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Ghosts and Haunted Places in New England

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(page 3 of 3)

"We checked out the possibility that it was a car driving by, but there was no dirt road in that section of the woods or traffic lights. We found out later that it was a fresh grave. Someone had been buried that day, and we didn't know about it. We captured the light on video."

The cameraman recorded the light for two and a half minutes. Then Harold told him to stay there for five minutes and take more video, this time to the right of the grave. The entire time he was filming, the cameraman did not see the light in the viewfinder. The next day, the group returned to the cemetery and discovered that they had been filming over a fresh grave.

Waterbury, CT: House

Skeleton Crew Paranormal Research Society

One of the group's strangest investigations was conducted at a house in Waterbury, Connecticut. Jim (Petrino) said, "We got a call that some people were sitting on the front steps and would not go inside until we got there. When we arrived, the girls were trembling on the steps, and I thought, 'This must be a genuine good one.'... During the meeting, a twenty-year-old girl was crying and pointing hysterically, 'There it is! There it is! Can't you see it?'

"I said, 'No, we don't see it.' Rick and I said, 'No we don't see it.' She said, 'It's right there. Don't you see it?' We said, 'No, we can't.' " The young woman continued to point at an unseen presence for thirty minutes. At the end of the interview, the group was getting ready to leave when the young woman claimed she saw the ghost walking down the hallway into the bedroom.

"I didn't believe her by this time," Jim said. "I left my camera and my video and just walked down the hallway with her. She pointed to a corner of the bedroom and said, 'Don't you see it?' I said, 'Yeah.' There was a full-bodied apparition standing against the wall. I was thinking, 'What do I do now? I don't have my video camera or my still camera. I don't have anything.' I was afraid it would be gone by the time I returned with my camera, so I took two steps forward, and the thing turned to the side. I took one step, and it disappeared before it hit the wall."

Ashland, MA: John Stone Inn

W.R.A.I.T.H.

One of T.J.Tucker's most interesting investigations was conducted at the John Stone Inn in Ashland, Massachusetts. "It was just a friend of mine and I who went to the inn. There's a legend that John Stone haunts it and that the guy that he killed haunts it, but there's also a little girl who passed away there," T.J. said. "We both experienced the spirit of the little girl."

"She was basically wanting to play with us. She kept popping up everywhere we went. We were, like, 'OK, we can't play with you now.' But she was persistent. She kept trying to joke with us and to get us to play with her."

Vermont: Old School

Granite State Paranormal

A case in point is an investigation at an old school in Vermont. Legend has it that a janitor who passed away in the 1930s had been seen and heard in the school.

"One of my guys went over there," Jim Snell said, "and was walking around doing Electronic Voice Phenomena work. One question he asked was 'Do you know that you're dead?' The spirit answered back, 'I'm still breathing.' "

Jim returned to the school a few weeks later with a group from Vermont called VAPORS. "One of the girls and I had walked twenty feet down the hallway, and we noticed that the door to the bathroom was open," Jim said. "They had one of those infrared triggering devices on the wall panel near the inside of the door. So we checked the area between the door and whatever it was that set it off. We determined that you had to go a ways inside the bathroom to set it off. There was no way out of the bathroom, so whatever was triggering the motion detector was still in there."

Jim and the young woman walked through the building to a different location where they could still see the room, and they asked the spirit to do it again, and the light came back on. Still, Jim is unwilling to cite this incident as definite proof of the paranormal because, after all, a motion detector is an electronic device and therefore is prone to malfunction. "It could be a coincidence too," Jim adds.

Rhode Island: Boys' Reformatory

Rhode Island Paranormal Research Team, Scituate, Rhode Island

The group collected some very eerie EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) at Saconawa Prison, which used to be a boys' reformatory. "We had a recording of Ray and Barbara setting up the equipment, but in the background, you can hear someone saying, 'Get out!' in a very ominous voice," Andrew Lairdsaid.

At other locations, the groups have recorded similar threatening EVPs, such as "Get out of my house!" and "Get out and leave us alone!" Some of the language on the group's EVPs is so abusive that, in Andrew's words, it "would make a truck driver blush." The hostile tone of some of these EVPs can be traced, Andrew believes, to the fact that some of these spirits simply do not want to be bothered.

Not all of the team's EVPs are angry, however. "We recorded one in the Paine House that is a little girl's voice," Andrew says. "Her name was Sarah. She told us to look in a particular place. We did, and we found a ring."