A Tale of Two Doppelgängers
If paranormal cases were earthquakes, some would be tremors and others would be mild quakes. When I read the email I received from a woman named Melanie who had recently moved into a home in Westchester County, New York, I knew that I had just hit a ten on the paranormal Richter scale. It wasn’t so much that the family who lived in the house were experiencing a ton of activity, it was the type of activity they were experiencing that intrigued me. Melanie reported the sighting of not one, but two döppelgangers in her home.
For those unacquainted with the term, a döppelganger is an exact double of a living person. As far as hauntings are concerned, these mysterious doubles often take on the appearance of someone living in the house. In this case, the döppelgangers were seen by two different family members, Melanie and her daughter, and each looked like a different person.
Döppelganger sightings are rare, and they are almost always extremely unnerving to the people who see them, so I wasn’t at all surprised when Melanie called and asked if I could stop by her home and see if I could help. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to investigate this unique, uncommon paranormal phenomenon.
The family had been living in the home for just a month before they saw these strange apparitions. Melanie was somewhat spooked by the spirit that she saw in the middle of the night, but her 12-year-old daughter, Emily, was so frightened by the ghostly double she saw in her bedroom that she has been refusing to sleep there. Since the sighting, which occurred just a few days before I received the phone call, she had been sleeping in her parents’ room.
Melanie was kind enough to allow me to interview Emily over the phone, as she would be in school on the day I was scheduled to run the investigation. I was eager to interview the girl to get an accurate account of the sighting, and to reassure her that what she saw was harmless.
“Hi Emily,” I said. “Your mom told me a little about what you saw the other night. I wanted to hear the story from you, and to ask you a few questions as we go along if that’s okay. So, you were in your bedroom when you saw this?”
“Yes,” she said, “it was in the middle of the night and I was in my bed.”
“What time of night was it?” I asked. “Did you wake up, or were you not sleeping at all that night?”
“It was about 3:30 AM,” she answered. “I had trouble falling asleep that night, but I woke up from a dream. I looked over to my side and I kind of freaked out by what I saw.”
“What exactly did you see?” I asked.
“I woke up and I looked over toward my wall, and all I could think was, ‘That looks like my dad!’ I watched it for a while, then said to it, “Why are you here dad? It’s like three in the morning!” When I said this, it turned its head a little toward me, but I never saw its face, and then it ran out of the room.”
“How far away was it from you?” I asked
“It was about six feet away,” she answered.
“Was it just standing still, or was it walking around the room?” I asked.
“That’s the weird thing,” she said, “It was looking at my picture wall which has pictures of me and my family in frames. As it looked at the pictures, it was touching them, and it looked like it was moving them around. The pictures weren’t actually moving when it touched them, but it looked like it was moving them.”
“I know you said that you couldn’t see it’s face,” I said, “but which way was it facing?”
“Its back was to me,” she said, “and it turned around just a little bit when I talked to it. Like I said, I never really saw its face, but I really thought it was my dad because I recognized the shirt it was wearing. It was the same shirt that’s in my dad’s closet.”
“Your mom said it’s a very specific looking shirt that your dad sometimes wears. Can you describe it for me?” I asked.
“It was a red shirt with a car on it, and my dad wears it all the time which is why I thought it was him. Another weird thing is that this thing was standing in front of my mirror, but I didn’t see its reflection in the mirror.”
This observation really interested me. Seeing such a thing must have made the sighting even more frightening for Emily. “Did it register at the time that it didn’t have a reflection,” I asked, “or did you realize it later?
Emily thought for a few seconds, then said, “I really wasn’t paying attention to the mirror when I saw it because I was thinking how weird it was that my dad was in my room looking at the pictures. But when I thought about it later, I realized that this thing didn’t have a reflection.”
Melanie added that Emily had told her that the room’s motion detector light on the smoke detector lit up when her dad’s double ran out of the room. I asked Emily to tell me about it.
“I saw the motion sensor go off when it ran out of the room,” she said. “After it ran out I stood up on my bed and it went off again when I stood up.”
“About how long would you say you saw him for?” I asked.
Emily paused and thought about it, then said, “Like, twenty seconds. I watched it looking around my room for a while, but I didn’t want to say anything to it at first because I got creeped out. Then when I said, “Why are you here dad?” it turned a little bit toward me. It was like it saw me out of the corner of its eye, then it ran out. I guess when it realized that I saw it, it got scared and ran out.”
Apparition sightings usually last just a few seconds, but her father’s döppelganger hung around for quite a long time. It was almost as if it was so absorbed in looking at the photos that it forgot where it was. My gut feeling is that it would have stayed there much longer examining the pictures had Emily not called out to it. And who knows how long it was in the room looking at the pictures before she woke up and saw it.
“When this thing left your room, what direction did you see it go?” I asked.
“I couldn’t really see where he went,” she said. “It just went forward, and then as I ran downstairs to my parent’s room I couldn’t see him. As soon as he left I stood up to leave because I got nervous, and nothing was there in the hallway.”
Melanie interrupted the conversation briefly to point out that Emily’s bedroom is at the end of the upstairs hallway. From her bed, she can see all the way down the hall. So, the figure wouldn’t have made any turns unless it ran down the hallway and turned into one of the other rooms or went down the staircase.
“Did you get up and follow it?” I asked
“No,” Emily laughed, as if doing such a thing would never have crossed her mind. “I got scared, so I went downstairs to my parent’s room.”
“You said you were having a dream before you woke up. Do you remember what the dream was about?” I asked
Emily thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t really remember. I just know that I woke up feeling, like, scared.”
Sometimes ghost sightings are accompanied by feelings and emotions attached to the spirit, so I was curious to know if Emily felt anything odd when she saw this spirit in her room.
“I know that you were puzzled when you first saw it because you thought that your dad was standing there looking at pictures in the middle of the night, which you thought was weird,” I said. “But, did you have any unusual feelings when you were watching this thing?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It didn’t really seem like my dad. It didn’t give off the same feeling, the same vibe as my dad, and it just felt a little weird.”
“So, it didn’t give off the same vibe as your dad. You felt like ‘I’m seeing my dad, but it’s not feeling like it’s really him’. Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. It just didn’t feel like him. Oh, there’s something else that I wanted to tell you about too,” Emily said. “I’ve been waking up at the same time every night for the past two weeks. It’s always between 2 and 4 in the morning. One time when I woke up I looked down the hallway. All the lights were off, but I could see that there was a dark shape in the middle of the hallway right in front of my brother’s room. I thought it was my brother’s dirty clothes or something that he just threw there in the hallway, but I wasn’t sure so I put on the flashlight on my phone to see what it was. When I turned my flashlight on, there was nothing there. That kind of gave me the creeps and made me feel weird.”
“Did it have a definite shape to it? Or was it more like a bunch of clothes, like a blobby shape? I asked.
Emily thought for a few seconds. “It had a definite shape,” she said “like something solid, but I couldn’t tell you what that shape was.” Although most people associate a dark shape with something that is evil, this is not true. Spirits can appear as dark shadows, white smokey mist, or solid objects. Two people can even see the same ghost at the same time, and yet report seeing different things.
At the end of our phone conversation I promised Emily that I would do all that I could to make sure that the thing that she saw in her bedroom wouldn’t make another appearance. I also assured her that spirits are harmless, and that she is always safe in her house.
Before I hung up the phone, Melanie wanted to add that three weeks before the döppelganger sightings, a lot of strange things had been occurring in the house. First, there were the odd waking hours. Even though they slept on different floors, Melanie and Emily would both wake up for no reason between the hours of 2 and 4 AM. “Most of the time we were up at the same time and didn’t know it till the next morning,” Melanie said. “The strange thing is, we both would hear footsteps while we were laying awake in our beds.”
“Where did the footsteps sound like they were coming from,” I asked.
“They always sounded like they came from upstairs,” Melanie said, “On the same floor as Emily’s room. It was hard to tell where the footsteps were coming from, but they sounded like they could have been walking down the upstairs hallway.”
“Emily mentioned seeing a figure in the hallway. Has she or anyone else seen other figures in the house?” I asked.
“Yes,” Melanie said, “A few weeks after we moved in, Emily told me that she saw dark shapes in the upstairs hallway at night. She described them as ‘dark masses’. These seem to be different from the thing she told you she saw outside of her brother’s room. Luckily, she only saw these dark masses a few times.”
Melanie also said that she and her daughter heard the sound of indistinct voices in the house. They couldn’t make out what was being said, but it sounded like someone was either talking on the phone, or having a conversation with someone. Once, Melanie heard the distant sound of a woman screaming, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“There’s one more thing,” Melanie said. “One night I left the house because I couldn’t sleep. I had such bad anxiety in the middle of the night that I sat outside for a few minutes to calm down. This just isn’t like me. I’m usually a fairly calm person, so it surprised me that I kept having this feeling of anxiety so often; and that it had gotten to the point where I had to leave the house in the middle of the night just to calm down.”
I thanked Melanie for allowing me to talk to Emily, and for all of the additional information she provided, then hung up the phone. This case was getting more interesting by the minute. I was scheduled to meet with the family the next day, and I was hoping that I would be able to provide them with some answers.
A few days later I pulled up to the house. From the outside, it looked like a brand new house, but from the phone conversation I had with Melanie I knew that it was originally built sometime in the 1970s. Melanie and her husband bought the house from a contractor who had totally renovated it because the prior owners had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The contractor said that the place was a total wreck when he bought it from the couple who were going through a divorce. He guessed that the house was in such bad shape because they were just too preoccupied with family problems to take care of it.
As I sat in my car looking at the house, I wondered if the divorced couple’s energy had imprinted itself on the place. If so, could it have something to do with the highly unusual döppelganger sightings Melanie and her daughter witnessed? This didn’t seem likely. Döppelganger sightings always point to an active haunting rather than residual energy, but I would know more once I took a walk around the place. I gathered up my ghost hunting equipment and headed for the front door where I was greeted by Melanie and her husband, Phillip.
As I stepped across the threshold I was half expecting to feel the familiar tingling sensation that alerts me that a ghost is present, but the home felt warm and inviting. From the front door, the open floor plan allowed me to see all the way to the back of the house where a bank of windows showed a breathtaking view of woods and rolling hills. The contractor did an amazing job fixing the place up. If Melanie hadn’t told me about all of the major renovations, I would have thought I was walking into a brand new house.
As I followed the couple into the living room, I noticed the framed family photos on the wall going up the staircase and thought about Emily’s döppelganger looking at the photos in her room. The way Emily described the way it touched the photos as it looked at them made me think of my grandmother. Whenever she and I would look at her old family photo albums together, she would run her fingers lightly across each faded photograph as she told me about the people and places they showed. It always made me a little sad when she did this, as if she was secretly wishing to reach in and touch the people in the photos and maybe bring back a piece of the past. I wondered if the spirit in Emily’s room was having these same types of feelings as it touched each photo on her bedroom wall.
I unpacked my ‘ghost bag’ in the kitchen, and Philip and Melanie told me a little more about the house. The prior owners had allowed the house to deteriorate in a big way. When the contractor bought it from them, there was a hole in the roof that had caused a lot of water damage. It was so bad that the majority of walls and floors on the second floor had to be totally replaced. The wiring and plumbing had been brought up to code, and all of the appliances, light fixtures and doors had been replaced. It was essentially a new house. But as beautiful as it was, after just a month of living there, the strange döppelganger sightings forced Melanie to reach out to me for help.
Melanie was eager to tell me about her döppelganger sighting, but I told her that I wanted to do a walkthrough of the house first. Although I was anxious to hear her story, it was important that I try to pick up as much intuitive information as I could as soon as I got in the house. If I waited, I might not get as much information.
I told Melanie that I wanted to start on the second floor and make my back way down to the first floor. I told her that I would point out the spots where things didn’t feel right to me, and asked that she hold off telling me whether they matched the spots where she and the rest of the family were experiencing things.
I turned on my recorder, grabbed my digital camera and headed for the second floor. Melanie and Phillip stayed behind to tend to the dogs who were still excited that a stranger was in their house, so I was alone as I made my way up the staircase.
The stairs themselves felt fine, but as soon as I put my foot on the second floor landing I felt a heavy, smothering, anxious feeling on the second floor landing. I stood there for a minute taking in the atmosphere. ‘Someone was very unhappy here’, I thought. Whoever this spirit was, the second floor was their territory. There was a sense of sadness at the top of the stairs, and an unmistakable feeling of anxiety. I didn’t get the sense that a spirit was there with me, but I was definitely picking up the feelings and emotions of someone who had once lived in the house.
One quirk I have is that I always conduct investigations barefoot. Psychometry is the ability to pick up intuitive information by holding an object. I have this ability. By walking barefoot I am in constant physical contact with the object--in this case, the house--which allows me to pick up more accurate information.
I took off my shoes and left them at the top of the landing, then turned right and headed toward Emily’s bedroom at the end of the hall. As soon as I walked into the room, uneasy, restless energy washed over me. The feeling was similar to what I felt on the landing, a sense of anxiety, urgency, and waiting. It was strongest by the back windows and near the bedroom doorway.
I left Emily’s room and walked down the hallway. There was a small office on the right. I did a quick walkthrough this room, but it felt totally clean. The anxious feeling wasn’t in this space at all. I left this room and continued down the hall. On my right was another bedroom which turned out to be Emily’s brother’s room. This room also felt fine. I was beginning to wonder if Emily’s room was the only spot in the house that was active.
Leaving this room, I walked down the hallway a short way then stopped dead in my tracks. The brick from the first floor fireplace runs all the way up to the second floor, and this wall of brick makes up the entire left side of the hallway. There was a strong feeling of anxiety and urgency here. The whole area in front of this wall was charged with a sense of panic mixed with overwhelming sadness. Imagine hearing news that someone you loved was just rushed to the hospital, and that you were waiting for the phone to ring to find out if they were OK. That’s the kind of feeling that was attached to this spot.
I started to walk down the hall but after a few steps I was stopped in my tracks again, this time at a small landing that overlooked the foyer. The urgent, nervous feeling was in this spot as well. I could actually feel it coming up through the floor through the soles of my feet and coursing its way through my body. Anxiety, waiting, watching. I felt like I wanted to start pacing the floor.
From where I stood I could see the foyer below. I got the sense that someone used to stand in this exact spot, look down into the foyer and out the windows on either side of the front door and wait for someone. But it wasn’t as if they were waiting for anyone in particular. They were so sad, lonely and anxious that they were just waiting for anything to happen.
I walked down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. There was a slight feeling of anxiety in the entrance to the bathroom, but as soon as I stepped into the room itself it dropped off to nothing. Whatever feelings that were still attached to the house were in three main spots--Emily’s room, in the hallway near the brick wall, and on the landing overlooking the foyer. Did the energy I was feeling have anything to do with the döppelganger sightings? And why did the spirit show itself as family members rather than in its true form? These were the questions I asked myself as I walked through the rooms a second time.
The same spots felt strong to me, but the energy in Emily’s room fluctuated between feeling fine one minute, and feeling anxious the next. As I was walking back down the hallway, Melanie was coming up the stairs. “OK,” I said, “let me tell you what I’m sensing up here.” We walked into Emily’s room. “This room has a feeling in it,” I said, “almost like somebody’s waiting, waiting, waiting for something.”
“Yes!” Melanie said, “I feel it all the time.”
“It’s strongest over here near the window,” I said. “It’s also strong over here near the door to the hallway, but the whole room has a feeling of anticipation. It’s not constant, though. It comes and it goes. It’s strong sometimes, and then I’ll come back and it’s either gone or it’s really weak, and then it comes back in again. It could be just residual energy left over from one of the previous owners, but there’s that constant feeling of anticipation. A feeling of waiting, like somebody’s pacing and waiting for something to happen. Or, they're feeling like they’re stuck here and they don’t want to be, so they’re just waiting for something. That’s what I’m feeling in Emily’s room.”
I led Melanie down the hallway towards the brick fireplace wall. “The other part is right here,” I said, but before I reached the spot Melanie said, “By the chimney.”
“Yes! Exactly!” I said walking over to the brick wall. “I feel it exactly in this spot,” I said drawing an x on the floor with my toe, “and in this whole area,” I said gesturing with my hands around the brick wall.
“There’s one more spot,” I said as I walked over and stood on the landing. “It’s very strong here too.”
Melanie hugged herself as if she had become suddenly cold, “When I’m down there in the foyer,” she said, “I feel really uncomfortable. A dark feeling comes over me. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like the beginning of an anxiety attack. Whenever I’m in the foyer, it always feels like someone is looking down at me me from up here. I always feel so creeped out down there.”
“I can see why,” I said. “When I was coming down the hall I went right to this spot and had the feeling that somebody used to stand here and look down into the foyer. It was that same feeling of waiting that’s in Emily’s room.”
“Yes,” Melanie said and nodded in agreement. “Constantly. A feeling like someone is waiting for something to happen.”
I walked over to the fireplace wall and stood near the center of the hallway. “Whatever is in this house, it has something to do with this area. I don’t know why, but it’s really strong right here in this exact spot,” I said, indicating the spot with my foot, “and over here on the landing that overlooks the foyer, just like you were saying.
I walked back down the hallway and stood on the landing. “When I came up the stairs, I felt something at the top of the stairs. Then as I walked down the hallway like this,” I said walking slowly down the hall toward the brick wall, “I was thinking, ‘I’m feeling a little something, I’m feeling a little something, then boom--you get right to this spot and you really feel it.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. My daughter runs right through the hallway up here,” Melanie said. “I can hear her from downstairs. When we first moved in I was like, What the heck is happening up there? She never walks. She runs down the hallway every time she has to go to the bathroom. She starts out walking, then she takes off running past the fireplace wall, and then she goes back walking once she’s past it.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said. “It proves that you and I aren’t the only one who feel uncomfortable in this area. As for the figures that you and your daughter saw, döppelgangers are very rare. Very rare. There are two reasons why spirits appear as döppelgangers. Sometimes they’re trying to trick someone into thinking they are somebody else. But that’s not the case here. They wouldn’t run out of a room if that was the case, they would stay. Your daughter said that when it realized that she was looking at it, it got startled and ran. Like, ‘Somebody can see me? I’m out of here!’
The second reason spirits appear as döppelgangers is because they’re getting their energy from the person, or the people, in the house. When it uses their energy, it also picks up images from their minds, and it manifests as one of those images. It’s not intentional, it just borrows that visual information along with the energy it’s using from the people themselves.”
“I’ll tell you,” Melanie said, “as I’m sitting here in the hallway near the fireplace, I don’t feel well.”
“I can see why,” I said, “This whole area is a place that you just don’t want to be in. It makes you want to get away from here, to run past it the way your daughter does. I wonder what could have happened here? Sometimes I’ll get a feeling of sickness that shows me that someone passed away in a particular spot, but I’m not getting that here. I’m just getting a strong feeling of anticipation. It’s more like a feeling or an emotion is imprinted in this area rather than a spirit is present.
Yet, when you tell me that you and your daughter saw something actively looking around, it makes me think that an intelligent spirit is here. I actually think it’s both. I think there’s residual energy left in the house from one of the previous owners, and an active haunting. Whatever it is, it’s up here. I want to go downstairs and have a look around, and I want to hear about the figure you saw.”
I did a walkthrough of the first floor, but there was absolutely nothing there. The entire first floor was filled with warm, positive energy. “There’s nothing here,” I said. “Nothing at all. The whole first floor feels great.”
“Yes,” Melanie said, “Exactly. There’s nothing down here or in the basement. Whatever it is, it’s clearly upstairs in the hallway, and on the landing that overlooks the foyer. I have to tell you, I won’t walk through the foyer unless I’m leaving the house because it feels like someone is watching me from up there. My bedroom is over on that side of the house, and I’ll walk all the way around the living room to get to it rather than walk through the foyer.”
I asked Melanie to tell me what she saw. From our first conversation, I had some sketchy details, but I wanted her to tell me the story from the beginning. She led me to the master bedroom and told me what she had seen just a week earlier.
“So, this is my side of the bed. The other night I was laying here and I looked up and I saw my daughter over on the staircase. When I saw her, she was on the corner step where the plant is.”
“Did it look like she was coming down the stairs, or going up?” I asked.
“She was coming down the stairs,” Melanie said. “I reached for my glasses here on the nightstand, grabbed a sweatshirt to get out of bed, then I called out to her. I said, ‘Emily, what are you doing? Emily?’ As soon as I said this, it just kind of dissipated. Like, it literally just floated up and that was the end of it. It was gone. The whole thing lasted about ten seconds. After this happened I ran up the stairs to check on her and she was asleep.”
“How bright is the staircase at night?” I asked.
“My daughter leaves the hallway lights on upstairs because she’s afraid,” Melanie said, “The lights were fully on upstairs, and I could clearly see the stairs. I have to say, I always feel anxiety often whenever I walk up those stairs. I get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I start going up the steps. As soon as I get to the landing at the top of the stairs--well, I just don’t feel good up there. Sometimes a sad feeling comes over me, other times I actually feel angry. The staircase and the upstairs hallway give me a lot of anxiety.”
I recalled the first time I set foot on the landing, and how I felt a heavy, smothering, anxious feeling. I wondered what part the stairs played in this strange drama. Did someone have an accident on the stairs? Was negative energy stored on the staircase and on the top floor landing? Or, was there an active spirit lurking there?
I sat on the bed and looked at the staircase from the vantage point that Malanie saw the eerie figure that night. There was an unobstructed view of the stairs from the bed. The stairs are only about 20 feet away, and with the lights on in the upstairs hallway the full length of the staircase would have been clearly visible.
“It’s really interesting that both figures reacted to being recognized. In your daughter’s case, it literally ran away when she talked to it. In your case, it dissolved and faded away when you called out to it. The negative, anxious feeling imprinted in the hallway and in your daughter’s room is definitely something I need to take care of, but there’s definitely an intelligent spirit here, a spirit who is aware of you and your family. I need to try to figure out who this spirit is, and I need to help them move on. I’d like to run an EVP session in the hallway near the fireplace wall. I usually get a lot of intuitive information during these sessions, so I have a feeling we’ll get some answers.”
The goal of an EVP session is to pick up spirit voices on a digital recorder. Whenever I listen back to a recording where there was not a sound in the room at the time and I hear an unknown voice answering my question, I’m always totally amazed. These are voices of spirits, ghosts, of people who are no longer on this earth. Hearing a spirit voice actually speaking to me on a recorder triggers a million questions. How can they imprint their voices on a recorder? What are these spirits experiencing where they are? What do we look like to them? Are they aware that they’re no longer alive? Are they lost? How can I help these poor souls?
Melanie and I went back upstairs, and I sat cross legged on the floor with my back to the fireplace wall. I chose this spot because it was where I felt the strongest energy. I always start an EVP session by asking simple questions out loud, and leaving about 20 seconds after each for the spirit to answer. “What is your name?” I asked. “Did you used to live here? Do you feel that this is still your house? Do you have a message for me?”
Just as I started asking this last question, I began feeling something creeping closer and closer to me. It felt like it was coming from the direction of Emily’s room. “I’m starting to feel a presence here with us,” I said to Melanie. “I think it’s curious about us.”
Melanie’s intuition kicked in. “It's a woman,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said, then closed my eyes to help block out any external stimulation that might prevent me from connecting with the spirit. “I get a sense that you’re waiting for something,” I said aloud. “What are you waiting for?”
The hallway was silent, but the feeling that a presence was with us was getting stronger. Melanie was sitting about 10 feet away from me, and she could feel it too. “This whole left half of my body has pins and needles,” she said.
As I continued asking questions, the nervous energy returned. The spirit seemed to be pacing back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other. Melanie and I both commented that we felt the presence leave, then return a short time later. The nervous energy was back as the spirit continued its nervous, ceaseless pacing up and down the hallway.
It was time to tell the spirit what I had in mind, and I hoped that it would cooperate. “You really don’t belong here,” I said aloud, “but I’m going to show you how to go where you belong, and where you’ll be happy. I’m going to show you the way to a beautiful place where all of the anxiety and sadness that you’re feeling will be totally gone.”
The sense of anxiety in the hallway began to rise slowly as I felt something coming closer and closer to me. “Is that something that you want?” I asked. “Do you want to be free of all of these anxious feelings?” As soon as I asked this, I got a strong sense that the presence had stopped and was now standing in the hallway with us. It felt as if someone had come right up to my left side and was standing over me. It was so close that if this was a living person, I could have moved my hand just a few inches and touched their leg. I could feel it looking down at me. The feeling wasn’t menacing, it was a distressed, apprehensive feeling.
I said to Melanie, “Something just came back, and they’re reacting to what I’m saying. The feeling is very strong now.”
She looked at me and said, “It’s funny, because right before you said that I felt it walk right past me over to where you’re sitting.”
I started asking questions that I hoped would cause the spirit to react and give me more information. “What is it that you’re waiting for?” I asked. “Did you have an alcohol or drug problem, or did you just have emotional issues with anxiety?” I think I hit a nerve with this last question because the feeling in the hallway knocked up a few notches. My body began to feel charged with static at this point.
“It’s very strong right now,” I said to Melanie. “Very strong.”
I didn’t want to lose touch with this spirit so I said, “The family that lives here now are taking good care of this house, so that’s something you don’t have to worry about. You don’t have to hold on to these things any more.”
Melanie shifted her weight, then pulled her sweater around her and said, “I’ll tell you, I have the chills up here now. My back feels warm, but my front feels cold.”
“That’s because it’s coming from this direction,” I said, indicating the area behind her. “It’s definitely a female, and she keeps coming back and forth like she’s pacing. The feeling that I’m getting besides the anxiety is that she was a very sad person. There’s just something very sad and lonely about her. I don’t know what it is that got her to his state. I don’t think she had a mental illness, but she had very high anxiety. She should have been medicated, but she never was. She should have had anxiety meds which would have taken care of everything, but she never did and so she had this constant feeling of anxiety.”
“The waiting and watching feeling is incredibly strong,” I continued, “She’s looking down from that landing over there, looking down to see who’s coming home. I’m not getting a sense that it's spousal abuse or anything like that. It’s more like waiting for something to happen, waiting for somebody to come like, ‘I wish somebody was here. I wish anybody was here.’”
I closed down the EVP session and told Melanie that it was time for me to move this spirit on by doing a clearing. A clearing has a two-fold purpose. It removes any negative energy that has built up over time, and it reunites spirits with their loved ones on the other side.
Conducting a clearing is deeply personal, so everyone’s method is different. For me, silent prayer plays a major role. In addition, I always call on my patron saint, Padre Pio, for guidance and protection. I visualize him standing beside me as I encourage spirits to go through a doorway of light that I open in my mind’s eye--the doorway to the other side. When a spirit goes through that doorway I can often see them very clearly in my mind, and many clearings culminate with an emotional reunion of the spirit with their loved ones on the other side.
One common misconception is that when I’m conducting a clearing, I’m somehow performing some type of an exorcism or a ritual that is forcing spirits to leave. I’m not. I’m acting as a guide to show them the way to their loved ones. This is the ultimate goal of every clearing. But it’s important to keep in mind that spirits have free will, so not all choose to move on.
In addition to prayer, I use various types of incense during a clearing. I chose Frankincense for this clearing because it infuses a space with peace, serenity and a sense of well being. It is the same type of incense used in religious and spiritual ceremonies for purification and to enhance spiritual awareness. I remain barefoot throughout the clearing as I will be, in a sense, creating a sacred space.
I lit my incense, and began by saying a silent prayer to Padre Pio. I imagined that he was walking next to me as I walked slowly through each room infusing it with Frankincense. I reminded them that if this was once their house, it no longer is and that the family who lives here is taking good care of it. I asked them to follow me so I could guide them to their loved ones. After doing this, I went back to the brick wall in the hallway and sat down and started the final stage of the clearing.
I said out loud, “I’m opening a doorway of light right here,” indicating a space to my right. “I feel you with me now. This is the doorway that you’re going to go through to meet your family, your friends, your relatives. They’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Any fears that you may have had about crossing over and meeting them and going to that light, you need to let them go now. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of. The place you are going to is beautiful. It’s filled with God’s light, love, happiness, and joy. There’s nothing bad at all in the place you’re going. You don’t belong here, you belong there, and this is how you can get there, through this doorway of light.”
“I know there is a woman here with me today,” I continued, “but I know that there are other spirits here with me today. Any of you can go through this doorway. You will see your relatives, you will see your friends there. Listen, they’re calling for you. Can you hear them? Call out to them and they’ll come and get you.”
As I sat in silence, I continued to pray and to urge the spirits to go through the doorway. Suddenly, I picked up a very strong intuitive impression. “Somebody’s calling the name Casey,” I said.
Melanie began to feel the effects of the clearing as she sat a short distance away from me. “I thought I heard the name Mary,” she said.
“There could be more than one spirit here with us, so more than one may go through. The name Casey keeps coming to me. It’s like someone is calling, ‘Casey, Casey. Come. Come on.’ I don’t know if it’s someone on the other side, or if it’s a voice from the past attached to this house, but the name is very persistent.”
As I sat with my eyes closed, I felt a sudden rush of energy leave the hallway as at least one spirit crossed over. This was accompanied by a strong visual image. I opened my eyes and looked over at Melanie.
“Wow,” I said. “That was successful! I can really feel it. Toward the end I picked up a very strong image of a woman with a red scarf or kerchief around her neck that was tied in the front. I kept seeing this woman as I felt someone go through. Sometimes a spirit will hesitate as if they’re saying, ‘No, I don’t want to go there. I’d rather stay here’. But there was no hesitation. It was more like, ‘Oh, good! I can finally leave!’.”
Melanie was amazed at how different the hallway felt. The frantic energy was mostly gone, and the space felt much lighter and calmer. I told her that after a clearing, it takes at least two weeks for all of the energy to settle down.
“At least one spirit went through to the other side,” I said, “but I’ll leave the doorway open so more can go through if they want. I’ll close it remotely in a few days. Don’t worry, there’s no danger of anything coming through the doorway into your home. It’s a one-way doorway.”
The real work on a paranormal investigation begins after I leave the site. I pour over photographs looking for anomalies, and spend hours carefully listening to the recording I made for EVP. I usually start by listening to the EVP session to see if there are any answers to my questions. In this case, I was rewarded with the sound of unexplainable voices.
At one point I asked, Did you used to live here? A few seconds later, two voices can be heard. One sounds like an adolescent child, and the other sounds like a female adult. Although it’s difficult to make out exactly what they’re saying, it’s clear that they are having an argument. The child sounds as if he or she is using the ‘F-word’ followed by the adult talking in a calmer voice. The child’s voice then comes in again saying something like, “Yeah, right!”
I doubt very much that I recorded a mother and child ghost having an argument. EVP aren’t always the voices of spirits who are trying to communicate with us. Sometimes they are simply echos from the past. What I probably picked up was a conversation from years gone by that had occurred in the hallway. One of the families who lived in this house were obviously very unhappy, and their interfamily relationship was very unstable, which would explain the feeling of anxiety and sadness present in the upstairs hallway.
At another part of the EVP session, a voice whispers, “Great house” right after I mentioned the name Casey. I suspect that the voice came from an intelligent spirit who was eager to point out that it wasn’t always bad in this house, and that they were once very happy here.
After the investigation, Melanie asked a few friends and neighbors some questions about the former owners. She learned that the first family was very happy in the house. They were a very happy family, and they loved living here which might account for the “great house” EVP.
Melanie also discovered that an old woman once lived in the house next door. One day, the local senior citizen bus dropped the woman off, and as soon as she got off the bus she passed out and died in the driveway. Her name was Mary, the exact name that Melanie picked up on.
It’s very possible that the woman that I saw during the clearing with the red scarf was Mary. Although she passed away next door, spirits travel, and they often show up in places other than their former homes. Several years ago, I conducted an investigation at a house where a man saw his deceased neighbor in his living room. If Mary took a liking to Melanie and her family, she would naturally gravitate to them. She would also be curious about things like family photographs. Melanie’s friend said that he remembered that Mary often wore scarves around her neck the way a lot of older women did at that time. Spirits show us the way they see themselves, so if it was Mary that I was seeing, she might have been recalling a time when she dressed this way.
As for the EVP of the argument, the neighbor told Melanie that the second owners of the house had a very unstable and unhappy family situation. No one knew exactly what went on in the house while they were living there, but there were a lot of dark rumors swirling around this particular family. The neighbor vividly recalled the mother and daughter fighting all the time. He said that sometimes their fights were so loud that he could hear them from inside his house. The EVP of the child and adult fighting could very well have been a heated mother-daughter argument from the past.
I was never able to figure out the significance of the name Casey. That bothers me because the name came across so strong and with such persistence. The neighbor told Melanie that one of the previous owners went by a nickname, but he couldn’t recall the name. Perhaps she went by her initials KC and people called her Casey? Or, perhaps Casey was a random spirit who decided to cross over when I opened the doorway of light. It could even have been the name of a family pet! One thing I’m sure of is that during the clearing, someone was calling out to Casey to join them on the other side.
I recently received an update from Melanie. She said that the house feels much better since I did the clearing, especially the upstairs. But it seems that either some residual energy hasn't dissipated yet, or a spirit might have chosen to remain in the house.
“There’s something interesting that’s been happening over the past week or so,” Melanie said. “I’ve been seeing shadows in the foyer, and shadows going into my room. They move super fast, like one of those things that makes your head turn and say to yourself, ‘What the heck was that?’
Last week Phillip was in the kitchen when he heard someone say his name. He came into the bedroom and was like ‘Yes?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘What’. We were both confused. I laughed and I said. ‘That wasn’t me. It’s our new ghost!’ Other than that, the whole place feels much better. It’s been super calm since you were here.”
I feel truly blessed to be able to help reunite lost souls with their loved ones. I firmly believe that a spirit’s journey doesn’t end on the other side. Spirits who cross over become guides to the living, and they eventually move on to higher spiritual realms where their work continues in ways we can never fully understand. Those spirits who choose to remain behind eventually find the way to the other side on their own, and I’m confident that the shadowy figures Melanie recently reported will fade away over time.
For those unacquainted with the term, a döppelganger is an exact double of a living person. As far as hauntings are concerned, these mysterious doubles often take on the appearance of someone living in the house. In this case, the döppelgangers were seen by two different family members, Melanie and her daughter, and each looked like a different person.
Döppelganger sightings are rare, and they are almost always extremely unnerving to the people who see them, so I wasn’t at all surprised when Melanie called and asked if I could stop by her home and see if I could help. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity to investigate this unique, uncommon paranormal phenomenon.
The family had been living in the home for just a month before they saw these strange apparitions. Melanie was somewhat spooked by the spirit that she saw in the middle of the night, but her 12-year-old daughter, Emily, was so frightened by the ghostly double she saw in her bedroom that she has been refusing to sleep there. Since the sighting, which occurred just a few days before I received the phone call, she had been sleeping in her parents’ room.
Melanie was kind enough to allow me to interview Emily over the phone, as she would be in school on the day I was scheduled to run the investigation. I was eager to interview the girl to get an accurate account of the sighting, and to reassure her that what she saw was harmless.
“Hi Emily,” I said. “Your mom told me a little about what you saw the other night. I wanted to hear the story from you, and to ask you a few questions as we go along if that’s okay. So, you were in your bedroom when you saw this?”
“Yes,” she said, “it was in the middle of the night and I was in my bed.”
“What time of night was it?” I asked. “Did you wake up, or were you not sleeping at all that night?”
“It was about 3:30 AM,” she answered. “I had trouble falling asleep that night, but I woke up from a dream. I looked over to my side and I kind of freaked out by what I saw.”
“What exactly did you see?” I asked.
“I woke up and I looked over toward my wall, and all I could think was, ‘That looks like my dad!’ I watched it for a while, then said to it, “Why are you here dad? It’s like three in the morning!” When I said this, it turned its head a little toward me, but I never saw its face, and then it ran out of the room.”
“How far away was it from you?” I asked
“It was about six feet away,” she answered.
“Was it just standing still, or was it walking around the room?” I asked.
“That’s the weird thing,” she said, “It was looking at my picture wall which has pictures of me and my family in frames. As it looked at the pictures, it was touching them, and it looked like it was moving them around. The pictures weren’t actually moving when it touched them, but it looked like it was moving them.”
“I know you said that you couldn’t see it’s face,” I said, “but which way was it facing?”
“Its back was to me,” she said, “and it turned around just a little bit when I talked to it. Like I said, I never really saw its face, but I really thought it was my dad because I recognized the shirt it was wearing. It was the same shirt that’s in my dad’s closet.”
“Your mom said it’s a very specific looking shirt that your dad sometimes wears. Can you describe it for me?” I asked.
“It was a red shirt with a car on it, and my dad wears it all the time which is why I thought it was him. Another weird thing is that this thing was standing in front of my mirror, but I didn’t see its reflection in the mirror.”
This observation really interested me. Seeing such a thing must have made the sighting even more frightening for Emily. “Did it register at the time that it didn’t have a reflection,” I asked, “or did you realize it later?
Emily thought for a few seconds, then said, “I really wasn’t paying attention to the mirror when I saw it because I was thinking how weird it was that my dad was in my room looking at the pictures. But when I thought about it later, I realized that this thing didn’t have a reflection.”
Melanie added that Emily had told her that the room’s motion detector light on the smoke detector lit up when her dad’s double ran out of the room. I asked Emily to tell me about it.
“I saw the motion sensor go off when it ran out of the room,” she said. “After it ran out I stood up on my bed and it went off again when I stood up.”
“About how long would you say you saw him for?” I asked.
Emily paused and thought about it, then said, “Like, twenty seconds. I watched it looking around my room for a while, but I didn’t want to say anything to it at first because I got creeped out. Then when I said, “Why are you here dad?” it turned a little bit toward me. It was like it saw me out of the corner of its eye, then it ran out. I guess when it realized that I saw it, it got scared and ran out.”
Apparition sightings usually last just a few seconds, but her father’s döppelganger hung around for quite a long time. It was almost as if it was so absorbed in looking at the photos that it forgot where it was. My gut feeling is that it would have stayed there much longer examining the pictures had Emily not called out to it. And who knows how long it was in the room looking at the pictures before she woke up and saw it.
“When this thing left your room, what direction did you see it go?” I asked.
“I couldn’t really see where he went,” she said. “It just went forward, and then as I ran downstairs to my parent’s room I couldn’t see him. As soon as he left I stood up to leave because I got nervous, and nothing was there in the hallway.”
Melanie interrupted the conversation briefly to point out that Emily’s bedroom is at the end of the upstairs hallway. From her bed, she can see all the way down the hall. So, the figure wouldn’t have made any turns unless it ran down the hallway and turned into one of the other rooms or went down the staircase.
“Did you get up and follow it?” I asked
“No,” Emily laughed, as if doing such a thing would never have crossed her mind. “I got scared, so I went downstairs to my parent’s room.”
“You said you were having a dream before you woke up. Do you remember what the dream was about?” I asked
Emily thought about it for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t really remember. I just know that I woke up feeling, like, scared.”
Sometimes ghost sightings are accompanied by feelings and emotions attached to the spirit, so I was curious to know if Emily felt anything odd when she saw this spirit in her room.
“I know that you were puzzled when you first saw it because you thought that your dad was standing there looking at pictures in the middle of the night, which you thought was weird,” I said. “But, did you have any unusual feelings when you were watching this thing?”
“Yeah,” she said. “It didn’t really seem like my dad. It didn’t give off the same feeling, the same vibe as my dad, and it just felt a little weird.”
“So, it didn’t give off the same vibe as your dad. You felt like ‘I’m seeing my dad, but it’s not feeling like it’s really him’. Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. It just didn’t feel like him. Oh, there’s something else that I wanted to tell you about too,” Emily said. “I’ve been waking up at the same time every night for the past two weeks. It’s always between 2 and 4 in the morning. One time when I woke up I looked down the hallway. All the lights were off, but I could see that there was a dark shape in the middle of the hallway right in front of my brother’s room. I thought it was my brother’s dirty clothes or something that he just threw there in the hallway, but I wasn’t sure so I put on the flashlight on my phone to see what it was. When I turned my flashlight on, there was nothing there. That kind of gave me the creeps and made me feel weird.”
“Did it have a definite shape to it? Or was it more like a bunch of clothes, like a blobby shape? I asked.
Emily thought for a few seconds. “It had a definite shape,” she said “like something solid, but I couldn’t tell you what that shape was.” Although most people associate a dark shape with something that is evil, this is not true. Spirits can appear as dark shadows, white smokey mist, or solid objects. Two people can even see the same ghost at the same time, and yet report seeing different things.
At the end of our phone conversation I promised Emily that I would do all that I could to make sure that the thing that she saw in her bedroom wouldn’t make another appearance. I also assured her that spirits are harmless, and that she is always safe in her house.
Before I hung up the phone, Melanie wanted to add that three weeks before the döppelganger sightings, a lot of strange things had been occurring in the house. First, there were the odd waking hours. Even though they slept on different floors, Melanie and Emily would both wake up for no reason between the hours of 2 and 4 AM. “Most of the time we were up at the same time and didn’t know it till the next morning,” Melanie said. “The strange thing is, we both would hear footsteps while we were laying awake in our beds.”
“Where did the footsteps sound like they were coming from,” I asked.
“They always sounded like they came from upstairs,” Melanie said, “On the same floor as Emily’s room. It was hard to tell where the footsteps were coming from, but they sounded like they could have been walking down the upstairs hallway.”
“Emily mentioned seeing a figure in the hallway. Has she or anyone else seen other figures in the house?” I asked.
“Yes,” Melanie said, “A few weeks after we moved in, Emily told me that she saw dark shapes in the upstairs hallway at night. She described them as ‘dark masses’. These seem to be different from the thing she told you she saw outside of her brother’s room. Luckily, she only saw these dark masses a few times.”
Melanie also said that she and her daughter heard the sound of indistinct voices in the house. They couldn’t make out what was being said, but it sounded like someone was either talking on the phone, or having a conversation with someone. Once, Melanie heard the distant sound of a woman screaming, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
“There’s one more thing,” Melanie said. “One night I left the house because I couldn’t sleep. I had such bad anxiety in the middle of the night that I sat outside for a few minutes to calm down. This just isn’t like me. I’m usually a fairly calm person, so it surprised me that I kept having this feeling of anxiety so often; and that it had gotten to the point where I had to leave the house in the middle of the night just to calm down.”
I thanked Melanie for allowing me to talk to Emily, and for all of the additional information she provided, then hung up the phone. This case was getting more interesting by the minute. I was scheduled to meet with the family the next day, and I was hoping that I would be able to provide them with some answers.
A few days later I pulled up to the house. From the outside, it looked like a brand new house, but from the phone conversation I had with Melanie I knew that it was originally built sometime in the 1970s. Melanie and her husband bought the house from a contractor who had totally renovated it because the prior owners had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The contractor said that the place was a total wreck when he bought it from the couple who were going through a divorce. He guessed that the house was in such bad shape because they were just too preoccupied with family problems to take care of it.
As I sat in my car looking at the house, I wondered if the divorced couple’s energy had imprinted itself on the place. If so, could it have something to do with the highly unusual döppelganger sightings Melanie and her daughter witnessed? This didn’t seem likely. Döppelganger sightings always point to an active haunting rather than residual energy, but I would know more once I took a walk around the place. I gathered up my ghost hunting equipment and headed for the front door where I was greeted by Melanie and her husband, Phillip.
As I stepped across the threshold I was half expecting to feel the familiar tingling sensation that alerts me that a ghost is present, but the home felt warm and inviting. From the front door, the open floor plan allowed me to see all the way to the back of the house where a bank of windows showed a breathtaking view of woods and rolling hills. The contractor did an amazing job fixing the place up. If Melanie hadn’t told me about all of the major renovations, I would have thought I was walking into a brand new house.
As I followed the couple into the living room, I noticed the framed family photos on the wall going up the staircase and thought about Emily’s döppelganger looking at the photos in her room. The way Emily described the way it touched the photos as it looked at them made me think of my grandmother. Whenever she and I would look at her old family photo albums together, she would run her fingers lightly across each faded photograph as she told me about the people and places they showed. It always made me a little sad when she did this, as if she was secretly wishing to reach in and touch the people in the photos and maybe bring back a piece of the past. I wondered if the spirit in Emily’s room was having these same types of feelings as it touched each photo on her bedroom wall.
I unpacked my ‘ghost bag’ in the kitchen, and Philip and Melanie told me a little more about the house. The prior owners had allowed the house to deteriorate in a big way. When the contractor bought it from them, there was a hole in the roof that had caused a lot of water damage. It was so bad that the majority of walls and floors on the second floor had to be totally replaced. The wiring and plumbing had been brought up to code, and all of the appliances, light fixtures and doors had been replaced. It was essentially a new house. But as beautiful as it was, after just a month of living there, the strange döppelganger sightings forced Melanie to reach out to me for help.
Melanie was eager to tell me about her döppelganger sighting, but I told her that I wanted to do a walkthrough of the house first. Although I was anxious to hear her story, it was important that I try to pick up as much intuitive information as I could as soon as I got in the house. If I waited, I might not get as much information.
I told Melanie that I wanted to start on the second floor and make my back way down to the first floor. I told her that I would point out the spots where things didn’t feel right to me, and asked that she hold off telling me whether they matched the spots where she and the rest of the family were experiencing things.
I turned on my recorder, grabbed my digital camera and headed for the second floor. Melanie and Phillip stayed behind to tend to the dogs who were still excited that a stranger was in their house, so I was alone as I made my way up the staircase.
The stairs themselves felt fine, but as soon as I put my foot on the second floor landing I felt a heavy, smothering, anxious feeling on the second floor landing. I stood there for a minute taking in the atmosphere. ‘Someone was very unhappy here’, I thought. Whoever this spirit was, the second floor was their territory. There was a sense of sadness at the top of the stairs, and an unmistakable feeling of anxiety. I didn’t get the sense that a spirit was there with me, but I was definitely picking up the feelings and emotions of someone who had once lived in the house.
One quirk I have is that I always conduct investigations barefoot. Psychometry is the ability to pick up intuitive information by holding an object. I have this ability. By walking barefoot I am in constant physical contact with the object--in this case, the house--which allows me to pick up more accurate information.
I took off my shoes and left them at the top of the landing, then turned right and headed toward Emily’s bedroom at the end of the hall. As soon as I walked into the room, uneasy, restless energy washed over me. The feeling was similar to what I felt on the landing, a sense of anxiety, urgency, and waiting. It was strongest by the back windows and near the bedroom doorway.
I left Emily’s room and walked down the hallway. There was a small office on the right. I did a quick walkthrough this room, but it felt totally clean. The anxious feeling wasn’t in this space at all. I left this room and continued down the hall. On my right was another bedroom which turned out to be Emily’s brother’s room. This room also felt fine. I was beginning to wonder if Emily’s room was the only spot in the house that was active.
Leaving this room, I walked down the hallway a short way then stopped dead in my tracks. The brick from the first floor fireplace runs all the way up to the second floor, and this wall of brick makes up the entire left side of the hallway. There was a strong feeling of anxiety and urgency here. The whole area in front of this wall was charged with a sense of panic mixed with overwhelming sadness. Imagine hearing news that someone you loved was just rushed to the hospital, and that you were waiting for the phone to ring to find out if they were OK. That’s the kind of feeling that was attached to this spot.
I started to walk down the hall but after a few steps I was stopped in my tracks again, this time at a small landing that overlooked the foyer. The urgent, nervous feeling was in this spot as well. I could actually feel it coming up through the floor through the soles of my feet and coursing its way through my body. Anxiety, waiting, watching. I felt like I wanted to start pacing the floor.
From where I stood I could see the foyer below. I got the sense that someone used to stand in this exact spot, look down into the foyer and out the windows on either side of the front door and wait for someone. But it wasn’t as if they were waiting for anyone in particular. They were so sad, lonely and anxious that they were just waiting for anything to happen.
I walked down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. There was a slight feeling of anxiety in the entrance to the bathroom, but as soon as I stepped into the room itself it dropped off to nothing. Whatever feelings that were still attached to the house were in three main spots--Emily’s room, in the hallway near the brick wall, and on the landing overlooking the foyer. Did the energy I was feeling have anything to do with the döppelganger sightings? And why did the spirit show itself as family members rather than in its true form? These were the questions I asked myself as I walked through the rooms a second time.
The same spots felt strong to me, but the energy in Emily’s room fluctuated between feeling fine one minute, and feeling anxious the next. As I was walking back down the hallway, Melanie was coming up the stairs. “OK,” I said, “let me tell you what I’m sensing up here.” We walked into Emily’s room. “This room has a feeling in it,” I said, “almost like somebody’s waiting, waiting, waiting for something.”
“Yes!” Melanie said, “I feel it all the time.”
“It’s strongest over here near the window,” I said. “It’s also strong over here near the door to the hallway, but the whole room has a feeling of anticipation. It’s not constant, though. It comes and it goes. It’s strong sometimes, and then I’ll come back and it’s either gone or it’s really weak, and then it comes back in again. It could be just residual energy left over from one of the previous owners, but there’s that constant feeling of anticipation. A feeling of waiting, like somebody’s pacing and waiting for something to happen. Or, they're feeling like they’re stuck here and they don’t want to be, so they’re just waiting for something. That’s what I’m feeling in Emily’s room.”
I led Melanie down the hallway towards the brick fireplace wall. “The other part is right here,” I said, but before I reached the spot Melanie said, “By the chimney.”
“Yes! Exactly!” I said walking over to the brick wall. “I feel it exactly in this spot,” I said drawing an x on the floor with my toe, “and in this whole area,” I said gesturing with my hands around the brick wall.
“There’s one more spot,” I said as I walked over and stood on the landing. “It’s very strong here too.”
Melanie hugged herself as if she had become suddenly cold, “When I’m down there in the foyer,” she said, “I feel really uncomfortable. A dark feeling comes over me. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like the beginning of an anxiety attack. Whenever I’m in the foyer, it always feels like someone is looking down at me me from up here. I always feel so creeped out down there.”
“I can see why,” I said. “When I was coming down the hall I went right to this spot and had the feeling that somebody used to stand here and look down into the foyer. It was that same feeling of waiting that’s in Emily’s room.”
“Yes,” Melanie said and nodded in agreement. “Constantly. A feeling like someone is waiting for something to happen.”
I walked over to the fireplace wall and stood near the center of the hallway. “Whatever is in this house, it has something to do with this area. I don’t know why, but it’s really strong right here in this exact spot,” I said, indicating the spot with my foot, “and over here on the landing that overlooks the foyer, just like you were saying.
I walked back down the hallway and stood on the landing. “When I came up the stairs, I felt something at the top of the stairs. Then as I walked down the hallway like this,” I said walking slowly down the hall toward the brick wall, “I was thinking, ‘I’m feeling a little something, I’m feeling a little something, then boom--you get right to this spot and you really feel it.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. My daughter runs right through the hallway up here,” Melanie said. “I can hear her from downstairs. When we first moved in I was like, What the heck is happening up there? She never walks. She runs down the hallway every time she has to go to the bathroom. She starts out walking, then she takes off running past the fireplace wall, and then she goes back walking once she’s past it.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said. “It proves that you and I aren’t the only one who feel uncomfortable in this area. As for the figures that you and your daughter saw, döppelgangers are very rare. Very rare. There are two reasons why spirits appear as döppelgangers. Sometimes they’re trying to trick someone into thinking they are somebody else. But that’s not the case here. They wouldn’t run out of a room if that was the case, they would stay. Your daughter said that when it realized that she was looking at it, it got startled and ran. Like, ‘Somebody can see me? I’m out of here!’
The second reason spirits appear as döppelgangers is because they’re getting their energy from the person, or the people, in the house. When it uses their energy, it also picks up images from their minds, and it manifests as one of those images. It’s not intentional, it just borrows that visual information along with the energy it’s using from the people themselves.”
“I’ll tell you,” Melanie said, “as I’m sitting here in the hallway near the fireplace, I don’t feel well.”
“I can see why,” I said, “This whole area is a place that you just don’t want to be in. It makes you want to get away from here, to run past it the way your daughter does. I wonder what could have happened here? Sometimes I’ll get a feeling of sickness that shows me that someone passed away in a particular spot, but I’m not getting that here. I’m just getting a strong feeling of anticipation. It’s more like a feeling or an emotion is imprinted in this area rather than a spirit is present.
Yet, when you tell me that you and your daughter saw something actively looking around, it makes me think that an intelligent spirit is here. I actually think it’s both. I think there’s residual energy left in the house from one of the previous owners, and an active haunting. Whatever it is, it’s up here. I want to go downstairs and have a look around, and I want to hear about the figure you saw.”
I did a walkthrough of the first floor, but there was absolutely nothing there. The entire first floor was filled with warm, positive energy. “There’s nothing here,” I said. “Nothing at all. The whole first floor feels great.”
“Yes,” Melanie said, “Exactly. There’s nothing down here or in the basement. Whatever it is, it’s clearly upstairs in the hallway, and on the landing that overlooks the foyer. I have to tell you, I won’t walk through the foyer unless I’m leaving the house because it feels like someone is watching me from up there. My bedroom is over on that side of the house, and I’ll walk all the way around the living room to get to it rather than walk through the foyer.”
I asked Melanie to tell me what she saw. From our first conversation, I had some sketchy details, but I wanted her to tell me the story from the beginning. She led me to the master bedroom and told me what she had seen just a week earlier.
“So, this is my side of the bed. The other night I was laying here and I looked up and I saw my daughter over on the staircase. When I saw her, she was on the corner step where the plant is.”
“Did it look like she was coming down the stairs, or going up?” I asked.
“She was coming down the stairs,” Melanie said. “I reached for my glasses here on the nightstand, grabbed a sweatshirt to get out of bed, then I called out to her. I said, ‘Emily, what are you doing? Emily?’ As soon as I said this, it just kind of dissipated. Like, it literally just floated up and that was the end of it. It was gone. The whole thing lasted about ten seconds. After this happened I ran up the stairs to check on her and she was asleep.”
“How bright is the staircase at night?” I asked.
“My daughter leaves the hallway lights on upstairs because she’s afraid,” Melanie said, “The lights were fully on upstairs, and I could clearly see the stairs. I have to say, I always feel anxiety often whenever I walk up those stairs. I get a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I start going up the steps. As soon as I get to the landing at the top of the stairs--well, I just don’t feel good up there. Sometimes a sad feeling comes over me, other times I actually feel angry. The staircase and the upstairs hallway give me a lot of anxiety.”
I recalled the first time I set foot on the landing, and how I felt a heavy, smothering, anxious feeling. I wondered what part the stairs played in this strange drama. Did someone have an accident on the stairs? Was negative energy stored on the staircase and on the top floor landing? Or, was there an active spirit lurking there?
I sat on the bed and looked at the staircase from the vantage point that Malanie saw the eerie figure that night. There was an unobstructed view of the stairs from the bed. The stairs are only about 20 feet away, and with the lights on in the upstairs hallway the full length of the staircase would have been clearly visible.
“It’s really interesting that both figures reacted to being recognized. In your daughter’s case, it literally ran away when she talked to it. In your case, it dissolved and faded away when you called out to it. The negative, anxious feeling imprinted in the hallway and in your daughter’s room is definitely something I need to take care of, but there’s definitely an intelligent spirit here, a spirit who is aware of you and your family. I need to try to figure out who this spirit is, and I need to help them move on. I’d like to run an EVP session in the hallway near the fireplace wall. I usually get a lot of intuitive information during these sessions, so I have a feeling we’ll get some answers.”
The goal of an EVP session is to pick up spirit voices on a digital recorder. Whenever I listen back to a recording where there was not a sound in the room at the time and I hear an unknown voice answering my question, I’m always totally amazed. These are voices of spirits, ghosts, of people who are no longer on this earth. Hearing a spirit voice actually speaking to me on a recorder triggers a million questions. How can they imprint their voices on a recorder? What are these spirits experiencing where they are? What do we look like to them? Are they aware that they’re no longer alive? Are they lost? How can I help these poor souls?
Melanie and I went back upstairs, and I sat cross legged on the floor with my back to the fireplace wall. I chose this spot because it was where I felt the strongest energy. I always start an EVP session by asking simple questions out loud, and leaving about 20 seconds after each for the spirit to answer. “What is your name?” I asked. “Did you used to live here? Do you feel that this is still your house? Do you have a message for me?”
Just as I started asking this last question, I began feeling something creeping closer and closer to me. It felt like it was coming from the direction of Emily’s room. “I’m starting to feel a presence here with us,” I said to Melanie. “I think it’s curious about us.”
Melanie’s intuition kicked in. “It's a woman,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said, then closed my eyes to help block out any external stimulation that might prevent me from connecting with the spirit. “I get a sense that you’re waiting for something,” I said aloud. “What are you waiting for?”
The hallway was silent, but the feeling that a presence was with us was getting stronger. Melanie was sitting about 10 feet away from me, and she could feel it too. “This whole left half of my body has pins and needles,” she said.
As I continued asking questions, the nervous energy returned. The spirit seemed to be pacing back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other. Melanie and I both commented that we felt the presence leave, then return a short time later. The nervous energy was back as the spirit continued its nervous, ceaseless pacing up and down the hallway.
It was time to tell the spirit what I had in mind, and I hoped that it would cooperate. “You really don’t belong here,” I said aloud, “but I’m going to show you how to go where you belong, and where you’ll be happy. I’m going to show you the way to a beautiful place where all of the anxiety and sadness that you’re feeling will be totally gone.”
The sense of anxiety in the hallway began to rise slowly as I felt something coming closer and closer to me. “Is that something that you want?” I asked. “Do you want to be free of all of these anxious feelings?” As soon as I asked this, I got a strong sense that the presence had stopped and was now standing in the hallway with us. It felt as if someone had come right up to my left side and was standing over me. It was so close that if this was a living person, I could have moved my hand just a few inches and touched their leg. I could feel it looking down at me. The feeling wasn’t menacing, it was a distressed, apprehensive feeling.
I said to Melanie, “Something just came back, and they’re reacting to what I’m saying. The feeling is very strong now.”
She looked at me and said, “It’s funny, because right before you said that I felt it walk right past me over to where you’re sitting.”
I started asking questions that I hoped would cause the spirit to react and give me more information. “What is it that you’re waiting for?” I asked. “Did you have an alcohol or drug problem, or did you just have emotional issues with anxiety?” I think I hit a nerve with this last question because the feeling in the hallway knocked up a few notches. My body began to feel charged with static at this point.
“It’s very strong right now,” I said to Melanie. “Very strong.”
I didn’t want to lose touch with this spirit so I said, “The family that lives here now are taking good care of this house, so that’s something you don’t have to worry about. You don’t have to hold on to these things any more.”
Melanie shifted her weight, then pulled her sweater around her and said, “I’ll tell you, I have the chills up here now. My back feels warm, but my front feels cold.”
“That’s because it’s coming from this direction,” I said, indicating the area behind her. “It’s definitely a female, and she keeps coming back and forth like she’s pacing. The feeling that I’m getting besides the anxiety is that she was a very sad person. There’s just something very sad and lonely about her. I don’t know what it is that got her to his state. I don’t think she had a mental illness, but she had very high anxiety. She should have been medicated, but she never was. She should have had anxiety meds which would have taken care of everything, but she never did and so she had this constant feeling of anxiety.”
“The waiting and watching feeling is incredibly strong,” I continued, “She’s looking down from that landing over there, looking down to see who’s coming home. I’m not getting a sense that it's spousal abuse or anything like that. It’s more like waiting for something to happen, waiting for somebody to come like, ‘I wish somebody was here. I wish anybody was here.’”
I closed down the EVP session and told Melanie that it was time for me to move this spirit on by doing a clearing. A clearing has a two-fold purpose. It removes any negative energy that has built up over time, and it reunites spirits with their loved ones on the other side.
Conducting a clearing is deeply personal, so everyone’s method is different. For me, silent prayer plays a major role. In addition, I always call on my patron saint, Padre Pio, for guidance and protection. I visualize him standing beside me as I encourage spirits to go through a doorway of light that I open in my mind’s eye--the doorway to the other side. When a spirit goes through that doorway I can often see them very clearly in my mind, and many clearings culminate with an emotional reunion of the spirit with their loved ones on the other side.
One common misconception is that when I’m conducting a clearing, I’m somehow performing some type of an exorcism or a ritual that is forcing spirits to leave. I’m not. I’m acting as a guide to show them the way to their loved ones. This is the ultimate goal of every clearing. But it’s important to keep in mind that spirits have free will, so not all choose to move on.
In addition to prayer, I use various types of incense during a clearing. I chose Frankincense for this clearing because it infuses a space with peace, serenity and a sense of well being. It is the same type of incense used in religious and spiritual ceremonies for purification and to enhance spiritual awareness. I remain barefoot throughout the clearing as I will be, in a sense, creating a sacred space.
I lit my incense, and began by saying a silent prayer to Padre Pio. I imagined that he was walking next to me as I walked slowly through each room infusing it with Frankincense. I reminded them that if this was once their house, it no longer is and that the family who lives here is taking good care of it. I asked them to follow me so I could guide them to their loved ones. After doing this, I went back to the brick wall in the hallway and sat down and started the final stage of the clearing.
I said out loud, “I’m opening a doorway of light right here,” indicating a space to my right. “I feel you with me now. This is the doorway that you’re going to go through to meet your family, your friends, your relatives. They’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Any fears that you may have had about crossing over and meeting them and going to that light, you need to let them go now. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of. The place you are going to is beautiful. It’s filled with God’s light, love, happiness, and joy. There’s nothing bad at all in the place you’re going. You don’t belong here, you belong there, and this is how you can get there, through this doorway of light.”
“I know there is a woman here with me today,” I continued, “but I know that there are other spirits here with me today. Any of you can go through this doorway. You will see your relatives, you will see your friends there. Listen, they’re calling for you. Can you hear them? Call out to them and they’ll come and get you.”
As I sat in silence, I continued to pray and to urge the spirits to go through the doorway. Suddenly, I picked up a very strong intuitive impression. “Somebody’s calling the name Casey,” I said.
Melanie began to feel the effects of the clearing as she sat a short distance away from me. “I thought I heard the name Mary,” she said.
“There could be more than one spirit here with us, so more than one may go through. The name Casey keeps coming to me. It’s like someone is calling, ‘Casey, Casey. Come. Come on.’ I don’t know if it’s someone on the other side, or if it’s a voice from the past attached to this house, but the name is very persistent.”
As I sat with my eyes closed, I felt a sudden rush of energy leave the hallway as at least one spirit crossed over. This was accompanied by a strong visual image. I opened my eyes and looked over at Melanie.
“Wow,” I said. “That was successful! I can really feel it. Toward the end I picked up a very strong image of a woman with a red scarf or kerchief around her neck that was tied in the front. I kept seeing this woman as I felt someone go through. Sometimes a spirit will hesitate as if they’re saying, ‘No, I don’t want to go there. I’d rather stay here’. But there was no hesitation. It was more like, ‘Oh, good! I can finally leave!’.”
Melanie was amazed at how different the hallway felt. The frantic energy was mostly gone, and the space felt much lighter and calmer. I told her that after a clearing, it takes at least two weeks for all of the energy to settle down.
“At least one spirit went through to the other side,” I said, “but I’ll leave the doorway open so more can go through if they want. I’ll close it remotely in a few days. Don’t worry, there’s no danger of anything coming through the doorway into your home. It’s a one-way doorway.”
The real work on a paranormal investigation begins after I leave the site. I pour over photographs looking for anomalies, and spend hours carefully listening to the recording I made for EVP. I usually start by listening to the EVP session to see if there are any answers to my questions. In this case, I was rewarded with the sound of unexplainable voices.
At one point I asked, Did you used to live here? A few seconds later, two voices can be heard. One sounds like an adolescent child, and the other sounds like a female adult. Although it’s difficult to make out exactly what they’re saying, it’s clear that they are having an argument. The child sounds as if he or she is using the ‘F-word’ followed by the adult talking in a calmer voice. The child’s voice then comes in again saying something like, “Yeah, right!”
I doubt very much that I recorded a mother and child ghost having an argument. EVP aren’t always the voices of spirits who are trying to communicate with us. Sometimes they are simply echos from the past. What I probably picked up was a conversation from years gone by that had occurred in the hallway. One of the families who lived in this house were obviously very unhappy, and their interfamily relationship was very unstable, which would explain the feeling of anxiety and sadness present in the upstairs hallway.
At another part of the EVP session, a voice whispers, “Great house” right after I mentioned the name Casey. I suspect that the voice came from an intelligent spirit who was eager to point out that it wasn’t always bad in this house, and that they were once very happy here.
After the investigation, Melanie asked a few friends and neighbors some questions about the former owners. She learned that the first family was very happy in the house. They were a very happy family, and they loved living here which might account for the “great house” EVP.
Melanie also discovered that an old woman once lived in the house next door. One day, the local senior citizen bus dropped the woman off, and as soon as she got off the bus she passed out and died in the driveway. Her name was Mary, the exact name that Melanie picked up on.
It’s very possible that the woman that I saw during the clearing with the red scarf was Mary. Although she passed away next door, spirits travel, and they often show up in places other than their former homes. Several years ago, I conducted an investigation at a house where a man saw his deceased neighbor in his living room. If Mary took a liking to Melanie and her family, she would naturally gravitate to them. She would also be curious about things like family photographs. Melanie’s friend said that he remembered that Mary often wore scarves around her neck the way a lot of older women did at that time. Spirits show us the way they see themselves, so if it was Mary that I was seeing, she might have been recalling a time when she dressed this way.
As for the EVP of the argument, the neighbor told Melanie that the second owners of the house had a very unstable and unhappy family situation. No one knew exactly what went on in the house while they were living there, but there were a lot of dark rumors swirling around this particular family. The neighbor vividly recalled the mother and daughter fighting all the time. He said that sometimes their fights were so loud that he could hear them from inside his house. The EVP of the child and adult fighting could very well have been a heated mother-daughter argument from the past.
I was never able to figure out the significance of the name Casey. That bothers me because the name came across so strong and with such persistence. The neighbor told Melanie that one of the previous owners went by a nickname, but he couldn’t recall the name. Perhaps she went by her initials KC and people called her Casey? Or, perhaps Casey was a random spirit who decided to cross over when I opened the doorway of light. It could even have been the name of a family pet! One thing I’m sure of is that during the clearing, someone was calling out to Casey to join them on the other side.
I recently received an update from Melanie. She said that the house feels much better since I did the clearing, especially the upstairs. But it seems that either some residual energy hasn't dissipated yet, or a spirit might have chosen to remain in the house.
“There’s something interesting that’s been happening over the past week or so,” Melanie said. “I’ve been seeing shadows in the foyer, and shadows going into my room. They move super fast, like one of those things that makes your head turn and say to yourself, ‘What the heck was that?’
Last week Phillip was in the kitchen when he heard someone say his name. He came into the bedroom and was like ‘Yes?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘What’. We were both confused. I laughed and I said. ‘That wasn’t me. It’s our new ghost!’ Other than that, the whole place feels much better. It’s been super calm since you were here.”
I feel truly blessed to be able to help reunite lost souls with their loved ones. I firmly believe that a spirit’s journey doesn’t end on the other side. Spirits who cross over become guides to the living, and they eventually move on to higher spiritual realms where their work continues in ways we can never fully understand. Those spirits who choose to remain behind eventually find the way to the other side on their own, and I’m confident that the shadowy figures Melanie recently reported will fade away over time.