Our Ghostly Guests Weblog

I actually wanted to spend one more night in the house now that everything we want is out of there. I would have been happy to spend one more day there, since the activity wasn’t limited to the night hours.

I wanted to do more EVP experiments, and see what sort of things would happen, especially down in the basement.

I put out a text message to virtually everyone who has ever spent time in the house, and had an “experience,” inviting them to join me. The only person who agreed (reluctantly) was Cheryl. No one else.

Doing an investigation by oneself is bad protocol, since there are no witnesses as to any activity that may occur, so I decided against staying there by myself. Although, even as I write this, I’m still tempted!

Maybe it’s just better to leave well enough alone.

I don’t know. I still might, with or without someone there with me.

If I do, I’ll let you know what happens.

What about you? Care to join me?

It’s official; as of today Cheryl and I no longer live in the house. We’ve moved into another home and it’s so refreshing. The energy is so much different in a number of ways.

Albert and Prince are so much happier in our new home. To give you an idea as to what I mean, the move has taken place over a series of days. Each time I’ve gone there Prince would typically be with me, and he would usually want to leave within minutes of getting to the house. More than once he would refuse to follow me down into the basement.

Today, he was with Cheryl and me when we went to move the last of the things that we wanted to take and Cheryl went to go get us some drinks. After she left I went down into the basement and since Prince did not follow me down when I got to the bottom of the stairs I turned around to see what he was doing.

I saw him sitting and staring towards the area of the utility room. I called out his name, and he just kept staring. I called out to him several times before he finally looked at me for a moment, then went back to staring at whatever it was he was sensing. This actually happened at least three times. He would glance at me to let me know he heard me, then he would go back to staring towards the utility room area.

I started to walk back up the stairs when he kind of snapped out of it. He came towards me and rolled over on his back to let me tickle him. I started back down the stairs and he sat up and started staring into the bathroom this time. When I went back upstairs he met me half-way and came into the basement with me. While we were in the basement, I heard footsteps above us in the kitchen area.

I went upstairs calling out, “Hello!” expecting to see Cheryl but she wasn’t there. When Cheryl finally did get back, Prince ran out into the garage to meet her.

“He doesn’t want to come in,” Cheryl told me. “He wants to get in the car.”

So I went out to the garage, and rather than running out into the front yard like he usually does when the garage door is open, Prince was on the other side of the car running towards me. I opened the door on the driver’s side and Prince jumped in. A little while later both Cheryl and I went out to the garage and opened the door to the car and called Prince to come out of the car and into the house. He refused.

Other things happened, such as Cheryl’s camera acting up whenever she tried to take pictures in “trouble spots.” It would be working fine, and then suddenly it would not take a picture, and then turn off. This happened at least four times, and all of them in the areas we experienced the most activity.

Since we started moving one of the things I personally noticed was how “dense” the energy in the house seemed as it became emptier and emptier. It got to the point that I would only be in it for a few minutes and I would be literally exhausted. I would feel lethargic and even depressed. The last time I was there with only Prince, I was only able to last 30 minutes before wanting to leave.

It was even worse when Cheryl was with me. We would get to the house and be at each other’s throats before long. One minute we’d be fine, and then the next literally be snapping, and name calling at each other, for no reason. Honestly, I had heard about this sort of progression and escalation before in cases I’d investigated, but this was the first time I personally experienced it. I can truthfully say that I think we got out of the house “just in the nick of time.”

I can’t begin to tell you how happy we are to be in our new home. A friend of ours came by a few days ago and commented on how much calmer our cat, Albert, is. Prince is not only happier, he has even more energy. Cheryl is not on edge anymore, and neither am I.

Finally, I’d investigated cases of hauntings, apparitions, and poltergeist activity long before it became popular to do so. I’d even lived in a couple of homes that had activity of a paranormal nature. For years I collected objects that were supposedly haunted. A few were, most weren’t. Those that were made my life interesting.

However, it wasn’t until living in this house that I really appreciated what it was like for the people I’ve tried to help in the past. I specialized in investigating homes that people were afraid of living in, and on the verge of moving out. Some I investigated after they moved out due to the activity they were experiencing. I now know what their lives were like. We weren’t afraid of living in the house, but things were definitely taking a turn for the worse.

I don’t want to close without saying a word about the ghost hunting groups that are sprouting up like weeds these days. In my opinion, many of these so-called “paranormal investigators” are really just hoping to experience a ghost themselves. They have no real interest in helping those who are living through it. I even wrote articles about this and was dunned for it. That’s why I quit. I genuinely wanted to help people, and I was tired of what I was seeing happen in the field.

Then I started helping on investigations as a psychic and medium. When a group, that I helped start, fell into “thrill seeking,” I quit for good. Ironically, they came to our home, and I’m still waiting for a report and a copy of the evidence they gathered almost two years later. They got what they came for, and saw no reason to go any further.

Perhaps Cheryl said it best when I asked her for her thoughts about the house a few days ago. “The whole experience almost became boring,” she told me. “I did learn though that you have to learn to control it, or it will control you.”

If I ever do start investigating paranormal claims again I’m sure I’ll be much better at it because of the time Cheryl and I lived in this house. It changed my life.

It changed me.

I’m glad it’s over.

When I was actively investigating hauntings, one of the questions I was most asked was, “Can a ghost hurt you?” The answer is “no, a ghost can’t hurt you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt.”

Several years ago I started a ghost hunting group – long before they started showing up on television. At the time, I used psychics to help me out. It made sense to me that since hauntings are human experiences I need humans to experience what was supposedly going on, and I would use equipment to measure what was going on in the environment at the time the activity was going on.

By the way, as I was writing the above paragraph Cheryl and I heard a loud bang coming from the basement. She’s in the family room and I’m in the Teton room.

The first investigation we did was at a university and to make a long story short, one of the psychics started complaining of a pain in her stomach. Then the other psychic made the same complaint. “Mental note,” I said to myself, “keep psychics separated as much as possible at all times. The power of suggestion seems to be at work here.”

Suddenly, I felt as though I were kicked in the stomach! I couldn’t believe how much pain I was in; I was literally doubled over. We were in a small kitchenette, and I knew that there was an energy by the refrigerator, so I stumble over to it and leaned against the wall. “Take pictures of me!” I shouted. “What are the instruments (Tri-Field Meters) saying?”

“Nothing!” one of the investigators said. “The needle isn’t moving!”

“How could that be?” I wondered.

“Your camera isn’t focusing!” another investigator, Diane, said.

“Good! Keep shooting! Don’t stop taking pictures!”

Finally the pain subsided, and I was able to crawl out of the kitchenette. “Oh my God! Look at this!” Diane called out.  We looked at the photos that she took while I was struggling to stay standing. Slowly, with each frame I was disappearing from view. Then a white mist starting forming in front of me, until it formed into what appeared to be a face with a huge smile.

I’m writing this because even though I was thinking about it while I was writing about what went on here Saturday night, I still forgot to mention it. After Wyatt commented on the energies in the house not liking the crosses he walked into the walk-in closet off of the master bathroom. As he walked to the other end he was standing in the area in which two of my tee shirts flew at Cheryl.

Suddenly he turned around with his hand on his right kidney. “Wow!” he cried out.

“What happened?” Cheryl asked. Miguel was behind her filming.

“I just felt as though I were sucker punched in my kidney,” Wyatt told them.

So what attacked me and struck Wyatt? Was it a ghost?

No, ghosts are recordings of energy replayed under circumstances. I tell people to think of them the same way you’d think of an image on your television. What hit Wyatt was something else. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but as I said before, it feels as though the energy may be ramping up, and I don’t think this is going to be good.

Last night April and Wyatt came over, along with Wyatt’s son Ryan, and my friend Miguel, and Khendra, a mutual friend of Cheryl and me. Before starting the walk-through of the house, we sat around and talked. Cheryl prepared great tasting food for dinner. She’s an awesome cook, and a wizard at the grill. It was a great time with lots of food, conversation and laughter.

Miguel arrived first, then Khendra, and finally, April, Ryan and Wyatt. I wasn’t there for the conversation but Cheryl told me later that April if we had a two dogs. When Cheryl told her “no,” April said that when they walked up to the house she could have sworn she heard two dogs barking. She then proceeded to describe the dog she was “seeing in spirit” that was in our house to Cheryl and described Cheryl’s dog before Prince, to a tee. Cheryl rescued “Magoo” from the pound the day he was scheduled to be euthanized, had him for seven years and had to put “Magoo” down about a year after moving into this house.

Several weeks ago I wrote that we apparently had a “ghost dog” in our house. Apparently it’s Magoo. Cheryl and I both found that thought comforting.

Both April and Wyatt gave us their impressions during the walk-through of the house, while Miguel filmed them. Unfortunately, April was feeling well, and so she was able to give us as much as I had hoped. Wyatt, however, gave us some interesting information. Both where able to identify areas in the house where a lot of the activity was going on, what I used to call when I was actively doing investigations, “hot spots.”

At one point, Wyatt was off with Miguel and Cheryl giving his impressions and April, Khendra, Ryan and I were in the living room. “Correct me if I’m wrong here,” April said, “but I keep feeling as though I’m dealing with an old friend in here. Someone I’ve run into when I’ve worked with you before.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her. Keep in mind, neither Cheryl nor I told either her or Wyatt what happened, or happens, in our house. They didn’t even know the address until they were on their way here.

“I keep sensing the ‘dark man’ is here.” The “dark man” is a presence April first encountered when I asked her to do a psychcometry reading on a relic supposedly dating back to the Salem Witch trials. While she didn’t mention the witch trials specifically, she did talk about a number of things that I was told regarding the relic, and she kept saying a “dark man” was blocking her from getting any information. Last night, she kept saying that “someone” was blocking her from reading the energy of the house. I attributed it to her being ill.

The next day, after her initial reading of the relic, I looked up information about the witch trials and found that those accused often described a “dark man, in dark clothes, wearing a black hat,” and said he was the Devil himself. In previous posts I wrote about how both Cheryl and I have seen a dark figure we named, “Zorro.”

I had my feelings that Zorro was the same presence that April picked up earlier, because I have the relic in my basement, but April didn’t know that. In fact, when she talked about feeling this presence, she asked if I had the relic in the house.

When Cheryl, Wyatt, and Miguel came back out into the family, I heard some interesting reports. One of them was an incident that happened this past Monday. Cheryl said she forgot to tell me about it because she was so sleepy when it happened, and she was getting ready for work.

Being Roman Catholic I have a number of crucifixes. We have them on the walls, and I have several scattered around the house. These are crucifixes that I’ve collected through out the years. I joke that the only thing I’m missing are strands of garlic around the windows to really make people think I’m afraid of vampires!

In our bedroom we have a large crucifix on one of the walls, a tiny metal one (among others) and two crosses made out of palm leaves from Palm Sunday masses. There’s also a picture of Cheryl with her sisters, mother and grandmother (whom Cheryl just adores). Cheryl also has a small wooden bust of Jesus next to her side of the bed which she kisses every morning.

Wyatt was in the bedroom when he said, “There’s a presence here that really doesn’t like the crucifixes.” That’s when Cheryl remembered what happened last Monday morning.”

As I mentioned before Cheryl kisses the bust of Jesus when she wakes up in the morning. Monday morning she woke up and noticed that the statue was turned away her. She didn’t think much of it until she reached over to turn off the clock radio and saw that a small metal crucifix that she keeps next to the bust was not where it usually lay, but several inches away, laying face down.

As she got out of bed she saw that the picture I mentioned was now laying face down, and the two palm crosses were no longer where they usually were, but in a different location and laying upside down. In other words, the tops of the crosses were closer facing her, instead of away from her the way they usually lay.

After she told us this, she asked me, “Is that why you’ve hung crucifixes around the house? Did you sense something evil in here?”

The truth is that I’ve always done that, for years now; but I do believe that the crosses have kept things to a minimum – until last Wednesday.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Wednesday night was a wild night that started with me hearing a man “humming, talking, then singing.” It ended up with Cheryl and I crossing a number of children over to Heaven to be with their parents. By the way, last night when Wyatt was in the basement giving his impressions, he described a small wood box buried underneath. When I asked him to give me an idea as to the dimensions, what he told me could have easily described a child’s coffin.

Well, one of the things I didn’t mention was a strange sound we picked up three different times on the recorder. It was a low, guttural, rattling sound. At first we both speculated that perhaps it was a growl. Then we settled on it was probably the wood floor “creaking” as I walked around.

The next day I was laying on the couch in the family room, tired from the night before, and trying to take a power nap. I was laying facing the back of the couch when I heard the same sound right behind me! I jumped up and almost fell off the couch I was so startled.