Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf (19 page)

The box the doll was found in.

Armand sailed out of the port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, alongside a great many seamen of Portuguese and Brazilian decent. Within those cultures exists a form of black magic known as macumba, and it is possible Armand learned the magic from one of them. Macumba rituals are often used to seek revenge on family members who have done harm, often utilizing a photograph of that person to do so. For that reason, many superstitious Brazilians will not allow a photograph of themselves to be given to anyone they don’t know.

Upon discovering the box and altar, Lucy’s first instinct wasn’t to call a paranormal investigation team. Instead, she hired a medium to help the restless spirits move from the house and remove bad vibes brought about by any strange rituals her brother was practicing. Another reason she sought help from a psychic was to address rumors of a stash of money hidden somewhere in the house. Armand had been successful in the fishing industry, but there was no trace of his profits anywhere.

The medium told Lucy that Armand’s strange outdoor collection of seafaring memorabilia was some sort of map detailing where he buried his money in the yard, but the family never found any of it. She also explained that the pins that were stuck into the fish doll were arranged in a way that would inflict pain on the intended target. Without knowing about Erica or how she died, she noted that one of the pins appeared to be placed in what would represent the spleen. A shiver went down Lucy’s back.

The medium also told Lucy that if they buried the box with the fish doll in the yard, the hauntings would stop. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be true, which was how John Brightman and NEPR got involved.

“It was just a weird situation,” John said. “(Lucy) called us in and explained the whole situation with her brother, sister, and mother. We investigated one night for over nine hours, and we captured absolutely nothing in terms of evidence.”

Perhaps the haunting was meant only for the family to experience.

“It was kind of a let-down,” he said. “I was hoping to get something that would back up what they were saying.”

John and his team even dug up the box with the fish doll inside, which at that point had been buried for about three months. They returned it to the house and attempted to use it as a “trigger object,” hoping that it would stir up activity again.

“Again, nothing,” he said.

John took pictures of the box and the doll and sent them to colleagues who are authorities on voodoo. The voodoo experts said the pins were inserted in the right places to inflict pain on the intended targets, but not knowing if Armand invoked the proper chants and prayers makes them unsure that he “activated” the curse.

Was Armand really so upset with his sister and mother for the sneaky arrangements they made behind his back that he put a macumba curse on them, leading to their deaths? And did his evil actions result in his own passing as well?

The doll that may have held a curse.

One mystery that still remains is the identity of the man in the third photograph stuck to the fish doll. Speculation is that it could have been a fishing partner who wronged Armand in some way. Perhaps a deal gone bad is the reason Armand’s money has never been found, and he turned to macumba to seek his revenge on his partner as well as his family. That might even explain why the doll was in the shape of a fish.

When the box was removed from the property, all the strange activity came to an abrupt end, and a sense of peace that had been missing for many decades once again filled its rooms.

The box is now in Brightman’s possession. He plans to eventually give it to John Zaffis, paranormal investigator and collector of haunted objects, to be placed in his museum, John Zaffis Museum of the Paranormal.

Brightman believes Armand’s spirit perhaps felt guilty about the pain he had inflicted on his loved ones and realized he was wrong to be so upset. Once the box and the doll were removed, his spirit was able to find peace and move on to be reunited with his mother and sister, where all would be forgiven.

The Haunted Travel Clock

When Richard was a child, his mother owned a small wind-up travel clock that had been a gift from her grandmother. Richard never felt comfortable around the clock, saying it always gave him the creeps, even though he had no idea why. He said it looked like a small version of the famous “Big Ben” clock in London. It had a gold case and a green face with Roman numerals in a gold color. The hands and wind-up key were brass.

Although it was an ordinary little clock, it just never sat right with Richard. Just being in the same room with it would give him fits of paranoia, as if it was ticking down the minutes of his life.

When Richard’s great-grandmother died, the clock stopped working. No matter what was tried, it wouldn’t start up again. Richard began to wonder if maybe the tick-tocks hadn’t been measuring his life, but rather that of his great-grandmother. The thought was enough to send shivers down his spine.

Richard’s mother never threw the broken clock away because it held sentimental value for her, and every time he looked at it, he would get a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. When his mother was out one day, Richard buried the clock in the backyard. He said there was “merry hell” when his mother found the clock was missing, but she never discovered what he did with it.

But even now—more than 30 years after he moved away from the buried haunted clock—Richard can still see its green face and brass hands in his sleep, and hear its crazed second hand ticking away in the night.

The Haunted Butter Dish

One morning Heather was making toast for her two children. She put the butter dish, which had been given to her by her grandmother, on the island countertop in her kitchen, and turned her back for a moment to put the bread in the toaster. When she turned around to get the butter dish, it had disappeared.

“I asked the kids if they took it, even though I knew they hadn’t because they had been in the living room watching television,” Heather said. “I remember yelling out loud, ‘This is stupid. Who loses a butter dish?’ ”

Without the butter, Heather decided she’d have to make something else for breakfast instead. As she went to throw the toast in the trash, she looked back at the kitchen island and the butter dish had reappeared—right where she had left it.

Heather didn’t think much of the disappearing butter dish until it happened to her husband as well. One morning he made toast as Heather played with the children in the living room. When he reached for the butter dish, he saw it had disappeared from the kitchen island. He called out to Heather to see if she had moved it.

“I told him to just give it a minute and it would come back,” Heather said. “At first he said, ‘Yeah, right,’ but when he looked down again, it was there again. I told him it was just haunted and he had to deal with it.”

That was four years ago, and the butter dish still has a tendency to disappear and reappear. Although there has been ghostly activity in her home, the butter dish seems to be the focus of the haunting.

The disappearing and reappearing butter dish.

Don’t Sit There!

On display at the Thirsk Museum in North Yorkshire, England, is the famous Busby Stoop Chair, said to be about 300 years old. Nobody has sat in the chair since 1978, and with good reason—the chair is allegedly cursed and responsible for at least three deaths.

The story goes something like this: There was a man named Thomas Busby, who owned the Busby Stoop Inn just outside of North Yorkshire. He was married to the daughter of Daniel Awety, with whom Busby was involved in some illicit, illegal activities. One of their crimes, known as “coin clipping,” involved shaving off parts of coins in order to create enough metal to forge their own counterfeit coins.

In 1702, Awety and Busby got into an argument, supposedly over their criminal enterprise, and Busby stormed off. The next time he saw his father-in-law was in the pub, sitting in Busby’s favorite chair, supposedly to taunt Busby. Enraged, Busby threw him out of his pub. A short time later and likely full of ale—Busby was a notorious drunkard—he snuck into Awety’s home, bludgeoned him to death with a hammer, and stashed his body in the woods.

The body was found and Busby was, of course, the main suspect. He was arrested at the pub and dragged down the main street to the gallows. Along the way, he shouted out a curse that anybody else who dared to sit in his favorite chair would die just as cruelly as Awety had, and as Busby soon would.

He may have just made good on that curse.

The chair has been loosely linked to a handful of deaths in the past few centuries. A chimney sweep who sat in it in the late 1800s was found dead the next morning, hanging from a gatepost near where Busby himself was hanged.

During World War II, visiting airmen would sit in the chair, and their entire squadron would perish. Two particular pilots were killed before they even got the chance to fly again, when their car crashed into a tree on their way back to the airbase. Heart attacks, car wrecks, and other terrible afflictions often befell whoever sat in the chair, and the legend of its curse began to spread throughout England.

Soon, the chair became sort of a “Bloody Mary” to pub-goers, a challenge to show that you were not afraid of it. People would dare one another to sit in it, often resulting in fatal consequences. The last straw came in the 1970s, when a young man who sat in it on a dare fell to his death while working on a roof. After that, the chair was placed in the basement, presumably to prevent anyone from sitting in it again. That is, until a delivery man decided to take a break in it one morning—and afterward, just a few miles down the road, his truck crashed
and he was killed.

At that point, the owner of the pub donated the chair to the Thirsk Museum. No one has been allowed to sit in it since.

Don’t Sit There, Either!

Among the ornate architecture and mesmerizing landscapes of the famed mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, is the rather unique Belcourt Castle. It was built between 1891 and 1894 as a 60-room “summer cottage” for Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who built the Louis XIII-style mansion for $3 million.

Belcourt Castle remained in the Belmont family until 1940. It went through a series of owners and saw continued neglect until the Tinney family purchased it in 1956. The Tinneys spent many years restoring the castle to its former glory, filling it with antique furnishings from around the world—and with them, a whole slew of ghosts.

There were no real reports of Belcourt Castle being haunted before the arrival of all those antiques, but these days there are so many ghosts, current owner Harle Hope Hanson Tinney actually conducts ghost tours of her home.

Although more than a few objects in Belcourt Castle are known for their associated spirit attachments, none are more famous than the two chairs in the French Gothic Ballroom.

Most visitors to the castle describe a severe drop in room temperature surrounding the two chairs; no matter what season it is, the air surrounding them is always ice cold. While the spirits surrounding the chairs are both adamant about not wanting anyone to sit in them, they do so through two different methods. One chair simply cannot be sat in; there is a force of resistance so great it’s like a force field around it. The other chair can be sat in, but if you sit in it you will soon be tossed out.