Paranormal Investigations at the Allen House

For years, I have written fiction (short stories and novels), but this is not fiction.

On the evening of June 7, 2008, my wife, Rebecca, and I welcomed to our home a team of paranormal investigators from Louisiana Spirits, a branch of T.A.P.S., the paranormal investigators who are featured on the Sci Fi channel show Ghost Hunters. Louisiana Spirits had assured us that they would be as objective and scientific as possible, using infra-red cameras, digital voice recorders, and devices measuring electrical activity and temperatures.

Rebecca and I gave the six investigators a tour of the house and briefly talked about the stories that we had heard from townspeople and that we had read in books and on the internet, as well as about our own personal experiences. They then brought their equipment into the house and began setting up.

Rebecca and I thought we'd leave them to their work and go to a late-night movie. As we were pulling out of the driveway, I said that maybe the investigators should have set up a camera in the carriage house. Then I added, "But they can do that when they come back."

My wife said, "Why would they come back?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I just have a feeling--"

Then her cell phone rang.

We were no more than two blocks from the house. She listened for a moment and then said into her phone, "All the power went out?"

It was the lead investigator calling to say that, just as they were about to turn on all their monitoring equipment, there was a tremendous crash outside, and the backyard lit up with sparks and blue lightning. The house went black.

Rebecca and I returned to the house to discover that all our neighbours had power, but we didn't. A large branch had fallen in the back yard and snapped our power line. The meter had been ripped from the house. The power line lay on the ground.

The weather that night was hot and perfectly clear and calm. No rain. No wind. Not the slightest breeze. Yet a branch had fallen off a large old tree, and the branch just happened to be over our power line. And it happened just as the first-ever paranormal investigation of the house was to commence.

In addition, one of the investigators received a text message at the same time the power went out. It read: "Urgent. I am watching you." She didn't immediately know who sent the message. Although she concluded that it must have been sent by a neighbour of hers in Louisiana, the eeriness of the timing was not diminished.

The investigators left their battery-operated audio recorders running for a while, but it soon became clear that the power was not going to be restored quickly. They told us they would return on June 28 and try again.

*

Between June 7 and June 28, the investigators discovered that in the short time they were in the house they had picked up three audio recordings. One EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) was recorded in the dining room. A man's muffled and gruff voice says, "Hello." An EVP picked up in the front parlour is of a whispery female voice very distinctly saying, "Okay . . . okay." This EVP is so clear that it's hard to believe a living person standing next to the recorder isn't speaking, yet the voice represents the injection of a third person into a room that only two investigators occupied at the time. The most provocative of these three EVPs occurred on the second-floor landing as the investigators were commenting on the "weirdness" of the power going out. In the midst of their talk, a whispery female voice (the same one as in the parlour, it seems) says, "Not a transformer."

And the investigator who received a text message from a neighbour? The neighbour admitted that the message came from his phone, but he claimed he didn't send it.

When Louisiana Spirits returned on the evening of June 28 and commenced their investigation, Rebecca and I stayed at the house and watched the monitors with two of the team members. I was impressed with their knowledge and with their efforts to dismiss anomalies that could be easily and logically explained. For instance, several orbs appeared on most of the eight monitor screens, but the investigators explained that orbs were usually just dust particles or insects.

But even with the investigators' inclination to explain away events, they could not explain away everything.

In the front parlour, an investigator got a spike on her EMF (Electromagnetic Field) meter. Such a spike can be an indication of paranormal activity, and in fact, she could find no logical explanation, like a breaker box or an electrical outlet.

Investigators got photos of a blue mist in the doorway of the dining room and of a white mist drifting through the master suite.

In the third-story turret, an investigator asked whether Allen Bonner, a former resident of the house, was present, to which she heard--and recorded--a young male voice saying, "Sure." The investigator also heard female giggling and what sounded like a music box.

*

The investigators from Louisiana Spirits came back to the house on July 23 to reveal and discuss all their findings. They said that the night of the second investigation they went to their motel and started listening to some of their audio recordings. They ended up not going to bed for several more hours because it was quickly apparent they had captured a number of EVPs. They explained that typically, if they record any kind of evidence at all, they might get one or two EVPs and not necessarily clear ones. At our house, they had gotten several EVPs. What's "several"? By my count--not including questionable clips of indistinct sounds that some listeners might interpret as moans or sighs--the investigators caught forty-two EVPs.

Yes, you read that correctly: forty-two (42).

Many of which (about twenty) are "category A" EVPs, that is, very clear and distinct.

The investigators and Rebecca and I discern at least six different voices.

The male voices include the young man (or possibly adolescent boy) saying "Sure" and a man seeming to respond to some baiting from an investigator who says, "Scared, scared of two women in here." His voice is faint but distinct: "No, I'm not." In a different clip, a male voice says, "Christ." An older-sounding male voice in the dining room says, at different times, "Hello" and "Allen."

In response to a string of questions from one of the investigators, it sounds like a child who says, "Be quiet." A child also says, "Listen to me."

The woman who said on the occasion of the first and abbreviated investigation "Okay" and "Not a transformer" does a good bit of talking during the second investigation. Some of her words seem to be interactive, that is, in response to something an investigator is saying or doing, as when she says, "Not a transformer." Most of the time, however, her words seem out of context, suggestive of a residual haunting. In response to an investigator saying, "Move this table," this female voice says, "Help me." On other clips, she says, "It's just a pot"; "Not my eyes"; "I just lied"; "Michael . . . Michael." A female voice, possibly this same one, responds, "Yeah," when an investigator asks, "Are you the one who made the tree fall on the power line?"

At least one other female spirit appears to be present in the house. Responding to an investigator saying, "The spirits in this house are very loving," this second female says, "They are." A female voice in an empty room is recorded saying, "It's awful . . . awful," and a woman says, "No," in the midst of my wife's telling one of the investigators about the order in which members of the Allen family died as if Rebecca has gotten some detail wrong or as if the woman is in denial. While Rebecca is talking about the suicide of a young man in an old house a few blocks away, a suicide that occurred fifteen or twenty years ago subsequent to the young man breaking up with his lover, a female voice injects, somewhat shrilly, "She killed him."

This is not fiction. I have deliberately limited myself to a discussion of some EVPs that are distinct, that are clearly not the creaks or moans of an old house, background noises, the voices of living persons present in the house, or electronic glitches.

For another account of events and additional information, please see the website for Louisiana Spirits, whose investigators are impressively meticulous and professional.

Until recently, whenever someone asked me whether my house was really haunted, I'd shrug and say, "A lot of people think so, but who knows?" Now, next time somebody asks, I will simply say, "Yeap."The LA Spirits team told us something else. Prior to the power outage, a timer (used for Christmas lights last December) was in the wall socket in the third-story turret. After the power outage, the investigators discovered it lying on a chair.