Ghost Box Page 3
The fifth version of Frank’s Box
that Frank built to Chris’s exact specifications.
When we first walked into that room, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a huge 1980s-era beige computer tower on the workbench. It appeared that someone had ripped off the faceplate and shoved in gobs of wires and then made their own misshapen faceplate and screwed it on the front. It looked like there were several homemade switches and knobs on the front as well as handwritten labels done in marker. On top of the tower there was a small wooden speaker. As I took a few steps in the room I thought to myself, “Oh God, please tell me that’s not it.”
“This is it!” Frank exclaimed. I felt as if someone had drained me of all my enthusiasm. “Do you want to hear it work?” Frank asked excitedly.
The sixth version, named Sarah’s Box, was built by Frank and created
for Chris’s daughter Sarah, who has the same ability to hear spirits
through the box as her father.
I took a few steps toward him and the machine and said in a doubtful voice, “I guess.” Frank walked over to the machine and aggressively flipped a large silver switch on the front of the panel that was labeled “on” and “off” in magic marker. Several of the lights on the machine lit up and through the wooden speaker on top it began to make a strange “warm-up” sound. Suddenly, the speaker came to life, spitting out what sounded like static and random words. I could clearly hear snippets of local radio broadcasts in all of the confusion. It quickly dawned on me that this man had built a broken radio and claimed to be speaking to ghosts and aliens through it. I knew it was time to go. I looked at my father and he looked back at me and, without saying a word, we knew what the other was thinking. Nervous, I took a few steps backward, as did my father.
I told Frank, “Thanks so much for inviting us out here today, we really appreciate it.” As I turned my back to leave I said, “We’ll try to do an article on this in the magazine and see where it goes from there.”
As my father and I started walking toward the door, we heard Frank yell, “Wait!” We both froze in our tracks. I slowly turned around to face Frank and as I did he said, “The voices said that you’re supposed to take this with you.”
I thought to myself, the voices. Instinctively, I started to reach into my back pocket for my wallet and in an extremely hesitant voice asked Frank, “How much does someone pay you for something like this?”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
In a shaky voice, I answered, “No.”
The first video box. Chris bugged Frank
for a long time to create the first video box.
Chris’s echo box that was built by Andre.
There was a moment of silence before Frank stated, “I’m supposed to stay here and build these things; you’re supposed to take this out and talk to ghosts.” It felt like we stood there staring at Frank forever. Eventually my father and I moved at almost the same moment to break the tension. I grabbed one half of the gigantic machine and my father grabbed the other half. We didn’t exchange many pleasantries with Frank after that as we quickly made our way up the stairs. As we left the house, both of us felt extremely on edge. We were driving an old white Jeep Cherokee at the time and I remember lifting up the tailgate and not gently setting, but rather almost tossing the device in the back of the vehicle. As we quickly drove away, it felt as though we’d survived a near-death experience. Both of us laughed nervously and recounting some of the strange details of what had just taken place. Suddenly, something dawned on me. Frank and I had engaged in a huge flame war for several months, and he seemed to be some sort of electronics genius. What if he didn’t build a Telephone to the Dead at all? What if he built some kind of dirty bomb and we were driving away with it? I could visualize Frank standing in his driveway as we sped off into the distance holding some sort of remote control and muttering to himself, “Telephone to the Dead, my ass!”—then pushing the button and witnessing our demise.
But, we didn’t blow up. Instead, my dad and I took the machine back to our office and stuck it on a shelf by the entrance. It sat on the shelf, unused, for nearly a year. We thought there was nothing to it whatsoever. When we walked into the office and saw it, we would chuckle. It became our “pick me up” for the day before we started work.
The holiday season arrived and we were preparing to shut down the office for several days. We had a huge investigation set up at the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas, for just after Christmas. This was going to be a big investigation because it was our fourth time there and we felt we had a great chance at solving the crime that surrounded the house. I remember walking into the office that morning and seeing Frank’s machine sitting on that shelf, dusty and unused. I thought to myself, “I’m going to prove to that guy that this thing doesn’t work at all.”
I got one of my digital voice recorders, plugged in the machine, flipped the big silver switch on the front, and once again witnessed the strange sounds coming out of the speaker on top. I set my digital recorder next to the speaker and walked away for the rest of the day. When I wrapped up my final emails of the day, I walked back over to the machine and shut it off. I grabbed my digital recorder and took it over to the computer where we did the majority of our EVP analysis. I plugged in the patch cord from the recorder to the computer and patiently waited for the large file to download.
When the notification popped up on the screen, I immediately plugged in my 1970s “Princess Leia” headphones and slipped them over my ears. As I pushed the play button, the sound that came through was just like what we had heard in Frank’s basement—like a broken radio, basically—but louder. I tried to concentrate for quite a while, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, but eventually my thoughts wandered to the upcoming investigation. I thought about the house, the town of Atchison, the spirits that we had already contacted, the poor little girl who had died there, and the mystery that surrounded the property. After some time passed, I realized I still had this annoying sound torturing my eardrums. I grabbed the mouse and prepared to turn it off. Just as I was getting ready to right-click, I heard something that took my breath away. A male voice said, “Your trip to Atchison.” I froze. The sounds continued in my ear for quite some time before I found the sense to push the stop button. I rewound, eventually finding the spot in the recording I was looking for. Once again it said, “Your trip to Atchison.”
It was at that moment I was convinced I had lost my mind. I started to listen beyond that point and could make out clear voices in the recording, stating facts that only my team and I knew. I had to quickly bring in a witness to make sure I wasn’t losing my grip on reality. I called my mother and she came down to meet me. I started to play her snippets of things that I found on the recording and she was as stunned as I was. As I let the recording play, she heard something and her face turned white as a ghost. “Wait! Play that back!” After rewinding, you could hear another male voice saying two words: “Ice boat.”
You see, my mother has always had dreams about being on the Titanic and has had a very clear waking nightmare of being in the freezing water as the ship went down, attempting to hold two blond-haired children’s heads above the water. This was a distinct message to her. At this point, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t just “hearing things,” so I sent the recording off to one of my best EVP analysts. I didn’t tell him what the recording was, I just asked him to see if he could find anything meaningful in it. He found more than twenty clear statements in that one recording. Like it or not, we had to test this device in the field.
The fourth version of Frank’s Box was more portable.
It was the first to run on batteries.
The second ghost box that was built by Andre.
We made the decision there was no better place on earth than Sallie’s House to find out if this truly was the completed version of Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead. In a way we were right, since the spir
it of Sallie, the innocent child spirit, did have something to say. We even thought we might hear from the man responsible for the child’s death (a doctor)—and we did.
What we didn’t expect to encounter was the doctor’s inhuman astral world guardian.
[contents]
CHAPTER · TWO
Sallie House
Not long after the oversized and under-appreciated “Telephone to the Dead” spoke to us for the first time, we left for Atchison, Ghost Box in tow. (Our investigation of the Sallie House using Frank’s Box was actually our fourth investigation of the Sallie House property.) I should probably start at the beginning …
I was first introduced to the story of the Sallie House through the television show Sightings, which aired in the 1990s. It focused on paranormal activity and explored everything from ghost stories to UFO investigations. I remember being particularly fascinated by the story of a young couple that had moved into a small house in Atchison, Kansas, with their newborn child. Apparently from the moment they moved in, strange things began to happen.
At first it was small things, like items being misplaced, but it quickly escalated. The woman who lived there said she used to put the child to bed at the same time every night. One day, her next-door neighbors saw her outside and asked her why, each night after she put the baby to bed in the nursery, she would turn the light back on only a few minutes later. The neighbor asked if everything was all right. The woman explained that she seldom went back in the room unless the child was crying and that she rarely turned on the light. But the neighbor reiterated that the light came back on every night—they could see it from their room!
This obviously concerned the homeowner, who thought she might be having electrical issues in the house. The owners had the wiring checked and were told that it was old, but in decent shape. From there, things seemed to spiral out of control. The woman said she walked into the nursery one day to find a mobile above her baby’s bed spinning wildly. Even stranger, all of the baby’s stuffed animals were arranged in a perfect circle in the center of the room. Obviously someone had deliberately placed the toys in a circle, but neither she nor her husband had done it and the baby was too young to do so.
Frightened and curious as to what was happening, the woman began to snap photographs throughout the house. She was shocked when she saw strange mists, lights, and figures in the photographs. She had the film and camera checked out to make sure there was nothing wrong with them, and was told there were no problems with either. As the occurrences became more frequent inside the house, she feared for her family’s safety.
She contacted the Sightings television show, asking them to come out and help her with her possible paranormal problem. After reviewing the evidence, the show’s producers agreed to come out and investigate. They set up their base camp across the street at the Glick Mansion and went over every day in an attempt to record any strange occurrences. The crew was frustrated by the lack of evidence inside the house. They went to tell the woman they hadn’t discovered much and, more than likely, would not be airing the episode. As they broke the news to the woman and her husband, the couple was clearly disappointed.
Suddenly, the man began to act very strange. He winced and hunched over in obvious pain. Startled, the crew asked him if he was all right. The man clenched his teeth and exclaimed, “She always does this when she gets angry!” He raised his shirt to expose his chest. To the crew’s astonishment, they noticed small red marks begin to develop at the top of his chest and move down toward his abdomen. Very quickly the marks became deeper and clearer. Eventually blood began to drip from these scratches.
The shocked crew asked, “How often does this happen?”
The man replied, “Whenever she gets angry.” The Sightings team was obviously fascinated by this new development, as it was something they had never seen before. They set up experiments in which they had the man sit in a chair in the center of the room and wait for something to happen. According to the show, they had several encounters with an entity that scratched the man repeatedly. They filmed the majority of these attacks.
Also, while these experiments were taking place, there was a bizarre incident with a rose. At one point, while the team was attempting to communicate with the spirit inside the house, they smelled something burning. When they went to investigate, they found that a single rose inside the house had caught fire with no apparent cause—it was still smoking when they found it. Mystified by this activity, the producers called in a famous television psychic to attempt to shed some light on why this might be happening. The psychic came to the Sallie House and did a full investigation. He later revealed his findings.
He claimed the house was haunted by the spirit of a seven-
year-old girl named Sallie. According to his visions and impressions, in the 1800s, the house used to be a doctor’s home. Sallie’s mother had brought her daughter to this house in the middle of the night. Sallie had been complaining about severe pain in her stomach and her mother felt her ailment couldn’t wait till morning. For some reason, the doctor decided to perform the exam in the upstairs bedroom, rather than in his standard medical room downstairs. He made Sallie’s mother wait outside. Within minutes, he stepped out of the room and told the mother that Sallie was suffering from acute appendicitis and he had to operate right away or the appendix could burst and Sallie could die. According to the psychic’s impressions, the doctor returned to the room, closed the door behind him, and attempted to give the child ether to sedate her prior to the operation. But when the doctor began to make an incision to remove the girl’s appendix, the child sat up screaming! He hadn’t given Sallie enough ether. In a split-second decision, he decided to continue with the surgery, even with the child wide awake. Sallie screamed and kicked while he attempted to remove her appendix.
The psychic said the last thing Sallie saw was the doctor standing above her with a sharp scalpel and bloodied hands as she faded off into death. He claimed that it was the little girl’s spirit that remained in this house and who was responsible for all of the paranormal activity. The psychic also stated that the reason the man of the house was being scratched was because of Sallie’s anger toward the doctor who botched the surgery and killed her.
After the footage aired, it became Sightings’ highest-rated episode. They went on to film eleven additional episodes about the house, showing more fascinating footage each time. The family was finally frightened out of the home by the entity on Halloween night approximately one year later, and they swore to never return to the house. Allegedly, an older seductress spirit began to influence the husband and posed a physical danger to the wife and child.
While I was fascinated with the incredible story and the footage I saw on television, I was absolutely convinced it was fake. I was sure this was just “Hollywood magic” and they had created this story strictly for ratings. It wasn’t until I was invited out to the Sallie House many years later that I was able to investigate for myself.
Sallie House—First Investigation
My first investigation of the Sallie House happened many years after I saw the Sallie House episodes on Sightings. It began when I received a call from the Atchison, Kansas, Travel and Tourism Bureau. They told me they were interested in promoting their haunted trolley tour during the Halloween season and asked if I’d be interested in coming out to investigate a few of their more well-known haunted houses. In negotiations with the man from the tourism bureau, I told him my team would definitely be interested in coming out, but that the infamous Sallie House had to be included in the investigations. He told me that he would need to contact the owner of the property and get permission and that he would try to get back to me later that day.
After hanging up the phone, I enthusiastically called my partner at Ghost Hunter magazine and told him about the possibility of investigating the Sallie House. He was just as excited as me, and we discussed our views of the footage that we both hadn’
t seen for years. Around three o’clock that afternoon I received a call from the man from the tourism board letting me know we had approval to go into several of the houses in town, including the Sallie House. I was ecstatic at the news and started preparing right away. We decided this would be a great opportunity for our new intern to come along and write his nonbiased experiences, since he knew nothing about the Sallie House.
A few weeks passed before we made the long journey to Atchison, Kansas. We decided to drive the nine hours through eastern Colorado and Kansas as we weren’t being paid for our time. We drove all day, maneuvering some pretty spooky fog-covered roads. It was nighttime when we finally arrived in the small town. The elderly couple that owned the Glick Mansion bed and breakfast worked with the town and agreed to let us stay at their beautiful B&B for free. We decided since we had a long day ahead of us, we would all go to sleep right away. I remember lying in my bed thinking about the day ahead. While I didn’t really know what to expect, I was excited about the possibilities.
While we were having breakfast at the Glick the next morning, my contact from the Travel and Tourism Bureau arrived. He was a slender man with short hair and glasses and I could immediately tell he had no true interest in what we were doing, but was a good soldier and knew he had to deal with these “ghost people” to get the information and publicity needed to promote their tours. We shook hands and had a brief meeting about what was in store for us that day. He had a very precise schedule with a list of the houses we could investigate and specific times that we had to be in and out. We gathered our gear and followed him to the first location. Many of the houses we visited that day were occupied. The homeowners were very hospitable and we captured lots of amazing evidence inside their homes. My partner and I immediately began to comment about the extraordinary amount of paranormal evidence we were collecting in every location we visited. This town was definitely a hot spot, but we were baffled as to why.