NEW LIFE. OLD DEMONS: Part 2 of 3

This is Part 2. If this is your first time visiting my blog, then you've missed something pretty cool. You should go and find Part 1 of this paranormal investigation post. If you're here because you read Part 1 and want to read more, then Awesome! Glad you made your way back to join us for the continuation!

The Investigation

We began in Kyle's apartment, since this was the focal point of the activity he had been experiencing. An entry hallway greeted us when we walked in the door. The hallway ran to the back of the apartment and ended at a door to the larger of the two bedrooms. The door to the smaller bedroom led off to the left.

A living room at the right front corner of the apartment contained only a couple of large boxes of unassembled furniture. Moving toward the back of the building from the living room, we found a stacked washer and dryer to our right before entering the kitchen.

New, walnut finish laminate flooring had been laid throughout the apartment, and new inexpensive light fixtures had been installed. The kitchen had also been recently updated with a medium oak stained cabinetry and granite countertops.

There was something sad about an empty home or apartment. Perhaps it was the lack of personal items that made a place home. Or perhaps it was the feeling of emptiness itself. No one was there to love the place or to spend time and energy fixing it up. 

As I walked through the apartment, I kept my senses tuned in to the energy. Most of the apartment felt normal, but when we entered the larger bedroom, suddenly the energy changed. The air became heavy and thick. It felt as if someone strong was pressing on my chest and preventing me from taking a deep breath. My eyes wobbled slowly in their sockets, as if I was opening my eyes underwater and the world around my was fuzzy, out of focus. My heart became a bass drum, pounding out a rhythm that I could feel in my ear drums.

This was nothing unusual for me. I'd learned over the years of investigating that there were places like this. Sometimes it was an entire home, and the moment I crossed the threshold of the front door, the sensation arose. Other times, like this, the feeling arose only when I entered one room. I decided long ago that this was my body's reaction to spirit energy. What kind of spirit, I'm still not sure. What I do know is that the stronger the sensation, the stronger the spirit.

I tried to draw in a deep breath. "Oh, yeah. It's in here," I announced. 

Jeff and Kyle entered the room behind me, but I didn't turn my attention to them. I kept it focused on the room around me. 

Like the other parts of the apartment, this room was also empty. A small closet had been built into one corner, but lacked a door. A single window at the center of the wall to my left looked out over the landscape of corrugated metal buildings and parking lots cluttered with old vehicles. 

Standing at that window, looking out, I could feel eyes upon me. I knew it wasn't Jeff or Kyle staring at me. This was something else. When I turned to face them, I said, "There's definitely something in this room."

This was the first hot spot, the first location where we would set down the equipment to investigate. As if reading my mind, Jeff stepped to the center of the room and placed the digital voice recorder on the floor. "Let's try an EVP session, then."

"Okay," I responded, and moved the wall adjoining the kitchen. I stood with my back against it, waiting as Jeff stood against another wall. Kyle, who had been carrying his camcorder with him, stood outside the bedroom door and began taking photos and video. 

"I'm Jeff."

"And I'm Linda."

Our typical introductions were always followed by a short speech, usually given by Jeff, that was meant to not only tell potential spirits more about ourselves but to explain why we were there. We also made it a point to state that we had no intentions of harming them. It might not be possible to harm a spirit anyway, but if the spirit didn't know it was a spirit, then a simple statement like this could be enough to calm his or her nerves. 

What followed was a series of questions, not always in the same order, that were intended to draw basic information out of a potential spirit. We always asked his or her name, why it stayed there, if it was attached to the home, the land, or an object in the home. The questions were separated by an intentional silence of between 10 and 30 seconds. This would give a spirit plenty of time to answer the question before we asked another. There is nothing more annoying than hearing a disembodied voice while reviewing the audio files, but being unable to tell what it was saying because an investigator was speaking at the same time. 

Throughout the EVP session, the room remained somewhat heavy. I glanced around the shadowy room, illuminated only by dim light from the window and from the living room. If I were blind, I would have believed at that moment that there were more people in the room than just Jeff and I. "There's a female energy here," I told Jeff and Kyle. "Her bed was in that corner." I pointed to the corner farthest from the door, to the right of the window. 

"Someone used to come in here and abuse her." Neither Jeff nor Kyle responded, so we continued with our questions.

After about 10 minutes of asking questions and waiting for a response, we ended the session and went about reviewing the audio. Occasionally, when listening through the digital voice recorder, you can hear a disembodied voice. Other times, we have to wait until we can run the audio through analysis software on the computer. With the aid of noise cancelling, over-the-ear headphones and the software, quiet voices and whispers often appear. 

I listened carefully to the audio, with the digital voice recorder pressed up against my right ear, but after listening to the entire session, I hadn't heard anything out of the ordinary. I stopped the playback.

"Nothing," I told Jeff. 

"Well, should we try going downstairs?" he responded.

"Yep. Let's do it."

We stuffed our equipment into our pockets and made our way back out of the apartment and down the steps to the front door.

The double doors had been painted forest green. Each had multiple panes of rectangular glass, separated by mullions, in the upper half of the door. Pulling the door open, we stepped inside and found ourselves standing on a landing, with one staircase leading up on the right side and another leading down on the left. 

The steps were covered with12 inch square tiles that resembled white marble. We made our way down and found a long hallway leading away into the darkness. To the right was a doorway, and we walked through to find a kitchen on the left. A dim, fluorescent light fixture hung precariously from the center of the dingey, white ceiling. It seemed as if a good stomp on the floor upstairs might send it crashing to the white tile below. What drew my attention, though, were the walls. Someone thought it was a good idea to paint the kitchen walls with a shade of green a bit less vivid than lime. Holes in the sheetrock walls had been recently patched with white spackling compound. Red spray paint had been used to paint a crude daisy-like flower on one wall with a speech bubble emerging from it. The text within the speech bubble had been spackled over. 

Against the walls in the small kitchen stood stainless steel work tables, each dotted with various construction remnants. One held pieces of old wood trim, a can of paint, and a 90s style boom box. The tables and the items they held appeared to have been caught up in a spontaneous flour fight between contractors. White dust, no doubt resulting from sanding the white spackling compound that dotted the walls, covered the tables, their contents, and the floor around them. 

I moved through the kitchen, toward the back of the building, far enough to see that the kitchen ended at a griddle with a range hood caked with years of sticky, amber residue. At the opposite end of the kitchen, against the front wall of the building, was a small nook that could've held a dining room table at one time. Medium stained oak panels clad the walls. A chocolate brown-painted window, wider than it was tall and with multiple panes of glass, cut through the longest wall. The top of the window butted up against a sagging drop ceiling as if attempting to hold it up. At the center of the nook, the floor tiles had been scraped away, revealing a dark brownish-black spot on the concrete floor beneath it. 

At the sight of the large, dark spot, my overactive imagination began pouring through possible scenarios. I imagined people sitting around the dinner table, feasting on partially decomposed steak from a nearby grocery store dumpster, when a young man says something that angers another. The second young man lunges across the table and plants the blade of his dinner knife deep in the chest of the first, who falls out of his chair and onto the floor at the exact location of the dark spot. He bleeds out on the floor as the rest of the diners return to devouring their rotten steaks. 

Standing in the kitchen, staring into the dining nook, I looked to my left and found another doorway. This one led down a short hallway. On the left side of the hallway, a set of stairs covered in navy blue carpet led up to a ceiling, not unlike a staircase I'd seen in pictures of the Winchester House in San Francisco. "What the hell?" 

Kyle appeared beside me, looking up the staircase. He chuckled. "My boss said he is going to get one of those Halloween skeletons and set it up there, then wall-in the stairs."

The next people to renovate the building were certain to get a scare when they busted a hole in the wall, shined a flashlight through the hole and illuminated the skeleton lying inside. 

Sounded like a good idea to me, although closing off a perfectly good staircase seemed like a waste of space. At the very least, the area could've been used for storage. 

A few steps further down the hallway, and we entered a room filled with an energy that caused me to stop just a few steps past the doorway. The floor of the room, like the others, was covered with tile. The room was devoid of furniture. Light from surrounding buildings angled into the room through a few windows and formed clusters of golden rectangles upon the tile floor. 

"Whoa," I said, looking around the room.

"What?" 

I didn't turn to face Kyle, but continued to look around the room. "This isn't a good feeling in here." 

He didn't immediately respond, but looked around the room for a moment. Then, "The air is really heavy in here."

I nodded. "You definitely have something in here, too."

I took a few steps into the room, then made my way around the perimeter. The energy began to subside as I moved through the room, and I decided to check out the other downstairs rooms. I had yet to explore the rooms at the end of the hallway I'd encountered when I first walked down the steps from the front door. 

The hallway had chair rail molding with more wood paneling below it. More sagging acoustic tiles, some stained by old leaks, loomed over the hall. An exit sign, illuminated with red letters, hung by its electrical wire just outside the doorway to the kitchen. 

We met Jeff halfway down the hall. "Go down there," he said, in a tone that I knew meant he had sensed something at the end of the hall from where he had just come.

The hallway receded into shadows as it led to the back of the building. A small, empty room led off to the left, another to the right. The room that drew my attention, though, was a utility room at the end of the hall. It held a water heater, a washing machine, and a dryer. 

When I got to the threshold of the room, I stopped. Again, the energy was strong and dark here. In my mind rose the image of a young man hiding in the room. He would come to this room and use some sort of drug. 

"A young man would come here to hide. He would do drugs in here," I told Jeff and Kyle. "I don't like this room at all. It feels terrible."

There was a sense of chaos in the room, of dark impulses and frightening thoughts. The man who hid there was troubled, to say the least. 

"Let's try here," I told Jeff. We set our REM pod down just inside the door of the utility room, placed the digital voice recorder a few feet away from it, and backed out into the hallway.  

For a few minutes, we stood there asking questions, hoping to elicit a response through the REM Pod. As we stood there though, I began feeling as if there was a young man behind me, back toward the front of the building. I looked back and examined the space. I couldn't see anything but the illuminated kitchen doorway and the base of the steps leading down from the front door, but I knew he was there. He was on the top of the steps, squatted down so that he could see under the drop ceiling to the end of the hallway where we stood. He was keeping an eye on us.

I voiced my feelings to Jeff, who then began to watch the stairs for signs of movement. He snapped a few photos in that direction, and I did the same. As I clicked off a photo, Jeff said, "Whoa. Did you see that?"

"What?" I hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary. 

"A small shadow just moved near the bottom of the kitchen door." He set off down the hallway and stopped at the kitchen doorway, pointing down to where light from the kitchen illuminated the hall floor. "Right here, something just moved, like a shadow. Take another picture." 

I snapped off a few more pictures, taking a moment to look at each one before taking the next. 

Nothing.

Jeff had began taking his own pictures of the room across the hall from the kitchen and of the kitchen itself. He took a few more of the shadowy stairs and the landing at the front door. Then, he turned to me. "Move around a bit. I wanna see if there's a way we could've caused the shadows to move."

I did as I was told. I swayed back and forth, took a few steps toward him then a few steps away. Nothing that I did could've created the movement that he saw. Whatever caused it had to have been either in the kitchen or in the hallway with us. 

We walked away scratching our heads. Up the steps to the front door, we turned 180 degrees to walk up the second flight to the upper floor. The condition of the upstairs rooms was much the same as on the lower floor. It appeared that renovations had begun here, as well, but hadn't gotten very far. 

We chose one small room that felt different than the others. Standing against one wall in the room, I began asking questions. The voice recorder and the REM Pod both sat at the center of the floor before me. Jeff and Kyle wandered through the hallway and the other rooms on the upper floor, leaving me alone to try and communicate with whatever might be there. 

There was a sense that perhaps a young man who was mentally handicapped might've resided in the room at one time. His childlike energy was still there. I could sense the love he had for his mother, as well. He had never known his father. 

I spoke as if there were a child in the room. I asked about his mother. I asked what games he liked to play, but the REM Pod never responded. My only hope was that the voice recorder had picked up a voice besides mine. I would wait until I could run the audio through my analysis software to determine if the young man's spirit was still there or if it was simply his energy that remained.

While standing outside, taking a short break, we tried to decide if there was something more we could do and if we did, where we would do it. We decided that we needed to try something more in Kyle's apartment. That was the section of the building that would be occupied first, and his safety was our priority. 

Since we hadn't taken the REM Pod or the spirit box into the apartment yet, we carried both back up the newly built steps to the apartment, and made our way back down the hall to the larger of the two bedrooms. I set the spirit box down in the center of the floor and set the voice recorder on the floor about halfway between the spirit box and me. 

This time the energy in the room wasn't quite as heavy. Still, I hoped that something remained there to communicated with us. As I asked questions, Kyle began to ask questions of his own. Jeff went to the corner to the left of the window, stood there for a moment, then moved to the corner to the right of the window for a moment before returning to the other corner. He moved back and forth between the two corners a few times before I asked him what he was doing.

"Seeing if the energy is different in each corner. It is. The energy in that corner is worse." He motioned to the corner to the right of the window. 

"That's because that's where her bed was," I told him. I could see her sitting on the head of the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms curled around her legs as a man walked into the room and shut the door behind him.

I decided to try Jeff's experiment, and soon decided he was right. The energy in the corner to the left of the window felt almost normal. The other corner felt strange, like fear and pain had been so profound at one time that it morphed into some tangible creature that occupied that corner of the room.

I returned to my line of questioning, with Kyle chiming in every so often. Between questions, the building was silent. Then suddenly, Kyle began yelling like a drill sergeant. Jeff and I jumped and our hearts leapt into our throats. We couldn't understand what Kyle was saying, but it would've intimidated even the most strong minded. When the sudden shock of so much yelling subsided, Jeff and I exchanged a slight smile. Our investigations never lacked entertainment. 

Yelling was a good idea, despite our amusement. So far, we had spoken in soft tones, careful not to anger anyone. However, that hadn't seemed to garner any responses. It was time to try something different. 

Voices had been emanating from the spirit box steadily since we turned it on. We quickly noticed though, when Kyle yelled, the voices coming through the spirit box fell silent for a minute. 

We lingered in the apartment for a while longer, then decided it was time to pack up and go. We had a bit of driving to do before the night ended. As we said our good-byes, Kyle offered us money. We told him we couldn't take so much, and ended up leaving with only a fraction of what he offered. We told him that we intended on giving it to our church, and he was fine with that. To make up for the money we didn't take, he offered two small mason jars of a thick, red hot sauce he made and was trying to start marketing. That was something we couldn't turn down. 

It was one of the best sauces I've had. I slathered everything with it for the next few weeks until it was gone and plan on returning to purchase more in the near future.

Well folks, it's about time for me to end this and get on with life. Sitting here writing is a wonderful escape from reality, and with a hot cup of coffee beside me, I could sit here for another couple of hours with ease. But the responsibilities of life call to me. I hope that you'll come back next week to check out the last part of this investigation post, where I'll talk about the evidence we got from the investigation and our recommendations for what course of action we believed Kyle should take.

There are more interesting stories to come!

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