Back in February 2008, I did an investigation for ghosts at a small farm in Southwestern IA. Due to confidentiality issues, I'm going to withhold the name of the farm/ranch, as the case is still being worked on. What I am going to say is that this is by far the most unusual case that I have ever worked on, as the entity in question plays with emotions.
Many of you will say that I'm insane when I tell this story, and others will say that I just plain don't know the first thing about spirits. The latter may be more true than anything, but I AM well versed in ghosts and their types. This is just a case like none other I've ever had before.
I started this case while working with my usual ghost hunting team back in February. What the client claimed at the time, was that the entity was causing things to not get done at the house, and that people that she would hire to do the jobs that were required there were doing only half the job and then leaving. She also claimed that whenever she would hire someone over the phone to do something that it would never come to fruition. For example...one of her local friends had a son that was an electrician. He was supposed to come over one weekend last year to have a look at her wiring, as it was very old and needed to be brought up to date. They tried for six months to try to schedule a date, but every time that date would approach, something tragic always happened to prevent it. This is just one example of many that she put in front of us.
Initially, we kind of blew that off. We went ahead and investigated the house as per usual, gathering photographs, evp's, and video footage, and made an appointment to come back a second time. Sorting the evidence proved to be interesting, as we managed to lose all of our video footage taken from the site. We figured that it was because the recorder was just a borrowed one, and we didn't have but one single battery that ran out much faster than it should have. No matter, when we went to see the video footage that we had taken from the upstairs of her house, we were able to watch 5 minutes of it, then it went blank. In another odd occurrence, I had been recording in the same upstairs room that we had kept the video camera in, and during the recording process at one point almost an hour and 20 minutes in, the recording simply shut off. My computer has NEVER done that before, and hasn't since. I was however able to retrieve a couple of EVP's from the information recorded, and I forwarded them on to the homeowner. One of them sounded like a little girl, and one of them sounded like our home owner calling one of her dogs, making chipper and cheerful noises toward one of the pups, but alas, wasn't our homeowner at all. We decided to make a second appointment to visit he home, both to again try to recapture some video footage of the upstairs, and also to do a cleaning if she desired one.
That's when wierdness started to happen to us. When we were heading out to do the secondary investigation, we got a call from our group leader to take a side trip to Harlan, IA to do a quickie investigation on a new UFO case that was called in to our group. While we were on the way there, we got lost and wound up going about an hour out of our way. In addition, the "service engine" light came on in the car we were driving. Of course we pulled off of the road and checked all the fluids and whatnot, but could find nothing wrong. We decided to go ahead and chance it rather than head back to Des Moines, and luckily we were able to do both things without too much problem. We got to the home and did an investigation, but we all decided at that time that we just weren't ready to do the cleaning as we hadn't gathered enough data yet to do a cleaning. We still needed to go through what we had gathered on that day.
After reviewing the data gathered from this second investigation, we wanted to set up a third appointment to clean the house, but the home owner wasn't quite sure that she wanted to do that based on the information we received in one of the EVP's gleaned from the investigation on the first day we were there. It was the voice of a little girl, and she just couldn't bring herself to clean the house and make this little girl spirit homeless. Although we understood how she felt, we didn't necessarily agree, so we told her that she just needed to call if she changed her mind about having a cleaning done and that was, we thought pretty much the end of it.
We kept in contact for the next several months, and finally the entity invading this womans home started to become VERY active again. She contacted us again formally, stating that she c0uldn't live like this anymore, and that we should come out and clean. That's when the fun started. She still wasn't convinced that cleaning the house was the best option, as she had some wiccan friends come through before we had, and when they had tried to clean her house it made things a lot worse. She was afraid that our cleaning wouldn't take, and even if it did, the old addage "what was clean will once again become dirty" particularly bothered her. She was uncomfortable with the Christian cleaning that we were offering initially, thinking that the spirit entity was most likely a Native American spirit, and that the standard Christian blessing wasn't going to do more than piss it off. As we discussed her concern, I realized that I still really had an affinity for this woman, that although we hadn't seen whole lot of activity at her house, that it was imperative that I continue to do a lot of work...research work, on how to rid her of this invasion in her life. I wasn't going to quit. I was going to keep on this case no matter what until she had gotten her life back. The problem was I wasn't sure what I was up against, or exactly what it was that I was going to do to help her.
We eventully did set up an appointment to go out there, almost 5 months after the original investigation had taken place. I had come up with a multi tiered plan to clean the downstairs, the land, and he upstairs of the home all at once, hence forcing the being out of the house and off the land if it worked. The most important thing that I was going to need was people. I needed enough people to cover all the compass points on the land with two on each point, I needed two people at least to clean the downstairs, and I needed myself, and at least one other upstairs. By radio, we were going to communicate and start all three cleansings at the exact same time, which would hopefully give the desired effect of capturing the entity in one place and holding it there until it had no way to go other than up and out. I never found out if it would have worked or not. While I wasn't looking, our team leader was up to something that he never told me about.
Late last year, we were approached by a man who claimed himself to be perhaps the best "house cleaner" in the world. He claimed that he was SO good that he didn't even have to go to a house in order to clean it, that just by the power of prayer he could do it from his own living room. Of course I scoffed at this, as I had no idea what kind of arrogance it took to think that you were really so good that it didn't even matter what you were facing, but you could clean it with a simple prayer for a person that you'd never even met in a place where you'd never even been, but I knew it took a lot. That immediately put a bad taste in my mouth, and I expressed my opinion to my team about it. For the most part I was agreed with, but apparently not everyone did. My team leader didn't get the message apparently, and he apparently became fast friends with this new guy, even to the point of beginning to attend church with him.
The day of the cleansing came upon us rapidly and we all had plans to get out there and do something, even if it were just a regular style cleaning if we didn't have enough people to do the big one. The day arrived, but something happened, and we will never know exactly what it was. For one thing, our team leader kind of went mental on us, saying that he was NOT going to go and clean that house...ever. Well now! That sucked! He was my ride out there, and I had already decided that I was going to do this no matter what! I was confused, very confused, and a bit nervous. After all, what would our client say? Well, I found out later that day.
Many, MANY things had gone on behind the scenes. Apparently our team leader had tried to bring this new "house cleaner" friend in on the deal. He had emailed the home owner and told her about it, and she wanted to know more... He had the "house cleaner guy" email her back, which is a HUGE mistake. This guy was a serious bible thumper...the kind who believe that if you don't go to church, if you don't believe in Christ...I could go on and on, that you were damned and there was no hope. If she didn't believe that Christ was the almighty, that the cleansing wouldn't take. Of course, the homeowner didn't like his tone, or his message. She believed in God, but still had questions about Christ, as she was native American and had been brought up to believe that Christ was more of a prophet for God. Needless to say, they had some serious exchanges between them...so heated that she decided eventually to contact the owner of the whole organization to make sure that this "house cleaner" guy wasn't involved in her case at all...she didn't want him, and she knew he could only make things worse.
The group owner contacted "house cleaner" guy and told him to leave her alone. Unfortunately, he did not. He apparently tried to do a long distance cleaning of her house by praying from his living room, which resulted in our homeowner being terrorized for the entire night, not just with banging, rattling and general unrest in her home, but also with a plague of flies so thick she had trouble breathing! She was also bitten by a spider...a big nasty pussy bite that made her miserable. After one more call to the group owner, she terminated her case with the group that I was working with. It was rough, nasty, and not a lot of nice words were said on the way to that conclusion either, from what I have been able to gather since then. People are still a bit tight lipped about the whole thing...and I probably would be too had I been a participant in ANY of that nightmare.
Anyway, there I was, stuck with this huge plan to clean the house and nothing to do with it. My group had alienated our client...a client who, mind you, I had PROMISED to stick with all the way through until the damn thing was solved and removed from her life. I'd never felt so bad. It was all over before I'd even had a chance to put my two cents worth in...and I would have. Mainly because I could see that this Chaos was typical of the entity. Once again an appointment had been made to do something to the house, and unseen circumstances caused the appointment to be broken. Was it the entity that had caused this? How was I going to find out, especially since I had been forbidden to contact our homeowner again?
I've always been kind of the "mouthy" rebel in our group. I've usually got some snide comment to make in order to shed some levity on a subject, or just to break the monotony in general. I try to be that way in order to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously, which we are known to do sometimes. I've also been a bit of a loner, as being the group archivist I've had to do a lot of work alone rather than as part of a team. I've always known that it probabaly wasn't the best thing for me to do being that way and that some day it would probably cause me to be removed from the group, but it had worked for me thus far. I decided that I was going to make a bit of a stand, and that if I got a negative reaction I would just have to keep at it until I got the positive one I was looking for. I waited for things to calm down a bit (three or four days), and during a group meeting I got the group leader alone and asked him if he knew what was going on with the case.
He told me that our homeowner had contacted another group, and that she had requested that we have absolutely nothing to do with her case ever again. I couldn't believe it! After a bit of thought, I decided I would ask how he felt about me approaching the new group and offering my services, as kind of a "Okay, I've been there, is there anything I can do to help you along" type of gesture. I also explained that I had serious guilt about the way that things went, as I had made promise that I really didn't want to break if I could avoid it. He thought about it for a few minutes, and told me that it would be okay for me to do it...but only as a single entity. It wouldn't be an effort on the part of our group, but that I'd be pretty much flying solo. I agreed.
The first thing on my list was to contact the new group. I did so, only to find out that it was the wrong group! How embarrassing! I'd been given slightly incorrect information. I re-emailed and this time got a response from someone who knew who I was talking about and forwarded my request to the appropriate person. It was also a bit negative, expressing distaste about the group that I worked for, how the home owner said she didn't want to work with "us" anymore. Also that there had been so much negative about the group I worked for that they didn't see that I could be of much assistance at all. Pretty much the response was "no" in a nutshell.
That response ATE at me. Here I had made this damn promise...and I'm GOING to try to keep it. I needed to at least let the homeowner know how bad I felt about everything that happened, and let her know that I was still willing to help if she would have me. Even though I had been told not to email her, I did it.
She was happy to hear from me. I think she was also happy to know that she hadn't gone through all that stuff with my group just to have to completely start over again. I am the one who had the evps that she had been hoping to get back from my group, so she no longer would have reason to email my old group at all. She understood that I was trying to keep my promise, so she decided to fight for me to join forces with this new group that was working in her home.
And a fight it turned out to be. This group had been made from people who were either ex members of my old group, or they had experienced some sort of bad experience by the current and past leaders of the organization that I worked with regularly. These people hated me, were suspicious of me, was sure that my only purpose was to try to sabbotage their investigation, and the list just goes on and on and on. You would swear that I personally was the devil incarnate, even though I personally hadn't met any of these folks before in my life! Thank god for the homeowner, and the leader of the current group, who both had the presence of mind to get past all of that.
I'll explain more about what is going on now in the next post. I had to do this in order to bring you up to where I'm at now, because I'm a bit on the nervous side. This has turned into a tense investigation, and I'm going to need to be able to release some thoughts and stuff before its over. I will also need to be able to put things on paper to be able to analyze them to come up with new and creative ideas, and to make sure that I'm not overlooking things. Bear with me.
Ciao.
