Deliver Us from Evil (37 page)

The day after the poltergeist incident, Donna's cordless phone seemed to develop a mind of its own. “It was driving me crazy with its beeping, so Mike came over to fix it,” she explained, speaking with a strong Italian accent. “He tried new batteries and moved it different places around my house, but nothing worked. Then he suggested we talk to the phone. I told him he was out of his fucking mind—and that's when the phone stopped beeping, like it was listening to us.”

That convinced the cop that his hunch was right: The phone must be haunted. With cop-like persistence, Mike started to interrogate the poltergeist—not realizing he'd fallen right into the evil spirit's trap by giving it recognition. Instead of communicating telepathically, as inhuman entities often do when they speak to humans, this one replied with beeps, but only if Mike and Donna were both on the line.

“Donna got very scared,” Mike added. “She said she didn't like doing this—and didn't believe in poltergeists. Without her knowing it, I started taping the calls. I set up a very simple format so I could communicate with whatever was on the phone—one beep for ‘yes' and two beeps for ‘no.' Through my questioning, I found out the spirit—or soul—on the phone was a little girl.” His questions eventually elicited an extremely touching tale from the spirit, who claimed that she and her brother had died as children, victims of an unspeakable crime.

Mike soon amassed hours and hours of recordings of his questions and answers, with an occasional comment from Donna. Listening to the tapes, which I transcribed, I heard Mike ask a question that got no response. “She went away,” he says in a disappointed tone, then asks Donna accusingly, “Or was that you beeping? I want you to swear on your son that you weren't doing that!” Even though she instantly did, I also had to wonder if one of them was making the beeps.

During the interview, I questioned each of them separately, as I would crime suspects at the police station, and asked Mike to write down the details of the case, which I carefully compared to the tapes. I also listened to their voices and reactions to what they were hearing and experiencing. Unless they were the world's greatest actors, I knew what I was hearing wasn't staged. Here's an excerpt from one of the tapes in which Mike asked the questions:

Are you a little girl?
YES

Are you dead?
YES

Did you die in an accident?
NO

Were you killed by a fire?
NO

Did someone kill you?
SERIES OF LONG BEEPS YES

Was it your parents?
NO

Were you stabbed?
NO

Shot with a gun?
SERIES OF LONG BEEPS FOR YES

Did you die a long time ago?
YES

Was it before the house was built?
YES

Did they find your body after you died?
NO

Did they find the killer?
NO

Do you want us to help you?
YES

On the other tapes, the story unfolds in bits and pieces, through Mike's questions, which sometimes drew immediate beeps for yes or no, and sometimes received no reply at all. About fifty years ago, according to the spirit, she and her brother were kidnapped by two men and brought to the swamp behind Donna's house. There they were both raped and shot in the head. Their bodies were then buried in the muck and never found. This story was enough to break your heart—and that's exactly what it did. I could hear Mike and Donna getting more and more upset and more and more emotionally involved with the spirit. At first, they refer to it as “little girl”; later Mike calls it “honey” and “cutie.” Sometimes he even chides the spirit in a loving, fatherly way for being naughty when it made the phone go into outbursts of random beeps.

Fascinated and shocked by this ghastly tale, Mike wanted to know more. To find out the pathetic poltergeist's name, he began with the letter “A” and worked through the alphabet. “I got a yes beep when I said the letter ‘I,'” he told me. “Then I went through a list of girls' names beginning with that letter and kept getting two beeps for no until I said the name ‘Isabel.' The phone went crazy with ‘yes, yes, yes!' so I knew I had the right name.” He laboriously repeated the process for the brother's name, until he was finally rewarded with a yes beep for “Louis.”

On the tape, I heard Mike pressing for details: “How old were you when you died, Isabel?” The phone beeped six times. “Oh, God!” His voice shook with emotion: That was exactly the age of his own son!

“And how old was your brother?” When the reply was eight forlorn beeps—the age of Donna's son—the macho cop actually broke down in tears, as did his girlfriend.

While the couple considered this just a horrible coincidence, I shuddered at how evil this spirit was, to prey on these two parents' sympathies with these touching details.

What a cruel scam,
I thought.
Such a tear-jerking story that would break the heart of any mother or father, but it's all bullshit. The demonic are truly masterful, dangerous and extremely cunning! It reminded me of the Halloween horror: Although both cases happened years apart—to families in different cities who didn't know each other—there were striking similarities in the demonic M.O. Not only did both spirits use old-fashioned female aliases and concoct sob stories about being murdered, but each cunningly included a second victim in their tale, who, not at all coincidentally, had some trait sure to tug at the heartstrings of someone else in the household. Just as the Westchester “ghost” claimed to have a fiancé who had committed suicide, thereby gaining the sympathy of the groom's mother, this spirit pretended that she and her dead brother were the same age as Mike and Donna's children.

Through sobs, Mike told Donna, “Babe, these kids need us! We've got to free them up—help them move on!” He then started a new line of questioning, and again the demon knew just what buttons to press. “Can you ever leave the property?” he asked, and got two muted beeps for no. “Do you want us to find your little bodies?” A series of awful wailing tones made the spirit's longing plain. “If we find your bones and move them, can you leave?” The answer was a long beep for yes. Strangely, however, the spirit insisted that only Donna could locate its remains.

While Mike, true to his cop nature, wanted to charge into action, Donna was dubious. “I said, ‘What are we going to do—ask the police to dig up the swamp because of beeps on the fucking phone?' They'd think we were crazy! Hell,
I
was starting to think we were crazy! The beeps went wild when I said that, then I remembered something really strange.”

Looking at her little boy—who suddenly stopped chewing his gum and began listening intently, as if he knew what she was about to say—Donna told me, “A couple of months ago, I heard Bruce talking when he was all by himself. I asked what he was doing, and he said he was talking to two kids who lived in the house. I figured it was some bullshit game—you know, just a kid's imagination. After all that phone stuff started, I thought, ‘Oh my God, he was talking to those murdered kids!'”

Bruce refused to meet her eye. “I don't want to talk about that,” he whined. “Don't make me!”

“Come on—tell Mr. Sarchie about ‘the big one,'” his mother cajoled.

“He's … he's very bad!” The boy's lips began quivering as if he was going to cry. His mom gave his chubby shoulder a comforting squeeze.

“My son said some kind of creepy thing lived upstairs. I thought he'd been watching scary shows on TV and didn't pay much attention,” she explained.

On the tape, I heard her saying “Mike, I'm scared, really scared.” To reassure her, the cop asked the poltergeist if it meant any harm to Donna or her son. No, no, no, it beeped emphatically. And
was
there a “big one” upstairs? Yes, it replied. Was Donna in any danger from that spirit? A furious, frightening series of yeses shrilled from the phone, followed by dead silence. Was Mike in danger too? Yes. More than Donna? A long beep yes.

Listening to this had an oddly familiar ring. Suddenly I realized I was hearing a variation of the well-known “good cop/bad cop” routine, where one police officer intimidates the perp with harsh questions, threats, and a bullying manner, then leaves the room. The other cop then brings the suspect coffee, sympathizes with him, and implores him to confess before the mean cop comes back for round two. Here the game was good spirit/bad spirit, except that both spirits were actually the demon. The spirit ingratiated itself with Donna and Mike in the guise of a pitiful murdered child, then insinuated itself further into their lives by warning that a malevolent force meant them harm. Naturally this made them feel more dependent on the so-called good spirit to protect them from the bad one.

Despite being a cop himself, Mike didn't recognize this ploy. Instead, he was drawn even deeper into the demon's world of lies, even though Donna begged him to stop talking to the phone. On the tape you can hear her crying that she's frightened, then shouting at Mike when he persists with his investigation. Fear, anger, and discord are the negative emotions that the demonic feed on and use to gain strength for new assaults. Things were beginning to heat up.

In another call, Mike asked a question that was totally out of the norm: “Does Donna love me?” A melodic chime proclaimed that she did. For once the demon wasn't lying: These spirits will tell the truth when it advances their cause. “I'm going to take her out of her house,” Mike announced, only to be dissuaded by a double beep for no. The demon wanted Donna right where she was, so it could insidiously break down her will, opening the way for possession. Donna then suggested that they call in psychic researchers, receiving another dismissive double beep.

“Are you afraid of them?” she asked, and heard a brief, timid beep. Damned right, “Isabel” was afraid of us—if we came to that house, the spirit would be exposed for what it really was. Here was another parallel with the Westchester case, where the demon insisted that “holy ones must not come!”

Not seeing the incredible illogic of a spirit who claimed to need help yet objected to getting it, the couple became consumed and enthralled by the events the “poltergeist” described. Communicating with it became such an obsession that Mike actually took a vacation from work so he'd have even more time to pursue his investigation of the spirit's claims. The mystery fueled his cop's curiosity. He and Donna began combing through phone books, trying to identify what town the two dead kids might have come from. The spirit beeped no to each possibility but remained strangely silent when towns that ended with the word “brook” were brought up.

The couple's confusion only added to the creature's credibility. Using this clue, Mike combed old newspapers at the library, looking for stories about missing children from a town whose name ended in “brook.” Of course, he found nothing, but being a cop, this only intrigued him even more. He began keeping case notes of what he'd discovered so far. One entry he showed me read:

Isabel, age 6. Comes from Brook? Broadbrook? Fosterbrook? Potterbrook? Blue car; two males. Remains: located in swamp. Sexually molested, then killed. Deceased, 50 years. States that she had blond hair and green eyes. She also states that her brother has blond hair. It is my opinion that due to the age at which she was killed, she has a very limited vocabulary. We are dealing with the mentality of a 6-year-old. We have to speak in words she understands.

Intensely curious about the spirit, Mike invited it to reveal more of its powers. “Isabel, can you move things?” After an agreeable beep was heard, Donna shouted in astonishment. A cloth heart she kept on her kitchen wall had just tumbled to the ground on its own! She picked it up and put it on the kitchen table, but when she turned around, the heart was back on the wall in its usual spot. “Isabel, did
you
put the heart back?” she asked in bewilderment, and the phone chimed affirmatively.

On the other end of the line, Mike had more suggestions. “Can you turn the water on?” Nothing happened. “She can't do it,” he said sadly. A kitchen faucet gushed in response.

“The hell she can't,” Donna gasped.

To me, this was further proof that the culprit in this case was a demon: Ghosts are much weaker spirits and don't have the ability to move anything but the lightest objects, so they couldn't possibly turn a faucet handle. It's also debatable whether a human spirit could make a phone beep: I've never heard of a case where this happened, but if several ghosts were in the house, they might be able to pool their spirit energy to accomplish this feat.

“Isabel, can you touch Donna's arm?” Mike asked twice, but got no response—until he heard a blood-curdling shriek from Donna.

“Never do that again!” she cried, sobbing so hard she was choking.

“What happened?”

Unable to find words for the indescribably icy terror of that touch, she just sobbed. “Oh, shit! Never, ever do that again.” Angry and afraid, she finally caught her breath and railed at her lover for putting her through such heart-stopping horror. “What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”

Mike reminded her that the spirit wasn't out to hurt her and had helpfully warned them about the “big one” in her house. His remarks were punctuated by soothing single beeps of agreement, which calmed Donna considerably.

Her kitchen was suddenly filled with brilliant flashes of light. Each of them appeared at the very edge of her peripheral vision, so she stood there, turning her head from side to side in astonishment. Although she didn't know it, she was seeing what we call “ghost lights,” bursts of energy from either human or inhuman spirits. Hardly daring to ask, she whispered into the phone, “Isabel, was that you?” A long, triumphant tone echoed through the phone, and Donna hung up, too upset to talk further. The spirit, however, had something else to say; it gave Mike a quick beep of farewell.