A night in a haunted town house

For the better part of the last ten years, I have heard stories about a townhouse not too far outside of Denver. A friend purchased the place back in 1998. It’s now a rental property, and has recently become vacant after the last tenants left. When fellow investigators and long-time friends Randy and Robbin invited members of my team, the Boulder County Paranormal Research Society, in to investigate, I jumped at the chance. After all, who knows when the property will be available again, once a new tenant has moved in?

One doesn’t have to look too far to find the reason behind the haunting. Although completely unaware of it at the time of purchase, the owner subsequently spoke with a homicide detective who told him that many years ago, a former tenant had drowned both his wife and his daughter in the bathtub, laid their bodies out on the bed in the master bedroom, and then gone downstairs and hanged himself. The owner subsequently consulted with four different mediums, all of whom concurred that some terrible tragedy had taken place in the bathroom.

The structure was two floors and a basement. Along with Randy, Robbin, and the owner, my fellow investigators Jason and Linda Fellon joined me at 7pm for a night that turned out to be far more active than we had anticipated.  Robbin already had history with the place: At the end of a previous visit, she had walked outside into the parking lot, when suddenly she was overcome with a sudden onset of crippling chest pain that radiated into the right side of her body. Randy was on the verge of either calling paramedics or taking her to the closest hospital, when Robbin told him that she believed she was under some form of psychic attack. She began to recite The Lord’s Prayer over and over again, and  immediately began to feel relief. The pain stopped as quickly as it had begun.

On another investigation at the same house, one of the team members was slapped across the face by some kind of invisible force, or so they claimed.

After some baselining and light-hearted banter, we began to investigate the place in earnest. At 8:30, the owner (who stayed with us for a few hours) heard the sound of a woman’s voice speaking indistinctly into his left ear. We fired up the Ovilus, which immediately spit out the words HOMICIDE, RESENT, THEM.

The Ovilus is a controversial gadget. If the truth be told, for many years I always thought that it was garbage. The occasional spectacular ‘hits’ were far outweighed in my mind by the tsunami of irrelevant meaningless verbiage that it tended to spew out. My mind has been changed on more recent investigations, such as Asylum 49 in Utah, where the Ovilus output eerily tracked with the events going on in the room.

The events of last night removed pretty much all traces of doubt from my mind. Some examples: When Linda asked which of the innocent victims had been drowned first, the Ovilus responded with BATH, DROWNED, RANDY, BATH, and ROBB. The references to Randy and Robbin’s names were every bit as striking as those to drowning and the bathtub, and the atmosphere among our team of investigators grew quite excited. In order to double our data collection rate, we began to run two Oviluses side by side. One was the physical Ovilus IV, and the other was the iOvilus app running on a smartphone.

Shortly after 9 o’clock, I went upstairs to investigate along with Jason and Linda. The Ovilus responded with CONFESS, BATH, and then followed up with HEY, UPSTAIRS, THREE – a clear reference to there being three of us upstairs. As strange as it may sound, we each took turns sitting in the bathtub. When I climbed in, a shout went up from downstairs; the Ovilus had just said BRITISH, and then BRITISH, ENEMY.

The night was still young, and it seemed that I was already making enemies.

“Guys, did you see that?” Linda asked. We hadn’t. From her vantage point on the upstairs landing, Linda had seen a dark grey form come swirling toward her; it reminded her of a pillar of smoke, some four feet high, with lighter grey patches swirling around inside it. The anomaly came toward Linda from the doorway of the master bedroom, disappearing before she could pull out her camera and snap a picture.

DROWN was all the Ovilus had to say.

At 9:30 we decided to take a break, and headed back downstairs to chat about the events so far. I was asking the homeowner about the murder-suicide, when suddenly the Ovilus chimed in with BRITISH, LARGE.

“Are you saying I’m too fat?” I responded indignantly. Never mind that it was true…

BIG, HURT, BEAT, ATTACK, RANDY, came the next (rather ominous) string of words. Trying to lighten the mood, I said, “I hope it doesn’t mean ‘Randy’ in the British sense of the word.” BRITISH, came the immediate response.

“What do you have to say to the Brit?” Linda challenged.

EXERCISE.

“Cheeky bastard,” I cursed. I’d heard enough comments about my expanding waistline from the bloody thing for one night.

“Say something to the redhead,” Linda said, referring to herself. She got a little more than she had bargained for: RED, HURT, BLOOD.

Hot damn. We all looked at one another with raised eyebrows. I’m not a big believer in coincidence on a good day, but the interactions with the Ovilus so far were almost impossible to write off as mere chance. The homeowner and Randy went upstairs after our break, determined to investigate matters further. I remained downstairs with Robbin, Jason, and Linda, running the Oviluses and recording their responses.

It was 9:45 and fully dark outside. We had no idea that the physical phenomena were about to start…