Is it possible for an object to become “haunted?” This is the question that I found myself asking when, as a paranormal investigator, I was asked to help a woman with a picture that was taken on her camera one Halloween night. 

Phyllis (not her real name) is a registered nurse who worked in the psychiatric ward at the time the picture was taken. Because of this, she and her co-workers in the ward were allowed to wear costumes, but not masks. 

Phyllis brought a digital camera with her to work and put it on a computer monitor. Setting the timer she and her co-workers posed for a picture. Phyllis didn’t like the picture so she asked everyone to pose again. Again, she wasn’t crazy about the picture quality, so she took two more pictures herself.

A CNA from another ward walked by and Phyllis asked her to take a pic of the group. The CNA agreed, and everyone posed yet again. The nursing assistant took the picture, handed the camera back to Phyllis and walked away. 

Phyllis looked at the image in the LCD. Behind the group of nurses in the image was someone apparently wearing a mask. 

“Who has the mask?” she asked. A mask, especially one like the one in the picture could easily frighten one of their patients. It looked like something out of the movie, “The Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

No one admitted to having one, so she asked them to take their costumes off, and even checked the purses of the two female nurses she worked with. She was frustrated when she couldn’t find it. She showed them the picture on her small camera and no one could believe what they were looking at. 

When I saw the picture I told her it was obvious to me that someone was in the hallway in the picture, and simply walked up behind them when the picture was taken.

“Anthony,” Phyllis responded, “that’s not a hallway. It’s a small office. No one could have gotten in there without us knowing about it.”

I conducted an investigation in order to try to determine how this image showed up in the picture. I blew up the picture and I could sit that there was a face under the mask. I could even see the skin fold under the eyes. There were eyeballs, but what disturbed me was that there wasn’t any sclera (white) in the eyes. 

As I interviewed the nurses on duty that night in that particular ward. One of them, Tony, asked me if I thought that the necklace he was wearing might have been the source of whatever was in the picture. Tony was dressed as a vampire and the necklace he was wearing was on loan to him by a friend of his who bought and sold antiques. 

“She told me she bought the necklace in West Hollywood from a woman’s estate in 1962,” he told me. “She also told me she’s only worn it twice since then.” 

Could the necklace be the source of the image? I didn’t know, but I wanted to find out. I bought the necklace, and had my own experiences with it. That led me to want to investigate more objects that were supposedly the source of paranormal activity. 

That led me to eBay.  It was on eBay that I found the skull and “amulet” two years ago. 

The skull is supposedly of a man who was killed in Andover, MA before the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria. He is purported to be the first witch of Andover, and the allegedly taught Martha Carrier the “Craft.” The “amulet” is what he allegedly used to cast his spells. 

This blog will document my search for the truth behind this story. 

Restless Spirit Hunter