It was hard to keep Mike in frame. He was in the front seat of the SUV and I was stuck in the back with the boxes of equipment. That's the disadvantage of being the junior guy on the team. That, and the fact that my sister Emily, the one in the passenger seat, was Mike's girlfriend and they didn't want to seem like they were playing favorites. The biggest problem for the moment was the bumpy dirt road we were heading down.
Mike turned back to everybody in the back seat, and me in the cargo area. "We're almost there," he said.
I was sure he wasn't going to show up well on the video. We were headed west and it was a little after five o'clock in late October. Only another hour till sundown and all the lighting was going to be tricky. If I could keep from pointing my camera straight into the sun, I should be able to get some good high-contrast shots.
It was Emily's turn to talk to everybody. "Everybody knows your job. Alpha Team will cover the house. Beta Team will cover the barn. Remember there's no plumbing, no electricity, and the place is likely to collapse and kill us all before the night's over, so be careful."
She didn't seem very enthused, something that has been happening in the more recent investigations.
The members of the Beta Team were the ones in the back seat. Danny Hopkins, Mike's best friend from college, was the leader. Sarah Lynch was Danny's girlfriend. Even with their heavy coats they managed to snuggle close together enough that I could video the rest of the trip. Not snuggling with them was their camera guy, Max McDermot. He was a lot older than me, about thirty-two, I think. He had a couple of jobs and did video stuff on the side. He wasn't a film student like me.
Emily went on, "It's supposed to get down into the low fifties tonight, with a west wind. Make sure you stay bundled. If you get too cold, get back to the van to warm up. We don't need any icicles tonight."
The van she mentioned was still behind us, probably. Looking through the rear window of the SUV, I mostly just saw the dust we were kicking up. A darker spot said the van was still there. The Tech Team, just Matt and Fleet, had the van with all the recording and communication equipment. They would keep a remote eye on all of us through the night and keep a warm place with plenty of coffee.
As we crested the hill, I tried to focus in beyond the windshield and past Mike and Emily to see where we were going. It looked like it was probably a more complete farm at one time, but now was just a house and barn. There was a line of trees along the west edge of the yard; they were going to provide some great imagery before the sun set. A driveway joined the road next to a headless mailbox post.
Mike slowed down to make the turn, following the dirt driveway up to the house. I fought to keep from tipping off my box. The van pulled up behind.
The Historical Society had sent pictures of the house, but it looked much worse in person. Someone had broken all the glass from the windows. The old paint pulled away leaving just gray wood. Vandals replaced some of the paint with graffiti in basic colors around the ground floor. This was going to look great on video.
Everyone started their climb out of the vehicles. I popped the rear hatch of the SUV and crawled out the back. Even if I was the youngest, sitting on boxes the whole way made me feel like an old man. I stretched and watched as the Beta Team headed back toward the van.
Mike and Emily stood at the passenger-side front door. That usually meant they wanted some privacy. It was a good time for me to get some shots of the surroundings to set the mood. For the investigations, I was the camera operator for Mike and Emily, the Alpha Team. It kind of reminded me of the Jimmy Olsen character from the Superman comics, like I was just tagging along with Mike's Clark Kent and Emily's Lois Lane. Every once in a while, I was tempted to interject, "Super duper!" just to see if they'd notice.
The cold air wouldn't show up but the wind blowing the remaining leaves would. I turned up the audio gain to make sure I got the wind noise. With the trees mostly barren, and the harvested corn field in the background, this was going to give one of those feelings of desolation. You know, that feeling like you were suddenly all alone in a void and you really need to find your way back to the real world before you cease to exist. The scent of decaying leaves helped in person, but the camera left that out.
"This has got to be the last one," Emily whispered.
"I know," said Mike. "It's just hard."
"What's so hard?" Emily said back. "Nobody is going to take me seriously as an accountant if they find out I hunt ghosts on the weekend. I can't keep doing this."
"But, we already got all the equipment and Danny is really into it. I can't just abandon Danny."
"But you want me to abandon a career? All my plans for the future? What happens if we have kids, huh? You want to drag them out to places like this to see if they can survive?"
Mike looked around for a moment trying to come up with a response. "Yeah, well, what about Josh? He seems to get a lot out of this camera work. It's good experience for him."
"Josh? Are you kidding? He would probably film a clock in black and white and call it avant garde or something. He doesn't need this."
I would have been annoyed at her suggestion if it wasn't a little too on the nose. I actually thought about doing that a semester ago when I couldn't think of a film project for a class.
Anyway, it was the same argument they had been having for a few months. I knew my sister, and she was getting to the end of her rope. I really liked Mike, but he was not going to win this one. Anyway, not officially any of my business.
Paying attention to the camera again, I scanned across the yard, having to step away from the SUV to get a better angle. That seemed to end Emily and Scott's little discussion.
Part of the yard looked rough. I guessed it was probably a garden at one point. It was a rectangle that was little more weedy than the rest, but it all looked brown and dead. Further back, two t-shaped, rusty poles stood, all that was left of a clothes line.
Panning back toward the house, I saw the man walk out the door.
"Uh, guys," I said to Mike and Emily. When they looked my way, I nodded toward the man.
He was some old dude, probably in his sixties or early seventies, and he was big. He wore one of those red plaid coats like you see in old nineteen-fifties Christmas movies. His cheeks were a little chubby, but there was some sort of sterness like he used to be a cop or something. With his long legs, it didn't take him long to reach Mike and offer up a hand to shake.
Mike shook his hand and said, "Hi, we're from Pedersen-Hopkins Investigations. I'm Mike Pederesen."
"People just call me 'Bub'. Come on; I'll show you the house." He turned and started back toward the door.
We followed, Mike first then Emily. I trailed and tried to keep everybody in frame without tripping over anything.
As we headed toward the house, a yellow blur zipped by in the yard, headed for the garden.
Emily called back toward the van, "Matt, can you get Rumples? He's headed out behind the house."
Rumples was the eight-year-old golden retriever with the team. She belonged to Danny, but on investigations she was the responsibility of the Tech Team. Her main job was finding animals in places they weren't supposed to be. She was really good at it. Before Danny got her, she was a cadaver dog, the kind law enforcement people use to find bodies. With age, her hips went bad, so they retired her.
"All that's left is the barn and the house these days," Bub said as we headed up the porch steps. "The Rumpe family held it for almost a hundred years. Jacob Rumpe, he was the first disappearance. That was back in the prohibition era, so disappearances weren't such a big deal back then."
The Historical Society had mentioned a few disappearances. That was part of the reason people thought the place was haunted.
I panned across the porch, partly for some artistic footage and partly because it may show signs of the animal activity that contributes so many of the noises of hauntings. It was made of wood slats across beams that sat on a stone foundation. I learned a lot about buildings since I started helping on these little excursions.
The roof of the porch sagged against the pillars, but didn't look like it was going to fall any time soon. I moved around slowly to make sure all the graffiti was readable. People always wanted to know if markings were satanic or ritualistic or something. They were mostly the scrawl of some idiots who giggled because they were painting on someone else's walls. Just a few less brain cells and those people would smear their feces on everything.
The frame of the door stood empty. Rust spots marked where screws or nails used to hold the door. I adjusted my camera because it was in the late day sun and the opening was really dark.
Bub crossed the threshold, so we followed.
The old man continued his tour. "After Jacob went away, the farm passed to his cousin. It went through a couple of generations after that. In nineteen-seventy-two, John Rumpe moved in with his wife Mary. They planned to build the farm up to its prior glory."
Once inside, our eyes and my camera adjusted to the lower light level. I started my shots. Vandals tore the old wall paper and knocked holes in the lath walls. Sarah, our resident construction person, taught me that the insulation behind those was a great home for vermin.
Like outside, graffiti covered everything.
To the right, on the outside western wall, stairs went up to a balcony on the second floor. I remembered that many of these old houses were built on a four-square plan and would have had another room above the one we were in. This one was very airy with the open space. I turned to get the second floor windows in the shot. They would let in more light, even though they faced north.
"This was the dining room," Bub said. Apparently, they liked it big. Some people report seeing hauntings. They don't see things that happen in this room, they see things while they're in this room."
"What sort of things do they experience?" Emily asked. I noticed she wasn't standing very close to Mike. That made it harder to keep them both in frame.
"Let me show you," he said. He turned to the room to the east.
I rushed ahead to get a shot of the whole room and then be able to catch Mike and Emily's expressions as they came in. It pays to be a cinema student.
This one was as trashed as the dining room. Two windows opened to the north and another two to the east. Out of the east ones, I could see the barn. For one of the east windows, the sash weight hung against the wall, dangling by the remains of its rope.
I expected the room to smell musty, but it carried the same autumn air as the outside.
Bub waived around. "This was the parlor. People say they hear moaning and scuffling in here, like maybe somebody was fighting."
Any evidence of an assault was long gone. They say, though, that violent episodes lead to those residual hauntings, you know, like an emotional recording that plays back. It could be that sort of thing. It could also be drunk people hearing boards creak.
"They speculate that it may have something to do with John and Mary. They were the other disappearances," Bub went on.
Mike reached out to tap me on the shoulder. "Make sure we get cameras, separate sound recorders, and EMF meters all over this room."
I nodded, like I didn't already know how to do my job. We needed different equipment not just to get various angles, but we wanted different technology. The ghost hunters believe that spirits can interact with different wavelengths of energy, so one device might catch something another would not. The EMF meters just measure the electromagnetic fields that ghosts give off. It helps that they also pick up on shoddy wiring, which a house with no electricity should not have.
Bub led them into the room to the south. "This was John and Mary's bedroom. People say you can hear a woman screaming and the sounds of someone being dragged into the parlor, but in the parlor, it stops suddenly. But that's where it gets strange."
Most of this was standard haunting, but Bub knew how to tell it. No wonder the Historical Society sent him out. The "gets strange" part caught everybody's attention. I was lucky that Mike and Emily's faces were in frame to catch their expressions.
"You see," Bub continued, "they say it's like a woman screaming and being dragged. But when the woman stops screaming, they think the recording keeps playing back, just without her."
You could tell that Mike was starting to wonder about this. Could this be their first real haunting? Every investigation so far had been animals in the attic or loose boards, or something else they could explain away. That's how he and Emily met, when he found the raccoons in the crawlspace of our mom's house. I watched as he looked over to see if Emily shared his interest.
She didn't.
Bub led us back through the parlor and dining room to the kitchen. The remains of a sink and cabinets clung to the walls, but the room was otherwise trashed. Near the lower cabinets, little bits of linoleum still stuck to the floor, but most had been ripped to the wood.
The back door opening stood just as empty as the front. From the windows, I saw the clothesline poles.
"They put indoor plumbing in back in the forties and then updated it in the sixties. They also switched the wood stove to propane. I don't know of anybody experiencing anything in here, but down there is a different story." The old man pointed to an opening with a set of stairs leading down.
The stairs to the cellar sat below the stairs leading to the second floor. It looked dark and I didn't remember seeing any windows around the foundation of the house. Even if there were, the sun was already getting low in the sky. I turned on the light on my camera.
The big man made it down safely, so we probably could too. Mike and Emily each dug a flashlight out of their vest pockets. This time, I was going to film from behind; art versus freaky basement.
Unlike the dryness of the rest of the house, the cellar stank of must and moisture. The steps and walls were made of cut stone. It was a cramped space, only half the size of the kitchen. Bub had to duck to fit and the rest of us crouched just out of instinct.
"This was the old fruit cellar," he said. "There used to be shelves bolted to the walls but they aren't here anymore. You won't see any graffiti down here. Don't know why this gets left alone, but nobody wants to be here. It could be the light or the smell. Anyway, people say they don't like it."
I panned around a little more. Our lights glinted off moisture on the stones. Small, rusty holes showed where the shelves used to be bolted in place. I decided to look to the floor to see if any of the old wood remained. That's when I noticed that the floor was just packed dirt.
"Let's head back up," Bub said. He went back up the stairs and we followed as quickly as we could. Why we followed quickly was a mystery, but it seemed like the thing to do.
He took us through the kitchen and back to the dining room, and then up the stairs, stopping on the balcony.
Mike and Emily stood close to where Bub stopped. I stood at the top of the stairs so I could keep the camera on them.
"This is the one that really scares people, probably because the story has an official record."
"There's an official record of a haunting?" Emily asked.
Bub smiled and shook his head. "No," he said, "there's an official record of the violence." He patted the balcony railing firmly with his hand.
"Shortly after the last disappearance, Mary Rumpe's uncle came to see what was going on. He was a retired G-Man. That's what they used to call federal agents back then. Anyway, he was snooping around but nobody knew about his law enforcement past. A couple of men, probably responsible for the disappearances, decided to get rid of him too."
"It was a neighbor, George somebody, and his buddy, a corrupt deputy named Pitman, who came over. They tried to hang the G-Man. They had his suicide note in hand before they even got here. They probably would have gotten away with it but they got a surprise."
The old man paused and looked into the distance through the second floor windows.
I thought, this has got to be the best storyteller in the whole Historical Society and I needed to learn some of his craft.
After his dramatic pause, Bub continued. "The G-Man had some buddies from the Bureau coming for a visit. They showed up, two carloads of them, while the struggle went on. The G-Man shouted for help, his buddies came in, and there was a shootout. The bad guys died right here where we're standing."
Mike and Emily instinctively stepped back, their eyes drawn to the floor. Their expressions clearly that of shock and a little fear and I got it all on video. Super duper!
Bub gave them a moment to recover, a slight grin on his face. "Nobody figured out if those men had anything to do with John and Mary's disappearances, or where the couple went. That's why it's all a mystery."
He motioned toward the stairs suggesting they should head down.
"Since then," he went on, "the place has been deserted. It was a crime scene for a while. Then relatives took over the fields but didn't use the farmstead. They tried to rent the house, but nobody would stay. Eventually the last heir passed and the county took ownership of the property. They sold the fields but the house and barn sat unwanted. Now it's all condemned as dangerous, so they're going to tear it down and make it into fields as well. It'll all be nothing but a memory."
I could see Mike looking around. He usually did that when finishing with a guide to see if there are any other questions he can think of.
"Why's the Historical Society interested in the house? I'm sure they had some reason to call us?" Mike asked.
Bub smiled like he knew something, but then decided to answer with something else. "Well, they just want to wrap up the stories of the hauntings and maybe have something interesting in their little museum and newsletter. If you folks can find something to liven things up a bit, I'm sure it would be appreciated."
"Well, thank you," Mike said. "I guess we'll start setting up. The sun will be down soon.
Emily held up her hand for attention. "Bub, I didn't see a car when we pulled up. Are you ok to get home?"
"I'm fine," Bub answered. "My place is very close. Thanks for asking, though."
Somewhere outside, Rumples barked at something.