| abstract | - I am an amateur ghost hunter, and have been since early 2000. In the last five years myself and three friends have investigated numerous haunted places, from homes to bridges to graveyards to battlefields, with varying results and experiences. I'm going to share with you part of what I consider to be one of our best investigations, and the only time we have encountered what I can seriously call a "dangerous" ghost. First I need to tell you in advance, despite some talk of photography in this post, there are no pictures. There's several reasons for this. First I can't post images, second I'm not the one that keeps the photograph archives, and most important, I offer my word in writing to every "client" we investigate for that I will not release any information or pictures that could in any way pinpoint the location of the investigation to their home. Believe me, most of these people have a hard enough time living normal lives without intrusions from the media, thrill-seekers, crackpots or scam psychics (in case you're wondering, I'm half thrill-seeker half crackpot). To further protect privacy, I've changed all names involved in this except for those of the four ghost hunters. Let me introduce you to them. I'm Josh, currently 25 years old, earning a degree in criminal justice with agonizing slowness while I ghost hunt on weekends. For the first three of my ghost hunting years I did computer work for the Department of Defense, now I work for a document imaging and archiving company. The degree and the jobs are both just to get me by until I can make my living as a full-time writer, which has always been my dream. Next we have Sara, 26 years old and a business major. I met her online in 1997 and we started hanging out. She was a so-called "friend with benefits" for awhile but that just sort of stopped happening, and we managed to get out of it while remaining friends (with very little effort or heartache really; I don't think we were very compatible that way). She has brown hair and eyes and is fairly attractive. She was also the first to take me up on my ghost hunting offer back in 2000. Then there's Kevin and Jenna, fraternal twins who are both 24 now. They share features such as hair and eye color (black and hazel respectively), and had similar noses as well (rather large, but I can't say that in front of Jenna); you could easily guess they're brother and sister, but you might not realize they're twins. They've been very close to each other their whole lives. Kevin is a business major as well, Jenna does history and she's sort of out there, but not in an irritating way. She's just very new-agey, spiritual and open-minded. Both were eager to join me in my new hobby, and signed on about a month after Sara. We had several investigations before the one I'm about to relate to you. During these early ones we learned to work as a team, perfected our methods for getting things done (photography, note-taking, etc.), and learned to budget the costs involved (gas, food, and batteries are all expensive, and you end up spending way more on batteries than you might think—more on that later). We also had plenty of time to get used to being tense-but-bored (most sessions we don't see, hear, or feel anything out of the ordinary) and a little time to get used to being FUCKING SCARED (no matter how well prepared you think you are, you're not ready when something happens). Basically we were a fairly well-oiled machine, all things considered, by the time we took on this mother-bitch of a ghost. A word about my stance on ghosts: I am interested in them as a PHENOMENA. There are thousands upon thousands of reports of ghostly phenomena, going back hundreds of years and even further. The fact that ghostly phenomena occurs is, in my opinion, impossible (and silly) to dispute. Weird things happen in certain places, as evidenced by thousands of eye-witness accounts (from all types of humanity), photographs, video, and careful scientific observation and investigation. What IS open to questioning is whether or not "ghosts" are the spirits of the deceased or if they're something else entirely. I personally believe there are multiple causes, because I've encountered multiple "types" of ghosts. I do believe SOME phenomena are caused by the spirits or souls of the dead. I believe others are caused by a massive buildup of emotional energy that lingers after the source has gone. Still others I think are caused by (layman's terms, I don't know how else to put this) a "wrinkle" in time. These are the ghosts that do the same thing over and over again, perhaps only at certain times of the day or month or year, and completely ignore everything around them. Other phenomena I believe are caused by intelligent aware entities that are NOT deceased because they've never lived on this earth as a human (elemental spirits, demons). Then we have things like Poltergeists, which are not usually spirits, but rather are reputed to be psycho-kinetic energy from a living human, usually a young male or female with some repressed emotions. Basically, there's a whole lot of shit about ghosts that humanity doesn't understand yet, and my team of hunters is not specifically trying to answer any of these questions. Our mission is to observe and record, nothing more, and we do it out of a fascination and a love of being creeped out. We don't charge for our work; it costs the people we visit nothing more than the occasional raided fridge, and we don't even do that often since our investigations usually occur long after dinner time and we're usually too nervous to snack much. Anyway, enough philosophy. On to the investigation. The Night of the Blue-Palmed Pervert My family moved up here to Northern Virginia in 1993. My parents came up for a week to go house-hunting, and dragged me along against my will because I was still a kid. House-hunting bored me so I didn't go with them most days, choosing to stay in the hotel where we had cable TV and there was a pool and small arcade. One day they came back and my mom told me about a house they'd visited out in the boonies that she had refused to even consider living in because she felt that there was something wrong with the house, particularly the basement. She wouldn't even go down there to look around, though my dad did and he says he felt nothing out of the ordinary. I was intrigued, but eventually forgot about it, and we ended up taking a house in the country not far from the one they'd looked at. In 2001, with my ghost hunting hobby firmly established, I remembered the house and asked my mom if she could remember exactly where it was. We lived pretty close to it and she occasionally drove past it on her way to the town of Culpeper (which we visited rarely, preferring Warrenton as it was closer and MUCH less country-fried), so she had no trouble giving me directions and a description. I figured I'd drive up there and see if anybody lived in it, and if they did, see if I could talk to them about the place. I was afraid it would be empty because if it was I wouldn't be able to investigate it—I was dead set against doing anything illegal that might endanger my hobby, so breaking and entering a house that was still up for sale was out of the question. I was lucky though, the place was inhabited. After a year of ghost hunting I had gotten pretty good at speaking with strangers and making them feel like they could talk to me. Small talk inevitably turned to my job and my schooling, and hearing that I worked for the Department of Defense and that I was studying Criminal Justice probably played to my advantage with some people. Surely if the government would let me into high-security places they could trust me with a ghost story. To keep this from getting too long (and it's already going to be), here's the skinny: the house was owned by a 63 year old man who I'll call Woody here. He was an ex-marine and teacher, had recently retired and his wife had recently passed away. He looked a lot like Sarge from Survivor, only less hair and heftier. He knew something was not quite right in his house. More importantly, he seemed to have a genuine interest in ghosts, and he seemed lonely—it didn't take much more than a promise to cause no damage to the property and to keep the investigation on the down low to get him to agree to let us sit up with him one night to see what happened. The four of us set out for Woody's house with the usual gear and plan of action. We had planned to start the ghost hunt after dark but Woody insisted we show up around 4 PM, several hours prior to sunset. Between us we had four cameras, two film and two digital, and two tape recorders for interviewing witnesses and general recording during the actual hunt. We each had a notebook with which to record thoughts, feelings, observations, and take notes. We had plenty of water, a first aid kit, two cell phones, and we all had pepper spray (a lot of the sites we visited were fairly isolated, and you can never be sure who you'll run into). We didn't usually bother with more scientific instruments—we didn't even have anything to gauge temperature with, mostly because our experiences had showed us that if the temperature was going to drop due to the presence of a ghost, we wouldn't need any fucking instruments to tell, we'd be shivering. One sidenote about the tape recorders—we've tried EVP before, which is where you leave a tape recorder running in some quiet part of the house hoping a spirit will talk and you'll capture it's voice. EVP is bullshit guys. I know there have been some threads about it here ... it's crap. We rarely try it anymore. I am convinced that most ghosts don't talk. The ones that can will do so quite loudly (although it's usually shrieking or screaming and not words), and have no need to whisper into tape recorders. The house stood alone and angry-looking in the middle of a treeless field. The next nearest home was about a hundred yards away, over a slope and on the other side of a grove of trees in the distance. The feeling we got was one of intense isolation. We were a bit keyed up, as we always were on the way to a hunt. Anticipation is part of the fun. To be fair, the house didn't look all that bad. It was a pretty good sized one-story home, and Woody kept some flowers growing here and there. It really could have used some trees though. Anyway, we pulled into the driveway, leaving our equipment in the car for the time being, and before we got to the door we were greeted by Woody. He introduced himself to my friends after shaking hands with me. He then invited us inside and showed us to the den in the back, which I hadn't seen before, having only sat with him in the front family room the day I met him. The den made one thing perfectly clear to us—Woody took his retirement seriously. He had a TV the size of a Hummer and a pool table that wasn't too shabby either. A sliding glass door led to a large back deck, and the grill was hot. Woody had decided to cook out for us since it was early May and wasn't raining or stormy for a change. Like I said, I think the guy was lonely. Oh man, he made these pepper-jack cheeseburgers that would have made him a fortune if he'd gone into the food service business. He also had endless stories about his time in the marines, most of them about drunken nights or FNG pranks. He told us a bit about having worked as a mink farmer for awhile too (protip: minks are fantastic escape artists and they're mean), but the girls got fidgety when they realized that part of the job included slaughtering the mink, so we didn't stick to that subject too long. We ate, chatted, shot some pool, and waited for dark so the vigil could begin. We didn't talk much about the house or the alleged haunting; since Woody was the only witness, we figured half of the team could interview him while the other half was sitting in the basement. That way any experiences the basement team had couldn't easily be put off as power of suggestion. Inevitably the sun decided to abandon us to our fate. It was time to go to work. Rule number one for my team was that we broke up into teams of two and never left each other's sight when we were on site. The only exception was when one of us had to pee; his or her partner waited just outside the bathroom door in those situations. We swapped partners frequently to keep us all feeling like we were on the same level with each other, but for this investigation it would be myself and Sara as team 1, and Kevin and Jenna as team 2. We walked out to the car to bring in our equipment. First thing you do before going on a ghost hunt is put brand new batteries in all of your gear. First thing you do before BEGINNING the ghost hunt is check them again. We were not surprised to find that all of our brand new batteries were dead. This is a common phenomenon in ghost hunting. I don't know how or why it happens, but I do know this—every single time we've found our batteries dead, we've had something happen to us that same night. So while it's fucking expensive, and it's also pretty unnerving, we consider it a good omen to find dead batteries. We swapped them for fresh ones, and this time everything worked. We split up into teams at this point with the intention of searching the outside of the house and the first floor. Woody led myself and Sara through the house while Kevin and Jenna checked outside. This search is standard for every hunt and has a number of purposes. First, we want to make sure nobody is hiding on the premises with tricks up their sleeve. Second, we learn the layout of the place. Third, we get a feel for the place. None of us make any claims to being psychic, but even us mundane people can pick up impressions, and we can certainly notice areas of low temperature, which often indicate supernatural presence. The search revealed nothing; even standing at the top of the steps to the basement, neither Sara or I felt a thing. We brought Kevin and Jenna there and they also felt nothing. Search concluded, we all made a quick trip to the bathroom and gathering our gear, Sara and I descended alone into the basement while Kevin and Jenna went to interview Woody. We left the basement lights off. We each had a flashlight/lantern combo, the kind you can pick up for about 20 bucks at Wal-Mart. I love these little things. We both had ours turned on, cameras in the other hand (we didn't use straps, and we also made the girls tie their hair back tightly, because stray camera straps and stray hairs can both result in false-positive phenomena if caught on film). I had a small satchel with the tape recorder and a few other things. And down we went. It's difficult to describe in words the awful feeling you get heading deliberately into what you believe is a haunted area. Your body kind of tingles, the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up, and you start to breathe a little heavily. It's entirely involuntary, and it happens every time. No amount of experience ghost hunting can eliminate fear. Even worse, once we made it to the bottom of the steps we became acutely aware of..something. I don't want to mislead you here, it wasn't like in the ghost stories where we felt we weren't alone any longer, or felt something watching us, or anything corny like that. Picture the word WRONG by itself, in big bold black letters on a white sheet of paper. That's the feeling this basement gave me. There was just something about it that wasn't quite right. It felt unclean. Anyway, we searched the area, snapping pictures of everything. The basement was plain; Woody had described what was down there for us, and we found it just as he said it was...basically two open rooms spanning the entire length of the house, door-less openings at each end forming a circle. In the room in which the steps ended there were some boxes, neatly stacked, an old table, and a cheap but heavy metal and wooden rack at the far end filled from top to bottom with paint cans and brushes and such. The second room was liberally covered with newspaper and there were several sawhorses and a workbench with no tools. Woody had told us he did woodworking as a hobby (he was especially fond of making birdhouses, which a friend of his sold at the local farmers markets for a few bucks each), but that because of the haunting he didn't use the basement anymore except to store paints. He'd put some on his rack that very day (and noticed no phenomena when he was down there). We searched the basement quickly and efficiently and settled down to our vigil, planning to wait long into the night if need be. Somewhere up above us Woody was being carefully interviewed, one of our tape recorders capturing every word while Kevin and Jenna asked questions and scribbled notes about what he'd experienced. I stood in the opening closest to the paint rack, at the far end from the stairs upward. The satchel was on the floor next to me, the camera and lantern in my hands. Sara leaned against a sawhorse. From where I stood I could see almost the entire basement; from where she stood, she could see the far end better than me. We turned out the lights and waited...and waited...and waited. We didn't check the time, and we didn't chat much at all, just a few whispers here and there. It was the same boring-yet-horribly-intense routine we'd done many times over the last year. After awhile we managed to put the dread mostly aside and ignore it. We only had a vague sense of time passing down there; as I said we weren't checking watches or anything. But we had sat for what turned out to be about four hours when we noticed a faint tapping sound, like two fork prongs clicking together, coming from the base of the center wall in about the exact center of the basement. Immediately our lanterns blazed to life and illuminated the area. Tap-tap-tap. It continued, despite the challenging glare of our lights. It seemed to be mocking us. We were thoroughly creeped by this point, but also very excited. We snapped a lot of pictures, both at the tapping origin and all around us. The sound was coming from bare wall; there were no objects, no pipes, no nothing that we saw that could be making that noise. We whispered briefly, discussing what we wanted to do. I tried to start our tape recorder and fuck me if the batteries hadn't died again. I told Sara, and asked her if she wanted to leave. She hesitated, but said she'd stay. So I decided to stay too. Really, there wasn't much question we were going to stay. This is what we wanted after all. But damned if I was just going to sit there and listen to the tapping. It took a lot of fucking nerve to turn my back on that sound, (tap-tap-tap) but I wanted to keep busy, so with the light on, I took to reading the labels of the paint cans on the rack. There must have been 40 of them, every color of the rainbow, some cans with words like Additives and Textures and a few very subtly different shades of (tap-tap-tap) what looked to me like the same color and...anyway, I was pretty swept up in the thrill of educating myself about what kind of paint Woody liked. That was when I heard Sara give a little gasp and curse. I whirled around, expecting to see a smoking, smirking red devil with a pitchfork impaling my girly girl; instead I saw that she had been pacing the floor around the sawhorses and the workbench and had torn her pants badly across the side of her thigh on a poorly hammered nail (tap-tap-tap). I asked if she was alright and she nodded, told me she thought so. Then she shocked the hell out of me by undoing her pants and letting them drop to her knees, I guess to check and make sure she wasn't bleeding. Now I have a confession to make. I like seeing girls in their panties. In fact, I'd rather see a girl in panties than see her naked. To be more precise, I'd like to see ALL of you in your panties. All the time. I am shameless. So when Sara decided to drop her pants with her back to me to see if she was bleeding, I held up my light to get a good look. She knew about my little fetish, and I guess by this point was feeling a little pissy (more on this later). She told me if I didn't get my light off her ass, I would likely find it shoved up mine. I wasn't about to argue—she could do it, and blame it on the ghost (tap-tap-tap), and nobody would ever be the wiser. So as she bent to pull her pants back up, I reluctantly turned back to my paint rack. Just in time to watch the motherfucker finish TIPPING OVER TOWARD ME. I am convinced to this day that it was tipped onto one corner while I was gawking at Sara, and waited until I turned around to come down on em. Anyway, I yelled, scrambled back, then tripped, my camera and (oh thank god) my lantern still in my hands. Alas tape recorder, I knew ye well. Landed right on the satchel, and the recorder wasn't meant to bear 180 pounds. The rack crashed down within inches of crushing me, and a lot of the paint cans spilled. One landed right beside me and began to spill out, but that wasn't all...the fucking handle on the paint can was FURIOUSLY slamming up and down by itself, right against my leg. I screamed like a scared little sissy girl and flung it away with my hand, then pushed myself up onto my feet, getting blue paint all over my hands for my trouble. As the noisy can spun into the corner, all the others off the wrack began clacking and clanging as well. It was about this time that I noticed the temperature had dropped drastically—like I said, I don't need any damned expensive gizmos to tell me if there's a ghost in my face. All of this happened in the span of a about ten seconds. Sara had whirled around at my first cry of alarm, when the rack fell over. She plainly saw the handle of the blue can clacking by itself, and she panicked just as I panicked. She bolted for the stairs, pants falling back around her knees and me right behind her. I still had my lantern in my left hand but left my camera in the rush. She hit the steps and stumbled, and I blindly reached out with my right hand and shoved her along, too scared to realize I was getting paint everywhere. Kevin, Jenna and Woody had heard the commotion and were waiting when we burst out at the top of the steps (I could still hear the clanging of the paint can as I reached the top) and kept running to the front lawn, where we finally stopped, both of us gibbering incoherently. Kevin and Jenna, no stranger to panic (previous experiences...) rushed out and immediately tried to calm us down (and Jenna talked Sara into pulling her damn pants up), while Woody stood on the front porch, apparently torn between helping us and gawking at the mess we'd made coming up. After a few minutes of soothing we were both resting on the grass and trying to relate what had happened. What a fucking mess. All three of them confirmed after things had settled down that they heard the noises as we were coming up the steps. Unfortunately nobody knew precisely when they stopped, because we were all outside. I apologized to Woody for getting paint all over his basement and stairs and dripping on his floor. He took it all in stride—he actually had a bit of a grin on his face once he realized we were all ok, and told me not to worry about the mess. It was probably the most excitement the old guy had had in quite awhile. Kevin and Jenna went down (reluctantly!) to retrieve my camera and the satchel—the paint cans had stopped clanging, and the place was a godawful mess, but there was nothing supernatural going on when they went down, and they made the usual jokes about us losing our nerve and not being cut out for the game, trying to lighten the mood. Sara and I didn't find ANY humor in any of this. I was badly shaken by the rack tipping over—this was a big rack, with a lot of heavy paint cans, and I probably barely escaped serious injury. Sara was even worse; we couldn't coax her back inside the house, and so we gathered our cameras, our lanterns, notebooks, and one remaining tape recorder, and said goodnight to Woody after promising to get in touch and see about doing another vigil. The next morning we went out to breakfast and a debriefing. It's always easier to analyze what happened in daylight after some (usually restless) sleep. The pictures would be developed shortly and there was always the hope we might have caught something. The tape recorder I had was destroyed, and we'd have to replace it, but at least with the batteries having been drained, we know we didn't lose any important recordings. Sara and I both were in agreement that the tapping was very real, seemed to be coming from the same place to both of our ears, and that that place contained no easily identifiable explanation for the sound. There was of course the possibility that something inside the wall was making the noise, piping or what not. Sara maintained that she would have not dropped her pants in some dingy ass basement in the house of a man she barely knew, and that she felt she was coerced by whatever was in the basement. She also mentioned that, in hindsight, she felt herself growing increasingly angry without explanation as the hours in the basement passed, which is something that had not happened to me. Knowing Sara like I do, I have to agree that she's not the type to just drop her pants in front of other people. She's not the showoff type—doesn't even expose her navel in her daily dress. We could argue that she was concerned she might be bleeding, and that given her intimate history with me she felt no embarrassment about uncovering herself for a minute. Because of that argument, we don't really draw any solid conclusions about whether or not she was influenced in our report—but given her statements of growing anger during the night, I'm inclined to believe she was. Later trips to this house further solidified our opinion on this. In the end, Sara and I did find some humor in this whole incident, when we got our pictures developed. When the commotion in the basement started, Kevin, Jenna, and Woody ran to the top of the steps. It seems Woody grabbed one of the cameras on the table, which Kevin and Jenna forgot to take with them in the heat of the moment. While myself and Sara were panicking on the front lawn, and Kevin and Jenna were frantically trying to calm us down, Woody snapped a couple of pictures and nobody noticed. We got our photos back, and they contained nothing the least bit ghostly. What they did have was a great picture of Sara from the rear, pants around her knees—and an almost perfectly formed blue hand print on her ass where I pushed her going up the steps. Thus was this investigation unofficially christened the Night of the Blue Palmed Pervert. So that's the story of our first trip to Woody's house. I'm writing it now because I got word from his family the other day that he's in the hospital, heart is failing, and they're not sure he's going to make it. He's remained something of an e-friend since our investigation at his house, and I guess this is my way of dealing with the news that he's dying. The four of us are going to visit him this weekend. I've been revising this for the past two days and I'm going to stop or I'll never actually get it posted. I'll answer any questions about ghost hunting or whatever, if there sufficient interest. Also, we made two more trips to Woody's house, and something happened both times (in fact things got increasingly hostile each time). If you guys want I'll try to do a couple (shorter!) writeups about those two trips during the weekend. I also encourage others to post their experiences in this thread.
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