Ghost Hunting (13 page)

THE HAUNTED DINING ROOM FEBRUARY 2005

M
ost people know Brennan’s restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter as one of the country’s finest dining establishments. But it wasn’t the food that brought us to Brennan’s on the second and last stop of our Big Easy trip. It was the claim that the place was haunted.

We were invited there by the Brennan family, the owners of the 212-year-old restaurant. Unfortunately, I was sick with the worst head cold of my life on the night we were supposed to check out Brennan’s. We ended up postponing the investigation until the following night, when I was feeling a little better.

David Sledd, the captain, met us at the Royal Street entrance and gave us a tour of the place, starting with dinner in the infamous Red Room. As we sampled Cajun-Creole dishes under a gas-burning chandelier, Sledd directed our attention to the portraits hanging on the walls.

One depicted a Mr. LeFleur, a local shipping magnate. Another showed his wife and a third one showed his son. As the story goes, LeFleur went out one morning and arranged for three funerals. Then he went home and methodically killed his wife and child before hanging himself from the Red Room’s chandelier.

The portrait of LeFleur is said to change expression every time you look at it, going from a smile to an angry scowl to a troubled frown and back again. I might have been able to see it if my head hadn’t been so stuffed.

Sledd pointed out a cold spot over the fireplace in the room, which all six of us got a chance to experience for ourselves. It was cold there all right, though the debunker in me wondered if there was a hole nearby that a draft could come through.

Apparently, the LeFleur story has been an unlucky one, and not just for the LeFleurs. One night, as Sledd was telling the tale to a bunch of kids in the Red Room, a young riverboat captain put on a sheet and burst into the room. The kids were scared out of their shoes, as expected. But that night the captain, who was only twenty-seven, died in his sleep.

After dinner, we were shown the Chantelclair Room. Once, when it was being painted, the painters looked out the window and saw the face of an old woman. They all ran out and set off a night alarm. But when the police responded, they didn’t find anyone outside the room.

Sledd also told us about sightings of apparitions and occasions when people heard dishes banging though no one was banging them. Then he let us go to work. As always, we set up our equipment and began our investigation.

Paula and Kristyn checked out the Chantelclair Room while Steve and Brian took a look at the Red Room. However, neither team could get much done because there was a party on the same floor. Over the course of the next several hours, we tried our best to pick up evidence supporting the restaurant’s claims, but we couldn’t find a thing.

It was an unfortunate situation. Brennan’s had shut down the restaurant for us the first night, but there were customers in it the second night. It really inhibited the possibility of a valid investigation.

It didn’t help that Brian had spent half the time on the phone with his girlfriend. Clearly, we would have to have a talk with him. He was going to have to make a choice between his girlfriend and his position in T.A.P.S.

As for Brennan’s, I would like to go back there some day, and not just for the food. I can’t help wondering what we would find.

THE 100-YEAR-OLD PLAYHOUSE FEBRUARY 2005

T
heaters always make for fun investigations. Maybe it’s because we’re all frustrated actors and we love to be on stage. Or maybe it’s because the ghosts there are so…well, theatrical. At any rate, we were looking forward to hunting ghosts at the century-old Bradley Playhouse in Putnam, Connecticut.

Partly because the place was so close to our headquarters in Warwick, and partly because we wanted to get a couple of people some experience, we brought along a bigger team than usual. In addition to Brian, Steve, Donna, Grant, and me, we had on hand Paula Donovan from our research and development department and Jill Raczelowski, our T.A.P.S. archivist.

The Bradley Playhouse had seen its share of trouble, mostly in the form of fires. The first two had taken place in 1914, just fourteen hours apart. The damage had come to $40,000, which was a huge sum at the time. In 1937, the theater suffered another enormous blaze, the result of a short circuit in an actress’s dressing room. Had it not been for an experimental asbestos curtain, the whole building would have gone up in flames.

Pat Green, who ran the place, greeted us at the door when we arrived. She told us about the phenomena reported by actors, stage crew, and patrons over the years. The actors, for instance, claimed to have seen an entity running behind them when they were on stage.

They had also seen a woman standing in the balcony after the audience had left the theater. It had happened so often that they had given her a name: Victoria. Figures had also been seen flitting by in the mirrors that lined the wall opposite the stage.

Pat Green took us into one of the dressing rooms, which had a creepy, Victorian feeling to it. A lady in a white dress had been glimpsed there from time to time. People had also heard noises in the theater that they couldn’t explain.

We thanked our tour guide and started setting up our equipment. It was a big theater, with nearly a thousand seats, but it didn’t seem to offer too many logistical problems. Besides, we had a lot of hands to help out.

Most of the time, I’m the one who pulls the practical jokes during an investigation. This time, Donna tried to take my place. She had gotten hold of a remote-control fart machine—a device that made farting sounds whenever she hit a button—and had hidden it in our Yukon sport utility vehicle.

On the way to Putnam, Grant and I were sitting in the Yukon and talking, filming a segment of the show, and in the background there were these farting noises. Donna was setting them off from her car, snickering to herself. But we had an idea of what was going on and we ignored the farts. We just kept filming.

We didn’t say anything about it, either. But when we got to the playhouse, we found the fart machine and took out the batteries. So when Donna came to check on it, wondering why it hadn’t worked, she would find a reason.

Later, while we were setting up in the theater, we put the batteries back in. Then we had one of our production guys hide the machine under the springs of Donna’s car and steal her remote for us. When we saw her, we asked her to film a shot where she drives up to the theater in her car. “No problem,” she said. But as she pulled up to the curb, we used our stolen remote to set off the machine. All she heard were these long, loud, wet farts.

She couldn’t believe it. It was a total backfire. That will teach her to mess with the master.

In the meantime, our setup wasn’t going as quickly as we expected. I went to see why—and found Brian talking on his cell phone. Naturally, he was talking with his girlfriend.

Steve was unhappy because he felt that Brian was slacking off. Not one to mince words, Steve expressed his resentment. I, in turn, confronted Brian, asking him what was more important than his obligations to T.A.P.S.

Brian felt he was still doing his job, and balked at any innuendo to the contrary. But there was no denying that he was taking a long time to finish the setup. And the longer it took, the less time we would have to investigate.

In the meantime, Paula was running past the mirrors on the wall, trying to see if she could debunk the claim that images were seen flitting by in the reflective surfaces. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find an angle from which her reflection could be seen without her being seen also. But it was a good try.

Soon after, we were ready to go dark. Killing the lights, we proceeded with the rest of the investigation. Brian and Steve conducted an EVP sweep of the playhouse basement, which didn’t turn up any unusual sounds. However, they did find a trapdoor. It was an exciting discovery until they opened it and found nothing but a concrete surface underneath it.

Donna and Jill started their efforts in the playhouse office. When they couldn’t find anything there, they moved on to the balcony, where, with audio equipment in hand, they looked for Victoria. Donna, who is sensitive to such things, felt a sadness up there, but no scientific evidence.

At the same time, Grant and I were discussing the actors’ claims. We were skeptical about something running behind the actors when they were on stage. After all, there were people in the audience. If the actors could see these things, why didn’t anyone in the audience remark on them?

We also tested the acoustics of the place to see how small a noise could be heard from a distance. We discovered big honking air vents offstage that would kick on at strange times and make weird sounds. Certainly, they would provide an explanation of the noises people had heard.

Up in the balcony, Steve, Brian, and Paula were using an EMF detector to see if they could find any energy fluctuations. Five hours into the investigation, they ran into a 4.0 spike, which is a serious variation. But try as they might, they couldn’t find a repeat of it.

Soon after that, we called it a night.

Back at headquarters, Steve and Brian ran through the footage and found only one piece of evidence. As they and Paula were talking in front of one of our cameras, an orb seemed to appear and linger for a while. Was it in fact an orb or something else? That was the question they asked themselves as they reexamined the tape. Eventually, they decided it was just a dust mote.

That left Grant and me with a problem. Pat Green had been really nice to us, and we hated to tell her we hadn’t turned up any proof the place was haunted. There are ghost-hunting groups who make money off their investigations and tell their clients whatever they want to hear. T.A.P.S. isn’t one of them.

So we went back to the theater and sat down with Pat Green. Unfortunately, we said, we hadn’t come up with any evidence supporting the theater’s claims. To our surprise, she was fine with that. In fact, she was relieved. Now she could relax when she found herself alone at night in the theater.

From our point of view, the investigation had been profitable, even if we hadn’t run into any ghosts. After all, we had accomplished some good debunking, and, as Grant will tell you, that’s as satisfying to us as anything else is.

We were all ready to head for home when we got a call from Brian. He wanted to talk with us for a minute. That was good, I told Grant, because I wanted to talk with him too. This business with his girlfriend and his cell phone had gone far enough.

When we met Brian in a park near our headquarters, I had a whole list of things to tell him. Uncharacteristically, he insisted on speaking first. That’s when he dropped his bomb on us: he wanted to take a leave of absence from T.A.P.S.

Why? He claimed he felt intimidated by me. I told Brian that his problems were of his own making. He had allowed his relationship with his girlfriend to warp everything else in his life.

On one case alone, he had spent three hours talking on his cell. Worse, when anyone confronted him about his problem, he took refuge in a lie. One time when Steve told him he needed to get off the phone, he said he was speaking to me—but he wasn‘t. He was speaking to his girlfriend.

If he wanted a leave of absence, that was fine with me. Grant too. I felt bad that the situation had come to this, but it seemed like the best decision for everyone concerned. So Brian left.

Grant and I sat there for a while, talking about what Brian’s departure would mean to T.A.P.S. In a way, we were relieved. But we also recognized that we had lost a workhorse and, more than that, a friend.

MORDECAI HOUSE MARCH 2005

M
ost of the time T.A.P.S. is so busy we have to train people on the run. Other times, we have some time on our hands. It doesn’t happen often, believe me. But when it does, we like to set up a pure training run.

No pressure, plenty of leeway to make mistakes. That was what we had in mind as we left rainy Rhode Island in a three-vehicle caravan and headed down to North Carolina, where we were slated to investigate Mordecai House, the birthplace of our seventeenth president, Andrew Johnson. The two trainees we took with us were Dustin Pari and Jen Rossi.

Dustin had worked for a number of local TV stations as a cameraman, so he would be a big help to us in our video work. However, he was still a babe in the woods when it came to investigations. Jen, on the other hand, had been with the group for a while but had never handled the equipment. For both of them, this was an opportunity to take on additional responsibilities.

We put Andy in charge of the training program. After all, he was more than just an experienced investigator. He was someone Grant and I had trained, so he knew exactly what to pass on to Dustin and Jen.

One thing we learned about Dustin on the way down was that he spent fifteen minutes a day arranging his hair. I don’t know what he put in it—some kind of mousse, I guess—but it looked like it would go up at the first sign of a spark. I dubbed him unquestionably “the most flammable member of T.A.P.S.”

When we arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, we were greeted by Jim Hall and Dave Gurney, who head up Haunted North Carolina. Their group had joined T.A.P.S.’ extended family a couple of years earlier. Like us, they took a scientific approach to the paranormal.

Since we were all hungry and we weren’t supposed to reach our destination for another hour, we stopped for dinner at a local restaurant. While we chowed down on Buffalo chicken, we discussed the upcoming investigation. Jim and Dave were going to take part in it so they could learn from us and vica versa. Also, their familiarity with Mordecai House promised to make the evening that much easier for us.

After dinner, we pulled up to Mordecai House and were welcomed by museum educator Chandra Millikin. She showed us around the place, starting with the parlor. The piano there was known to play when tour groups were in the house, even though no one was playing it.

Most of Millikin’s experiences had occurred in the bathroom. One time she’d felt her hair lift off her head. When we asked if there was any evidence of Andrew Johnson on the property, she took us to the place where he was born—a separate building still furnished in the manner of the early 1800s.

Millikin said she had felt a distinctly male presence there, and an implicit command to “Get out!” She hoped that we could shed some light on it. We assured her that we would do our best.

Under Andy’s guidance, Dustin and Jen used the EMF detector to check the place out. “First,” he told them, “get a baseline reading.” Then they could examine the rest of the room and have a basis for comparison.

For Dustin, this work was the culmination of something that had begun a long time ago. When he was seven or eight years old, he woke up to see a shadowy figure hovering by the side of his bed. Soon afterward, it happened again. But even at that age, he made a stand. He told the apparition it wasn’t welcome there, and it dissipated.

Jen hadn’t had any such experiences, but she was eager to become a more integral part of our investigation team. Unfortunately, we hadn’t gotten far into the evening before she told us that she felt nauseated. In fact, she had been queasy since dinner. Though she was disappointed, she was unable to continue with the training session.

After Jen left, Jim and Dave told us they had arranged a treat for us—a chance to investigate a haunted battleship in the area. Were we up for it? You bet we were.

But we had an investigation at hand. Though Jen was on her way back to our hotel, we still had business there at Mordecai House. That came first.

Until Dave announced that he didn’t feel well either. He told us that he had been battling a cold for days. With two people down, we decided to scrap the training mission and let everybody get some rest.

It turned out to be a good decision. Before we were done packing up, Grant fell victim to stomach cramps. And later that night, I had the same problem. As it turned out, we had food poisoning—all four of us.

It was bound to happen. We were on the road so often, eating at greasy spoons and worse, it was a miracle we hadn’t been poisoned before. I was just glad it happened on a training mission and not in a place we would never have access to again.

Besides, we had a bigger investigation ahead of us—the USS
North Carolina.