by Jason Hawes
“Sounds like a plan,” Jason said.
Layne took a few steps, then stopped. He turned his head. “Oh, and one more thing—most people think the gunfight happened in the corral itself. But it didn’t,” Layne explained. “It happened around the corner, next to Camillus Fly’s photography shop. Wouldn’t want you to waste your time looking for ghost gunfighters where there wouldn’t be any.”
The sky was deep red when the last visitors’ car drove off. Layne met up with the TAPS team and gave them keys to all the buildings. Then he said good-bye for the night and left the TAPS team to investigate. After he left, Lyssa stared out into the desert. It seemed peaceful, but it also felt lonely. Aside from the sound of a small airplane flying overhead, the desert was completely quiet. In the twilight, the cacti looked like people buried waist deep in the ground.
Jason and Grant brought the team together.
“It’s going to get dark soon,” Grant said. “Which means the temperature is going to drop, too. It can get very cold at night in the desert. Make sure you all keep warm and keep in contact. Jason and I will set up the Command Center in the gift shop. There’s plenty of space in the back. Jen and Lyssa, why don’t you check out the corral itself? And Mike and Mark, you guys check out the saloon. Good luck, everyone.”
Lyssa helped Jen gather their equipment. As they walked toward the corral, Lyssa stopped for a moment. She could see the first stars coming out above the mountaintops. There was still just enough light left in the day to see the street in front of her. No lights in the windows, no sounds of people, no life. The wooden buildings all around her made her feel as if she were living in the past. She shuddered. She felt a little lost standing there, as if the place didn’t really exist.
A few wispy clouds glided across the crescent moon. Two bats whizzed by overhead, looping up and down. There was no need for Jason or Grant to make the call to go dark. The darkness of night fell over Tombstone as if someone had turned off a switch. Lyssa pushed open the gate to the corral.
“Let’s take some readings outside first and then check the shack,” Jen said.
“Good idea.”
Lyssa took out the digital thermometer and began walking slowly around the corral. Jen was close by with the infrared camera. The reading on the thermometer was steady, at eighty-two degrees. After about ten minutes, the temperature dropped by a degree.
“See anything, Jen? These readouts are totally normal.”
“Nothing yet. The rocks are still much hotter than the rest of the ground, but that’s normal, too. They retain the heat from the sun.”
Lyssa began walking toward the shack. She thought of Layne’s story about the man in the window. It was so creepy, the way he said the man disappeared like smoke. She looked down at the thermometer. The readout said it was fifty-four degrees.
“Jen! Come here, quick.”
Jen rushed over.
“Do you feel anything?” Lyssa asked.
“No, why?”
“You’re not cold?”
“Not at all; it’s still way hot out.”
“I just looked at the thermometer. The temperature dropped over twenty degrees.”
Jen scanned the area with the IR camera. But there was nothing out of the ordinary.
“Do you think it could have been the wind?” she asked.
“No way. There’s barely a breeze.”
Lyssa looked up at the shack. It was only a few yards away. The door was slightly open. She felt herself drawn toward it.
She stopped in front of the door. The thermometer reading was back to normal. She turned it off. Then she turned on the video camera.
“It’s pretty cramped inside,” she said to Jen. “I’ll go in first.”
She opened the door. It slanted at a funny angle and was hard to open.
“Hello?”
It was much hotter inside the shack. Lyssa stood in front of the window where Layne said he saw the man and focused her video camera. Then she sat down cross-legged on the floor with the camera pointing at the window. The wooden planks were rotting. She could smell the earthy scent of the ground underneath.
“Is anybody with me here tonight? Please say your name.”
No answer.
“Do you work at the corral?”
She waited ten seconds in silence. A spider hung off a strand of silk in front of her face. She batted it away and refocused.
She recalled a detail from Layne’s story. He had said the man was angry, that he was scowling at him.
“Can you see any robbers out there? Is there anyone trying to steal cattle from the corral?”
A split second later she heard a shriek from outside.
“Lyssa!”
Lyssa jumped up and rushed outside, where Jen was pointing the IR camera straight at the shack.
“Were you just standing in front of the window?”
“No. I was sitting on the floor. Why?”
Jen got right up to the window. She put her hand to it.
“It’s the same temperature as the air…”
“Jen! What’s going on?”
Jen showed Lyssa the monitor on the IR camera and rewound the tape. Lyssa watched the dark blue image of the shack. Then a ball of intense red light flickered.
“Whoa. What was that?”
“A big hot spot flashed on my screen and then was gone. Did anything happen while you were inside?”
“No,” Lyssa said. “I was sitting on the floor. I held the camera and asked questions. But I didn’t get a reply. Then you called out. I didn’t see a thing.”
“What were you asking?”
“The usual… if there was anybody present, if they worked there. Then I asked if there were any robbers. That’s right when you called out to me.”
“The IR camera registered heat. But there’s nothing there… No electricity, no water pipe… nothing that could cause a spike in temperature.”
Jen stared at Lyssa without a sound. Lyssa could tell she was puzzled, trying to think of the next step. Finally Jen’s face softened.
“Let’s look at your footage. There was no reason for that heat to show up out of the blue. Maybe your footage will show us where it came from.”
Lyssa played back the last few minutes of her tape. She heard her own voice asking the room if there was anyone trying to steal cattle. Lyssa didn’t know what to expect next.
Then she saw something.
“Jen, did you see that?”
“No. See what?”
Lyssa rewound a few seconds, then hit play. The camera was focused on the window. From where Lyssa was sitting, she had a straight shot out of the window. If she looked closely, she could even see the fence in the background. Then, out of the blackness, a sparkle of light shone, like a diamond being dangled on a string. It lasted for only half a second.
“What was that?” Jen asked.
“We’ll have to look at the footage more closely in the morning. But I think I have an idea of what that was…”
“What?”
Lyssa had no way of knowing for sure, but she had a strong hunch.
“The night watchman,” Lyssa said.
Mike and Mark stood in front of the bar in the saloon. The front doors were swinging half doors that didn’t go all the way to the floor or the ceiling, so air flowed in freely from the outside. The door moved back and forth slightly with the small breeze. The lone streetlamp cast down a white light that crept in through the huge open windows. Mike shivered and rubbed his hands together—the desert temperature at night was considerably cooler than in the daytime. He looked at the mirror behind the bar and saw the reflection of the empty street through the windows.
“I didn’t think to bring a winter coat to Arizona in June,” he joked to his brother. Mark laughed and gave the bar a pound.
“We better keep moving to stay warm, then. Let’s rock and roll.”
Mike spun to face the room and took out the EMF detector.
“The saloon has four b
asic sections: the bar, tables for eating, a few card tables over there, and the piano and stage,” he said. “Layne experienced the activity here by the bar and by the piano. So I say we split up. This place isn’t too big. Are you sure you won’t get lost, little bro?”
“I think I can handle it, old man,” Mark replied. “I’ll stay here at the bar and use the audio recorder. You check out the piano.”
Mike went across the room to the piano. As he sat down at the piano bench, the old wood gave a groan under his weight. Mike hadn’t played piano much since he was a kid. But sitting in front of one now made him feel almost like he was at a recital—a little nervous and excited. He closed his eyes. He could hear the creak of the door. He started to imagine the way the saloon sounded back in 1881: people talking loudly, the clink of glasses, the music of the piano.
After giving the piano a close look, he realized it was a player piano—the kind that plays on its own without a person hitting the keys. Of course Layne didn’t see anyone playing it! Mike knew a bit about how these pianos worked. There was a sheet of paper inside the piano that rolled around and around, hitting little tabs that struck the keys from inside. He slid open the little door so he could see the inside of the piano. But there was no paper roll.
Mike turned on his flashlight and looked deep inside the piano. He stuck his hand in, touching the cool metal. Something felt funny. The metal pieces just sort of hung there. He took his hand out of the compartment and looked at the piano keys. He held his finger over one of the keys and pressed. There was a dull thud.
He began hitting all the keys on the piano, but no notes came out. The piano was completely busted. There was no way it could have made any music.
He got up and turned on the EMF detector. He slowly waved it over the keys, getting a steady reading. Then he moved the EMF detector over the bench. Suddenly the reading spiked. He repeated the movement, but the reading stayed at the same level.
Mike looked under the bench, searching for an electrical outlet, a light socket for the nearby stage… anything that could create an electromagnetic field. But there was just dust.
Jason and Grant sat in the gift shop in the back of Camillus Fly’s photo shop, monitoring the investigation.
“It’s getting pretty late,” Grant said. “I think it’s time to wrap things up.”
Jason agreed and made the call over the walkie-talkies. Then they began to pack up the Central Command Center. They put all the monitors and computer equipment into sturdy boxes and began bringing them to the front of the store.
On the second trip to the front, Grant stopped to look around at the key chains and postcards that were displayed near the cash register. Something seemed out of place. Something was different than before.
His eyes burned a little. A sharp scent filled his nose.
“Jason, come check this out.”
Jason walked over. “What’s up?”
“What is that? Flowers?”
Jason looked confused. Then his face lit up.
“Yeah… Oh, man, that is thick. It smells just like my grandma’s house. Where is it coming from?”
They looked all over—behind the register and in the racks of T-shirts. Jason found a stepladder and inspected the air-conditioning vent. But the smell wasn’t coming from there.
“This is really weird,” Grant said. “The smell just came out of nowhere.”
He looked up. His eyes caught the gaze of a woman in a photograph hanging above the cash register. There was something amazing about the picture. Her eyes pulled him in. He walked toward it. And as he got closer to the picture, the flowery smell got stronger.
“It’s coming from over here,” he told Jason.
Soon he was only a few inches away from the woman’s face. It was so real he felt like she was really there. Then as quickly as it had come the scent disappeared.
He turned to Jason.
“It’s gone,” Grant said.
“Like a fan just blew it all out the window,” Jason said.
Just then the lights flickered. A moment later the room was plunged into darkness.
“What just happened?” Jason shouted.
“The lights went out!”
Quickly, Grant turned on his flashlight. He ran to get a camera and started snapping pictures of the room. He took twenty in a row of the area near the photograph of the woman. Then, a few seconds later, the lights came back on.
“That was something,” Jason said.
“Yeah, but what?” Grant asked.
In the morning, the first thing the team did was review the audio that Mark and Mike recorded in the saloon. The team listened, but all they heard was Mark and Mike asking questions. No EVPs. No piano music.
“I’m disappointed,” Mike said. “I just figured with everything leading up to this, the music from a broken piano and the high EMF reading… It all led me to think we would catch something on the audio.”
“You can’t predict what you’re going to catch,” Grant said. “But how can music come from a broken piano? That’s a real find.”
“I agree,” said Lyssa. “There’s no other explanation as to where the music came from.”
Mike nodded.
“I guess you guys are right,” he said. “Even without an EVP, it still adds up to something paranormal.”
Next, the team looked at the footage Lyssa and Jen took. They synced up the recordings and played them both frame by frame. The hot spot appeared on Jen’s film the exact same instant the light appeared in Lyssa’s footage.
“Whoa!” Mark exclaimed. “Look at that! It came out of nowhere!”
“It’s definitely not attached to anything,” Mike said. “It’s just a glowing ball… See, it even moves up and down slightly.”
“And you’re absolutely sure there was nothing that caused the reflection? Not a flash on the camera, anything like that?” Jason asked.
“There wasn’t anything,” Lyssa said. “Jen and I looked everywhere. But I have a theory. Layne said the man had beady eyes, that he looked angry. And then I remembered something Mark had mentioned. He had said the cattle ranchers hired watchmen, whose job it was to make sure no one stole their cattle. In the shack, I asked if there were robbers around. That’s when we saw the flash. I think the spirit could be a night watchman. Do you guys think it’s possible?”
“Sure, it’s possible,” Jason said. “But without doing more investigating, I don’t know if we can prove that. But looking at what you got here, there’s clearly something paranormal going on.”
Finally, Grant looked at the pictures he took of the gift shop. He stopped on one of the woman above the register. Even in the picture of the picture she looked real. There was just something very eerie about her face and the way she smiled.
“I think it’s time we have a talk with Layne,” Grant said. “He should know what we found.”
When the TAPS team arrived back at Tombstone the next day, groups of visitors were just beginning to show up. The team found Layne near the saloon and waved to him.
“Good morning,” Layne said. “I’m eager to hear what you found.”
Lyssa showed him the footage of the shining light in the shack.
“We looked for every possible explanation,” Jen said. “But we came up with nothing that could make this glow, so we have to conclude that something paranormal is happening.”
“That’s so strange,” Layne said. “That’s right where the man I saw was standing.”
Then Mike told him about the broken piano.
“With all this evidence, I think we can say the saloon is haunted, too,” Mike said.
“But there’s one thing that happened I’d like to ask you about,” Grant said. “Are there any electrical problems in the gift shop?”
“No. Because of all the tourists, we have maintenance crews working on the buildings at all times.”
“Are the lights on any sort of timer?”
“Definitely not. I turn off all the lights at night
.”
“Do you sell any sort of perfume in the gift shop?”
Layne’s eyes widened.
“Mary.”
“Who’s that?”
“The picture…”
Grant looked stunned. “What do you mean?”
“I thought it was all in my head…” Layne said. “The woman in the picture. Her name was Mary Fly. Her husband owned the photography shop. I’ve also smelled flowers in the gift shop. Especially when I’m near her photograph.”
“That’s amazing!” Grant said. “Both Jason and I had the same experience. It’s what we call a phantom smell. It’s very possible that Mary’s spirit is present and shows itself by the scent of her perfume. And what’s even stranger is as soon as we found the source of the scent, the lights went out for no reason.”
“With so much different activity going on here,” Jason explained, “I think the question isn’t whether this place is haunted, but what other parts of the town have activity that we don’t know about.”
“From everything we’ve seen, this seems to be a residual haunt,” Grant concluded. “The spirits have no idea they are in the modern world. They just replay their lives over and over again.”
“Sort of like the shoot-out show,” Layne said.
“Exactly.”
The group said their good-byes and got back in the van. As they pulled out into the desert, Lyssa saw that cars full of tourists were passing by to check out Tombstone—a real ghost town.
THE BEAST IN THE DARK
“There’s something down there.”
Twelve-year-old Cynthia Parker crouched by her bedroom window, staring down into the backyard. A full moon was slowly creeping up the sky. It shone through the bare branches of the woods just outside the back fence, filling the yard with strange shadows.
Cynthia’s older sister, Amanda, peered over Cynthia’s shoulder.
“I can’t see a thing,” she said.
“I heard it,” Cynthia insisted. “I heard something moving around.”
