EVP Recordings, April 28, 2008

Three clips were recorded last night.

Clip #1, 12:35 am, 0m 11s
My first impression is that this sounds like a hand or foot being dragged across the fiberglass surface of a bathtub, or across a glass surface like my shower stall. There are two bathrooms on the second level, and since the microphone is not directional, it could have come from either one.

Clip #2, 1:37 am, 0m 11s
This noise is loud and distorted like the source occurred on the shelf where I was keeping the recorder. The only thing I can think of is that an object got moved on the shelf, or something hit the shelf.

Clip #3, 2:53 am, 0m 11s
This is another interesting impact sound. You can hear the impact, and then you can hear whatever was hit bounce once or twice after the impact.

I feel pulling at the covers

Holly and I had went to bed pretty late last night and we were watching TV in bed. Holly was already asleep and I finally turned things off to try and go to bed. As soon as I got comfortable I started feeling the comforter slowly being pulled off the end of the bed.

I simply lie there, wondering if what I was feeling was just my imagination. I was trying to convince myself that Holly’s description of the events a few days before had contaminated my imagination. I could have been creating this feeling.

But I could not shake the physical sensation that the covers were slowly, VERY slowly, being pulled off us.

Eventually, I feel asleep and did not wake again until morning.

EVP Recordings, April 24, 2008

Clip #1, 2:31 am, 0m 21s
The best I can do to describe this is noise is a flexible metal conduit being dragged across a piece of wood...like the 2x4 studs in the wall. Very strange noise. After some padding, the noise starts at 0:10 seconds.

Clip #2, 5:00 am, 1m 3s
Footsteps, walking slowly somewhere in the house. It's Friday, and this recording was taken around 5am, so this should have been right around the time my alarm went off. Also, the footprints sound like they are close like on the top floor where we are sleeping, but there is no hard floors on this level. Very strange indeed.

Also, at 0:46, there are 5 chimes that do not sound familiar. Usually, when its windy outside you can hear the wind chimes outside banging against each other. These 5 chimes do not sound like anything I own.

EVP Recordings, April 23, 2008

We went to bed pretty early last night (11pm is early for us). Right after we fell asleep the recorder caught something.

There are two clips, and they are over 3 minutes each. In each, it sounds like a toy being played with. Ever slip a playing card into your bicycle wheel spokes and ride up and down the street? The sound is something similar. In the clips, something is being turned at variable speeds, creating a fast clicking sound. But the speed is variable, making this two very interesting recordings.

Holly and I have been talking and agree that one of the ghosts is a child. This type of evidence adds weight to that theory.

Clip #1, 11:37 PM, 3m 31s
The first clip.

Clip #2, 11:43 PM, 3m 31s
A few minutes later it starts back up and runs for 3 more minutes...

EVP Recordings, April 22, 2008: Obnoxious knocks

The theme of last nights EVP work is Obnoxious Knocks. "They" were in an annoying mood or something. While I sleep something knocks on the walls. And I record it for your entertainment!

Clip #1, 12:09 AM, 51s

This clip is amazing. It features rapid knocking on the walls, with footsteps afterwards. There's even some sort of grunt, but that could be me, so I have to discount it as evidence.

0:10: Obnoxious raps on the walls or ceiling. Who knows really where this thing is knocking? And why didn't Bobby go crazy over the knocking? Anytime someone knocks on the door our Jack Russel Terrier goes absolutely bonkers. Did he not hear this? Could this noise have come from upstairs so he assumed it was just us? Sometimes I wish there was direction indicators on my digital recorder...

0:22: Some sort of grunt. About a second prior, you can hear me snoring, so its possible that the grunt could be me. However, it could also not be me...

0:27: From here to the end of the clip, you can hear footsteps walking on some sort of hard surface. Funny thing, there is no hard surfaces on the upper level. The bottom level has wood floors, and the only other thing I can think of that would make noise like that is the basement steps.

Clip #2, 2:16 AM, 26s

This clip disproves that I am a light sleeper. How I slept through this noise I will never know. Or maybe I did wake up and went back to sleep pretty quick.

0:04: A small rap, or knock, or tap on something. Not sure what it is really.

0:17: BAM! An aggressive and harder rap, knock or tap.

Holly feels pulling at the covers

Last night, Holly and I had just went to bed and the light was still on in our room. I had forgotten something downstairs and left our bedroom to go downstairs. While I was out of the room Holly claims something was slowly pulling the top comforter off of her.

She claimed she gripped the comforter, thinking that it was gravity pulling it down, but could feel the pressure of something still pulling, trying to slowly pull the blanket off of her. Once I entered the room again, the pulling stopped.

She is amazingly calm about this whole thing. She's gone through this before - the house she grew up in was haunted as well, so these things "don't freak her out" she claims.

They freak me the fuck out, that's for sure.

EVP Recordings, April 20, 2008: Weird Mechanical Noises

More recordings for your listening pleasure. This must be the night of weird mechanical noises.

Clip #1, 1:39 AM, 15s

This is a very strange clip. It's some sort of mechanical noise that I have never heard before in this house. Not sure if it qualifies as paranormal, but I have no clue what it is. One thing I have learned from doing this EVP work is that there is some strange shit that you hear at night in your house.

0:06: The noise starts and lasts for only a second or two.

Clip #2, 3:04 AM, 56s

An even stranger clip. Is it a some weird alien bird? Again, it seems mechanical, but I have never, ever heard this type of noise in the house.

0:05: The first of two instances of the weird noises.

0:46: The second part of the weird noises

Please leave comments if you can offer insight as to what the noises are in these two clips.

EVP Recordings, April 19, 2008

So, what happened the first night? I captured two EVPs of interest. Both clips were within minutes of Holly and I going to bed.

Clip #1, 10:52 pm, 14s

This sound was easily recognizable because I hear it a lot. It is of my shower stall, which is a small square area completely enclosed in glass located next to a larger tub. My theory is that something is placing weight on the floor of the stall, then taking that weight off. There are two parts to the clip:

0:04: You can hear the weight being applied to the shower stall floor.

0:08: The weight is lifted off, causing the second noise.

Think of the noise a coke can makes as you squeeze it, then unsqueeze it. The shower stall does make this noise when Holly or myself are standing in it.

What's really interesting is at 0:02 you can hear the same voice from clip 02!. I did not hear this until I transferred the recording to the computer, so this was a surprise to me. You can barely hear it but make sure you check that out because I make note of it below.

Clip #2, 10:54 45s

This is a capture a small female child or a young woman. I think the voice originated from within my room, or just outside my room in the landing.

I verified with all my daughters that this voice was not theirs, even though I could immediately tell it was not any of them (you know your own daughter's voices).

0:08: The voice starts.

0:15: I think this is my daughters talking to each other in the next room, but it could also be the voice distorted, or facing a direction that the microphone could not pick up clearly.

0:22: The voice is clear again with a sound that to me is like a wordless disapproval. Note that this disapproval is the same sound at clip 01 at 0:02.

This EVP really freaks me out. It's a voice that is saying something in a language I can't understand. If anyone knows, or knows what she is saying, please leave a comment.

The rest of the night was quiet.

Time for some passive EVP work

Holly and I went to dinner last night - our favorite place for sushi. I told her at dinner I wanted to start recording sounds in the house while we slept, sort of passive EVP work.

So after dinner we walked to Staples - which was right next door to North China Inn, to pick up a digital voice recorder. I ended up picking a Sony ICQ-B600 for around $50. It's far from the top of the line, but it stores over 50 hours of sound, and can split recordings on the fly.

I have decided to the start recording my house while I sleep, just so I can prove to myself and hopefully others that something is going on in my house. The incident the other night in Shelby's room is the last straw for me and I am pissed off. I want to know what's in my house.

EVP is about the best I can do, because I can listen to the recordings while I work. Video would not work because I would have to watch a screen, so wouldn't be able to go through the hours of evidence while I worked. No, EVP is the way to go for me. If there's anything going on in my house, this is the way to find it.

Also, I'm not sure I want to see what's walking around my house while I sleep...

So tonight will be the first recording. I wonder what I'm going to catch. Maybe nothing?

"Something just crawled into my bed!"

Something walked into Shelby’s room last night, right after I put her down for bed. I said prayers with her, tucked her in, gave her a smooth, and said good night. I walked out of her room, got myself ready for bed, and started to look for something to read. I think 10 minutes tops had elapsed when she came into the room, really upset and scared.

"Something just crawled into my bed!"

She said she was lying in her top bunk when something knocked once on her door. Then she heard footsteps on the carpet coming into her room, and stopping at her bed. Then it climbed into the bottom bunk. She felt the bed shake and heard it creak. I guess that was enough for her at that point. I commend her for even getting out of bed and running through the her room to my bedroom. I can imagine how terrified she must have been.

This is not the the first time a spirit in this house made themselves known to my kids, but this is definitely the first time a ghost has upset one of them.

Not cool. It's time to do something about this.

No way that was a cat

We always let Bobby (our Jack Russell Terrier) outside one last time for the night. This is between 8:30pm and 9:30pm.

After that, I'm usually the one that goes out to get him well, because there are things out there, and I don't want my wife or my girls going out there at night.

So sometime in March, I went out to go get him from outside on his runner. I called him, picked him up, and proceeded to carry him in. We have a porch in the front of the house (look at the picture) and there are about 3 steps you have to ascend. Flanking the steps on the left is Holly's garden. As I was carrying Bobby and going up these steps, from somewhere in that garden came a loud and long meow.

This was no little kitten meow. This was a tomcat growl - long, low and pissed off. And it was so close it made me jump and made the hairs on my neck stick straight out.

Now, the thing that really wigged me out was that Bobby is a Jack Russel Terrier. So anything that moves is prey. If there really was a cat there, he would have heard that threatening mewl. If he did hear that cat, or even sensed that cat was anywhere in his vicinity, he would have been gone ballistic, twisting like crazy to get out of my arms and yelping in uncontained rage and frustration.

So I'm not sure there was really a cat there. Based on other EVP evidence that I have yet to post, I think this cat encounter was paranormal.

"Melanie?"

Out of nowhere, that's what Holly heard one morning while in our bedroom. A voice, from somewhere off to her left in the same room, calling someone named Melanie.


Was it a mother calling a daughter? Would there even be a daughter to answer her? Even if there is a remote possibility that, as ghosts, a mother and daughter could be sharing the same plane of existence is mind boggling to me.

Could Melanie be the name of the woman who hung herself at the top of Hawks Hill?

I see a shadowy figure "fly" up the hill

Ok, so all married couples fight, Holly and I included. And one night a few months ago we were fighting. I needed to get away from the situation so we could both cool off, but I didn't want to drive anywhere.

So I sat in my truck in the driveway and listened to some gaming podcasts. It was just past twilight, almost completely dark. It was to the point that if I were inside the house with the lights on, it would look like it was completely dark outside.

At one point I looked to my left up the hill towards the neighbor’s house behind us, and saw what I can only describe as someone wearing a black cape “floating” very fast up the hill. The “cape” was billowing behind the figure. I thought it was a kid in a Dracula cape running up the hill but it was moving WAY too fast, and there were no legs visible.

In a few seconds in was gone and I knew it was an apparition I just saw, outside of the house.

It made me remember a year prior when Holly said she thought she saw a shadowy dog or something run up the hill towards our house when my headlights splashed across the yard. She was positive she saw something then. Maybe I has just seen something similar?

Which then begs the question: is there some sort of "highway" that goes across my property? Is my house smack dab in the middle of ghost expressway? Is the shit I keep hearing at night now just wayward spirits stopping temporarily on their journey?

Holly gets greeted in the middle of the night

Holly woke up a few months ago in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When she crawled back into bed, something whispered, “Hi” right in her face. She never woke me up, just laid there, terrified until she finally fell back asleep.

Needless to say, I was a bit upset that she didn't wake me up! I don't want her laying there, afraid. Better just to go downstairs, make some coffee or tea and play a game or watch some TV.

Holly hears a sigh from behind her

Around January 2008, Holly heard a sigh.

I was leaving for work very early in the morning those days, so I could get home at a decent hour and still have a "life" outside of work.

I had already left for work that morning and it was still dark outside. Usually after I left for work Holly would go downstairs and watch some TV until it was time to get the girls up for school. One morning she was on the couch sje heard a sigh from behind her. The couch was pushed away from the wall, allowing a passageway behind it to the stairway and this passageway is where the sigh came from. The girls were not up yet and it was not the dogs. It was a human-sounding sigh.

She wasn't sure what to make of it but she described it as a sigh of boredom. Several minutes later she heard the sigh again. This time Jack, who was sleeping at the foot of the staircase landing, growled and started walking around the area behind Holly from where the sigh came from. He did this for several minutes, looking for the source of the strange voice.

Holly gets scratched

In November of 2006 a mysterious scratch appeared on Holly's back. She first noticed this in the shower, but she's not sure if she actually got scratched in the shower, or if it happened earlier that day and the water hitting it made it sting.

The scratch really looks like two claws to me.

This happened again a few months later, though I failed to get a picture of the second scratch.

I have no other proof that these scratches were caused by something paranormal, but based on other things going on in this house, I can't rule it out.

Neither Holly or anyone else in the house has displayed these types been scratches since these two events occurred.

The scars from these scratches are still visible.

The Shadow Person strolls by

I think the first "encounter" that happened in our house after we moved in happened to Shelby and Sophia. But they never even told us about it until a few months ago! I'm guessing it happened some time in 2005. Shelby would have been 7, and Sophia, 6.

At that time on the weekends, Holly and I used to sleep in an extra hour or two in the morning. Shelby was an early riser then, and would wake up about 6am to 7am. She'd wake Sophia up and they would play on the 2nd floor landing just outside our bedroom door. I'd tell them to close my door because they would break out the Littlest Pet Shop and play for a few hours until Holly and I woke up.

As it was told to me by the both of them, one weekend morning a shadow person walked through my bedroom door out onto the 2nd floor landing. It stepped over their toys and passed by them within in inches. It then walked into what was then my office, right across the landing.

They recall craning their necks to look up at the figure as it walked by them. They described it as tall, all black, and with a featureless face.

What freaks me out is how close it was to them.

"Weren't you scared?" I asked them. They both told me no, they weren't.

To be honest I'm not certain why they weren't scared, or why they didn't run immediately into my room after it happened. And I'm not sure why it took them almost a year to tell me. It's possible that because it was morning, i.e daytime, that the environment was not as threatening compared to if it happened during the night.

So the big question is: who is the shadow? Is it a civil war soldier?

New Windsor Ghost Legends

New Windsor is rich with history, and of course ghost stories. I've not done extensive research, but what I've been told second-hand is even enough to fill a blog entry!

This is what I know so far. As I do more research into why my house is haunted, I'll post my findings in future entries.

Here is what I know so far:

• No Civil War battles were fought in the immediate area, but confederate troops did raid New Windsor in 1864 without conflict and looted Roops grocery store.



• There is a an unconfirmed story of a woman who hung herself at the top of the Hawks Hill from an oak tree that no longer exists. Since this would have been Taggart's farm back then, we are trying to find out from Nana Taggart (who lives in New Windsor town now) if she remembers the incident and who that might have been.



• A few houses down towards the town, there was a barn fire that happened in the 1800s during Christmas season. A little girl was trapped in that fire and still reportedly haunts that house. The current owners keep Christmas lights up all year around the outside of the house to keep the girl happy.



• Old New Windsor Road, which runs in front of my acre plot, used to be a toll road for carriages. The locals say the road is haunted and that at night you can sometimes hear the sound of a carriage, complete with hoof steps, coming down the road.



• A year ago I was talking to Galen Roop, a local realtor, and descendant of the Roops (who owned the grocery store in town). He told me he was preparing to sell either the old Ander's House or the old Stouffer's House on Main Street [I need to confirm which the next time I drive by]. He was on the upper level taking pictures with his digital camera. When he went back to the office to download them to his computer all the pictures taken on the upper floor were completely blacked out. In the days of 35mm film, this could happen when the film was damaged or exposed prior to development. But this is very strange for a digital camera, as there is no film to be accidentally exposed.

The House is built

New Windsor, Maryland is an old town. Its history dates back to the late eighteenth century.

I had my house built four years ago on the outskirts of town. It was built on an acre of land located on the eastern side of Hawks Hill, a gentle rolling hill that overlooks a small valley containing 500 acres of corn field and is slowly being turned into a limestone quarry on the north end by the evil concrete company Lehigh. Thankfully, I will still have a view of a corn field for at least ten more years.

When our house was being built during the winter of 2003, Holly and I would drive up to New Windsor from Glen Burnie just to see how the house was shaping up. It magical seeing the construction transform from a concrete foundation to framed walls to siding to a completed house.

On an unseasonably warm January day, Holly and I brought my parents to the construction site to show my parents the house for the first time. At that point the walls were still only framed out and the floors were still plywood, but you could tell it was a house.

We pulled up the driveway and went in via the garage, which had no door on it yet. As we were mounting the steps from the garage into the kitchen, we all heard someone walking on the second floor directly above us. They were heavy steps, like boots. But they weren't fast footsteps, like someone who was trying to find an escape route - and we made plenty of noise coming into the site. No, the walking was slow and determined, like something with all the time in the world.

I went upstairs with my dad, but no one was there. We all sort of blew it off at the time. I think as a group we decided some local teen was upstairs and escaped out one of the windows. But the jump was too high from the second floor, and all the windows were shut save for one, which was only cracked. In their haste, someone wouldn't re-shut the window to that size of an opening. In retrospect there really was no logical reason for the sounds of the boots.

But I now realize that:

1. This was our first ghost encounter with this house


2. This happened during daylight hours


3. My house was not even built yet and it was haunted.

So why am I exposing to the world what's going on in my house? I guess because I'm pissed off. I'm pissed because if I dare stay awake more than 10 minutes after the lights go out at night, I will start to hear things moving around in my room, like someone walking softly on the carpet. I will hear things being moved, picked up, softly put down. It's terrifying.

Hopefully someone out there will see this information and will be able to provide some insight into what's going on.