Saturday, March 7, 2009

My favorite investigation so far....

A few months ago, we investigated a private residence in Nashua NH. From the beginning, we knew it was going to be an interesting case. With experiences of mangled full body apparitions, growling, scratching, flying objects and voices, everything seemed to point to the possibility of a demonic entity. The client had some family history of voodoo and "black magic" and had received a demonic name through a Ouija board at one point. She had tried to do a blessing on her house with holy water and it only seemed to intensify the activity. I'm extremely skeptical so I took everything I was told with a grain of salt, but there was no denying the negative feeling inside the house.
While setting up, I picked up the small bottle of holy water that we keep in our kit (just in case) and eyed one of the other investigators. As soon as the bottle was in my hand, the client called from the other room that she had a really bad feeling about all of this. She said that all of a sudden, she had a heavy feeling of dread and her heart started beating rapidly. One of my investigators had her sit down and got her some water. I put the holy water back into the kit and as soon as it left my hand, she took a deep breath and said that it had passed. We told her it was probably just anxiety from everything that was going on and left it at that.
We had everything pretty much ready to go when we noticed on our monitor that one of our cameras had fallen. The camera was in one of the bedrooms, duct taped to a shelf in a closet. Falling cameras can happen. There are knobs in two places that help to adjust the angles of the camera. If you don't tighten the knobs after adjusting, it will very very slowly tilt down and then the weight of the camera will just bring it down. So Liz went up to retape it and make sure that everything was tightened. When I came up with some more duct tape, she told me that as she was holding the camera in place, it felt like someone was ripping the camera out of her hands. We had an extra handy cam, so we set it up on the other side of the room, facing the IR camera so that if it happened again, we could pin point why it was happening.
Naturally for the first round of investigating, Liz and I took that bedroom. After about ten minutes of asking some questions and getting a feel for the room, I asked "If that was you that moved our camera, could you give us some kind of sign that you're here. But... can you not touch our cameras because they're really expensive?!" As soon as I said it we heard "RRRRRRRRRRIPPPPPPPP" and the camera came FLYING off the shelf and then dangled by the cord. Now, I've seen cameras come untaped and fall, but this was nothing like that. When I went back and listened to the audio from it, you hear me take the biggest gasping breath and I'm pretty sure you could probably hear my heart beating out of my chest. Liz and I didn't even move. We just looked at the camera and then at each other in silence. After we had a minute to collect ourselves, we turned on the light and examined where the camera had once been taped. We checked to see if maybe the shelf wasn't level and the weight of the camera had somehow caused it to come down, or for a piece of tape that may have ripped. But we found nothing. In fact, the shelf was actually uneven, but in the opposite direction that the camera had fallen. So it would've had to have pulled somewhat against gravity when it came down.
We debated even putting the camera back up, those things do not come cheap. But finally we retaped it in the same spot, but made sure to go extremely heavy on the tape and triple check all of the knobs. This is the picture I took of the base of the camera to prove that we had used enough tape to hold it down:

After a about a half an hour, Ashleigh (one of our lead investigators) came into our room and told us that we had to hear something. Her and Darin were doing evp work in the bedroom next to us and every time they would ask a question, they would hear a distinct growl answer back. Ashleigh was acutally almost to the point of tears. She said she had never heard anything like it. So I went into the room with Darin, and Ashleigh stayed with Liz in our room. I sat for a few moments while he asked questions, but for some reason, we could no longer hear it.
Liz decided to have a sort of group meeting, so we called everyone into the flying camera room and updated the group on what had been going on. We turned the lights on and quietly discussed all the experiences we were having, while I rewound the handy cam to see what we had caught when the camera flew. Not even five minutes of us all being in there, we heard it again. The camera had once again ripped, had almost hit Darin in the head, and was dangling from its cord. At this point, I wish we had taken the hint that this thing did not want to be taped.
Throughout the rest of the night, we all had some little personal experiences. Whistling, a few voices, some scratching, but for the most part it was pretty mellow. We packed up quickly and didn't mention to the client the experiences we had had. We wanted to look over the evidence first to rule out anything obvious before breaking the news to her that she really did have something going on in her house.
I was laid off at the time and extremely anxious to see what we had caught, so I brought home the DVR (the computer system that records what we capture from the IR cameras) and hooked it up to my t.v. as soon as I got home. But when I plugged it in, it wouldn't work. The red light that lights up when the DVR is turned on was now flashing (which I had never seen). I tried a different AC adapter, but still got nothing. So mad. So the next day I brought the DVR back to Liz's house and tried it there, still nothing. We went to radio shack and had the guy that worked there try a few power cords, but nothing would work. We called the manufacturer and we still had a warranty, so we sent it back to be looked at. The next day the guy called and told us that we had lost EVERYTHING. He said that when he opened up the computer, everything inside was melted. Literally melted.
That day was definitely one of the worst days of NHP. Not only did we lose the evidence from that investigation, but everything from the past six months. We had plenty of room left on the hard drive, so we hadn't gotten around to dumping each case onto a disc. Not only that, but I was scheduled to do a presentation at a high school the next day and now I had nothing to show them. Luckily, we were still covered under our warranty as far as getting everything fixed, but we were heartbroken.
The night was not a total loss. We did have to cancel the presentation, and lost a lot of video evidence, but we caught some of the best audio I have ever heard. On Kerrie's (investigator)voice recorder, you hear her say "I'm not very happy with whoever you are, you're scaring the little kids that live here." Clear as day, a little boy voice answers back "We didn't do anything!". A few minutes later, you actually hear the duct tape ripping from the camera upstairs and the little boy says "That's in my sister's room!". About twenty minutes later, Kerrie is having a conversation with the other investigator in the room and the entire time she is talking, you hear an extremely deep voice in the background. I couldn't make out what it was saying because Kerrie is talking too. We need to get some audio software that will lift her voice. Liz swears she hears "Shut the f--- up or I'll go in you.", but I'm still skeptical of it. No matter what voice recorder you listen to throughout the night, you can constantly hear growls, scratches, whistles and children laughing and singing. At the very end of the night, Liz actually fell asleep in one of the rooms and began to snore and you can actually hear little kids laughing at her snoring.
We were supposed to go back to the house last weekend, but the client ended up cancelling because her kids were sick. I can't wait to return to this house, but I don't know if I want to risk melting another hard drive...

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