Читать книгу Occult Investigator - Bob Psy.D. Johnson - Страница 5

It haunted her like she had committed a murder. Each time Mary Montrose entered the Velvet Room café on the Upper East Side of Manhattan a sense of fearful dread overcame her. She felt guilty, evil, ugly, even sinful. She felt as she had done something terribly wrong and she would somehow have to pay a horrible price. But what troubled her most was not the feeling of darkness, but the confusion in her mind as to why she should feel so badly. She was not an evil person. She did nothing to harm anyone in her life that would warrant these awful, malignant compulsions.

And what was even more disturbing was why did this feeling attack her only when she visited the quaint Madison Avenue café? The shop pleased her so much, decorated in the rich, ornate and lush Victorian period style? She loved the place. She loved the velvety soft sofas and how the cascading drapery framed the large front window. When she looked out of the window onto Second Avenue through the purple and red drapery she imagined herself a Victorian lady waiting for her gentleman’s carriage. Her heart beat rapidly and her face flushed during her café daydreams. But the glow was quickly overcome by that gnawing, ominous sense of depression that leaked into her mind and body, almost causing her to bolt from the café in a state of hysterical panic.

Mary simply couldn’t understand how a café, a storefront, could evoke such a terrible feeling within her. The first time she noticed it was in the early winter of 1995 – just after Christmas. She remembered it vividly because the New York holiday lull between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day stood out in her mind. She recalled how she desperately tried to hang onto that festive and secure feeling between the two occasions, but then remembered how it was suddenly interrupted by the Velvet Room café’s sullen shadow.

It began after a full morning’s shopping along Madison Avenue at her favorite boutiques, when Mary decided she needed a coffee break to recharge her energies for the remainder of the day. Although she vaguely remembered a small café that she promised herself she would one day visit, she couldn’t put her finger on its name or where it was located. Mary knew it appealed to her because of its décor and ambience, and that it seemed to “pop up” whenever she was shopping nearby, but she had no real sense of where the little shop actually was. She was determined to find the haven so she could rest her tired feet and also satisfy her curiOccult Investigatorty about the café. Walking aimlessly and peering down side streets looking for the shop, Mary was just about to give up and enter a Starbucks’ when a screeching taxicab jumped the curb of 56^th street taking out a mailbox, three street signs and nearly crushing her into a plate glass window. She was knocked off of her feet but she fortunately managed to avoid being seriously hurt.

Once Mary caught her breath and shook the cobwebs from her head, she assured the group of people who circled around her that she was indeed not hurt. She then walked a few steps, looked up and was amazed to see that she was directly in front of the storefront she was looking for. The Velvet Room café’s ornamental sign stared at her like a welcoming beacon and she instinctively entered the store unaware that her new favorite respite was to be the beginning of harrowing journey into the supernatural that carried with it a malignant ancient curse, strange apparitions and a greedy, deranged blood relation who would affect her life for years to come.

***

GHOST HUNTERS

When I pitched the idea for the creation of a special unit of Intercontinental Investigations, a prominent New York City detective agency, that would seriously investigate paranormal and occult cases, I expected to get a lukewarm response and possibly some feigned interest from my friend who owned the agency, mostly out of respect and a mutual understanding of my interest in “things peculiar.” But when he responded with sincere interest and began to recount stories of his Italian grandmother (thought to be a striga, an Italian witch) who regularly communicated with the dead, threw curses and was responsible for at least a few “mysterious” deaths in their small Italian village, I knew I had a shot at developing what was to be X-Investigations, the first paranormal and occult investigative arm of a licensed detective agency.

My background investigating the occult and the paranormal to this point was not on a professional basis. Although I had consulted numerous times with the preeminent ghost hunter and author, Professor Hans Holzer, and earned a certificate from his New York Committee for the Investigation of Paranormal Occurrences, my investigations had been of mostly of an academic nature, albeit fulfilling in their own right. Most of my experiences centered on the “possibilities” of paranormal and occult workings, more than actual sightings or first-hand encounters with the unexplained. That was until I attended a ghost hunting excursion with the International Ghost Hunters Society (IGHS), to Salem, Massachusetts that opened up a fascinating and sometimes frightening world of the unexplained and often disturbing glimpse of the “other side.”

Toward the end of the first day’s field work exercise that included a walk through of a local cemetery and instructions that a ghost hunter must “respect the dead” by asking their permission to photograph their resting places, our group headed for a building on Essex Street in the center of the town’s commercial pedestrian mall that once was a Colonial library building, now converted into a local retail establishment. The wood frame store was vacant for the most part – quite large and creepy by most standards – with huge open rooms filled with covered furniture accentuated by the store’s high ceilings and a central staircase that wound around to a landing with doors to a number of rooms on the second level. The building gave our group needed shelter from the cold Salem October night, but curiously did not feel secure. Although the temperature was warmer than outdoors, it was still surprisingly damp and somehow uninviting to us. The yellow cloud covered moon intermittently shone through the windows on the upper floors of the building and at first was the only light we saw as we entered. Everyone in our group briskly rubbed warmth into their hands and commented that it was good to be out of the cold, but as we ventured further into the darkness, waiting for the lights to be switched on, the group became silent – as if we were waiting for someone to say, ”It’s alright. The lights will be on in a minute and we’ll all feel safe and warm.” But no one spoke, and after about five minutes of standing in the glistening moon lit ground floor waiting for the caretaker to find the fuse box, some of us began to become “antsy,” demanding that some light be available. I was not the only one who said the place felt strange and foreboding…almost evil.

Our instructions from the person in charge of the ghost hunting organization, a stout, bearded fellow named Dave, was to scout around the building, using our Gauss meters (devices that measure electromagnetic variance, a standard ghost hunting apparatus) and cameras in order to capture any paranormal activity. Our group broke up into small scouting parties with the bravest of us venturing into the back rooms and deserted hallways looking for spirits or whatever unworldly manifestation might occur. I took it upon myself to head to the furthest room in the back of the building along with one of my fellow ghost hunters, Betsy, a middle-aged grammar school teacher from Lubbock, Texas, who was armed with a state-of-the-art digital camera. I wondered if Betsy knew what she was doing with such a high-tech camera. Her large, ill-fitting black eyeglasses and frumpy manner didn’t exactly speak of technical proficiency, but I admired her for her courage nonetheless.

We both walked gingerly into the center of the room, turning our heads from side to side as if we were cartoon characters in a Scooby Doo episode waiting for the typical malevolent force to strike out. But this was no cartoon. Immediately upon entering the room, we were both overcome by an overwhelming feeling of being watched. The kind of feeling that prompts people to jerk their necks around to see who’s there. We also felt a strange presence emanating from a darkened corner portion of the room directly beneath a window that stretched from the floor to almost ten feet in height. I couldn’t see anyone or anything, but I knew instinctively that there was something crouching in the dark. I felt its coldness cutting a path in the air right toward my face. An instant later Betsy and I both turned around to see if there was someone looking over our shoulders precisely at the same moment. Of course no one was present, causing us to look at each other in the eyes and exchange a non-verbal agreement that we should just keep walking because acknowledging this strange feeling would make it all the more real.

Despite our fear, a distinct feeling of dread, and a strong urge to run out of that damp room, we headed toward the area in question to investigate why it wreaked so much of something unknown. After all, that’s why we were on this trip, to discover a ghost or some other paranormal event, so now was not the time to run screaming.

I clicked on my hand held plastic Gauss meter and watched the black needle hover at the green colored low end of its Miligauss range of 0 to 2, which usually indicates nearly virtually no electromagnetic activity. Betsy sighed a breath if relief and began to snap some digital photos of the area. But her relief soon ended when I placed the gauss meter at the bottom of the window – the area we sensed the crouching presence – and the needle literally jumped through the safe green and yellow areas of its dial from 0 to 2 mG, shooting into the meter’s red zone of 7 to 20 mG, whirring violently in my hand. I yelled to Betsy that she had to look at what was going on with my meter. But instead of running to see for herself, the photographer in Betsy instinctively took over and she began snapping photos of me holding the Gauss meter at the bottom of the window. I managed not to move from my pOccult Investigatortion for a good five minutes so Betsy could click away, all the while transfixed on the windshield wiper motion of the meter’s needle snapping back and forth. Something was present in this spot, I was certain of that much, and I was grateful that Betsy had the presence of mind to take pictures while I was frantically yelling for my colleagues to watch this phenomenon. Needless to say I was spooked, and I’m the first to admit that a big reason that I stayed glued to the spot was because I was literally paralyzed by fear.

Thanks to the instantaneous feedback from digital cameras, we were able to see just what, if anything, would show up in the photos Betsy snapped. Two of the most common manifestations of spirits caught on camera, according to Dave our ghost hunting expert, are white wisp apparitions that appear like smoke, or round floating objects called “orbs” that can be spotted almost anywhere in the picture, but usually not in front of or on top of a person.

I watched closely as Betsy thumbed the top of her camera searching through the shots, not truly convinced that we were going to discover anything out of the ordinary. But then Betsy curiously stopped fidgeting with the buttons on the camera. Her gaze became fixed and her face literally blanched. She first whispered some inaudible expletive to herself, and then suddenly blurted out, “You are not going to fucking believe this…Look at this shot!”

She handed the camera over to me and as I brought the small rectangular image close enough to see what was there, I became speechless. It was a photo of me holding the Gauss meter at the bottom of the window. But what caused us both to look at the photo with dropped jaws was the image of a large white orb that sat hovering precisely at the top of the meter as though it landed on my electronic instrument! More of Betsy’s shots showed the orb moving first toward the meter and then upward toward the top of the window. Goosebumps, hair standing on the back of the neck, spine tingling chills; none of these descriptions fit how both Betsy and I felt when we saw the photos. And what was even more upsetting was that we felt that presence again, along with the coldness. We sensed a force very near to us and we had two technical devices confirming as much as possible that we were witnessing a manifestation of something unexplainable in “normal’ terms. There was no electrical current near the Gauss meter, nor any electrical wiring in the walls that would have sent the mechanism into its wild behavior. There was no possibility of “spots” on the film in a digital camera because there is no film. And Betsy was certain that he camera lens had been cleaned and air dusted right before she left her hotel room. There was only one logical conclusion…WE HAD FELT AND SEEN SOEMTHING PARANORMAL AND POSSIBLY SUPERNATURAL. WE HAD CAPTURED A GHOST!

***

THE BIRTH OF X-INVESTIGATIONS

Despite some hopeful interest, my conversations about creating a special unit to concentrate on the paranormal and occult of my friend Vincent’s detective agency, to this point was mainly friendly discussion and a semi-fact finding mission on his part to determine if there really was anything to my idea. We kicked around the possibilities, often returning to the problem of whether people would think they (Vincent and his business) were a bit loony, but there was no solid commitment or even an invitation on Vincent’s part to provide some proof that this kind of business could succeed.

But all that changed after my Salem excursion. I was now confident that when I returned to New York from my ghost hunting adventure with bonafide digital evidence of a real ghost sighting, Vincent would be a lot more receptive and hopefully lot less of a skeptic. What I didn’t bargain for was that when I got back to my Manhattan apartment I would find a message on my telephone answering machine from a woman at Vincent’s office who identified herself only as Silvana, saying that she was working with Vincent on a “special” case that involved things she described as “out of the ordinary.” Of course I was pleasantly surprised and intrigued first with the nature of the message, and also Silvana’s interesting Eastern European accent that I couldn’t directly place, but knew must have been Russian or Polish. I’m usually pretty adept at picking peoples’ origins from their accents, but because the message contained a sense of urgency tinged with some kind of underlying concern or worry, Silvana’s place of origin was a tough call.

The message was coincidentally delivered on the same day of my haunted library excursion in Salem, and mentioned that Vincent thought this case was especially suited for Silvana and I. Even though we had never worked together, Silvana’s message said that I shouldn’t be concerned about how she knew Vincent, or me for that matter, or what the case entailed, but that I should simply call and meet with her as soon as possible. She added that she wasn’t concerned about the lack of any formal organized framework within Vincent’s organization for paranormal investigations. She said, “This is the kind of investigation most people would think is bizarre and possibly crazy. But…you now know, as do I, that there are many things that cannot be explained, and there are but a few of us who are more than just curious…we are destined to uncover the unexplained.”

At first I thought Vincent was playing one of his infamous practical jokes, goading me into thinking that he came around to forming the special unit, so I’d rush into his office, arms flailing and spouting a hundred ideas. He’d then burst out with the bogus “Silvana” laughing hysterically next to him. But the next message on my machine confirmed what Silvana had said. It was Vincent’s secretary, Barbara, who was always as serious as death and never known to goof around. Barbara said Vincent was out of town but that I should call Silvana immediately. “It was very important.”

Not really knowing who Silvana was, or if she even existed, and not convinced that this wasn’t a trick of some kind, I instead waited until Vincent returned to town in the next few days. I didn’t want some nutty joke overshadowing the real proof I just uncovered and ruin the possibility of convincing Vincent about the viability of X-Investigations.

I visited the offices of Intercontinental Investigations one rainy Tuesday morning with Betsy’s borrowed digital camera in hand. I was adamant about convincing Vincent about my paranormal experience, so I knew I had to put the evidence right on his desk so he could see it with his own eyes. He greeted me as cordially as usual but before I could say a word he asked if I contacted Silvana. I told him I didn’t because of obvious reasons, and he became curiously agitated and said that Silvana had just the case I was looking for to start X-Investigations. Before he could pick up the phone to call her I stuck the camera under his nose with the glowing photo and said, “Vincent, I’m glad you said that. Now look at these photos. Tell me what you see.”

“I see you holding some gadget in an old house with a blob of light reflecting on the picture.” I told him that this was no blob of light but an actual ghostly orb captured digitally. “C’mon, this is a picture of a ghost? It’s dust on the lens,” Vincent said. It took me the better part of an hour of raised eyebrows and Vincent snickering to convince him that orbs are one of the most common paranormal phenomena captured and I described in detail the coldness, the malevolent feelings and the lurking presence in the dark that both Betsy and I felt. It took some doing, but Vincent knew that if I was this passionate about something he’d better listen. After an intense accounting of what took place at the Salem library story, Vincent became mesmerized and by the end of my tale he was hanging on every word. When I showed him the remainder of the orb photos he simply said, “I’ve got chills running up and down my spine. But I need more proof.”

The detective agency often used forensic specialists to investigate and analyze the most obscure evidence and clues imaginable, and although I suspected that most of Vincent’s experts never did much ghost hunting I suggested to him that he have the camera analyzed by one of his associates to validate the legitimacy of the photo and whether there as any “normal” interference that may have cause the appearance of the orb. If there were dust or reflections on the lens it would be detected by these modern day super sleuths. If there wasn’t, I was sure that I could convince Vincent that other worlds existed beyond our own, and more importantly persuade him to back my fledgling idea to help discover why these worlds exist and why they often intrude on this plane of existence we call “reality.”

It didn’t take long for Felix, Vincent’s forensic photography expert to give us the results in the detective’s office a few days later. His report stated that from all of the data supplied to him, the camera, its digital disc and optics were working just fine. He also reported that the digital images taken by Betsy that night were not tampered with in any way. There were no scratches on the camera lens, and there was no discernable dirt or dust. Felix added that any reflection that would have appeared on the photo would not have cause such a porous image, but would rather have appeared solid. He told us that a light reflection would have “blurred” deeply and the orb on the photo was nearly transparent. The bottom line was that Felix delivered the detective work we wanted to hear…the photos were legitimate and the orb appearance could not be explained. For all intents and purposes, we had caught a ghost on camera!

Feeling vindicated and confident that I could make a go of X-Investigations, I asked Vincent straight out if we could use his office as headquarters. He still wasn’t convinced about the viability of a ghost busting occult investigations division of his company, but he remembered Silvana and her almost frantic plea to him about a woman in dire need of help…not normal private detective assistance, but something that would require specialized expertise. He told me that I should first speak with Silvana to see what her situation involved. If we could fit it all together, Vincent said he’d back our endeavor.

Silvana gave Vincent only a sketchy idea of our would-be maiden case. The most he knew was that it involved a woman on the East Side who had a recurring problem with “unknown forces,” and that she was at her wits’ end. “There was something about her freaking out at a café and the owners were threatening to sue her if she didn’t stop harassing them about a curse or some nonsense,” Vincent told me. I knew that there was something Vincent was reluctant to tell me…that was his style, tease a case so the investigator got interested enough to flesh out the details and become so absorbed in the investigation that it becomes an obsession. But he didn’t have to play games to get me involved with this case. I figured that any case that would launch X-Investigations was worth pursuing. I wasted no time and called Silvana that evening at her home. What she told me not only piqued my curiOccult Investigatorty, but it allowed me a peak at a world only a few dare to visit.

She answered the phone with a distinct Czech accent, “Ahhlow.” She said. I began to introduce myself by saying “I am…” but she cut me off in mid-sentence and said, “I know who you are, Mr. Johnson. You have waited too long to contact me…we must act quickly for there is a woman’s life at stake.” Before I could ask her how she knew it was me, she said that she was a clairvoyant and medium with psychic abilities, and if I needed proof she said I was to meet with her that very evening. “If you’re psychic,” I said, “Then you should know where I’m thinking about meeting right now.” I waited for an answer but the phone line was dead. “Weird,” I thought. But then my apartment buzzer rang and the doorman said I had a message left downstairs that said the meeting that evening concerning the woman in need was to be at my favorite coffee house, Manzo’s, in Little Italy. I asked the doorman who left the message and he said that all he could remember was that she was a “tall babe with a great body and an accent.” He couldn’t remember her name, but he said she was worth going to the meeting for, no matter where it was, even if it was pouring an icy November rain outdoors.

As I was exiting a cab on Kenmare Street in front of Manzo’s to meet the mysterious Silvana, I gathered my umbrella and immediately had a sensation that I was about to see an old friend, not a new acquaintance. Maybe it was wishful thinking or a carry over sense of familiarity from our phone conversation, but when I entered the café and saw Silvana sipping an espresso and dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, a black leather skirt and deep violet tights with “Sex In the City” designer pointed half-boots, I felt as though I reconnected with an old relative or an old flame. It didn’t hurt that Silvana was stunningly beautiful…tall, slender with dark eyes and dark hair. She was a bit “beatnik,” combined with some of The Avengers’ Emma Peele TV character thrown in. But my first impression of her as a sophisticated European was mixed with a feeling that Silvana harbored some dark secrets. I felt that she was troubled, not by everyday, mundane problems, but by something that could be described as inky, murky, and almost ancient. Silvana stood tall and straight when she saw me enter. She greeted me with a firm handshake and warm, but questioning eyes. She said it was a pleasure to meet me in her Czech accent and got right down to business, telling me of a woman who was cursed…not by a person, but by a store, a café right here in Manhattan. Mary Montrose had contacted Silvana some weeks ago after she learned of her psychic abilities. With no one to turn to, Mary sought Silvana’s help in ridding herself of the awful occurrences that haunted her daily life. They were strange indeed, the fits of hysteria, the cold winds in her room, the smell of vomit in her kitchen, the constant disappearance of her money. Mary’s life was becoming a living nightmare. And as Silvana recounted Mary’s story to me for the better part of two hours I finally realized what was behind Silvana’s questioning eyes, She could feel the other side and the entities that inhabited it, but she could do nothing about it. She was virtually paralyzed by her own perceptive powers. Silvana was a paranormal conduit that needed someone who could stay grounded on this plane. That’s where I came in.

The next morning in Vincent’s midtown offices over deli coffee and bagels, I explained to Silvana my idea to start X-Investigations and how her calling me and seeking help with Mary Montrose was serendipitous to say the least. She wasn’t very concerned with the business of solving occult cases…Silvana’s more burning issue was to fulfill her “calling,” but she agreed that having a framework for this kind of assistance was a good idea. When I asked her if she was interested in being my partner and that she would have to undergo some paranormal abilities testing, she simply smiled at me and told me the exact date that my mother passed away, that my father was still alive and what hospital I was born in in Brooklyn. I told her that that was pretty good party game psychicism, but any good detective could have simply looked up my records on the internet. But when she told me that my old cat Szandor liked to eat lasagna I was stunned. “Now how did you know that,” I asked. She smiled and said, “Vincent told me.”

I gave Silvana the benefit of the doubt and we became paranormal partners on the spot.

We began mapping out X-Investigations as a business with a plan to call Mary Montrose that afternoon and get this case underway. We didn’t know what our fees would be or what equipment and/or other professionals we would need to conduct our investigations, but we knew we had an enigma on our hands. Silvana did know however, that Mary appeared to be well off financially and she even mentioned to her that money was no object, Silvana pointed out that Mary wore an incredibly expensive initial “M” diamond brooch. “Robert, [Silvana refused to call me Bob] it moost cost two or three hundert towsand Amerikan dollars,” Silvana said. At the very least we could tell Vincent that we were not working for free.

I asked Silvana to tell me in detail about Mary’s bizarre dilemma and the more she relayed, the more I felt this would be more than just our first case – it would be an adventure into the unknown. I can’t explain why it felt like more than just a project or a job to me, I just knew we were embarking on a fantastic experience – one that would haunt us for our days to come.

Mary Montrose answered her telephone with a strained and obviously troubled tone in her voice. “Hello, Miss Montrose, this is Bob Johnson, I am an associate of Silvana’s…” at that point Mary interrupted me and said that she was terribly troubled. “Yes, yes, I know who you are. Can you help me? Do you know what I’ve been going through these past few weeks?” She was frantically rambling so I had to stop her by asking for her address and when we could visit her. I asked if we could perhaps meet at the Velvet Room café, the origin of her troubles. She snapped back that that was the last place she wanted to be right now. “The last time I was in the café I was taken away in an ambulance and spent two days in the psychiatric ward at St. Vincent’s hospital. Please, please come to my home.”

Silvana and I arrived at Mary’s apartment around 7 PM that evening. The weather had gotten progressively worse, now mixing sleet and snowflakes with the icy rain, so we were happy to enter the warm lobby of Mary’s luxury apartment building. The traditionally cozy Mediterranean décor coupled with a fire in the lobby fireplace, and the smiling concierge gave us a sense of hospitality and security upon entering. But that glow soon vanished when we heard Mary’s unsettling ghost story.

The well-dressed, middle-aged woman served us tea and specialty chocolate cookies that I recognized were from Grace’s food store on the East Side. All indications were that Mary was a product of fine upbringing and was no stranger to the better things in life. Despite the graciousness of the moment, Mary sighed deeply and began telling us how she was literally thrown into the Velvet Room café by virtue of an errant taxicab that jumped the curb, nearly killing her. “It was the strangest thing. I was shopping and a bit tired so I thought I would have some coffee at a small, lovely café I spotted many times but never had the time to visit. I really could not remember where it was located, but I recalled it was lavishly decorated in Victorian fashion, so I just started to wander along Madison Avenue. Suddenly I heard screeching and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the café with people rushing around asking me if I was all right and if I needed a doctor. Well, once I gathered my senses I was pleased to discover that I at least reached the destination I sought, so I accepted the shop owner’s gracious offer of tea and scones gratis for my trouble,” Mary recounted.

She then explained how she admired the Velvet Room cafe’s décor – the beautiful and lush drapery, the ornate wallpaper and gilded furniture. As she sipped her tea, Mary was pleased with the sense of warmth she got from the café and made it a point in her mind to visit as often as she could. She was also thankful for not being killed by the taxi. But then the unexplained began to happen. As Mary was nibbling on her blueberry scone she felt a tightening in her throat. She thought at first that maybe she was allergic to some ingredient in the pastry, but she had eaten blueberry scones many times before. They were her favorite. She was puzzled by what was causing this odd sensation. Then things got worse. The strangling feeling increased, and all at once the room seemed to be clOccult Investigatorng in on her. Was this odd feeling an after reaction to the near-accident, she thought? She couldn’t think straight. She told Silvana and I how it didn’t feel like an ordinary illness, she felt as though something crept into her throat and was choking her from the inside. The walls of the café moved toward Mary Montrose in an ominous, threatening manner so powerfully that it caused her to drop the scone and scream a shrieking screech that froze the patrons and workers in their very footsteps.

She could barely speak as she told us of her horrifying experience. But I insisted that she continue, telling us as much detail as possible so we could get a handle on with what we were dealing. I instructed Silvana to begin tape recording when we entered the apartment, so everything Mary said was documented. ”Of course Mary, this could have been an aftershock, so to speak, from your trauma that day, as you already mentioned,” I said. But Mary stressed that she had a subsequent medical check up the very next day, but more importantly, this was just the first in a series of harrowing experiences in the café and then in her home. “They are NOT all physical manifestations of that trauma. Things are happening in this apartment that have nothing to do with me physically. I feel as though I am being watched, taunted, and punished for something. I am being haunted,” she said choking back tears. With that remark, X-Investigations experienced its first paranormal anomaly! At first we thought the driving frozen rain pellets were beating off of Mary’s living room window, but as she turned her head into the bedroom, we realized there was a rapid tapping coming from within the room. “There, see, it’s happening,” she said in a much more agitated voice. “There’s that infernal rapping on the painting above my bed. It happens almost every evening. It’s driving me mad.”

I asked if Silvana and I could enter the room and Mary told us to go right ahead, but to be very careful. “Sometimes things fly across the room,” she warned. When we entered through the double doors, we were first struck by the coldness of the room, thinking that the heat was turned off. The sensation reminded me of my Salem ghost experience. I could literally see Silvana’s breath smoke in the dim light. Yes, it was cold in New York, but luxury digs are kept warm for sure. And the living area was very comfortable. Something out of the ordinary was happening in Mary’s bedroom. But before we could identify what caused the tapping sounds in the room, we heard a loud shout from the living room where we had left Mary sitting. A scream of “GET THE FUCK OUT, YOU FUCKING WHOREMASTERS,” echoed throughout the apartment, apparently coming from where Mary was seated. We rushed into the living room and saw her slumped in her chair, mouth agape and staring into space. We were sure it was her making the sounds because we were in the room in an instant and there was no was anyone else could have entered. Her flesh was cold to the touch and a bit of drool slid down her chin. We called her name to get her attention, but she continued to stare so we shook her by her shoulders until we were able to rouse some consciousness in her. The entire room was now as cold as the bedroom and the smoke from all of our breathing was evident in the air. The parlor was filled with panic and an eerie sensation that both Silvana and I later agreed were like nothing we had ever before experienced. It was dreadful and lonely. It was like the feeling you get if you’re left alone at a wake and you’re the only person in the room with the body, Silvana said.

“Mary, Mary what’s wrong…what happened to you?” I asked her as Silvana rubbed her hand and wrist to help with her revival. She could barely speak but she told us that something had taken control of her and she could not be responsible for her actions. After a few calming minutes, she then began to tell us that since that day in the café, nothing has been the same. She felt as though she was cursed by some malevolent force that somehow entered her in the Velvet Room café, in the middle of the afternoon on an autumn day in Manhattan. Mary recounted how she went back to the café after the first episode in an effort to ease her mind and prove to herself that the panic attack she first experienced there was nothing more than some physical reaction to the trauma. But after only a few moments at the shop’s counter strange things began again. This time the brass antique espresso machine behind the counter erupted spurting hot coffee in the face of the waitress, and splashing onto Mary’s arm, nearly scalding her. Mary ran screaming from the café into the street sobbing hysterically as she walked home.

“But that’s not all, “ she continued. “The bad things got worse. I returned to the café for the third time and sat there for about ten minutes despite the shopkeeper, Mr. Langley’s, apprehension about me possibly causing another scene. My stay was fine for a short while. That was until my order was served. I asked for an orange muffin and hot chocolate with whipped cream, a dish that I have been fond of since I was a child. It always makes me feel secure, conjuring memories of my happy childhood. That was until the waitress placed my order on the table in front of me. I thought I was hallucinating because I saw the muffin jump…move a bit. When I lifted it there were literally hundreds of crawling, black, multi-legged silverfish insects stuck to the bottom of the muffin and squirming on the plate. I was at first transfixed by the horrible sight, not believing my eyes. My first reaction was to call for the waitress and complain but I couldn’t move. I was virtually paralyzed by the sickening creatures darting in and out of the muffin and jumping into my hot chocolate.” With that last statement Mary began to sob uncontrollably. “I need help. Something not of this world is cursing my life. Please, whatever you can do to free me I will appreciate. I’ve heard of poltergeists and possessions. I know I’m sane in every way, but no one takes me seriously. I turn to you to deal with what I believe is the unseen,” Mary said.

On our way back to our respective apartments, crowded in another damp, cold cab, Silvana and I agreed that Mary appeared as sane as she claimed and was very possibly the victim of a malevolent force. It is common knowledge among those who study human nature as it applies to curses and possessions, that if one believes ever so slightly in superstitions of any kind, their susceptibility to superstitious “suggestion” is always present. It was our job to discover if Mary was somehow contacted by someone, or exposed to something that set this ‘curse” mode in motion in her life. Or if in fact she was truly cursed. It was X-Investigations first case and it was a baffling one at that. Our first step was to visit the café the next day and witness the origin of Mary Montrose’s haunting.

We called Mr. Langley, the owner of the café earlier in the day but he said that the only time he had free was near clOccult Investigatorng around 11PM so if we wanted to meet we’d have to make it late. Silvana and I arrived just as the store clerk was about to lock the front door. Fortunately we saw Langley and asked the clerk to tell him who we were. He greeted us with some speculation, not understanding that we weren’t detectives looking to nail him on something, but paranormal investigators simply associated with a detective agency. But once we told him that we were hired by Mary he nodded and said, “Oh yes, the crazy lady who thinks my café is haunted.”

Langley described Mary’s experiences almost exactly as Mary did herself, without Mary’s description of internal terror. “Something really spooked that woman. We all just thought she was nuts, but I’ll admit there were bugs in her food and that’s very odd here because I keep an immaculate kitchen. It never happened before and it hasn’t happened since. And…she carried a bible with her the last time she was here. Guess it didn’t help. We thought she was odd but it got us thinking about Jeremy’s problem,” Langley said. “Jeremy’s problem?,” I asked. “Yeah, we had a worker here that used to close up the shop. He would say he saw strange things going on. You know, he saw shadows, things being moved without his knowledge, wispy smoke coming from the cellar door, crazy shit like that. But it didn’t happen all of the time so we just thought he was loony too,” Langley said.

“And, oh yeah, Jeremy said it all started when he found the old docket in the cellar filled with deeds for this place from the turn of the 18^th century.” I was about to ask to see the old papers when Silvana tightly grabbed my wrist and began whispering to me that she felt a presence in the room. I could see the sweat bead on her upper lip as she tried to control herself. She was squirming in her chair as Langley went on about the papers describing the original deeds and the voluminous amounts of legal documents. “They might be worth some money, huh?” Langley asked.

Silvana became more agitated. Her eyes were half-closed and her breathing increased so noticeably that Langley started to become alarmed. “Hey, what’s wrong with her?” he shouted. I told him that she was a clairvoyant and she was experiencing some kind of paranormal manifestation. “She’s being contacted or she’s becoming part of your ghost, Mr. Langley,” I said. During this disturbing episode, the Velvet Room café became cold…as cold as Mary’s bedroom the evening before. Now all three of our breaths were evident as smoky wisps. Langley turned pale as Silvana said to me in between gasps of air that we needed to leave the cafe and that she would explain when we left. At that very moment my cell phone rang. It was Mary Montrose. I answered to her screaming plea for help. She was crying that her apartment was literally seething with activity. The wall paintings were banging, drawers opening, the toilets were bubbling and backing up water on the floor and she was in fear of her life. I told her that we would be right over and not to call the police. I then rushed Silvana out of the café and told Langley we would be back. He simply stood there in a daze with a baffled and frightened look on his face. We heard him yelling as we left, “Is my café haunted? What the hell…”

On the ride over to Mary’s, Silvana told me that there was a force – a disturbed, vengeful presence – that was attempting to settle the score for itself. It is connected with the café and the old papers found in the cellar and somehow Mary is involved. Silvana warned me that the thing is at its final stages on this plane and whatever is to transpire is going to happen quickly. I only knew Silvana for a few days but I could see in her eyes that she was dead serious about whatever grasped her in the café. Until this point she was witty and often a bit sarcastic. Now, Silvana was truly troubled at what we were facing.

We expected to see a trashed apartment when we arrived at Mary’s, but we never expected to see Mary herself in such horrific condition. Her clothes were drenched in sweat, her hair was completely disheveled and her eyes were teary and bloodshot. The place stank as though old gym clothes were left in piles for days gathering mold and mildew. Mary too smelled of perspiration and could barely speak when we entered the apartment. She said that this was the worst event yet. After her home had been violently tossed by the bizarre eruptions, the entity appeared. “I saw terrible faces in the mirrors…they were sickly pale and looked at me with dreadful eyes. The cold stares were unbearable, I was paralyzed by the stares but I couldn’t move,” Mary said. Then she said that the thing actually spoke to her in full sentences. In an eerie moan that rang of despair and hatred it demanded that she pay for “the heinous heartache and damages of the whoremongers.” “It yelled at me. It said that I was the ‘caretaker of sorrow’ and that it was the Montrose’s who killed its family. It said it was a slave of the house, but did not deserve to lose its loved ones because of a greedy landholder,” Mary told us.

Silvana and I were extremely troubled and rendered speechless by what we heard. But at least now we had some clues. We left Mary’s assuring her that we would be able to help, and in fact as we left it occurred to me that whatever spooked Mary – even if it was her own imagination – it sounded as though there was a link between the café and Mary’s family that we could use to make sense out of this case. The use of the word “landholder,” stuck in my mind. I remember reading it used as New York slang in the late 18^th century to describe what we more commonly know as a “landlord,” or real estate owner. When I mentioned this to Silvana she suggested that we check the city records to see if the building that housed the Velvet Room café had any link to Mary’s family.

Sure enough, at the New York Building Department’s Bureau of Records in Manhattan we discovered the connection. Mary’s family, the Montroses, owned quite a bit of real estate on the east side of Manhattan and from what we could discern from the old records, one of her ancestors owned the very building plot that housed the café. After searching microfiche newspaper pages from that era we discovered that the Montrose House, as it was called, originally a refuge for the destitute, became a “bawdy house,” or brothel after its owner Murdoch Montrose evicted the shelter’s operator. It was reported that Montrose tossed the former tenants into the street who included a caretaker, his wife and six children. After some more digging we found newspaper accounts about the caretaker being arrested after he assaulted Murdoch Montrose in a street brawl. Apparently some of his children died as a result of their homelessness and the caretaker went berserk. We also discovered that the caretaker was later released from jail and returned to the brothel, violently confronted Murdoch once again and was ultimately shot dead by one of Murdoch’s henchmen. It was evident to us by the newspaper clippings that Murdoch’s motivation was obviously greed as the ghost had said to Mary. It was also evident that Mary Montrose was now suffering a curse levied on her ancestors over 200 years ago.

Now we knew that when Mary entered the Velvet Room café she set the spirit off. Somehow it knew she was a blood relative and it was determined to wreak revenge. We phoned Mary immediately and told her what we uncovered about her family’s involvement with the café and that if we could perform a ceremony, perhaps a séance or exorcism using Silvana as a medium, we could offer some kind of help to mend the Montrose curse and release the spirit. We thought it best to conduct the séance in the café itself and that we’d call Langley the next morning to set up an appointment for us to visit.

The cafe normally opened early to cater to the breakfast crowd but oddly enough no one answered the telephone when we called. When we tried three times later after 10AM and there was still no answer, Silvana and I decided to ride down to see Langley for ourselves. “It will be better to talk first to him directly about matters so strange,” Silvana said to me in her “AmeriCzech” accent.

But about three blocks away from the café we were trapped in traffic, not atypical for midtown Manhattan. But I didn’t like the look in Silvana’s eyes as we came to a dead stop. She turned her head toward me, and before she could utter a word I said, “Let’s get out and walk.” We started down the block and we could see the problem up ahead - fire trucks and emergency vehicles blocked the entire street. At first I thought, I hoped, that it wasn’t what I suspected. But Silvana’s walk, now turned into a trot, confirmed the worst. She was ahead of me yelling, “Robert, the café, it has burned down!”

We managed to find Langley, seriously distraught, and called him over to us outside of the fire lines. He said that his store mysteriously caught fire last evening and it was destroyed and that the building would probably have to be demolished. He rambled on about his losses and his business woes and then added, “And oh yeah, that crazy woman was by here this morning too. She just stared and smiled…nuts!”

Later we visited Mary and we were surprised to see her in good spirits. Actually, she was better than we had ever seen her. She of course knew that the café had burned down and said that she felt “relieved.” “You both made me realize the heartache my ancestors were responsible for and I am truly sorry. I believe that family’s past regressions were somehow purged in the flames of the fire last night. The ghost was obviously happy that the place burned down and I feel it will never bother me again. I sincerely thank you both for your compassion and help. And of course…please bill me whatever the cost.”

As Silvana and I turned to leave the apartment we were happy to know that at least Mary was now satisfied that the curse was lifted. But we couldn’t explain the coincidental burning of the store just when we were about to perform the exorcism and séance. We also couldn’t explain the sudden calm in Mary’s demeanor. Silvana, more than I, was particularly observant about Mary’s attitude and she told me that she was shocked to see that Mary wasn’t wearing the priceless initial “M” diamond brooch she wore constantly. She politely asked Mary where the brooch was because she was so fond of seeing it on her. Mary answered Silvana quite matter-of-factly; “Oh I think I may have lost it…perhaps at the café during one of my episodes. It was much too ostentatious anyway. It’s probably burned and lost in the fire now. I won’t miss it much. It’s a small price to pay for peace of mind. Wouldn’t you agree?” Mary asked smiling.

EPILOGUE

The cause of the Velvet Room café fire was never discovered, although according to New York Fire Department records, arson was not ruled out. Langley was not a suspect and insurance fraud was ruled out because there was no obvious motive – the business was doing well.

We phoned Mary Montrose some months later and asked if her paranormal experiences were truly over. She said everything was fine and she was completely free of any odd occurrences. She mentioned that she had contacted Langley about rebuilding on his now burned out lot. “Oddly enough,” she said, “Each time he planned to rebuild his business on the land something inevitably queered the operation. It didn’t surprise me however. So I’m investing and we agreed to build a community center. Langley’s happy with that. He told me that he could sleep nights again. Seems he was having some difficulty,” Mary said.