Ghost Box Read online

  We traveled throughout the town gathering information and talking to individuals who had heard stories passed down from older relatives. We were able to document Sallie’s last name as Hall and actually found her in the census records during that time. We also discovered she was at least part African-American. When we went to the town cemetery to look for a grave, we were disgusted to find they had paved over the section where Sallie’s grave was reported to have been. The African-American population at that time was so disrespected that they were given small plots where they would actually bury one family member on top of the next. When it came time to put the new road in, the city decided it wasn’t worth it to move the gravestones or graves. In addition, a very dark and seedy underbelly to the Atchison, Kansas, of the late 1800s was becoming evident. The crime, depravity, and money lust of the era seemed to create a deep evil in the very heart of the town.

  Through tireless research in the three-day investigation, we were able to locate Sallie Hall’s birth and death record as well as her family’s census records. I still remember the shock and elation that we felt when we found out, via census records, that Sallie actually existed and that she was of both African American and Caucasian descent.

  While Atchison, Kansas, is well known as the birthplace of Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot, there is no way that we could have known that she wrote a journal entry regarding the spirit of the little girl on Second Street. This was great validation that even during Amelia Earhart’s childhood, the spirit of Sallie Hall was well known by the locals.

  While we left our third Sallie House investigation with more questions than answers, it felt as if a major breakthrough was about to happen.

  Sallie House—4th Investigation

  Now we were going back to this very haunted property with Frank’s Box, which seemed, incredibly, to be working, therefore presenting us with the perfect opportunity to hear what happened straight from the spirits of those involved. Since this was our first time using the device, and to our knowledge, the very first time it had ever been used in any paranormal investigation, we were excited and curious to see how Edison’s Telephone to the Dead performed in the field, rather than in a lab setting.

  As we drove eastbound on I-70, my mother, father, and I tried to come up with the best game plan to use the device during the investigation. We were supposed to arrive sometime in the early afternoon, so we decided we would take the machine up to the most active room in the house (which was the nursery), get it set up, turn it on, and then leave for the day. We’d then return with our whole team that night to see if anything came through the Ghost Box. It seemed like a solid plan at the time. We weren’t, however, counting on having car trouble.

  When we finally arrived in Atchison, it was very late in the afternoon. We quickly unloaded our suitcases into the Glick Mansion. Then we drove to the Sallie House to unload all of our equipment, since the amount and size of the equipment required us to drive the short distance.

  When we arrived, my father and I jumped out of the Jeep and started to pull gear out of the back. I noticed my mother was staying firmly planted in the front passenger seat of the Jeep. I set down a large speaker and walked to her side of the vehicle. I asked her, “Are you ready? Are you coming in?”

  She said, “No way!” I realized the sun was starting to go down. One thing I had learned from investigating the Sallie House three times before is that this wasn’t a property you wanted to go into alone or with fewer than five people—it was far too active and truly dangerous. I laughed a little bit with my mom to ease the situation and told her I understood.

  My father and I decided the best thing to do was to take just Frank’s Box up to the nursery, get it set up, and then get out fast. I remember the feeling of sadness and of being watched by invisible eyes as we walked in the front door. We hurried up the stairs to the nursery and started putting the machine together. Once it was assembled, I plugged the power cord into the wall and flipped on the power switch in the front. The device started to make its typical warm-up noise and then emitted some broken radio sounds. We started to gather our things to leave. It was at that point that something hit me—I realized no one had ever used this machine in the field before and I should probably say something. I held up my finger as if to say, “Just a minute,” to my father and had an idiot moment. I stood in front of the machine and said in a shaky, almost childlike voice, “Um, if there are any ghosts in here who want to talk, please speak through this machine that Frank built. It’s good. Um, I already heard things through it.”

  My extremely skeptical father stood there and looked at me as if I had completely lost my mind. I stood there staring at the machine when suddenly a phrase came into my mind and I blurted, “Technicians, assist.” I had no idea who or what a Spirit Technician was at this point. I also had no idea where this information came from, and after I said it, I really felt confused about its source. I didn’t give it much thought at the time, however, since I knew it wasn’t a good idea for just my dad and I to be alone in the house and I was feeling a strong urge to leave. I looked at my father, he looked at me, and we made our way out of the room and started down the stairs. We made it about two steps down when, from behind us, we heard the sound of white noise blaring through the speaker on the machine. It sounded like someone had turned the volume all the way up. We both froze in our tracks. It felt like we stood there forever but in reality it was probably only thirty seconds.

  Then we heard the voice of a male spirit say very clearly, “Sallie, listen.” Every hair on my body stood on end and I hunched over, fingernails digging into the wood banister. I looked over at my father and he was frozen with shock as well. Then we heard one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard, even to this day. The little girl’s voice that we captured dozens of times on open air EVP came through the speaker of the Ghost Box. The male entity was attempting to train her on how to use the device effectively! We stood there and listened to the two spirits speak back and forth until it was pitch black inside the house.

  We finally pried ourselves away and went back to the Jeep to get recording equipment in hopes of capturing some of this exchange. There sat my mother in the exact same spot we left her quite some time before. When we explained what was taking place, she looked at my father and me like we were absolutely crazy. We finally convinced her to venture into the house and she helped us bring the equipment up to the nursery. Once we had recorders and video cameras in place, we began to do question-and-answer sessions with the spirits. To my amazement, we found that when we asked questions into the open air, the spirits would reply in their own voices right then and there through the machine! This truly was the Telephone to the Dead!

  At one point during this investigation, I was alone in the nursery. My parents were downstairs working on equipment issues. I was asking questions via Frank’s Box in an attempt to understand what had caused the haunting. While trying to reach the little girl’s spirit, I was contacted by the doctor who was responsible for Sallie’s death. When I began to ask questions of the doctor, his voice came through the speaker very clearly. It was at this time that I learned via the Ghost Box that the doctor had a mistress. In addition to the doctor’s voice, another more frightening voice was present. It could only be described as inhuman. When I pressed for answers, I was threatened with being scratched. When I continued with the interrogation, I clearly heard the sound of scratching coming through the vents in the room. I wrapped up the session but left the night vision camera running.

  When my parents and I reviewed footage of the period after I had left the room, we found not only video evidence of spirit activity, but also a vocal exchange between the spirit of the doctor and the inhuman voice coming through the Ghost Box. The doctor stated, “You were supposed to protect us.” The inhuman spirit responded with a blood-curdling roar. Upon hearing this, I felt a deep sickening shock run through my entire body. All at once, the true scope of the haunting
became clear to me.

  I believe that, after the doctor passed away, he returned to this house on Second Street in an attempt to keep the past and his crime buried forever. A scared and hateful man in life, he carried that same personality into purgatory. Through the emptiness and fear that plagued him in this new existence, I believe he unwillingly summoned demonic entities, which now possessed him in the middle ground. He worked with these dark forces in an attempt to protect his name and legacy. When we arrived with Frank’s Box and were able to speak directly to the spirits involved, we became a true threat. What we heard on the recording from Frank’s Box was the doctor communicating directly with demonic forces, informing them that they hadn’t kept up their part of the bargain.

  After hearing the doctor’s angry outburst and the demonic roar, we placed the Ghost Box in the master bedroom upstairs, which was the room in which Sallie died. My father and I talked back and forth with the spirits in the room. We talked to the spirit of Sallie and told her that we cared about her and wanted her to go be with her family in Heaven. We warned the negative spirits that we wouldn’t be bullied into leaving and told them that we would not bargain with the demonic. We attempted to speak to the doctor’s mistress and told her that we knew it was she and the doctor attacking the living and then blaming it on Sallie.

  The thing that was most amazing about using Frank’s Box for the first time in the field was having the ability to communicate with spirits in their own voices and have them tell us things that we would have never known unless we’d spoken to them directly. We were able to take quite a bit of information the spirits gave us and actually document factual, historic events from their words.

  For a long time it was thought that Sallie’s spirit was the entity causing not only the physical scratching, but all of the paranormal activity in the house. When we were able to speak to her as well as the other entities, it became very clear that Sallie was simply a scapegoat for the attacks.

  Speaking through the Ghost Box, the spirits made the shocking assertion that Sallie’s father was the doctor, the man who killed her. (Though plausible, we have no way to verify this claim.) The spirit of Sallie’s mother made another disturbing allegation via the Ghost Box: she stated the doctor’s mistress not only pressured him into performing the botched operation that resulted in Sallie’s death, but then remained with him inside the house even after her death.

  It seems the mistress was responsible for the majority of the attacks on individuals who entered that house. It was stunning to hear her distinct accent; we believe it to be a Creole accent. She clearly admitted to several of the crimes and also seemed to claim she was responsible for sexually violating the man who lived in the house during the period of the initial attacks.

  We were astounded with the results from the Ghost Box. The ability to directly communicate with spirits and hear their voices (or roars) in real time was something that was unheard of at that point. I suspected this would be a tool that we could utilize in all our future investigations. Even though there was quite a bit of static and delay with the first-generation machine, the potential of the device was evident. It was at the Sallie House, during our fourth investigation of the property, that we realized the field of paranormal investigation would never be the same again.

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  CHAPTER · THREE

  Spooky Childhood

  and Haunted Times

  People are always asking me how I became interested in ghosts and haunted houses. I think it’s because of my haunted childhood and because my mom, Paulette Moon, can occasionally see spirits and ghosts.

  I had a near-death experience (NDE) at around age two that I believe contributed to my psychic abilities and affinity with the spirit world. All I can remember prior to the NDE is that I was in a floating device in my grandparents’ swimming pool. (I’m told that while the family was on the other side of the pool socializing, I floated some distance away from them and was splashing and playing. At some point the flotation device capsized and my entire head and upper body were submerged under water. It took quite a while before anyone noticed that I had flipped.)

  My memory of the event was me desperately struggling to breathe before experiencing a sudden calm. As the strange calm soothed me, I felt myself begin to rise and I was soon looking down at my body and the entire scene from far above. I felt a comforting warmth as I ascended. Soon the only vision I had was of the brightest, almost white light calling me in. It felt very natural and I wasn’t afraid. The next memory I have was being thrust back into my body as someone hit my back, desperately trying to revive me. I spit up quite a bit of water and then coughed uncontrollably.

  I had the first paranormal experience that I can remember at age seven. (My mom remembers an earlier incident that involves me, which I’ll share later in this chapter.) My family and I moved into a house in Englewood, Colorado. The house was built in the 1970s and didn’t look scary or spooky, but from the moment I walked in, it felt different. It was summertime when we moved in and it had no air conditioning, so the first night we tried to sleep, we were hot. The house was on top of a hill and behind it was a large field that led to a creek bordered by a dense thicket of trees. Behind the creek was a restaurant and bar. I clearly remember lying in my bed tossing and turning, but all I could hear through my open window were the sounds of people laughing and talking and glasses clinking. Frustrated with the noise as well as the heat, I opened my eyes. I was shocked to see the silhouette of a little Indian boy standing at the end of my bed. For the rest of the night the spirit child never moved or said a word; he just stood and stared.

  The spirit boy appeared nightly in my room for months. Whenever I saw him, I froze. For a long time, I was too scared to speak. When I finally mustered the courage to ask questions (from behind the covers)—questions such as: Who are you? What is your name? Why are you here?—the boy eventually dissipated. He never answered my questions or spoke at all.

  The Indian boy played a huge role in my life, as he was the first ghost I saw. Seeing the spirit boy inspired me, at age seven, to someday become an amateur ghost hunter. It was also the catalyst for my life’s mission to prove to my skeptical father that my encounter with the spirit world was real. (Although the spirit boy stopped coming around when I was sixteen, he apparently didn’t leave—my daughter saw his image when I took her back to see the old house.)

  We had other ghostly occurrences in this house as well: doors opening and closing of their own accord, strange shadows, and light anomalies. Objects disappeared and reappeared on a daily basis. For example, if someone left their car keys on the kitchen counter unattended and returned to get them later, they’d discover the keys were gone, having seemingly vanished into thin air. I remember many times tearing the house apart looking for things only to return later to find the missing object in the exact spot it had been set down.

  One of the strangest paranormal experiences at our house was the night that ghostly sonnets played for hours on our family’s 100-year-old baby grand piano. When my great-grandmother passed away, she willed a very old baby grand piano to my aunt. The problem was that my aunt was living in an apartment at the time and had no room to store it. Since we had a fairly large house, my mother agreed to keep the piano. The piano was delivered a week or two after my great-grandmother’s passing. I was excited about having the piano in our house, as it was the first time I had an opportunity to teach myself to play. The piano was extremely large with a polished brown finish. It was in a state of disrepair; the keys were tarnished and worn.

  I remember standing and staring at the huge old piano for some time, oddly intimidated. When I finally gathered up the courage to sit down on the bench, I reached up and gently pushed one of the higher keys. It made a strange creepy sound. I didn’t know much about music at that time, but I knew this piano was definitely out of tune. That wasn’t enough to stop me. I stepped on the pedals and experimented with the different
keys up and down the board. Even though the piano was drastically out of tune, I started to make sense of how the tones worked together. I found several very old music books inside the bench and, one by one, I set them up on the stand over the keyboard and attempted to decipher the notes. (I never did learn how to read music, realizing I was fortunate to be born with a good ear and that it was easier for me to figure out songs on my own.) I played the piano until dinnertime that first night. I imagine I drove my parents crazy with the loud clanking sounds emanating throughout the house for hours.

  That night when we went to sleep, I was genuinely excited about the possibility of being an accomplished musician in the future. I can’t say that night felt any different than the other nights in the house when I closed my eyes to sleep. I had no idea my parents and I—yes, even my skeptical father—would experience a bout of paranormal activity in our living room that night.

  I’d been sleeping for a few hours when I was awakened by the distinct sound of music coming from somewhere in the house. As I opened my eyes and attempted to understand what was happening, I realized I couldn’t move. Within minutes I was fully awake and still completely paralyzed. The strangest thing was I didn’t panick. The music I heard was beautiful. It sounded like a single piano being masterfully played and I can recall a strange sense of calm coming over me. I don’t remember sleeping much that night, only dozing when I saw light coming through the blinds in my room.

  When I woke up in the morning, I was more tired than I had ever been in my life. I got out of bed and slowly descended the stairs, rubbing my eyes and yawning as I made my way into the kitchen. My parents, who were sitting at the kitchen table, said, “Good morning.”