Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (35 page)

“Did she say anything to you today?”

It was like the kid had multiple personalities. In a squeaky voice, Coley said, “I don’t want to die in the road.” Then, in a deep voice, she said some things we couldn’t make out. Finally, in a third singsong voice, she added, “I want to die.”

The look on Katrina’s face is priceless. It was such a strange moment the producers thought about investigating that angle, centering the episode on a witch named Deppy Zoe. It made sense that Coley would be a little weirded out after hearing her mom discuss their lost dogs. This little girl had lost two pets in a violent way in a short time. That’d be tough for an adult, let alone a toddler, to process.

Melanie told Katrina that after the dogs died, she woke up in the house once and felt a presence. But she’d had no experiences beyond that. Sybil’s son didn’t want to talk to us. He hadn’t had any experiences and wanted to let it be.

With the list Eilfie put together, we were able to make calls to several previous owners. Two got back to us. The first was Gail Kass, who lived there from 1984 to1986 with her husband, Ryan. They’d also had experiences. At night, they heard choral music in the woods, people singing, but no songs they recognized. Gail felt that the strangest thing that happened was that
her
dog died while they were away on vacation. Apparently, she received a call from her house sitter, who didn’t know how it happened. She said that suddenly the dog went crazy. The dog just ran out and bam! Gail said she felt it was the weirdest thing, confirming what we’d seen for ourselves, that people rarely drove on the road.

Next I spoke to Erik and Rhonda, who lived there from 1986 to 1988. They said they’d never heard any rumors or experienced anything strange on the property, at least nothing they considered strange, except for the fact that their dog had an aversion to the second floor, just like Lucy.

“She would sit at the base of the stairs while we were up there, and whine the whole time,” Rhonda said.

That was already a wild coincidence, if it was just a coincidence. Not knowing the history of the house, they didn’t mention it until I asked, but that dog had
also
been hit by a car and died. By the end of the day, I learned there’d been a total of
four
dogs living at the property that had been hit by cars on that normally desolate road.

And things were about to get even stranger.

Chip Coffey, who was with us regularly now, was there for our psychic walk-through. Now that we’d had a chance to review our procedures, we were even more cautious about making sure our psychics didn’t know anything about the case beforehand. When he wasn’t shooting, the producers kept Chip locked in a van. And this is one episode where Chip really proves himself.

Though she hadn’t fully unpacked, Sybil had already decorated with a lot of small porcelain knickknacks in the house—angels, clowns, and so on. They were all different types, and all over the place. Chip walked into the house and headed to the cupboard area. There, not in the open and not a huge piece, was a small porcelain necklace with a two-inch picture of Lucy.

Chip grabbed it. “There’s something about this dog . . .”

That shocked me. It was a huge leap.

He also felt drawn upstairs, where he asked about a female with an “M” name, Margaret. It struck him so powerfully that he made sure I wrote it down. Margaret. He picked up on more, a live dog and a dead dog, and then wondered if there was anything ritualistic going on.

“There’s something buried on the property,” he said, and started pointing outside.

He was hitting so well that I decided to see if he could pinpoint the area. We went outside and I followed him through the woods near the property. Chip didn’t find anything, but on our way back, he stopped short.

“Margaret! Margaret!” he yelled.

He pointed to a gravestone with the name “Margaret” carved on it. It was right off the backyard, barely into the woods. There was no cemetery, nothing else, just one tombstone. I’d seen the stone itself before and hadn’t thought anything of it. It looked like a rock. You’d have to be within a few feet to notice the writing. There was no last name, just Margaret.

With no Margaret listed among the owners, Eilfie went back to the library for more research. Meanwhile Chip met with Sybil and Lucy to ask about the ritualistic aspect he’d sensed. Apparently neighbors had told Sybil that in the sixties an older woman lived in the house. She was supposedly a very mean person, and hung out with a strange man who used to kill dogs.

That provided the rudiments of a theory. If the area had been the site of ritual killings, because of her friend’s dabbling in the occult, it’s possible Sybil’s presence escalated the activity.

Sybil had already been in touch with Lorraine, so the case provided a nice opportunity to work with her again. Like Chip, Lorraine was dead-on in what she sensed in the house. She felt the presence of an older woman, then headed straight up to the second floor, and sensed something she described as horrible.

“I feel like I’m being choked. I feel that hurt in my throat. Who would want to live in this house? I couldn’t live in here. I wouldn’t even want one of my animals in here,” she said. Under the circumstances, it was quite surprising to hear her mention animals.

As I mentioned, Sybil had originally spoken with another psychic who’d sensed similar things. According to Sybil, as they stood next to the house, the psychic pointed up at the window to the tiny room where most of our experiences took place and felt something there. She also saw a man who seemed malevolent. So here we had three psychics who had no contact with each other that I knew of getting basically the same information. It was
incredibly
unusual.

Meanwhile, for the second time, Eilfie’s research paid off. She’d managed to track down a neighbor, Fern, who’d grown up in the area. Fern was able to confirm some of the rumors about the property. When she was ten years old, an older woman
had
lived there.

“She had a male friend who used to ride on a bicycle, and he killed our dog,” Fern said.

That was the
fifth
dead dog we’d heard about connected with the property. Apparently he had a stick with a nail on the end that he’d use for killing dogs. Fern also knew the first name of the woman, Margaret. At this point, I have to admit, I was pretty damn impressed with Chip and Lorraine.

We never did get Margaret’s last name. She may have rented the house, or it could have been in her husband’s name, and she inherited it when he died. This was a very, very small town, and try as we might, we couldn’t find more information about these people—no family, no descendants, nothing.

We were able to determine that the stone wasn’t a grave site. I’m not clear on the details, but someone close to Sybil had a wife, who, by a surprisingly eerie coincidence, was also named Margaret. When she died, they had the tombstone made, ended up not using it, and left it there.

With all this data feeding the already heavy atmosphere, we went into Dead Time. Half of the team stayed by the tombstone while Chip and I were stationed on the second floor of the house. Early on, Chip sensed a spirit at the bottom of the steps, but couldn’t confirm who it might be. When he asked whatever might be present to communicate, we heard a tap and a barking dog. I did hear dogs in the neighborhood once in a while, so that was likely yet another coincidence, but then a motion detector went off on the second floor. We had a camera synced with it this time, but the photos didn’t catch anything.

We knew something was going on, but coulnd’t figure out what. To try to get more information, Chip offered to try channeling. Unlike a possession, where the host is unwilling, when channeling, a psychic invites the spirit to use their body to communicate. We hadn’t done anything like that previously on the show, and I’m always dubious about claims of mystic abilities. It seems possible, but especially with channeling, you have to trust the medium. I did trust Chip, so I opted to give it a shot.

After about ten minutes of attempting to channel, Chip’s demeanor changed. He looked very frightened and actually started weeping. It seemed to me as if he was genuinely coming under the influence of another personality. Whether that personality was imaginary or not, I don’t know.

When I asked if it was human or a demon, Chip couldn’t speak. He was only able to shake his head, “No.”

Aside from apparently being mute, while in the trance Chip didn’t know how to use his hands. He kept them balled up like paws. He later said that sometimes when human spirits enter a medium, they don’t quite remember how to use a human body. It’s possible, though, that he was channeling the spirit of one of the dead dogs. In the end, it was extremely interesting, but didn’t provide any additional information.

In all our cases, I try to put together a complete picture of what’s going on. Here, again and again, it felt as if we were on the edge of something, but we couldn’t quite get to what we needed to know.

Frustrated, while Chip was in the trance, I asked the spirit to pull all its energy together and give us some definite sign or clue about what was going on. As if in response, there was a
loud
bang to my right.

It wasn’t a rustling, a scratching, or a thump. It was a banging, so loud it made us all jump.

I was
sure
the recorders had captured it, but in a big disappointment, on playback, the sound was barely audible. Whatever it was, it was loud enough to take Chip out of his trance.

What the episode also didn’t show was that I investigated the sound. It was so loud, so intense, that I ran over to the right side of the room with a flashlight to see what had moved. Even though I was in the room with Chip and a camera guy, I suddenly felt a prickling feeling up my spine. I felt like something was eyeing me, like a predator watching its prey.

In the episode, the time crunching makes it seems as if right after leaving his trance Chip led us to a small pile of rocks, but the full story is much more interesting.

When we walked through the woods earlier, I’d spotted not one, but several piles of rocks. They were in various places, and each pile looked as if it were marking something. Eilfie thought they might be trail markers or fire pits that had been filled in, but they didn’t look like either. Most were stacked about four feet high.

One dog had been buried on the property, but we knew the location, and the stone piles didn’t match. Two of the other dogs died at the vet and weren’t buried on or near the property. I didn’t know what to make of the stone piles, but it looked like something was going on. Early on I had Josh and Serg start digging. By this time, they’d dug up two pits, but found nothing. The third they started on was different from the others. It was smaller, but more distinctly piled.

After they’d been at it awhile, they called and said, “Ryan, I think we might have found something.”

“You found something? Are you sure?”

I was floored. That was big news. We dug for things at least four times each in our second and third seasons and never found a thing. I’ve had people with sophisticated ground-scanning equipment
tell
us we’d find something in a certain spot, but we came up with nothing. Here, we go to Maine in the woods with a couple of shovels and find something.

I went over to them immediately and looked into the bottom of the hole. In it lay a blue plastic tarp, half covered in dirt, bundled up, and tied with rope. Some thick tree roots had grown over it, and to get to it, Josh and Serg had to cut them away.

I decided to pull it out and have a closer look. We had masks on as a precaution, and as we started moving it, the tarp shifted and an awful smell came out. Even with our masks on we had to back away. At that point we knew we had a dead body.

We were really freaked. What on earth was it? Another dead dog? A dead baby?

My heart was racing as we dragged the tarp up and out of the hole.

“Oh, God,” I said.

“Oh God, doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Chip said.

Once we opened it up and saw the corpse inisde, it was obvious it was a dog. It looked like a medium-sized breed, black or dark brown. As far as I could tell it didn’t have a head; it was decapitated. The body was also very moist, fresh. It’s possible the plastic tarp kept it preserved, but the thick roots growing over it meant it’d been buried a long time. Of the dead dogs we knew about, three were accounted for, and the others had died nearly twenty years ago. That’s a long time for a body to still look fresh. I wanted to get a vet to examine it, but we couldn’t find anybody available.

After regrouping back at the house, Lorraine told me that the “freshness” of the body, the lack of decomposition, was characteristic of ritual slayings. She and her late husband, Ed Warren, having done many occult cases, theorized that in these sacrifices the supernatural component slows down the decomposition, as if to defy, or mock, the natural order.

Was this another animal victim of Margaret and her dog-killing boyfriend? There was no way to know. The mystery of this place just kept getting deeper.

That night, there was one major experience that didn’t make it into the episode, basically because no one was awake for it except me. As usual, the team slept at the house that night. After the film crew took the lights and left, the desolation and the dark atmosphere really sank in. I remember thinking that staying might end up being something I’d regret.