unintelligible screams as well. Jeannette sent the audio clips to others in the paranormal field, and all agreed it was unlike anything they’d ever heard.

Not long after, Bob took a job out of state, leaving Jeannette and her youngest son alone in the house. Even with all the weird commotions going on, she wanted to stay there to remain close to her dying brother.

After visiting her brother one evening, Jeannette and her son came home to find the dining room door open and the dog—who always greeted them at the door—missing. Food from the cupboards and refrigerator was strewn all about the floor, creating a path that led to the two Haitian masks. The house was large and they were afraid to look for an intruder on their own, so Jeannette called 911 while her son closed the back door. The police arrived and searched the house and garage thoroughly. Everything was secured from the inside and showed no signs of entry or any type of disturbance. Nothing was missing. The police theorized that the intruder had entered the house, was scared by the dog, and then ran out the back door with the dog chasing behind him.

As they stood in the kitchen discussing the break-in, they heard a noise in the garage. They found the dog there—though she had not been in the garage earlier when the police checked it, and the doors were still secured from the inside. It was as if the dog had disappeared and then reappeared from thin air.

“The police had no explanation for where the dog had come from, and neither did we. We still don’t know to this day,” Jeanette said. “But after that, we’d always hear voices and boxes moving in the garage, yet every time, it was empty and secured from the inside.”

The phenomena kept intensifying—the banging, the slapping of her son, the breaking glass. More dead birds were found inside and outside the house, including one inexplicably stuffed with straw. It finally reached the point where Jeanette had to call a good friend, paranormal investigator John Zaffis. John, who began his career investigating claims of the unexplained and the demonic alongside his legendary aunt and uncle, investigators and demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, is widely considered the world’s foremost authority on haunted, possessed, and cursed objects. He even operates his own paranormal museum at his Connecticut home, John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal, with thousands of such items on display.

Zaffis felt that because of the age of Jeannette’s son and the family’s history with the paranormal, they might be the victim of a poltergeist. Poltergeist means “noisy ghost” in German, but in actuality, the prevailing theory is that they’re not the actual ghosts of deceased persons. Instead, they’re either a mischievous spirit energy that exists solely to plague people or—a newer theory—are actually caused through unconscious mental abilities manifesting in a prepubescent child. When Jeannette mentioned the correlation between the activity and the arrival of the Haitian masks, Zaffis suggested she cover them for a while to see if anything changed.

“In hindsight, I should have taken them down, but I just covered them with an Army Ranger flag instead,” Jeannette said.

Once the masks were covered, the activity did subside. When a friend of her youngest son died in a freak accident not long after, the family decided it would be best if her son went to stay with his older brother in Kansas for a while. That left Jeannette home alone in the house, along with the family dog and a new puppy they brought home to help ease the young boy’s pain over the death of his friend.

“Once my son was safely out of the house, it didn’t take long before the investigator in me came out,” Jeannette said. “I invited another investigator from the East Coast to spend the summer in my home to help me document the activity.”

It only took three nights before that investigator became just as terrified as Jeannette’s family.

On that third night, the investigator felt something kicking the bed and awoke to see a shadow person standing there, blocking the light. The next morning the investigator told Jeannette it was “the most frightening experience” of their life. After that, the two slept on opposite sides of the house. The activity continued, along with the addition of music and voices in the dining room at night. The sounds would stop whenever someone entered the room, but then start again once the dining room was empty.