The Sallie House Haunting: A True Story

by Debra Pickman

  For me, this was tough to do. I am not sure if it was simply the energy of the spirit in the room with us that wasn’t allowing us to do what we intended, or that I was so distracted and concerned by Tony’s intermittent spasms of pain. He was holding my hand so tightly that it felt lifeless and cold.

  We worked on filling the hall and master bedroom with light for almost thirty minutes. Several times, the medium asked Tony if we needed to stop. She had become gravely aware of the pain and attacks he was enduring as he described a burning sensation across the top of his shoulders. Each time however, his reply was, “No, I’m okay. Keep going.”

  He was focused on completing the task we had all set out to do. He wanted it to be done, once and for all. He knew the female spirit was angry, and leaving the job undone would only allow her to come back at him or our family with a vengeance.

  As the medium continued her attempts to convince the female to leave, telling her that she had people waiting for her, the female started to give in and get closer to the light. She would then get scared or angry and back away, thinking we were trying to trick her. We would repeat the prayers we had said so many times that evening and work at filling the two rooms with white light. This ebb and flow took place several more times.

  Eventually, it seemed that the female gave in. We said a closing prayer and thanked God and his angels for the help, strength, and protection they had given us. We sat quietly, hands still entwined, waiting, listening, and feeling for a sense of change. The candle was almost entirely extinguished and the recorder had stopped recording almost forty-five minutes before.

  Tony reported that the attacks on his back had stopped; that although the burning continued, he wasn’t getting hit anymore. He and the medium also reported feeling a lighter sense in and about the house. After several more minutes, we loosened our grip on each other, and stretched out our cramped legs to stand up. By then it was rather late; the whole process had taken almost two hours.

  We turned on the light to inspect Tony’s shoulders, which were covered with eight distinct and fairly deep scratches, some of which were twelve inches or more in length. We tended to his wounds and checked on the baby before moving to the living room downstairs. There we sat for a short time and discussed what might be expected over the next few days. The medium warned that there might be residual energy flying around for awhile, but that after a few days, it would dissipate. Then we could be sure our job had been completed successfully. The medium left us with some instructions on smudging in order to maintain the calm energy in the house, gave us her business card in case we needed to call her, and said another prayer for us and our protection before she left. All was well, we thought.

  twenty-one

  Because Tony’s experiences and perceptions of the activity we encountered during our stay were so different from my own, it is necessary to be aware of this and fitting to hear about it from his perspective.

  Honestly, that house scared the hell out of me. At one point, I truly thought I was going to need an exorcist. I constantly feared for myself and my family’s safety. I was worried that if the spirit got tired of messing with me, it would go after someone else, perhaps even Taylor. After all, he would not be able to tell us if something was wrong or was harming him. I worried every moment of the day for his safety.

  After several months of activity, my mother and I tried to tell Debra about our concerns, but she had such a different view on it and a strong desire to experience it that she never really listened. Every time I brought it up to her, we argued about the difference between her perspective on the situation and mine. She would say things like, “How could we just leave this little girl without helping her?”

  I was also very insecure at that point of my life, and although it seems silly for me to admit it, I allowed myself to be led by Debra’s choices. She is a headstrong woman who focused on logical arguments, and if she did not want to leave the house, nothing I could say would change her mind. Each time I voiced my concerns, her reasons for staying would override my pleas to leave. She simply did not take me seriously. Finally, I just gave up trying to get through to her and decided to live with the experiences, quickly realizing that my days in that house were going to be long and lonely.

  We really did not have the money to move. We had incurred expenses when we moved into that house and soon there were more expenses to make it our home: curtains, blinds, wallpaper, and a washer and dryer, among other things. The daily expenses of living in such an old, poorly insulated house added to the difficulties.

  My experiences continued to get worse and became more threatening. I remember thinking of cases such as the one that had occurred in Amityville where the situation and claims were similar to what I was going through. It scared me that so many of these situations ended in the killing of innocent family members. In the years prior to living in that house, I wondered how anything like that could happen, how no one could notice there was a problem before it escalated to such a devastating level. As the weeks and months passed, however, I felt the evil wrap around my every thought and emotion. I began to understand how someone could be driven to unwanted actions. I prayed to God every day not to let that happen to me.

  While living in that house, I struggled terribly with many emotions and insecurities. Realizing that Debra didn’t have any fear of the paranormal activity around us, I felt like less of a man for being so fearful. Certainly I was the man of the house, the strength of the family who shouldn’t show fear when others did not. With this in mind, I put up a strong front and hid my emotions from everyone.

  There were a lot of internal conflicts and discussions with myself that made me wonder what was wrong with me. Although these conflicts pushed me toward just leaving my family and walking away from them, something kept me focused on their safety and my responsibilities.

  Keeping it together was not easy since I questioned my own sanity and state of mind nearly every day. It was very difficult to understand what was happening to me and around me. It wasn’t something I could casually talk about with a co-worker, or sit down with a family member and ask their opinion. The mere mention of the word “paranormal” was taboo in this part of the country. If people were interested in the topic, they hid it. I knew my experiences weren’t run-of-the-mill, and I shuddered to think what people would think of me if I shared them.

  The only person I could talk to was Deb. She was very biased in her views and fascinated with the possibilities of the experience. The bigger problem seemed to be that while I told her there was something evil in the house, her own experiences presented something innocent. She saw no problems, wasn’t afraid, and there were times that I just couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more concerned. If the roles had been reversed, I would have gotten her out of the house as soon as I could.

  The experience with the television show brought mixed feelings, too. Although we argued horribly every time the Sightings team came into our house, deep down I really hoped they would bring us answers. Somewhere along the way, I also wanted someone to realize that some terrible thing was in our house and help us to live in peace again. However each time they came, the activity escalated. I dreaded the focus on me and the focus on the scratches that would appear on my body. I felt like a science experiment and a freak.

  There were times that we would go without any activity at all, often a few weeks or a month or more. Although this was a relief, it threw me back onto the emotional roller coaster that happened each day. I would again begin thinking that there had been something wrong with me all along. I was exhausted and hallucinations seemed to be the only reasonable explanation for my experiences. On the other hand, I knew there was something in our home. Debra was very aware of the paranormal activity and had experienced it herself. I just couldn’t understand how and why our experiences could be so different.

  ____

  Almost from the beginning, Tony’
s experiences were very different from mine. Was it the fact that he and I viewed our situation from two very different perspectives? My perspective was from a lifetime interest in and desire to know more about ghosts and the paranormal and his perspective was from childhood fears, borne in the closet the night he saw the white ghastly face and bony hands peering out from behind the door. I had often felt that his religious upbringing and Catholic schooling played a huge role in how he interpreted his experiences. While I saw non-threatening activity, he saw the possibility of demons and their trickery.

  Several years after moving out of the house, I began to realize he had not shared with me many of the things he had encountered there. Looking back, my reaction to any experience had been logical, but often without considering other paranormal possibilities. I know there were many occasions when I must have seemed skeptical of his personal experiences. Over the years, there have been many times where I have been disappointed in myself for not believing some of the events that Tony had witnessed and experienced. It is the worst aspect of having lived in that house and it is also my deepest regret.

  Working nights and attempting to sleep during the day was never easy for Tony. He never got a full night’s rest. I knew that getting only a few hours of sleep a night could lead to hallucinations; I often told him that his tired mind and body might be contributing to the things he felt, saw, or heard. I ultimately chalked it up to his imagination running away with crazy thoughts and blowing things out of proportion. Not that I thought he was making things up, because I knew he truly believed what he was experiencing was real.

  My attempts to dismiss his experiences as mere hallucinations seemed like a reasonable explanation. This led Tony to doubt himself and his experiences. It wasn’t long before he stopped sharing his concerns with me. He didn’t want me, or others, to think he was losing his mind or had some other kind of psychological problem.

  He must have felt very alone, living through experiences that he couldn’t control or understand. In the years since leaving the house and continuing to investigate it, I have realized the distinct negativity and demonic nature of what was there and the danger that existed. Tony knew in his heart that there was something bad in the house, but didn’t know how to protect himself or his family from it. His only hope was that it would not escalate or harm his wife and child. His prayers and belief in God’s grace was the only thing that kept him from losing his mind.

  As the years have passed, I have learned about many events and experiences that Tony endured without my support, assistance, or understanding. Hearing the details of these tormenting events makes me feel worse for not being there for him. I continue to realize how agonizing his life must have been.

  One of the first things he remembers telling me was the scratching he could hear in the walls. For him it seemed to be constant—something trying to get through the walls and make itself heard throughout the day. I do not remember the sounds at all and I probably chalked it up to squirrels or something else more plausible. He never brought it up again, even though the sounds occurred more often and became more distinct as time went on.

  I do remember the nights he heard what sounded like running up and down the stairs. We just assumed that it was one or both of our cats playing. Of course, this theory was comforting to the both of us until the night that Tony stepped out into the hall to investigate and discovered it was definitely not our pets. It was something unseen, perhaps a ghost.

  As noted earlier, Tony had the hardest time getting enough sleep in the house. I often thought the sounds and voices he heard were the side effects of a lack of sleep. It was only a few months after we moved in that he began hearing strange conversations, even though the voices seemed distant and unclear. As the days and months passed, these sounds got louder and it was easy to determine that they were indeed voices.

  For a while, he asked if I heard them too, but I never did. I’m sure this was daunting and made him question his sanity even more. Eventually, he stopped asking me about them, fearing that I would think he was hearing voices that were not there. Over the years, he mentioned that it often sounded as if many people were talking or whispering to each other. They often seemed to be talking at the same time or over each other and in the same room with him.

  Although he was often able to detect several distinct and separate conversations, he was never able to make much out of the snippets of words or phrases. These voices seemed audible to him only for a few seconds before disappearing completely. There was no way to replay it or for him to determine what he actually heard.

  Although he often heard the voices throughout the day and in different rooms, he usually heard them as he was drifting off to sleep. His focus was not on things around him, and certainly not on deciphering the strange voices. On the edge of sleep, it was very difficult to react or respond. This made it even harder to determine what he was hearing.

  As weeks turn into months, the voices seemed to gather strength and remained inaudible, except for a few specific words. Sometimes they did become a little clearer to him. He slept even less since he knew he might hear the voices and tended to lay awake, listening for them.

  Just before moving from the house, he reported that the room sounded like it was constantly full of people talking. Once, he heard a phrase spoken by a woman who was manifesting in front of his eyes at the end of the bed. She said, ‘I’m gonna get…” and then faded out. The combination of these ominous words with a black gloved hand reaching toward him seemed a definite threat and this certainly concerned him.

  Full and partial apparitions

  Tony was now seeing full-bodied apparitions that (except for the little girl in the kitchen) scared him even more. Since they always seemed to look like me, he found them even more disturbing. I think he really did want to see the experiences as I did—innocent and, for the most part, not harmful. However, something told him what was going on was not benign. The more he reflected on the events, the more he was sure there was a demonic force in the house. Even though this force presented itself as a little girl and then as a woman who looked like me, he was sure it wasn’t innocent.

  I wasn’t aware that Tony thought these apparitions were demonic, but I did believe he saw them and I was excited. I was intrigued by the idea that there might be more than one spirit in the house and I was thrilled with the opportunity to communicate with them.

  One day he called me at work shortly after 11:00 a.m. He had been trying to sleep when he saw something odd near the foot of the bed. This was the second time he had seen it. Weeks earlier, he had experienced a similar situation that had started out as non-threatening but ended traumatically.

  Eventually, I became aware of the terror that Tony was experiencing and the toll it took on him. He became distant and very distracted as he struggled to understand, accept, and deal with the situation. Although I did not pick up on this for quite a while, I soon realized that he was not himself for days afterward, which was excruciating to watch. At one point, we had agreed that I would be more open to believing him and understanding what he was going through if he let me know when these experiences were happening.

  I also thought being close to the activity might actually deflect some of it, since it seemed very little of the events were witnessed by more than one person. In fact, when any of us attempted to get involved in the activity, it often stopped dead in its tracks. So the second time Tony saw the telltale signs of a spirit apparition forming near the end of the bed and heard the familiar female voice whispering, he called me at work.

  Whispering to me as if it were a big secret, he described how the many voices seemed louder than before. As we continued talking, he described what the dust-like particles floating and forming in front of the window and near the foot of the bed looked like. After three or four minutes of telling what he was seeing and hearing, the activity seemed to come to a halt. We hung up and I finished work. When I
arrived home shortly after 5:00 p.m., Tony reported that no more activity had occurred after our conversation.

  Tony always got the brunt of the extreme activity and we thought it interesting that the activity stopped when we spoke on the phone. It gave us hope that we could thwart the malicious spirit by standing against it together.

  Later that evening as he got ready to for work, he seemed very tired. When I asked him about it, he said that he had not gotten any sleep that morning. He was afraid that something might happen while he slept. He was even afraid to close his eyes while he washed his hair. He felt like an easy target, a sitting duck with an ambush waiting to happen. This fear was always on his mind so he was often distressed before going to sleep.

  Hand prints

  Tony’s fears about things happening while he slept was not unfounded. Several months before the Sightings group began investigating our experiences, Tony was attacked in a different way. Originally, he had thought it was a dream. The only odd thing about this dream was that he never saw a face and just assumed it was me.

  At one point, however, he told me that incidents were happening more frequently and while he was awake. As I listened to his description of the events, I was shocked. He told me about the pressure he would feel on his upper thighs and the feeling of cold hands moving up his legs.

  A few nights after he told me about this, I felt him violently shaking me out of a sound sleep to tell me it was happening again. As he lay next to me, he could feel pressure on his lower body. He could not see anything there, but he also could not move his legs. Realizing that something seemed to be on top of him, I sat up and forcefully yelled at whoever or whatever it was to get off of him. I know I yelled loudly several times and later wondered what the neighbors thought. Within a minute or so, Tony reported that the pressure was finally gone.