Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside. Brad Steiger
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Now, this is a three-foot by two-foot window which opens outward and is secured by a hook-and-eye latch. It may have been a coincidence, but in light of what happened later, may not have been.
Either that night or the next I was upstairs in my bedroom reading another book (the Cahill book is short and I’d finished it off in one go). I was sitting on the bed, with my back against the wall and my legs hanging over the side, when I thought I felt movement. I stopped reading and looked to see if the bed was moving and, indeed, it was. It was going back and forth slowly at first and steadily grew more violent so that eventually the headboard was banging against the wall.
Thinking it was one of my brothers playing a joke on me, I leaned over to look under the bed, about to say, “You jerk, cut it out!” I got as far as saying, “You …!”
As soon as I looked under the bed, I saw that nobody was there and the bed instantly stopped shaking. I felt the blood drain from my head with the sudden understanding of what had just happened.
To give a quick overview of that house, these things happened to me there over the years:
1 I was once awakened in the middle of the night by a woman’s voice in a darkened room. She seemed to say “Pot pot, ahlen ahlen, pot pot, ahlen ahlen.” It makes no sense, but that’s what I heard. I turned the lights on, but saw nothing.
2 At another time, my clock radio made terrible screeching static noises at night as I was trying to sleep. This would only happen as I was about to drop off and stop as soon as I woke up again. It probably happened a half dozen times.
3 Similarly, one night I heard footsteps of someone outside my bedroom door. It wasn’t the sound of heavy walking, but the squeak of feet on a hardwood floor. Again, this sound would come as I was about to drop off to sleep and would stop when I awoke.
4 Awake in the living room after everyone had gone to bed, I heard a woman’s voice and music playing upstairs. I went to the foot of the stairs and listened for a while and then went back to watching TV. My aunt came down about twenty minutes later, and I asked her who was playing the music—and she said, “Music?” She hadn’t heard anything. I found out the next day that nobody had even brought a radio.
An aside on the house: For the longest time I thought that it was related to the serial killer Jane Toppan, who murdered four people in 1901 at a house around the corner. In fact, the next street is called Mystery Lane after these murders. This would have been Alden Davis, his wife, and two daughters. I did some property research and found that Alden Davis had once owned the land my aunt’s house is on, a part of the Cataumet Grover and Shore Company, but it was apparently sold before a house was built on the property in the 1870s or 1880s.
Curiously enough, Davis had once followed a preacher named Charles Freeman who, in the 1870’s, heard the voice of God speak to him and tell him that he had to sacrifice a member of his family. The next night, God told him which one would have to be sacrificed: it was to be his youngest daughter. Freeman murdered her, believing that she would be brought back to life in three days.
Instead, Alden Davis’s surviving daughter told her boyfriend, who happened to be a local police officer, and Freeman was arrested. One of my older brothers pointed out that the voice I heard in the bedroom said Pot and Ahlen, which is almost my first name and Davis’s first name. (Is any of this related to me? Who knows?)
We go to my aunt’s house on Cape Cod every Thanksgiving. Just before Thanksgiving 2005, the day before we were set to arrive, my aunt drove down from her condo in Boston to get the house ready. She pulled in and walked to the front door, only to find it slightly ajar. A set of her house keys sat on the front stoop. She has no idea where this spare set of keys came from. She entered the house and had a look around and eventually found, in the bedroom I normally stay in, a screech owl, which had made a mess of the place.
She called the police, who called animal control. The guy from animal control went in, opened a bedroom window, and told her that the owl would leave when it got dark, which it did. Nobody has any idea how any of this happened, but I began to wonder if there wasn’t something more to it. I did brief research on owl symbolism and found that it symbolizes a) evil or b) wisdom, the ability to see in the dark.
I’m not sure if this is a symbol or just a wild, bizarre coincidence. Her house, by the way, was in no way burglarized.
In February of 2006, I had a strange week. It started off one night when I was watching TV in the basement and thought I saw something flying around. It looked kind of like a bug, but since it was the height of winter, I didn’t think it likely that it could have been one. I got my digital camera and tried to snap a picture of it.
As soon as I looked under the bed, I saw that i nobody was there and the bed instantly stopped shaking. I felt the blood drain from my head with the sudden understanding of what had just happened.
Only one picture is at all strange, showing a glowing green ball about the size of a quarter. The next morning, at about 5:00 A.M., I was walking from my bedroom to the bathroom when I thought I heard a clear whisper in my ear say, “Paaat!”
My response was to say, aloud, “Pssh! Yeah, right!” and I went on to take a shower.
Later, that night, while in bed, I heard the whisper again. I turned on my computer, downloaded a quick audio clip of forest noises and played it in a loop so I could get to sleep.
The next night, I set up a radio and had it play loudly while I went to sleep so that I wouldn’t hear any whispering. When I awoke in the morning, I found that the radio had been switched off (it’s very low-tech and couldn’t have switched off by itself).
That night, I figured I’d try to catch something on video and set my radio up the way I’d done it the night before, but pointed my Sony Handycam at it. But to no avail. The radio was still playing the next morning.
Finally, I’d had enough. I felt that there was something in my house and wanted to get to the bottom of it. I have a digital voice recorder and decided to try to get some EVPs [Electronic Voice Phenomena]. I made a few recordings and what I got put me at ease (somewhat).
On one recording you can hear my voice and then what sounds like a few men chanting, a quick series of percussion sounds, and a woman’s voice saying “be strong” or “be cool” or something. In any case, it’s a definite musical composition. It’s not anything I would associate with a ghost. I listened to the recordings over and over and finally grew calm. My nervousness left me. I said aloud to the room, “You guys are just messing with me, aren’t you?”
Whatever seemed to be in my house left and I haven’t felt a presence since.
In June 2004, I received a very disturbing letter from a teenager named Lisa who said that she and her parents first noticed something was wrong when her little brother, Bobby (age 6) started to get bruises and cuts on his arms and legs.
In Lisa’s account of the frightening and painful encounters:
We would ask Bobby what was wrong, and he would say, “That man who comes into my bedroom hits me with a belt.”
Mom would roll her eyes and clean the cuts. Then one night, when he went to bed he acted scared, and he asked Mom to sleep with him. Mom told him no, but she turned on the night light.
The next morning when Bobby got up, he had a cut below his right eye. Mom figured he scratched himself, so she cut his fingernails.
Then a week later, he got a large bruise on his back. It covered both his shoulder blades. It really hurt him, so Mom took him to the doctor to see if he had something wrong with him. The doctor asked if he had a babysitter or someone we didn’t know very well watching him, because the bruises were probably from a beating, since he had so many of them.