Ghost Box Read online

  My mom said, “You look exhausted!”

  I told her I hadn’t gotten any sleep at all with all the music playing. I’ll never forget my mother’s and father’s response—my parents stared at each other in disbelief. Over breakfast, they shared their experience of the previous night. Apparently, both my parents were awakened by the sound of the music as well. They said that they, too, experienced the same paralysis I did. They also told me that both our cat and German shepherd raised their heads to listen, but neither animal got up to investigate the sound, which was odd, especially for our dog.

  I could see my father was bothered by the incident but wouldn’t acknowledge a ghostly explanation. He simply shrugged it off as a neighbor playing a radio too loudly. My mother and I looked at each other knowingly and shook our heads. It was obvious to me, and I believe to her as well, that it was my great-grandmother coming back and playing her old piano to let us know she was okay. Interestingly, when I was seventeen years old, I wrote a song on that old piano called “Goodbye.” One day after school, I was working on the melody when my mother came into the room with a stunned look on her face. I stopped playing, looked back at her, and asked, “Are you okay?”

  She replied, “Do you know what you’re playing?”

  I said, “Yeah, it’s a new song I’m working on.”

  She said, “That’s the song we heard that night at the old house.” The realization that my mom was right hit me all at once. It was, in fact, the ghostly sonnet that my parents and I had heard so many years before.

  In our family, we have a lot of unique characters. My mom has traced our genealogy and found out my great-great-grandfather was a Southern Cheyenne Indian chief. On my mom’s side of the family, we discovered that our ancestors came from Saracena, Italy. Many people consider Saracena, not Sicily, to be the Mafia capital of the world. (There was a time that the Pope wouldn’t even go there!) In addition, we are related to three Polish rabbis—I believe that’s where the Kabbalah magic comes in. My great-great-great uncle was Queen Victoria’s personal physician.

  There was another psychically gifted group in our family: the Scotch-Irish side. My grandmother, great-grandmother, and great aunt had special abilities. My grandmother was a clairvoyant who was able to predict the future with amazing accuracy. My grandmother was able to read people’s energies and could tell right off the bat whether or not a person was genuine.

  My mom’s great aunt Anna taught her to read fortune cards, which Mom later found out were a version of tarot. Whenever there was a problem in the family, Aunt Anna used to say to my mom, “Let’s sit down and see what the cards have to say.” Through every card she flipped over, she gained insight into what was happening. It never failed to amaze Mom when Aunt Anna would check in with someone in the family and find out that she was spot-on in her predictions. Aunt Anna’s abilities helped her in many different ways, including some that were considered “not quite” legal. It turned out she and her husband were bootleggers who specialized in bathtub gin and Chianti wine in their North Denver home in the late 1920s. When it was time to make a run to the local speakeasy, she would consult the cards to see if the speakeasy in question was law-

  enforcement free. She must’ve been pretty good because they were never caught.

  My grandma was a woman with quite a few talents aside from her psychic abilities. During the 1940s, she was a big band singer featured in the Dave Munro Orchestra, which performed live radio broadcasts from well-known hotels and locations around the country. After her singing career, she went on to own several businesses and had a spectacular business mind. Unfortunately, later in life she started to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease. After my grandfather unexpectedly passed away, it was quite clear Grandma wasn’t the person she had once been. Even though she was stricken with this debilitating disease and its quick progression, she would suddenly snap into a coherent state and relay a vital psychic message to me. I attempted to understand as many of Grandma’s message as possible and then, just as quickly as she was “back,” she was gone again. I feel this shows just how strong my grandma’s psychic ability was.

  The 1950s Colorado my parents grew up in was extremely conservative. My mom’s family absolutely did not want anyone to know about their psychic abilities for fear of ridicule. While my mom was in elementary school, she never shared with anyone that she was psychic. By the time she was in middle school, she decided to tell a few classmates about her unique abilities. Her friends would ask her questions like, “What’s going to be on the algebra test?” or “Is there going to be a snow day so we don’t have to study at all?” Those types of questions were innocent enough.

  It wasn’t until high school that she realized her abilities could get her into real trouble. Her girlfriends would ask, “Is my boyfriend cheating on me?” Regardless of the answer, she didn’t want to say anything because she knew it was a lose-lose proposition. When finally pressured into answering, if she had news they didn’t want to hear they would say, “Oh! Why would you tell me that?”

  When my mom was a junior in high school, she met my dad. At the time, she didn’t share her psychic abilities with him because his mother was a devout Catholic. My mom shares the time my dad called and told her he had to help his mother clean out the garage and that he would call her the next day. She saw very clearly this was not the case.

  When he called her the following day, she asked him, “So, where were you really yesterday?” He stuttered and said, “I already told you; I was helping my mom clean out the garage!”

  She said, “No, you weren’t! You were at the Offbeat 3.2 Bar drinking beer and playing pool with your friends.”

  He replied, “How did you know? Who saw me?”

  She told him, “Oh, it’s just woman’s intuition.” And then she slammed her blue princess phone down in his ear.

  A few years after my parents married, my mom discovered she was pregnant with me. She says she was overjoyed by this news; she couldn’t wait to find out if I had her psychic abilities. Even before I was born, she wanted me to have a love of music so she put her stomach up to the stereo speaker and played classical music like Van Cliburn. She jokes that something must have gotten crossed in the wires because I prefer Van Halen to Van Cliburn.

  No one wore seatbelts in their cars in those days (1973) and in fact, Mom says she doesn’t remember if her 1973 red Camaro even had seatbelts. While driving one day, she was hit from behind at a fairly high speed. The doctors put her on immediate bed rest. She says it was one of the hardest things she’s ever had to do.

  While on bed rest, my mom had a mystical experience three months before I was born. She awoke one morning to see the full-bodied apparition of a woman standing at the edge of her bed. It didn’t frighten her; as a matter of fact, she felt very comfortable. The woman didn’t say a word, but communicated with her telepathically. The spirit woman’s message was very clear; she insisted that if I were delivered by C-section, I would die. At that moment, my mom made the decision she would never allow that to happen.

  Once the apparition’s message was delivered, she simply faded away. When the experience was over, my mother wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with the information. Should she call her OB/GYN and tell him about the warning? She asked herself if this was something that happened to every pregnant woman or if it was unique to her. She decided not to say a word to anyone about the experience, fearful of what they might think.

  When she went into labor, the warning was firmly in the back of her mind. There was difficulty right away and she experienced nearly twenty-four hours of back labor. The staff told her they were going to have to take me via C-section and, remembering the warning, she immediately began to panic. Most of the hospital staff became impatient with my mom’s adamant objection to a C-section, but a nurse named Marianne respected her decision and decided to make one last attempt at a natural delivery. She came in the room and began t
o massage my mom’s stomach and adjust me into a standard birthing position. I was born shortly thereafter, without any drama. My mom says she truly believes that if she hadn’t heeded the warning, I would not be here today. When she glanced at the clock she saw that it was 3:16 am on March 25. It hit her that the grandmother she had lost five months earlier was born on March 24. It quickly dawned on my mom the apparition who passed along the warning was her own grandmother!

  My mom’s recollection of my near-drowning incident was that the adults had all gone for a swim in her parent’s pool in Texas. They put me in a flotation device in the pool so that I could safely enjoy the water. Everyone was sitting around the pool having fun while I splashed in the water. Suddenly, they realized there were no splashing sounds coming from the pool, only silence. They looked and saw, to their horror, that I was completely submerged upside down in the flotation device, my feet flailing in the air. At first, everyone froze. Shock turned to full-fledged panic when my frantic feet suddenly stopped moving.

  My aunt quickly swam over and flipped me right side up. I was motionless. My aunt pulled me out of the flotation device and swam to the side of the pool while everyone jumped into action. They rolled me on my side and attempted to get the water out of my lungs. Mom says it seemed like quite a bit of time went by, but they were all relieved when they heard me cough and saw water spill out of my mouth as I began to cry.

  My mom finds it interesting that I have such a detailed memory of the event, which we later discovered was a true near-death experience. We believe this only enhanced my psychic ability.

  As I previously stated, the first paranormal experience that I can recall happened in the house we moved into in Englewood, Colorado, but my mom clearly remembers my first ghost experience happening while we were still living in Colorado Springs, Colorado. While in school, I came down with a stomach bug and became very ill. I had a bunk bed at the time and liked to sleep on the top bunk. My stomach was extremely upset and my mom tells me I repeatedly climbed down the ladder, went to the restroom, and vomited. Each time she heard me get up, she got out of bed and came to my room to make sure I was okay before helping me back into bed. It was a long night and we were both very tired.

  The next morning I was sitting in the kitchen, feeling better and eating breakfast. My mom says I asked her a very strange question: “How did you lift me back up into the bed so easily last night?”

  My mom replied, “What do you mean? You climbed up the ladder by yourself the last time.”

  My mom says I told her she lifted me up and set me in the bed and then rubbed my head until I went to sleep. At first she thought I might have had a vivid dream, but when she asked me for details about the person who helped me into bed, she realized it was the same apparition that had warned her about my birth so many years earlier. It turns out my great-grandmother was still looking over us, making my mom extremely happy.

  When we moved into the house in Englewood when I was seven years old, I began to have nightly spirit encounters. My mom decided it was time to find out if I had her psychic ability.

  After listening to my accounts of strange things that were taking place in our house, my mom decided to start taking me to purportedly haunted locations throughout the Denver area. One of the first places she took me was the Molly Brown House during the week of Halloween. She thought this would be a safe environment for me to experience the house and hear other people’s ghost stories. I was intrigued with not only the stories, but also the second floor of the house. My mom saw I was experiencing something, as I became very quiet, but I didn’t say at the time what it was. Having a father who was a skeptic, I truly wanted to prove that I was experiencing something real.

  After this, I became an amateur investigator and wanted to go to additional locations to understand what these energies and entities truly were. When I was thirteen or fourteen, we had the opportunity to go on the Capitol Hill Haunted Mansion Tour, which was held the month of October. This tour allowed participants to walk through some of the most haunted houses in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver. My mom and I were familiar with some of the properties, since we had been to them before, but there were a couple of new houses on the tour that fascinated us.

  The first house resembled a French castle and was called the Croke-Patterson-Campbell mansion. It looked like a true haunted house. We wandered through the halls of the large structure and it was clear there was paranormal activity inside. My mom saw from my focused expression that I was sensing all of the spirits present.

  After touring the large property, we were guided to a carriage house on the side of the building. As we walked in, we could see they had transformed it into a modern office space with circular tables and signs in the entranceway. We made our way up a winding staircase into the upper portion of the building where volunteers from the historical society were giving a lecture. Wanting to listen from the beginning, we moved to the side wall away from the crowd in hopes of getting a good seat for the next lecture.

  As we leaned against the wall, I started to gasp and flinch. My mom grabbed me by the shoulder and said, “What’s going on?” I was grasping my neck and couldn’t speak. I ran down the spiral staircase, stumbled toward the front door, and then out onto the lawn where I tried to catch my breath.

  I told my mom, “Something was choking me in there!”

  She asked, “Like someone had their hands around your neck?”

  I said, “No, like I was being hung!”

  After a few minutes, we decided to give it one more attempt and go back in the building. As we walked by the front desk, my mom asked the volunteer, “Can you tell us why my son had a choking sensation upstairs?”

  The volunteer replied, “Oh, that’s just Willie. He’s a friendly ghost.” My mom and I looked at each other in disbelief. When we returned upstairs, the room had cleared out and a new group was coming in to hear the lecture. My mom and I looked around to see if we could find anything that might have explained the choking. It wasn’t until the volunteer started to tell the story of the Croke-Patterson-Campbell mansion that things became much clearer.

  The speaker told us about a previous caretaker, known as Willie, and explained the connection with the movie Poltergeist. Apparently Willie was a Satanist. While he was the caretaker at the Croke-Patterson-Campbell mansion in the late 1800s, Willie began to do side work for the city of Denver. He was in charge of removing the bodies from the city cemetery and moving them to Mount Olivet and Fairmount Cemetery so they could use the vacated cemetery property as the new Cheesman Park. The problem was that Willie and his crew decided it would be easier to just move the headstones and leave the majority of the bodies in the park and no one would be the wiser. Even more disturbing was the fact that many of the exhumed bodies never arrived at their new resting places. Willie dug up the coffins and took them back to the carriage house via horse and wagon. Legend has it that he stacked coffins five high in the basement coal storage room. It is also said that Willie would use the bodies for ritualistic purposes.

  As the story was being recounted, my mom and I felt extremely uncomfortable. The volunteer continued, explaining that Willie didn’t limit his desecration to the remains of the dead, but, it seems, he would actually lure animals and small children in from the dirt road that ran in front of the house. The volunteer then pointed his finger toward the west-facing wall where my mom and I had originally stood inside the room and asked, “Do you all see that railroad tie hammered into the wall?”

  My mom and I slowly turned our heads in the direction the man pointed. My mom’s heart skipped a beat as she realized what the guide was going to say, a moment before he revealed the information. “That’s where Willie hung the animals and children and performed rituals on them.”

  She immediately knew I had directly picked up on the energy of the terrified victims who hung underneath the railroad spike—that spot was precisely where I was standing
when I experienced the choking sensation. The room where we were had twenty or so people standing and listening and it suddenly felt crowded and hard to breathe in, as if there was no escape. The guide continued, saying, “Willie got sloppy and was eventually caught and punished for what he had done. As a matter of fact, he was hanged right out front where he used to lure those poor souls in off the street.”

  The moment the presenter finished speaking, my mom and I looked at each other and then immediately focused on a small window at the top of the room facing onto the street. It had glass on the outside, a chain hanging on the inside, and another pane of glass on the interior. It was obvious to both of us there was a presence there at that moment. The chain inside the window began to slowly swing back and forth and quickly accelerated. My mom asked the guide, “Do you see the chain moving inside that window?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. Stunned, he said, “Um, yes I do!” He continued on. “That’s impossible, that glass is airtight. There is absolutely no way that chain should be moving.” We knew that Willie was still there. While my mom had always wanted to see how I would interpret paranormal activity, she admitted she wasn’t prepared for that.

  Afterward, we stood in front of the carriage house trying to grasp what had just happened. When we felt we had balanced and centered our energy well enough, we decided to move on to the next house. While the Croke-Patterson-Campbell mansion was intimidating, the next house that we encountered—the Peabody Mansion—was simply sinister. Had we known how the Peabody and its malevolent cast of astral denizens would consume me for the next three decades, we never would have set foot inside. The Peabody Mansion story, too complex and encompassing to be contained in a single chapter, will be told in a future book.

  [contents]