Our Haunted Lives: True Life Ghost Encounters

By Jeff Belanger

We are not alone…A collection of personal interviews with those who have witnessed the supernatural firsthand.
 
When people encounter what they perceive to be a ghost or spirit, their lives are forever changed. The ultimate question—Is there life after death—has just been answered for them.
 
Ghosts cross every culture and continent, and the belief in their existence is on the rise. Our Haunted Lives features the stories of dozens of people who have witnessed the supernatural firsthand in their homes, at work, and in numerous other locations, and explores the profound nature of ghosts and spirits. Through personal interviews, the author captures the many different facets of the experience: the touching, where people come in contact with a loved one who’s passed on; the funny, where pranks are played or peculiar disembodied sounds are heard; and the frightening, where people still feel shaken by what they saw, heard, and felt.
 
Ghosts are unbiased—they appear to people from all walks of life, ages, cultures, and religious backgrounds. Our Haunted Lives features accounts from famous hauntings, such as an extensive interview with George Lutz, the man whose experiences with the paranormal in Amityville, Long Island, launched debates, books, and movies. You’ll hear from police officers who were the first on the scene after a homeowner reported a break-in, only to find the disturbance wasn’t caused by the living, and doctors who had a brush with the supernatural after losing a patient on the operating table and speak about the very emotional and profound events they witnessed. Indeed, we are not alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 10, 2006
• ISBN: 9781601637147

Jeff Belanger

Jeff Belanger is a voracious fan of the unexplained. He's been studying and writing about the supernatural for regional and national publications since 1997. Belanger is the founder of Ghostvillage.com, the Internet's largest supernatural community, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors per year. He's the author of: The World's Most Haunted Places: From the Secret Files of Ghostvillage.com (New Page Books 2004), and The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places (New Page Books 2005).

Book preview

Introduction

When I started writing about ghosts and the supernatural, I began with some of the most famous haunted places. The Tower of London, the White House, Archer Avenue in Chicago, and Gettysburg were all certainly high on my supernatural radar. I was intrigued by the history, stirred by the legends, but completely gripped by the first-hand accounts I heard from the many witnesses of supernatural events at these renowned haunts.

Through the years, I've spoken with many hundreds of people who have shared their very personal and profound spiritual experiences with me—from encounters with strange cold spots, unexplained knocks, disembodied voices, even detailed conversations with relatives who have passed on. I have heard conviction in the voices that told me about their brush with the other side, and I've seen the wonder that returns to the witness's eyes as they recount the incredible events they've experienced.

For centuries, ghost experiences were told and retold by oral tradition. Even today—in a world that chronicles almost every event no matter how mundane via photograph, video, audio, and/or written word—details of ghostly encounters are still spread mainly by word-of-mouth. But that trend is changing. Today, belief in the existence of ghostly phenomena is on the rise, and some people are willing to come forward and share their own stories on television programs, radio call-in shows, and Internet sites. These people are quickly finding they aren't alone.

Our Haunted Lives is all about the experience, that life-altering event that proves—at least to the witness—that there is indeed life beyond death. This is a collection of my very spirited conversations with people who have experienced ghosts. Some of the encounters are frightening, some are touching, and some are simply quirky—it seems the other side also has a sense of humor.

These accounts are presented in the words of the eyewitnesses. Every effort was made to preserve the nature, nuances, and dialogue of each interview, because I want you to know these people. Understand that no one was placed on the hot seat with a lone spotlight shining on them. These are conversations.

You'll notice that some of the grammar may not be perfect. We ask that you forgive both the author and editor, but this is how people talk. It doesn't make them ignorant or even uneducated; we simply don't speak the way we write. If you were going to an important job interview, you would likely wear your best business attire, you'd sit with your back straight, and you'd carefully answer each question in an articulate manner. Though this is putting on your best face and placing your best foot forward, is it the real you? No, it's the polished and careful you. The real you is that person on the couch in sweatpants on a rainy Saturday morning. And if we could stay with the couch analogy for just a minute longer, now imagine how that person in sweats speaks. Imagine you had a friend come over—the kind of friend you know well enough that you don't have to change out of your sweatpants for. Your dialogue with that person would be relaxed. Some English snobs may say lazy, but I would call it intimate. And though William Strunk and E.B. White might have cringed while reading an exact transcript of two friends talking, the reality is that the language works. Information and meaning are shared and understood, and the content is genuine. There's beauty in that.

Writing on the supernatural often falls victim to sensationalism. One objective with Our Haunted Lives was to deliver each witness's account with as few distractions as possible and spotlight these real people who experienced something profound. This is what happened, in their own words, just as they would tell it to a close friend. I tried to make the interviews as informal as possible. I wanted people comfortable—in their sweatpants, if you will. My goal in presenting each interview was simply to stay out of the way of their experiences and to not judge or even comment on what was being said. After all, I wasn't there. I can't prove nor disprove something I didn't personally witness.

One thing I've noticed throughout the years, and especially while working on this book, is that it is a cathartic release for witnesses when they discuss their experiences. The truth will set you free, as the Bible says in John 8:32. I could hear more than one sigh of relief as people began to tell their stories. There was laughter at times, sometimes from the sheer discomfort of saying something that may be construed as strange or impossible. In other cases, the laughter and smiles were genuine in reflecting on an event or period in one's life. Sometimes there were tears. Not only were these experiences personal, but they often involved the death of a loved one—an incident that was sometimes relived in relaying a series of events.

A perfectly valid question to ask is, How do I know these people are telling the truth? A good question—and a question with a fuzzy answer at best. What is truth? That's a question philosophers have been trying to answer for centuries. In one regard, truth is relative. Speak to any devoutly religious person about what truth is, and he or she will likely quote from one of his or her religious texts. He or she may believe the text and its teachings to be truth. But is it universal truth? No, because there are a great many belief systems on our tiny planet, and so far, none of them has been able to capture 100 percent of the marketshare of believers. One truth doesn't speak to all people.

Do you trust your own senses? Most of us do. And the people interviewed in this book do as well. Some used to say, I won't believe it unless I see it, and see it they did. There was truth and conviction in the retelling.

One aspect of the ghost experience that has captivated me more than any other is that they cross all geographic boundaries. They're in religious texts and history books, and there's a term for ghost in every language. Ghosts are a sign of something else being out there beyond our traditional understanding of the world. They force us to question our own mortality and to explore our own deeper understanding of spirituality.

You'll notice that some of the people being interviewed had their experiences many decades ago. You may ask if their memory can be trusted. You may be surprised at the great detail in which these witnesses recall their ghost encounters. Do you remember what you got for a present on your fifth birthday? Probably not. But do you remember your child being born? The death of a loved one? Your wedding day? These are profound events, and they've been burned into your long-term memory. The ghost encounter is no different. Whether 5 years or 50 years have gone by, the experience is still vivid.

As people shared their stories with me, I tried to ask the questions you might have asked regarding the details of the event, and how it may have changed or touched their lives. You're invited to sit in on these conversations.

In the pages that follow, I'd like you to meet some good people. Some are young, some are much older. They're your sisters, your brothers, your neighbors, and your friends. In many ways, they're us, too.

Haunted Homes

Photo credit: istockphoto.com/Rob Zeiler

Our home is our castle, the place we (hopefully) feel the safest, and it's where we can be ourselves. After living in a house, apartment, or dormitory for even a short period of time, we quickly get used to the various noises the building makes, the neighbors who come and go at various hours, or the way the heater makes the wall tick, tick, tick. We also know the way the rooms in our homes feel. So when something strange is going on, many times the homeowner or tenant is the person who notices first. Because we get acclimated to a building, if something is off, even by a little bit, we can sense it.

Haunted homes are often frightening because people are dealing with an intruder—sometimes an intruder who can't be seen, or in more profound haunting cases, it's an intruder who can be seen, but one who can't be touched, let alone handcuffed.

There's a myriad of reasons why a ghost or spirit may stick around a home. Perhaps the ghost is simply a psychic impression left in the building—one that some people are able to tune in to. Another theory is that the spirit may not realize they are dead, and so they simply hang around where they were most comfortable. On the darker side of the supernatural, some speculate that houses or people might be plagued with demons or other evil forces that are trying to torment and drive them away. No matter the cause, when someone is dealing with a haunting in his or her home, it can be both frustrating and frightening.

George Lutz Amityville, New York Autumn 1975

On Wednesday, November 14, 1974, around 3 a.m., 23-year-old Ronald Butch DeFeo, Jr., sat awake in his bedroom at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. DeFeo, wrought with emotional and drug problems, sat seething as his mother, father, two brothers, and two sisters all lay sleeping in their beds in the silence of that cold autumn night. Butch reached for a .35-caliber Marlin rifle he kept hidden, and he walked out of his room toward the bedroom where his parents were sleeping. He slipped in, aimed the rifle at his father first, and fired twice. Next he shot his mother twice, leaving both parents in pools of blood. Over the next several minutes, he systematically executed every member of his family, sealing his name in the halls of infamy.

One might ask, Who would ever want to live in a house where such an atrocity happened? It's an easy question to ask when you're not currently trying to buy a house, but what if you needed a home for your family, you've already looked at dozens of houses, and you find a wonderful home for a significantly undervalued price? What if it's been a year since the brutal murder, and you and your family agree that houses don't have memories?

The Amityville house is one of the most famous haunting cases in the world. Ronald DeFeo's brutality captivated Americans for a brief moment, but mass murderers are soon forgotten as another twisted monster comes along, ups the ante, and makes us all forget about the last one. But we didn't forget the house. 112 Ocean Avenue still captivates us—but not so much because of what Ronald DeFeo did there, but because of the supernatural, and by some accounts, demonic events that George Lutz and his family went through for 28 days after they moved in.

George and Kathy Lutz were married in July of 1975. Both had been married before, and Kathy had children from her previous marriage. They decided to sell both of their houses and combine households. Kathy's house sold first, so the Lutzes all packed into George's Long Island home until they could find something suitable for all of them. What George Lutz experienced in the autumn of 1975 has profoundly affected the rest of his life.

How long did it take to find a new home after you and Kathy moved in together?

We looked at about 50 homes over the months that we decided to combine the households. We had actually gone to contract on another home about a month before we found the Amityville house. That one was on the water, it was in Lindenhurst, and it had a boathouse. It was smaller than this house, it needed repairs that the sellers were not willing to negotiate with—the boathouse needed dredging to get the boat in, the roof needed replacing, and that fell through. When that fell apart we just kept looking. We found the Amityville house, if I recall correctly, from an ad in the paper. We found a Realtor and she said, Look, I want to show you this house—this is how the other half of Amityville looks—because we were looking everywhere we could. I had a boat and I had dockage fees, and when you added that into the mortgages we had on both houses, it gave us an idea of how much we were spending then. We felt that we could combine the homes, get something on the water, and have our own boathouse and not spend all that time traveling back and forth to the boathouse.

So the Realtor showed us the house. When she showed it to us she said before we went, she said, I don't know if I should tell you now or after you've seen the house, but this was the house that the DeFeo murders took place in. We kind of looked at each other like, I'm not sure what you're talking about. And then she reminded us about Ronald DeFeo having killed his whole family. That had been in the newspapers about a year before. If I recall correctly, this was sometime maybe late August or September, some place in there. We saw the house and as soon as Kathy walked in she just started smiling. This was the best one that she had seen so far in terms of what she liked and what we were looking for. As I remember now, it was a bright sunny day, we had the kids with us, we walked through it, and we all really fell in love with it.

We went home and talked about it for days. We talked about the price, how this could possibly work, what kind of mortgage we would need, what kind of payments we were looking at, the taxes, insurance costs—all of the different things you do when you decide to buy a house. And we spent a lot of time with the children individually and together talking about whether they would want to live in that house.

Did the children have any concerns at all?

In the first movie that was done about this, James Brolin says something to the effect of, houses don't have memories. And I think that's the way we thought, without a doubt. It never occurred to us that it would be uninhabitable. We had concern for the kids—there's going to be some notoriety about this, and we were concerned about them. You don't just force your kids to move into a place like this, that isn't how we did things. But they had no reservations, they had no problems and we went back at least two more times. We drove around the town a little bit, around the neighborhood, and we spent more time looking through the house. Eventually we made an offer.

I don't remember the specifics because it's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure they were looking for $90,000 and we offered $80,000 and they took it. One way to describe this is that the house was probably worth somewhere around $110,000. They hadn't been able to sell it since they had put it up for sale about a year earlier and the estate was willing to bargain about it. So we made an offer of $80,000 and we went and got a mortgage from the first bank we went to, and the mortgage was $60,000. We had more than enough cash to close on the difference—from the two sales of our houses. We packed up our stuff and the moving date was set.

We closed on the house the day of the move. My house was sold and we had no place to go other than there—everything was in trucks, and on trailers, and in vans and we had friends helping us move. We went into the title company and we met our lawyer and their lawyer there, and we do up all of the documents. We got down to the house and we find we didn't have the key So we had to go find the realtor and get a key. Other than that, the only other thing that went wrong that comes to mind is that when I told a friend of mine who I built motorcycles with and rode with what house we were buying, he absolutely insisted I get the house blessed. He was such a good friend and I had never seen him do this kind of thing or say this kind of thing before. So I complied.

Did you have someone specific in mind to bless the house?

I asked Kathy about it because I wasn't Catholic. She explained to me that you get a priest to come out and he blesses the house for you. I said, Okay, if that's what Jimmy wants, that's what we'll do.

A year and a half before, I had been married, and that ended up in a divorce and then in annulment proceedings. I was invited down to the diocesan offices in Rockville Center to meet with an official of the diocese. His name was Father Ralph Pecoraro. Father Ray we called him. He spent time with me to explain the process—I was a Methodist, so this was new and foreign to me at the time. We struck up a friendship, and from time to time we would talk, which was really strange for me. I was a biker, I wasn't a Catholic, but something about this guy made him different than most people you meet. He was more than just special; he was worth spending time with. He would take my calls and I would take his. It wasn't like there was a lot of this, but we stayed in touch. I called him because he was the only priest I could think of. I called him and said, Would you come out and bless the house? We bought this house, and Kathy would like this done, and it's been suggested that we do this. He said, Sure, I'd be glad to.

I had no idea he was not a parish priest, I had no idea that he was an ecclesiastical judge for the tribunal there, that he had an STL [Licentiate in Sacred Theology] degree, which is the equivalent of a law degree, that he spoke so many languages, or any number of other things about him. He was just somebody that I liked. I asked him and he said, Sure, I'd be glad to, and he showed up shortly after we got the key and were in the process of moving in. I waved, he waved, and he went on in the house and went about blessing it.

When he was done, I tried to pay him and

Reviews for Our Haunted Lives

[booknookretreat7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a real good collection of true paranormal stories. It was a different type of paranormal read as the author interviews the people and they give their account of what happened to them. I really enjoyed all the stories and some of them are a bit creepy. The stories cover just about everything from ghost sightings to out of body experiences. Giving it four stars for keeping me entertained.

[chrisweir-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Collection of haunted house and ghost stories. This is different than most others that you'll find on the market now days. This is all interviews with the people that have had encounters with the supernatural. Broken into a few different parts; haunted houses, ghosts of people we know, ghosts on the job, haunted public locations and a section on ghost hunters.