Devil in the Delta (8 page)

According to Joanne, Tim described Keith perfectly (even though he had never met him or seen any photographs) and that he had even made a reference to a favorite shirt that Keith had lost in the trailer. As Joanne was feeding me all of this information, Tim and Sarah stood as a strange chorus of sorts, nodding and repeating “uh-huh” behind her. It seemed that they all agreed on the story at least. But I had to wonder even more about Tim now.

Though it was clear that activity was occurring prior to him moving in, it was also obvious that Tim was at least escalating the feelings of anxiety and hysteria in the home. All of them lived in fear of his bouts of possession. In order for me to have a productive investigation, I did not want any such environment. It would be a massive distraction and, possibly, even make some of the residents and investigators to want to leave.

So I decided to make my bold move regarding these possessions: I approached Tim, pulled him to the side, and told him, “Listen up, tonight I'm investigating this house. There's not going to be any of this possession crap going on.”

To my amazement, he simply nodded and said, “There won't be. The last time John tried to get me, I told him ‘no more' and he has stopped.” Huh? I was taking a big chance at possibly upsetting everyone there to even try this approach, but I figured if he still had an episode despite my warning it would just show that it was beyond his means to stop the phenomena—but if he simply obliged me, then it would be clear he was faking the whole thing. This “agreement” with John sort of voided my test. I was miffed by this, but, hey, at least there would be no possessions happening that night!

Further questioning of Tim and Sarah revealed other paranormal activity as well. According to the couple, the sounds of voices/growls were often heard while they were watching television in the living room and that objects had moved in that area on several occasions (including the utensil that flew from the kitchen). They also mentioned experiencing sudden headaches and feeling an occasional overwhelming “hot spot” hit them like a swirling blast of hot air.

Joanne also mentioned at least one occasion in which a clock changed time by itself; she had just noted the time and the clock was correct, then a short time later it was suddenly off by several hours, but was still running perfectly. This happened the evening the Mississippi and Florida paranormal groups were performing their investigation—the same investigation where a researcher felt someone touch her with invisible hands.

When I asked Joanne what bothered her the most about the haunting, she stated she was angry about her dogs. Apparently, her pets had been driven off by the entities. No evidence of their whereabouts had ever turned up, and she suspected that they might even be dead.

Joanne had suffered watching her children be terrorized by an evil spirit, endured the almost total destruction of her only home, witnessed her friend/tenant as he underwent horrific episodes of apparent possession—and now she was telling me that her pets, too, had either disappeared, been killed, or were driven off by a malevolent spirit in the trailer. All these negative experiences were almost more than any one person could endure. It was enough for me to ask Joanne something I'd sworn to avoid.

Before wrapping up the interview and diving headfirst into the investigation, I asked Joanne if she would like to have her house blessed. She appeared to be genuinely upset by a lot of the activity in the trailer, so I hoped that this might make her feel better about being there.

She quickly said yes, though she avoided mentioning any particular denomination or religion for the blessing. When I asked her who she would like to do the blessing, she lit up. “Oh, I believe in it all,” she said with a huge smile.

The First Investigation

Now that the preliminaries were over with, it was time to get down to business. Trucks were unloaded, household furniture was rearranged to accommodate movement in complete darkness, and the heat/air-conditioning unit was silenced so that it would not interfere with audio devices. Video cameras and audio recorders were then strategically placed throughout the premises.

Once we had extinguished all the lights in the trailer, we were then able to turn on all the night-vision cameras and kick off our investigation. Gear was distributed throughout the team and the residents were informed to stay quiet and out of the way during our visit. The Mississippi investigators gathered to plan their approach for the evening as I took a few moments to go through a few preliminary steps.

After taking some base readings throughout the house (EMF levels, temperature, etc.), I then took an extensive number of reference photographs, covering almost every inch of the place. I would turn to these photos if I needed to see the original position of a particular item, piece of furniture, or whatever during my review back home. During this photographic trip around the trailer, I noted some strange things.

First off, there seemed to be a lot of magic/occult-
oriented items about the home, including small bottles of herbs (marked with their own magical attributes), a small wand carved with symbols that were unfamiliar to me, and some sort of ward/mandala that was drawn on paper and tacked onto the wall. This disturbed me in a small way.

It was one thing to say your home is simply “haunted,” but it's quite another thing altogether if you are actually performing rituals and/or attempting to conjure something. I made it a point to ask Joanne about these things. In the meantime, I simply noted (and photographed) the unfamiliar items and continued my walkthrough.

Soon I was confronted with an even more disturbing discovery. Along with the magical paraphernalia, there was also paraphernalia of a different sort: drugs. At least one person in the home was engaging in casual drug use. While this might not have been the case for the majority of the inhabitants—or even explain the ghostly happenings—it definitely meant eyewitness accounts would have to be taken with a grain of salt.

In addition to documenting the environment, walking through the trailer also allowed me to smell for natural gas. There were no signs of the telltale odor, and though this did not completely rule out a leak, it did mean the egg scent that they had smelled was probably from a different source, since the scent would still be present if there was a leak.

Once we had our base readings and everything had be
en photographed for posterity, we then placed some environmental monitoring devices (digital thermometers, EMF detectors, etc.) strategically within the trailer and took up positions throughout the property to wait for activity. I thought it best to start the night at “ground zero” because of the events reported there, so I took up a vigil in the master bedroom along with Terri of the Mississippi group.

While Patricia, Tom, and Blake staked out various other hot spots in the trailer, Terri and I did some EVP work in the bedroom. Again, this is an attempt to record ghostly voices on our audio recorders. This is done by asking questions and then waiting for a reasonable amount of time for an answer.

Typically, these answers are not heard right after asking the questions, but appear later when listening to the audio during the review. On occasion, if the haunting or entity is strong enough, the answers can even be heard as a disembodied voice in real time during the investigation, though this is actually a rare event.

Making ourselves comfortable, I ran through the usual EVP questions: Is there anybody here with us? Can you make a noise for us? And so forth. As I mentioned in the prologue, it was after I asked, “How long have you been here in this house?” that IT happened. A long, loud rumble coursed throughout the room, shaking the walls around us. I blinked in disbelief and looked over at Terri. She was sitting, eyes wide, looking for anything that might have caused this to happen.

Tom and Blake then came crashing into the room to see what the noise was. Shaking off the surprise of something actually happening, I asked Tom if he had ever heard anything like this before. Though he thought it unlikely, he suggested trying to re-create the sound by messing with the trailer's plumbing.

The underside of the structure was completely open to the elements, so he was concerned that maybe an animal had bumped into the pipes beneath the place. I thought it was worth checking out, though I could not imagine any plumbing-oriented noises that could create the sound that I had just heard. Joanne, pleased that something had happened with new witnesses present, watched as Tom went outside to check everything out.

To that end, he crawled under the trailer and proceeded to shake and bang on various pipes while the rest of us listened inside the trailer. Nothing was even close to the sound we had heard. I had an audio recorder in the room, so I knew the sound of the rumble was definitely captured by the device—along with, hopefully, some good EVPs. I noted the time of the event in a small notebook and waited for Tom to come back inside.

When he returned, Tom stated that although there was nothing under the home to account for the sound we had heard, there was evidence of animals living under the trailer. This could explain some of the knocks and bangs the family had heard on a regular basis—and possibly even be where her missing pets were taking refuge on occasion. But, again, it did not explain the rumble we had all just heard.

Now the air surrounding this investigation was considerably different. Suddenly everything Joanne had said during the interview carried the weight of possibility. As a result, everyone was now motivated to experience even more activity. So we all switched into high gear and continued.

Several of us stuck around in the bedroom, attempting to get some interaction from any entity that might be present, while the remainder of the team went into the room with the magical items. We were about an hour into investigating in the master bedroom when another strange thing happened.

I had just asked anyone there in the bedroom to “make their presence known” when a loud metal-on-metal clang was heard from right beside me. Startled, I fumbled for a light and quickly looked around the room. The only metal object in my vicinity was an electric radiator/portable heater that was lying on its side on the floor, directly in front of me.

Upon closer examination, I noticed that an old gold watch was now lying on it. It had not been there before. I know this because I had actually sat on the radiator and used it as a makeshift seat for a good while. I carefully picked up the watch and took it with me into the living room.

When I held up the watch for everyone to see, Joanne informed me that she had never seen the watch before in her life. According to her, it wasn't her watch—or anybody else's in the house. Strange. Much like the mysterious materializing coins, it seemed that the old watch had spontaneously appeared in the bedroom—and where it came from, nobody knew.

Luckily this had happened a mere foot in front of my face, albeit in a darkened room. A surveillance camera (with night-vision capability) hooked up to a DVR system was recording in the bedroom, so I hoped the materialization was caught on video. It would be a great piece of evidence if the act had been recorded. Again, I noted the event and the time in my pocket notebook.

Both of these events had happened early in the investigation, so all of us were now quite excited. What was next? The answer: not much. As is true with most paranormal cases, when you want something to happen, it usually doesn't. We would go on and spend hours doing EVP work, roaming room to room with cameras and camcorders, coaxing spirits to do anything to let us know we weren't alone. Unfortunately, only one other unexplainable thing would happen during this trip to the trailer.

I was making my way down the hallway that runs past the children's bedrooms when I thought I saw a black shape shift ahead in the darkness. It appeared to move quickly from the hallway into a side room.

I know from past experiences that these events usually pan out to just be a trick of the light and/or my eyes attempting to adjust to a different level of darkness. On the chance that this was neither of these things, I moved quickly into the area where I saw the shadow go. This was the youngest daughter's (Katie) bedroom.

Moving into this room, I again saw the strange black mass shift—this time toward a closet. I was now sure this was no natural shadow. Whipping out a K2-style EMF detector, I walked toward the closet door. EMF stands for “electromagnetic field” and most paranormal researchers believe that spirits, in order to exist, must give off this type of energy. As a result, carrying a plethora of assorted EMF detectors during an investigation is a ghost hunting standard.

As I slowly crept toward the closet door, I stared at the device in my hand. It was when I reached the outside of the door that the K2 lit up like the Fourth of July. It had picked up an unusually strong reading—but only for a moment. Then it died completely. During our walkthrough of the trailer, we had found no EMF levels above 1.0 milligauss (and this is natural since even well-insulated wiring can give off a low EMF reading), but here there had been a short, sustained spike that literally maxed out the detector.

Though I would spend the next fifteen minutes trying to figure out what caused the spike—or where the possible entity may have gone—the single occurrence was all that happened. The EMF detector would pick up nothing else out of the ordinary and I would see no more strange shadows.

After hours of nothing else of paranormal significance happening, the night began to wear on me and the other investigators. At one point, I took a lap throughout the trailer to check in on the Mississippi team and was greeted by sets of bleary eyes and yawns. Blake was actually asleep on the living room couch, still clutching an audio recorder. It seemed that nothing more of note was going to happen this evening.