Escalation Of A Haunting
Case File: 11 Oakwood Drive
“There’s definitely something here,” Claire said as I stepped into the house from the backyard. She stood in the kitchen holding a large crystal in her hand.
“You saw the lights go off and back on, but it also got really cold for a split second right before the bedroom door slammed shut,” she added.
Lourdes and Paul entered behind me through the French doors. I glanced over at the live camera feed on Monitor One and saw that one of the cameras we had placed on a dresser in the master bedroom had gone dark, as if it had been moved or turned.
“What I’m sensing in this house is not a soul,” Claire continued. “And I don’t think it’s happy that we’re here.”
“Did you move one of the cameras in the bedroom?” I asked, my eyes still fixed on the screen.
Claire had opened her mouth to elaborate, but paused. “No. I didn’t even go in there. Why?”
Lourdes stepped up beside me as I rewound the video feed and played it back.
After a few seconds of stillness, the camera jerked slightly, then slowly turned 180 degrees toward the wall. It appeared to move as if guided by an unseen hand.
“Well, that’s spooky,” Lourdes said.
I checked the other camera feeds and rewound to the moment the lights went out. There was nothing visible in any of them, including the one pointed at Claire. I watched her on screen turn suddenly at the sound of the bedroom door slamming, and then the feed went black.
“Not only did the power go out,” Lourdes said, “but all of our battery-operated devices went down too?”
I checked the temperature sensor nearest me, but it showed no recent fluctuation.
“Hey, I’ll go fix the camera in the bedroom,” Paul said, already heading down the hall with a flashlight in hand.
I looked up from the laptop and caught Claire watching me. My mind snapped back to what she had said.
Not a soul. (Her preferred word for what most people would call a ghost.)
Not happy that we’re here.
Claire gave a slight nod, as if responding to my thought. She did that often.
“I think it’s something worse,” she said.
In the year and a half that Claire had been part of the team, I had never fully gotten used to her ability to say things that felt like direct responses to thoughts I hadn’t spoken out loud. She had insisted more than once that she couldn’t read minds. She was a medium — intuitive and perceptive — but not telepathic. Still, moments like this made it difficult not to question that.
“You don’t think this is a typical haunting?” Lourdes asked, stepping between us. “What exactly do you think we’re dealing with?”
Before Claire could answer, a loud, shrill wail erupted through the laptop speakers, startling all three of us.
A small plastic ghost with flashing blue eyes dropped into the frame of the master bedroom camera feed. A second later, Paul leaned into view beside it, grinning.
Paul never missed an opportunity to break tension with a joke, no matter how poorly timed.
“I don’t know, man,” he said into the camera. “I mean, the camera could have just slipped — just gravity doing its thing. Buuuut...that camera was facing the exterior wall — toward the back yard. I think it’s Fra-”
“Jesus, Paul,” Lourdes snapped. “Give it a rest already! Frank and Margaret are not in the backyard.” She made an impatient sound and started looking through a duffle bag next to her.
“I’m telling you, we should be digging around out there,” his voice crackled through the speaker in the monitor as he and his flashing, shrieking ghost keychain left the frame.
“They’re probably just trying to get our attention,” he said as he entered the kitchen from the bedroom down the hall. He mimed knocking on the wall and said in a ghostly voice, “We’re not in the house you dummies, we’re buried behind the shed!”
Lourdes shook her head, suppressing a smile, and turned back toward the second laptop. I followed her gaze.
One of the camera feeds from the basement had gone dark. I leaned in slightly, watching the screen.
Paul walked around the counter and leaned over my shoulder to investigate.
“Huh,” he said. “Could be a dead battery. Or the IR illuminator. But that setup was fully charged. It should’ve had at least eight hours.”
He dropped to his knees beside the equipment bag and pulled out a fresh battery along with a replacement for the infrared light.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” he said as he left the kitchen.
“Wait...” Claire started, but he was already through the den and bounding down the stairs into the basement.
Claire stared after him, her expression turning anxious. Then Paul’s voice came through the radio.
“Allan, get down here. You need to see this.”
He didn’t sound like he was joking around anymore.