Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers
Page 1
OTHER BOOKS BY LOREN W. CHRISTENSEN
The following are available on Amazon, from their publishers, and through the usual book outlets. Signed copies can be purchased at LWC Books, www.lwcbooks.com
Street Stoppers
Fighting In The Clinch
Fighter’s Fact Book
Fighter’s Fact Book 2
Solo Training
Solo Training 2
Solo Training 3
Speed Training
The Fighter’s Body
Total Defense
The Mental Edge
The Way Alone
Far Beyond Defensive Tactics
Fighting Power
Crouching Tiger
Anything Goes
Winning With American Kata
Total Defense
Riot
Warriors
On Combat
Warrior Mindset
Deadly Force Encounters
Surviving Workplace Violence
Surviving A School Shooting
Gangbangers
Skinhead Street Gangs
Hookers, Tricks And Cops
Way Of The Warrior
Skid Row Beat
Defensive Tactics
Missing Children
Fight Back: Self-Defense For Women
Extreme Joint Locking
Timing In The Martial Arts
Fighter’s Guide to Hard-Core Heavy Bag Training
The Brutal Art Of Ripping, Poking And Pressing Vital Targets
How To Live Safely In A Dangerous World
Fighting The Pain Resistant Attacker
Evolution Of Weaponry
Meditation For Warriors
Mental Rehearsal For Warriors
Prostate Cancer
Cops' True Stories Of The Paranormal
Fiction
Dukkha: The Suffering
Dukkha: Reverb
Dukkha: Unloaded
Dukkha: Hungry Ghosts
DVDs
Solo Training
Fighting Dirty
Speed Training
Masters And Styles
Vital Targets
The Brutal Art of Ripping, And Pressing Vital Targets
Restraint and Control Strategies
COPS' TRUE STORIES OF THE PARANORMAL
GHOSTS, UFOS, AND OTHER SHIVERS
LOREN W. CHRISTENSEN
Copyright © 2016 Loren W. Christensen
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the author.
All rights reserved
To those men and women who don’t call 911
They are 911
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A big hug to my wonderful wife, Lisa, for her encouragement and for taking the photos sprinkled throughout this book.
A manly hug to my friend Kevin Faulk for eyeballing the manuscript for typos and other errors.
A huge thanks to the men and women that contributed their experiences to this text. Stay safe out there.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
TERMINOLOGY
SECTION ONE: ON PATROL
VANISHED
TRAPPED
EYES
DEAD MAN WALKING
DEAD MAN’S CANE
A TOUCH OF THANKS
THE SNITCH
THE COUPLE
THE WARNING
THE LIGHT
WRONG NUMBER
ON PATROL IN THE NEWS
SECTION TWO: HAUNTED PLACES
JAILS AND PRISONS
GHOST PRISONER
TOWER 7
THE ETERNALLY CARING NURSE
SOME STAYED BEHIND
THE DRAWING
HOSPITALS
NURSE BETTY, THE “HAINT”
HOSPITAL MORGUE
OTHER HAUNTED PLACES
COFFEE AND CUPS
THE STABBER
THE FACELESS MANNEQUIN
WHITE EAGLE
THE MAN IN THE WINDOW
STRANGE PLACE
FOREST LAWN CEMETERY
HAUNTED PLACES IN THE NEWS
SECTION THREE: DIVINE INTERVENION AND DEMONS
SCRATCHES
A SIGN IN TWISTED METAL
THE VOICE
HE PULLED THE TRIGGER FOUR TIMES
DIVINE INTERVENTION IN THE NEWS
SECTION FOUR: UFOS
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SECOND KIND
UFOS AND COW MUTILATIONS IN THE NEWS
CONCLUSION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
At first cock-crow
The ghosts must go
Back to their quiet graves below
~Theodosia Garrison, "The Neighbors"
INTRODUCTION
Cops, corrections officers, military police, and security people see life differently than those outside of law enforcement. Depending on the job and location, some see more madness, tragedy, bloody violence, and man’s inhumanity to man in a month than most people experience in a lifetime. People on the job have been there, done that, seen it all, heard it all, and experienced it all.
Because they are lied to on a daily basis, people in law enforcement have a fine tuned b.s. detector. Even rookies quickly understand the two primary rules in law enforcement.
Rule 1: Everyone lies.
Rule 2: See Rule 1.
“I don't trust people, they tend to lie. Evidence never lies.” Gil Grissom, CSI.
Law enforcement people trust the evidence. Experienced officers know how crooks think and they know how bad guys operate when committing certain crimes. They recognize the pattern of street drug sales, residential burglaries, armed robberies, sexual assaults, gang graffiti, mass shootings, and so on. Yes, there are variations in all of these areas, but there are certain basics that help officers know immediately or very soon thereafter what they are looking at.
That said, ever so often something happens that doesn’t fall neatly into a category in which cops typically function, nor does it fall into any of the unusual situations that occur from time to time in law enforcement. No, these are events that go beyond the unusual. These are aberrations, oddities, and the eerie that cannot be put into any logical box.
As a result, it confuses, it causes anxiety, stress, and often leaves the officer feeling alone. To tell others about the aberration is to invite teasing, ridicule, and an even greater sense of feeling isolated from peers. People in law enforcement are no different than the general population in that they have their doubters, disbelievers, and scorners. That is, until something happens to the disbelievers. As paranormal investigator Jim Pace of Sooner Paranormal of Oklahoma says, “I love to take skeptics along [on an investigation]. The difference between a believer and a skeptic is personal experience.”
The men and women who tell their stories in this book did so for whatever personal reasons they had. Although I never asked, I got the impression from some that they were happy to have an outlet—no doubt after living in silence for so long—where they could tell their strange tale(s).
I have included incidents that happened to me. In one story, titled “Close Encounters of the Second Kind,” I tell of how dozens of Army missile specialists, and my military police buddies and I worked around UFOs for several weeks. While I’ve told friends and family about it over the decades, I’ve never before written about it. Will I get ridiculed? Probably. But I felt telling it was more important than worrying about what others think, especially those who haven’t experience anything.
Perhaps that is why som
e of the other writers came forward.
My role in this book
I’m not an investigator of the paranormal and supernatural. I consider myself an interested party, a reporter. I have had experiences as I relate in these pages but I wasn’t investigating such things when they happened. I was simply going through the motions of my job when caught flatfooted.
Such was the case with other cops, deputies, MPs, security officers, and correction officers who tell their stories within.
My minor “investigative” experience
I did have a brief investigative foray into things that go bump in the night, but not as a cop.
A few years ago, my agent talked to me about writing a book on Ghost Hunters, the long running TV program. The deal eventually went away, but not before my wife and I read a ton of books, watched DVDs, videos, attended a meeting with ghost hunters, and made a few excursions—armed with digital cameras and an audio recording device—into cemeteries, mausoleums, and old houses.
When notorious bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he continued robbing banks after he had been caught so many times, he answered with a shrug, “Because that’s where the money is.” We thought we would begin our investigation in the most logical places: cemeteries and mausoleums because, well, that’s where the dead people are. The argument against this idea is that spirits wouldn’t hang out where they are buried; they would seek out their loved ones or remain in places they enjoyed. My wife and I knew this theory but we wanted to start out slowly and get some experience at using our limited equipment.
We began in a mausoleum so large it had its own weather pattern. Maybe not, but it seemed like it, anyway. It was a sprawling complex built on the side of a large hill, with three stories above ground and three or four below. There were thousands of deceased in the place, most resting in marble covered drawers and the others in glass-encased urns. The place was dead quiet, to use an obvious descriptor, except for a mysterious sound of water trickling from somewhere and the occasional echoing footsteps of visitors, living, and perhaps, otherwise.
We spent an afternoon walking about snapping pics in hopes of capturing orbs, and sitting for long periods with a listening device while asking the room questions like, “Is there anyone here that would like to talk with us?” We didn’t capture an image of an orb, nor did we get an EVP, electronic voice phenomenon (see “Terminology” page). We even enhanced our recordings on a laptop.
The mausoleum had an incredibly thick atmosphere with a profound silence that reminded us how loud was our respective tinnitus. There was something immediately compelling about the place, as well as off-putting. Before we knew it, we had spent three hours inside, though we had only explored a fraction of the place.
So we went back the next week.
This time we stayed about 90 minutes. We didn’t have a set time for the visit and we might have stayed longer, but we both suddenly began feeling awful. My wife became deeply fatigued, so much so she just wanted to sleep on one of the marble benches. I abruptly grew angry, extremely so. All the way home, I thought about pulling motorists out of cars and beating them into paste. Our intense feelings came on simultaneously and for no apparent reason.
The trip from the mausoleum to our house took about 40 minutes. After pulling into the driveway, we remained in the car, both of us too drained to get out. Also, we wondered if it was a good idea to go into the house carrying with us whatever we had brought home. So we sat in the driveway. We had a function to go to that night but we gave serious thought to cancelling, though the tickets were expensive.
Happily, we slowly began to recover from whatever had hitched onto us. My wife’s energy returned and so did my usual happy-go-lucky self, though we still felt a tad out of sorts. We eventually got out of the car and went to the symphony, but we agreed we would not return to the stadium-sized mausoleum—ever.
We also took three ghost tours: Victoria, Canada, San Francisco, and the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. They were all fun and atmospheric, but only the Queen Mary gave us experiences. When we entered the ship’s long-empty swimming pool area, my wife’s movie camera immediately ceased to work. We were told this extremely haunted area of the ship regularly sucked the life out of visitors’ electronic instruments. Rattling us even more was that the camera began working again the moment we left the area.
We also felt a dramatic temperature change in two different places. The tour guide called them a vortex, an opening to the other side. Whatever they were, they were small enough to move our hands in and out of.
Some time after our negative experience at the large mausoleum we decided to give another one a try. It was a smaller building, one level, and shaped like an L. It was a typical mausoleum, mostly grey marble, cool, and with sporadic flowers sticking out from wall mounts. And silence. There’s quiet and then there’s mausoleum quiet.
I didn’t bring the EVP recorder but Lisa had the digital and was strolling about snapping pics in an effort to capture an elusive orb. She took dozens without success—except for one photo.
We separated at one point; she was around the corner in one leg of the L and I, having lost interest in spirit hunting, was reading the names and dates on the many drawers. At one point, I sat down on a bench lost in thought; the only sound was my wife’s camera clicking away in the distance.
Suddenly I felt quite cold. The temperature seemed to have instantaneously dropped 10 or 15 degrees. I looked all around for an air vent, but I didn’t find one, or any other source of the drop in temperature. Besides, it didn’t feel like the cold produced by a fan or an air conditioner. It felt, I don’t know. Different.
I could hear my wife’s camera clicks growing louder as she approached the corner from the other long hall. I sat motionless, almost afraid to move. I kept watching the corner waiting for her to round it. Finally, there she was, snapping merrily at anything and everything.
“What?” she whispered, apparently seeing the look on my face.
“Take. My. Picture.” I said, sans lip movement like a ventriloquist, so as not to disturb … I didn’t know what.
“Cold spot,” I managed.
She quickly raised the digital and snapped one photo. It would be the only picture out of all the ones she took that day, and the other two days at the big mausoleum, to depict a large orb—hovering by my chest.
A few minutes later, the cold pocket was no longer.
TERMINOLOGY
Here is a list of terms applicable to the stories found in this book. As is often the case in specialty fields, experts and students don’t always agree as to definitions in the paranormal and supernatural world. In fact, there is often disagreement on how to interpret observations and findings. (Sounds like law enforcement, doesn’t it?) Therefore, the following definitions are a composite from many sources.
First, the agencies represented in this text.
LAW ENFORCEMENT
Campus Police
Campus police or university police are often sworn police officers employed by a college or university to protect the campus and surrounding areas, and the people who live, work, and visit it.
Urban Police Officer
Men and woman that maintain regular patrols and respond to calls for service in cities, large and small. Patrol officers are assigned to patrol specific areas, such as parks, neighborhoods, and within the city. They routinely work in cars, on horses, bicycles, and on foot patrol.
Sheriff and Deputy Sheriff
Men and women that enforce laws at the county level. A sheriff, who is elected, performs duties similar to those of a city police chief. A deputy sheriff in a large agency has duties similar to those of officers in urban police departments.
Detective
A detective, no matter what police agency, gathers facts and collects evidence for criminal cases. They conduct interviews, examine records, observe the activities of suspects, and participate in raids and arrests.
State Police
Also known as
highway patrol officers, these men and women arrest criminals statewide and patrol highways to enforce motor vehicle laws and regulations. They direct traffic at the scene of accidents, provide first aid, and call for emergency equipment.
Military Police
MPs are law enforcement officers serving in the military. They protect the lives and property on Army installations by enforcing military laws and regulations. They also control traffic, prevent crime, and respond to all emergencies.
Security Officer
A security officer (guard) is a civilian hired privately to protect property, assets, and people. They are usually uniformed and serve to maintain a high-visibility to deter illegal and inappropriate actions.
Corrections Officer
A corrections officer (prison guard, detention officer) is responsible for the care, incarceration, and control of people arrested and awaiting trial, or people convicted of a crime and sentenced to serve time in a prison or jail. They are also responsible for the safety and security of the facility itself. Usually, the government of the jurisdiction in which they operate employs officers, though private companies employ people, as well.
PARANORMAL TERMS
3:00 a.m.
A few paranormal investigators believe that activity increases around this time (some of the stories in this book occurred at 3 a.m., but most didn’t). Some say that because Jesus died at 3:00 p.m., the demons come out at 3:00 a.m., the direct opposite. Those in opposition ask how this could be valid since no one knows the exact year Jesus died, let alone the exact time. Some long-time investigators get testy whenever the question is brought up because they think it’s a concept that came from Washington Irving’s book Sleepy Hollow, and therefore ridiculous.