When the Ghost Screams

by Leslie Rule

  When psychics scrutinize the afterlife, they sometimes provide explicit details about ghosts, but even their insights aren’t certainties. We can study phenomena around a haunting but still have more questions than answers. I suspect that the only real ghost experts are ghosts themselves.

  Though I held my tongue and did not contradict my fellow speaker, I and other ghost re se arc hers have thick files on hauntings by killers.

  I wonder if the evil ones remain earthbound for the same reasons as the innocent. Are they confused or shocked or simply attached to this plane? Maybe murderers have an entirely different reason for staying.

  Maybe it is guilt.

  If conscience does not nibble at them in life, perhaps fear does in death. Are these stuck souls afraid to meet their maker? Perhaps when they were made of flesh and bone they dismissed the “afterlife” as a fairytale.

  Smug in the belief that judgment day would never arrive, they committed their crimes, hurting others for their own gain. What happens when death curls its cold fingers around a murderer? How does a killer react to finding himself without a body?

  Psychics and those who have had near-death experiences tell us of a brilliant light. To go to it, they say, is to be embraced by love. Does this same light shine for evil people? Does it offer them the same love?

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  This uncertainty could prompt a killer to turn away from the light, choosing instead to cower in the darkness.

  Most of us take comfort in stories of a peaceful light where our dead loved ones are waiting to greet us. But what if the dead ones waiting for you are your victims? Killers might not be anxious for such a reunion.

  When I imagine the heartless wraiths wandering the blackness of the despair they created, I muster a drop of pity for these wretched souls who are afraid of the light. Here are their stories.

  ”See Ya”

  Warren Bridge was a man filled with hate.

  His life of crime began when he became a burglar at age fifteen. At age nineteen on February 10, 1980, he and his accomplice, Robert Costa, walked into a Galveston, Texas, convenience store. As they robbed the store, Warren pointed his .38 pistol at the clerk, sixty-two-year-old Walter Rose, and pulled the trigger, shooting him four times.

  It was a painful battle between life and death for the victim, who died two weeks later, four days after the robbers were arrested in a drug raid on their motel room.

  Prison did not end Warren’s violent streak. Filled with anger, the young Caucasian racist proudly displayed a tattoo of a Confederate flag. His assaults on black prisoners landed him in more trouble.

  Despite the fact that Warren Bridge was sentenced to die, defense attorneys fought for his life and warded off the execution until November 23, 1994, when he was fed his last meal. He ate a double-meat cheeseburger, fish sticks, and peaches, and then was killed by lethal injection.

  Before he died, he nodded toward his stepfather and said, “See ya.”

  Warren had plenty of time to contemplate his death and say goodbye to his family. He once said, “I don’t want to be hanged or ride old Sparky. I’m not very fond of electricity. Just a plain bullet is cleaner somehow.”

  Walter Rose was given no choice. He did not get to pick a last meal or say long good-byes to his family. Warren Bridge took all of that away.

  I must admit it is hard to not be angry as I write about Warren Bridge. I don’t want to think of the killer stepping into the afterlife, free to roam. But because I received a letter from a woman who knew him well, I must entertain the idea.

  Prison Guard Lorie Hopper tried not to think about the evil committed by the inmates she watched. “I treated everyone with respect,” she confided. And the prisoners seemed to respect her for that.

  It was not, after all, her job to punish the men on death row. They were human beings who had made mistakes, and their fate was in the hands of the law.

  In her letter to me, Lorie wrote about her strange experience in 1994:

  After staying home sick from work one November evening, I woke abruptly on the couch with the distinct feeling someone had just leaned over me, kissed my forehead and whispered, “Thank you.”

  While I did not SEE anyone, there are some things that you just KNOW, and I KNEW that someone had been there.

  It was not a frightening experience. Just baffling. WHO was it?

  My first thought, naturally, was that it must have been my boyfriend. Unfortunately, he was sound asleep in our bedroom. Since we had argued earlier that evening, the “thank you” made no sense.

  When I returned to work the next day, I learned that while I was off work, an inmate had been executed. While I had previously known that Warren Bridge’s execution was scheduled, it did not cross my mind until that moment that HE might have been my mystery visitor.

  Several months later, I finally told my strange story to another officer, and I almost fell over when she told me she had experienced the same thing on the same night.

  If Warren Bridge did indeed visit his prison guards after his execution, it may have been just the first stop on a long road.

  In addition to those he had to thank, there were many waiting for his apologies.

  The Last Resort

  Are killers born or are they made? It is a huge question with no definitive answer, though experts find that a combination of the wrong genes and a traumatic childhood are usually factors when a person is without conscience.

  On February 29, 1956, a killer was born in Rochester, Michigan, though when nurses peered at the wrinkled newborn, they saw only a baby girl. Aileen Carol Pittman never knew the man who provided half her genes. Her father, child molester Leo Dale Pittman, hung himself in prison in 1969. Aileen’s troubled teenaged mother abandoned her, leaving allegedly abusive grandparents to raise her.

  A bad seed planted in poisoned earth, Aileen became a thief, a prostitute, and a murderer. In fact, Aileen Wuronos has been immortalized in books and movies, because she is not the typical female serial killer. Unlike other women killers who most often murder with poison, Aileen shot her seven male victims.

  Parts of the blockbuster movie Monster, starring Charlize Theron as the killer, were filmed in the Last Resort bar, Aileen’s hangout. Al Bulling, owner of the bar, played himself in the movie. He thinks that Aileen favored his tavern because of its proximity to a pawnshop where she sold the valuables that she stole from her victims.

  Al, who has owned the biker bar south of Daytona Beach, Florida, for two and a half decades, had felt a little sorry for the woman, who usually didn’t have a place to go when the bar closed down for the night. He often let her sleep in a trailer out behind the bar.

  Much of Aileen’s saga had centered on the tavern, including her arrest. In January 1991, undercover officers posed as bikers and lured the killer out the front door of the bar, where she was surrounded by police.

  Aileen’s execution on October 9, 2002, has not stopped her from visiting the Last Resort. “She’s still here,” Al told me, explaining that she made her presence known moments after her death, when the bar was crowded with reporters who had gathered there to watch news of the execution on TV. A tub of knives suddenly leapt off of a shelf as startled witnesses gasped.

  “She always said that she would be back,” said Al.

  Bartender Kelley Pleis told me that she, too, has experienced odd things at the bar, such as the quiet afternoon she was alone there. “Business had been slow, so I was reading,” she said. Suddenly, the jukebox turned itself on. “It came on full blast,” she said. “There was no explanation for it.”

  Eeriest of all are the breezeless days when the back door suddenly bursts open. As Al watches and waits, the hairs on the back of his arms stand at attention. He knows what is coming. The television suddenly switches channels, and then in the seconds it takes the invisible presence to walk across the room, the front door abruptly opens.

  It is as if Aileen Wuornos is walking the path she walked in the days she cam
ped out back.

  Whenever the presence bursts through the back door, Al tries to remain nonchalant. As Aileen’s unseen hands change the TV channels, Al asks, “Who pissed you off this time, Aileen?”

  Ghosts in the News

  Ghostly Hostess

  THE GHOST OF RUTH ELLIS has been seen walking through a locked door in Caesars nightclub in Streatham, London, according to the November 4, 2005, edition of the Streatham Guardian.

  Ruth was a petite 103 pounds, mother of two, and just twenty-eight years old. She was also a convicted murderer and the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom. She shot and killed her boyfriend, David Blakely, twenty-five, in the parking lot outside of a pub on Easter Sunday 1955.

  Ruth and David had a tumultuous relationship, marked by jealously and abuse. The judicial process was swift, and Ruth was executed three months after an off-duty officer found her standing over David with a smoking gun in her hand. Hanged at Holloway Prison, her body was buried there, but her spirit apparently broke free, returning to a place with more innocent memories.

  Her haunting of Caesars has the staff rattled. Club owner Fred Batt told a reporter, “I’ve heard a scream and so have members of my staff. It’s very loud and high-pitched. I shivered the first time I heard it.”

  Ruth Ellis worked as a hostess in the building in 1946 when the place was called The Locarno. Today, employees refuse to set foot in the spookier area of the building. Batt told a reporter, “Even I won’t go into the club by myself.”

  Locked Inside the Gray

  Prisons are another place where killers roam decades after their flesh has turned to dust. Many haunted prisons no longer cage inmates. They have been turned into museums, where tourists wander freely from cell to tiny cell and try to imagine what it must have been like to be locked inside the gray.

  The cold steel doors stand open, and the heavy keys are simply interesting relics. Yet those who were once trapped sometimes remain. It is as if they don’t see the way out. Both the guilty and the innocent linger behind the bars of the following prisons and jails.

  Deadly Silence

  When the Quakers thought up a unique way of rehabilitating inmates, they certainly did not imagine that their tactics would drive the prisoners insane. A peaceful people, they believed that their methods would send criminals along the right path. Put a man in an isolated cell, they figured, and he would have plenty of time to contemplate his wrongdoing.

  To accomplish complete isolation, they built the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century with a modern feature that even the White House did not yet enjoy—private flushing toilets. There would be no camaraderie in a common restroom, no “good morning” or, “Please pass the toilet paper.”

  Each cell had its own toilet, so there was no need to venture out.

  Meals were delivered by unseen attendants who slid the trays beneath the cold doors with never a word spoken. The isolation was indeed complete.

  A few lucky prisoners captured mice to tame for pets. Everyone else was all alone.

  The suffering began on October 25, 1829, when the first inmate entered the castle-like structure. In addition to the loneliness, prisoners endured cruel punishment at the direction of Warden Samuel Wood. Inmates who were caught making noise were led outside in freezing temperatures, stripped naked, and doused with ice water.

  Lonely prisoners lived long, sad lives in total isolation at Eastern State Pen. (Leslie Rule)

  Every nook and cranny of the Eastern State Penitentiary hides secrets. (Leslie Rule)

  The tiny padlock on this old door could not have stopped the tough men once housed at Eastern State Penitentiary. (Leslie Rule)

  top: Tour guides of Eastern State Penitentiary shiver at the sound of evil cackling here. (Leslie Rule) above: Eastern State Penitentiary, once known as Cherry Hill, was a formidable prison that drove the toughest men to tears. (Leslie Rule)

  In 1833, prisoner Matthias Maccumsey was punished with the iron gag. The horrible contraption of iron and chains was inserted into his mouth and fastened so tightly that if he moved just slightly, he would suffer unbearable pain. Though the device was not designed to be fatal, it killed Matthias.

  Inmates, desperate to escape, dug tunnels, scaled walls, and swam through rat-infested sewers. In 1925, prisoner James Gordon escaped by hiding in a truck full of hot ashes. He was free for a year before being apprehended in Los Angeles.

  When infamous gangster Al Capone was jailed at Eastern, he claimed that the specter of James Clark haunted him. Shot and killed during Chicago’s black Valentine’s Day Massacre, the angry ghost apparently blamed Al, who could be heard shrieking, “Leave me alone!”

  When I visited the prison-turned-museum, employees told me that they’ve seen shadowy figures darting in and out of the cells. The most haunted area, they said, are the cells where the meanest criminals were housed. When witnesses hear evil cackling emanating from the dense stone walls, they don’t stick around to see who is laughing.

  Statues of the white cats that once roamed the old prison grounds of Eastern State Penitentiary are placed throughout the popular tourist attraction. (Leslie Rule)

  ————

  EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

  2124 Fairmount Avenue

  Philadelphia, PA 19130

  (215) 236-3300

  www.easternstate.org

  The Rock

  Alcatraz is widely acclaimed as a haunted island. “The Rock” is today a tourist destination for those visiting San Francisco and is most famous for its past as a prison for hard-core criminals.

  Paranormal investigator Mollie Stewart discovered a range of ghostly activity there. Unseen hands open and shut the doors to cells, and the eerie sound of a harmonica floats from nowhere. “It is an extremely haunted site,” she said.

  While many witnesses believe the earthbound spirits belong to the killers once imprisoned there, they are not aware of a tragic episode that occurred on the island long before it caged the worst of the worst.

  At one time, the island was a military base, and it was during this era when a sad human drama played out. While scrutinizing newspaper archives, I unearthed a skeleton that was buried so long ago that it has been forgotten.

  Surgeon William Dietz was a captain in the military who lived on the island with his wife, Ella, and their child. On January 28, 1891, Captain Deitz did something terrible. He shot and killed his wife and then turned the rifle on himself, leaving his eight-year-old an orphan. The horrific murder-suicide certainly accounts for some of the paranormal activity at Alcatraz.

  Alcatraz is an island in the San Francisco Bay

  ————

  Ferries leave from Pier 41

  FISHERMAN’S WHARF

  San Francisco, CA

  Tickets: (415) 705-5555

  www.nps.gov/alcatraz/

  Deadly Redemption

  Recognizable to movie fans as the set for The Shawshank Redemption and many other films, the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield was filled with drama long before actors such as Tim Robbins ever set foot on the gloomy grounds.

  Since the Ohio prison opened in 1896, its impenetrable walls have witnessed suicides, deadly prison breaks, riots, and horrible accidents.

  The real-life haunted prison is turned into a staged haunted prison during Halloween season. Actors play ghostly killers, strategically placed lights casts eerie shadows, and spooky sounds emanate from cobwebbed corners. But sometimes it is hard to tell what is pretend and what is real, for the screaming continues after the actors have gone home, the special effects are turned off, and the place is buttoned up for the night.

  A scent of flowery perfume wafts from nowhere on the third floor of the administration building. Staff credit it to the gentle spirit of Helen Glattke, who once lived on the prison grounds with her husband, Chief Arthur Glattke.

  Poor Helen met her fate on a quiet Sunday morning in November 1950. According to November 7 editions of Ohio new
spapers, the forty-one-year-old mother of two was getting dressed when she reached up on a high shelf for her jewelry box. Helen’s fingers curled around her husband’s .32-caliber automatic pistol, a defective weapon that often jammed. This morning it was in her way, and as she tried to move it, it slipped from her grasp, discharging as it fell.

  A bullet pierced her left upper lung, and she later died at General Hospital. The saddest thing of all was that she did not get to see nine-year-old Teddy and thirteen-year-old Arthur Jr. grow up. It is somehow comforting to know that her spirit is sensed in the administration building and not in the shadowy places where the evil wraiths roam.

  Some say they have witnessed Helen’s shadowy shape and even felt her soft touch as she caresses their faces and shoulders.

  ————

  OHIO STATE REFORMATORY

  100 Reformatory Road

  Mansfield, OH 44905

  (419) 522-2644

  www.mrps.org

  Haunted Cage

  A former warehouse turned museum in London, England, seems to be brimming with restless ghosts. After employees experienced phenomena there, the Paranormal Search and Investigation team checked it out, and both their psychics and their electronic equipment picked up on entities.

  A hostile energy on the third floor near the gibbet cage spooked the group. The gibbet cage was used to display the dead bodies of pirates in the 1700s. The lawbreakers’ lives of plundering and violence came to an end when they were captured and hung on Execution Dock in Wapping, a section of London.

  The grisly sight of the executed pirates was meant to serve as a warning to others who might be tempted to become outlaws of the sea.

  While the bodies of the dead pirates are dust in the wind, their angry souls apparently still cling to the cage that showcased their public humiliation.

  ————

  MUSEUM IN DOCKLANDS