Private Residence; Lynchburg, VA
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Private Residence, Lynchburg, VA
We normally do not post case studies of private residences but due to the nature of this case, we made an exception. Hence, no photos will be posted.
We were requested to investigate fairly extensive claims of paranormal activity in a residence including disembodied voices, sounds of a party in the parlor, lights turning on and off by themselves in the dining room, shadows, apparitions, and general feelings of dread in a storage area downstairs. The resident family has three children, two boys and a girl. The middle child suffers regularly from night terrors and who also hears malicious voices prompting him to do “bad things”. Members of the family have seen a full bodied apparition of a young girl on a stair landing on two separate occasions, and an adult member witnessed the apparition of what appeared to be a young man in an older-style football uniform standing at the foot of his bed. It seems activity has escalated recently to the point where the family feels uncomfortable. Understandably, they are fearful for their middle child, who seems to be the target of a potentially malicious spirit.
It was learned that previous owners of the house included a family that also had three children- their daughter interestingly had the same unusual name as the current owner’s daughter. This was not discovered until after paranormal events began accelerating and the family began researching history on the house. The fate of this young girl is not known, but it is believed that it is possibly her ghost that has been seen on the stair landing. There was also an apparent suicide of a young man in the basement of the house approximately 30 years ago. Could this be the image of the young man in the football uniform seen at the foot of the bed?
Our investigation began around 9pm with four senior investigators and ran until about 4am. During this time, we discovered several very interesting characteristics about the house itself that we believe may influence and even cause some of the perceived paranormal activity within the house.
In the boys’ bedroom, we discovered a significant EMF field of a constant 4-5 milligauss that starts about waist height and dissipates after about 18”. This field runs the entire length of the front of the house and could not definitively be linked to external power sources or structural design. There is a power line that runs from the street to this corner of the house, and can be measured from the ground level outside, but was not consistent with the upstairs field that runs at about a 30 degree angle away from the line. Nor could we positively associate the field with pipes or internal power lines as it was not present in any other part of the house, including a bedroom on the back side of the house. The most significant thing about this constant and steady field is that is passes directly through the bed areas of everyone in the family, with the exclusion of the oldest child (who apparently has not experienced the same amount of activity as the middle or youngest child). This anomalous EMF field was highest directly over the pillow of the middle child who has experienced the most intense activity. NOTE: There is also a digital alarm clock that sits about 12” from this head as he sleeps, though we measured no significant EM field from this device. The static EM field passes over the pillow of the youngest child, and across the pillows of both adults in the room where the apparition of the young man was seen. It is our opinion that this field may be inducing or facilitating both visual and audial hallucinations, and such intense prolonged exposures to the field while sleeping could present potential health hazards to the family.
The EM field does not, however, explain the apparition of the young girl seen on the stair landing. We were not able to capture any visual evidence during 24 hours of recording, and the only audio we captured was that of two hungry cats.
In the lower level, we found two areas of interest. There is a small garden room on the side of the house where reports of “sounds of a party” have been reported. Earlier in the evening, we had heard distant and muted sounds of cheering and music, and quickly realized the sounds were skipping across the ridge from a local high school football game. It is possible that under certain atmospheric conditions, and possibly due to acoustic shadow, sounds could be heard on this ridge from even miles away. However, in this small room beneath the parlor, we discovered an anomalous EMF spike in a static column from about 2 feet off the floor to approx. 2 feet from the ceiling. There was no power in this room at the time, and the spike could not be traced to a definitive electrical source. Columns like this occurred in at least two other places on the property, and our thoughts then turned to geomagnetic sources, such as quartz veins, which are quite possible in that area though no samples of quartz were readily seen.
There is a long “L”-shaped corridor on the lowest level of the house that leads to the old servant’s quarters. At one end of the corridor there is a window in the wall that can be opened or closed to create a breezeway. This window was down, but the upper portion of the passage was open, creating an area of potentially significant draft, though there was none that evening. The corridor turns sharply left in front of an exterior door and has been remodeled and finished out as a gameroom and a couple of storage rooms. In this area, there have been reports of dread, of an unseen presence, and of being watched. EMF sweeps of the area showed a large spike at the end of the corridor where the water heater, an old refrigerator and several electrical boxes are enclosed in a small room. This area creates a typical “fear cage” and it is our belief that the EM fields produced here have the potential to “pool” in the corridor running the length of half the house. This area could possibly also be the generating cause of the static EM fields on the upper levels. However, though there were several pockets of high EMF near radiators on the main floor, they were not as high as on the second floor.
Though we had IR cameras in the basement in the area where the young man allegedly killed himself, and on the stair landing where the apparition of the young girl has been seen, we did not capture any video evidence of paranormal activity. Throughout several EVP sessions, we did not capture any significant EVP’s. It is our general opinion that with proper electrical shielding and additional measures to remove beds from the areas of intense EM fields, much of the experienced activity may dissipate. But again we ask ourselves, are these high levels of electromagnetism CAUSING the experiences of this family, or are they ALLOWING them to experiences what is already there?
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