I'm On Vacation

“Have you listened to your tapes?”

“No, I’m on vacation.”

“You’re never going to believe what I got from the Durham house. I’m sending you the audio file. Let me know what you hear.”

“What time is it? Jeesh, J, it’s like midnight. Ok, I’ll listen to the file in the morning.” I climbed back in bed, but of course I couldn’t sleep. J is not the excitable type, so this must be a really good EVP.

Instead of sleeping, I fired up my computer, connected to the internet, opened my emails, and downloaded J’s audio file. Slipping on my headsets so I wouldn’t disturb Tony – and to drown out his snoring – I fast-forwarded to the spot J had marked, leaned my head back against the headboard and closed my eyes in a comfortable, semi-conscious, on-vacation state of being.

And then I jolted upright, fully awake.

It was the second time our team had been called to the Durham location. The house is a new build, designed by the current owners. It sits at the end of a dirt road on a couple of acres. Other new homes are visible from the front porch and the back of the property gently slopes towards adjacent woods that eventually lead to Jordan Lake. A few hundred yards into the woods is an ancient log cabin that, from the looks of it, had been converted into an animal pen at some point. There is also a wrecked DeSoto rusting nearby.

Our first investigation yielded nothing conclusive, but the wife insisted something was targeting her. So we returned to the house to see if we had overlooked anything. J and I positioned ourselves in the basement, while other team members remained upstairs in the kitchen and the son’s bedroom.

Among other claims, a long-term houseguest staying in the basement said he was awoken by a dark mass that hovered over him menacingly before moving across the room and disappearing into a wall. When the dark mass appeared to him a second time, he moved out of the house.

The audio J sent me captures he and I chatting about the homeowner’s progress in building an aquarium bar, our opinions on new equipment, and a healthy dose of skepticism about the likelihood of a new house being haunted. Noises from above caught our attention and so I headed upstairs to see who was moving around.

While I was gone, J proceeded to run through the standard “If there is anyone here who would like to talk…” series of questions. On J’s audio you can hear me coming back down the steps and announcing my presence. Within the same breath of me finishing my comment, the most menacing, frightful voice I have ever heard clearly proclaims:

 I will kill you, bitch.

And that is what jolted me out of vacation mode in the middle of the night. I jumped out of bed and excitedly dug through my bags to retrieve my recorder so I could matchup the timeline with J’s to see if I had captured anything.

“What are you doing?” My burst of activity had roused Tony ‘Snoreman,’ who was now sitting up in bed looking like a man married to a crazy woman.

“You gotta hear this.” Plopping the headphones on his drowsy, tousled head, I cued the sound bite and hit play. I didn’t even need to ask him if he heard it; the expression on his face told me exactly when he reached the part with the menacing I will kill you, bitch.

He tossed the headphones onto the bed. “How do you sleep at night?”

Obviously from my current flutter of activity, not very well. Despite his insistence that I go back to sleep, I continued digging through my bags and promised to move into the living room as soon as I found my recorder so I wouldn’t disturb him.

“Who was with you on the investigation?” he asked drowsily.

“J and Jim and Steve. The usual. Why?”

With a snort, he rolled over, pulled the covers up to his shoulders and mumbled, “That means, you’re the bitch.”