This house is protective," says Bernie Middendorf, sitting in the bungalow he and former girlfriend Tara Schroeder share in the Seminole Heights area of Tampa. "There's no other way to describe it. This house is very protective."
He sits in the rocking chair Schroeder jokingly calls her "white wicka wocka," detailing the abode's supernatural defense forces to paranormal investigator Sara Stone of Crescent Moon Investigations. Antiques, framed photographs and wooden furniture fill the house. It's a bright and cheery refurbed home on a bright and cheery summer morning.
Telling stories better suited to campfires than to cozy living rooms, Middendorf tells us of a poltergeist, or noisy ghost, who has slammed doors and shaken beds in the dead of night. In another incident, Middendorf was mad at Schroeder and angrily sorting a stack of mail, winging the stuff to be thrown out. Among the must-go: an envelope addressed to a houseguest who had died in the house.
Immediately after the throw, the chains dangling beneath the slowly rotating ceiling fan swung violently over his head — exactly as though something or someone in an even worse mood had slapped at them.
Middendorf demonstrates by slapping the living room fan pulls, and yes, the white knobs make a racket as they glance off the fan blade.
"Now do you feel a breeze?" asks Stone, on paranormal alert from the word go. She feels cold spots but does not see dead people. She is not psychic, but from the moment she steps onto the polished hardwood floors, she "gets a feeling" from an antique sideboard the previous homeowner hadn't wanted to move. Stone is a whole lot of Mulder with a little Scully thrown in. She believes in ghosts and has seen fiery rings in the sky, although she keeps some distance from UFOs: "The government is really involved with them," she warns. She wants to prove the supernatural — to herself and clients — scientifically. To that empirical end, she has tucked in her pocketbook a digital camera (35 mm will work in a pinch) and two Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors she bought from the Ghost Store.
Schroeder is no stranger to hauntings. For eight years, she has worked at Tampa Theatre, long the subject of local ghost lore.
Using old Polk City Directories (Polk was the name of the company that produced them) at the library, Schroeder has been able to trace the house as far back as 1919, seven years older than the Tampa Theatre, where many believe a deceased projectionist named Foster "Fink" Finley goes about opening doors, jangling keys and, in one recent case, spinning a large urn on the second floor landing.
Since buying the house two and a half years ago, Schroeder and Middendorf have accumulated the kind of stories best told by firelight. What's more, the events they speak of took place not at summer camp but in the reasonable comfort of their home.
Before moving into their newly purchased home, Middendorf and Schroeder wanted to renovate. They enlisted Mike Hampton, a carpenter and friend, to help. Hampton moved in Jan. 1, 1999. Three weeks later, a coworker came to pick up Hampton for his day job and found him dead of a heart attack. Hampton was 42 years old.
The job was far from finished. In fact, the walls looked like vandals had run at them with hammers, knocking holes helter-skelter. "We got it all rewired," Middendorf says, "and there were holes all over the place. And the deal we cut with the electrician was don't even worry about repairing, 'cause we've got Mike. And then Mike died. "Even before he died, the house was very protective," Middendorf notes.
Two electricians were working on the house, and one's mother visited the house on a Wednesday and was dead by Sunday.
"And the second one had to leave the job and go to Georgia because his mother had taken ill suddenly," says Schroeder. "It's just like, hey, what's goin' on?" As for the letter, says Middendorf, "It was a change of address form for Mike. He had just died."
Middendorf took the violent yanking of the fan's chains seriously. He did not throw away the letter.
"To this day, it's in the house," he says.
Schroeder missed a day of work to deal with paperwork, returning to Tampa Theatre to find a body outline taped to her office floor.
"The kind of people I work with," she says with a laugh. "Freaks."
Pursuing parapsychology … requires strong entrepreneurial skills, enormous persistence and creativity, resourcefulness, solid training in one of more of the conventional sciences or in a scholarly discipline.— www.parapsych.org
After taking photos and EMF readings inside Middendorf and Schroeder's home, as well as the back yard (where a blade once flew off the lawnmower Schroeder was using and Middendorf has glimpsed the specter of an old man), Stone picks up a gadget from the kitchen countertop.
"Hey, what's this?" she asks. No one recognizes the white, plastic device. Could be an electric garage door opener or maybe a GameBoy.
What it is, is an EMF detector. But, strangely enough, it is not the one Stone has been using to take readings. That would be her trusty black one, which she holds safely in her other hand. The white detector goes off in the danger zone all the time, Stone says, so she rarely uses it.
"It's mine," Stone is saying. "I didn't take mine out." Stone gravely repeats: "I swear, I didn't take it out of my pocketbook. Believe me." The implication, of course, is that if none of us moved it, then a poltergeist must have. How exactly a ghost could have moved a ghost detector without setting it off remains a mystery.
The spirits started messing with Sara Stone early. She was 8 years old when she began experiencing strange phenomena, such as taps on her back. She would whirl around and find nothing but air. She would hear footsteps in the attic and the family dogs by her side would stare and bark. Stone and other paranormal enthusiasts believe animals can sense otherworldly visitors.
Stone grew up on Long Island, and she has the accent to prove it. When she was a child, her mother would read tarot cards to her, take her to cemeteries and conduct seances. Later, Stone's education took a more conventional track, and she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from SUNY-Farmingdale.
Stone has a black cat, which costs her and husband, Damian (yes, Damian), an extra $13 a month in rent — bringing the monthly total to $666. The supernatural connotations of that amount make her chuckle, she says.
"Three accidents within six weeks added up to 666," she has written. Her sketchy math begat a terrific fear of the number 666, and Stone dedicated her life to Christianity. Specifically, she intended to become an ordained Lutheran minister.
While attending divinity school, though, she met her soulmate in Damian, and life took another turn. The two dropped out, got married and had two kids. After a cold year of living in rural Pennsylvania, the family drove to Florida in their '94 Dodge. They journeyed as far south as the Keys, but opted to settle in Lutz.
Like a lot of people who come to Florida, Stone saw an opportunity to reinvent herself. She went from someone who has personally investigated the paranormal to one who does so professionally. She soon met a Pasco publicist, who put together a press kit for Stone's inchoate ghost-hunting business.
According to her press kit, Stone can "call upon any number of intellectual, spiritual and herbal resources to identify and — if necessary — eliminate paranormal forces."
Now all Stone has to do is find clients. Her rates are low for the trade. A consultation and investigation session runs $20 and consists of interviews, a walk-through, EMF readings and digital photos. A seance or rune stone reading costs $5 more. The priciest of her services is the "removal of offending forces," which ranges from $40 to $50, depending on the tenacity of the polterguests. These are flat fees, not hourly rates, and Stone is willing to stay on the job as long as she is needed.
Still, Schroeder and Middendorf decline to have Stone shake their spirit; they're prepared to live with their bed-rattling guest indefinitely.
"Fresh batteries and an open mind are essential."—Jeff Reynolds
Recently, the Stones attended a Ghost Hunting workshop and ghost tour at Cassadaga, a small spiritualist community in Volusia County. Jeff Reynolds, founder and director of Ghost Tracker Investigations and North Florida Paranormal Research Inc. conducted the workshop.
It was while in Cassadaga with Ghost Tracker, Sara Stone says, that she and Damian had their best sighting to date: an orb, hovering in some trees. According to Reynolds' booklet, Ghost Hunting 101, an orb is "a spherical translucent mass of energy or a ball of light."
Stone makes it sound more exciting than that. "We were getting ready to go to the (Cassadaga) hotel," she says, "and we were waiting, and this gentleman said, "Oh, look over there! There's an orb!'
"When you take a picture, it flashes, and you can see an orb shape. I said, "All right,' and so I took a picture," Stone says.
Stone says what they saw with the naked eye and the camera's small monitor resembled a lithograph with two faces. But when she later printed the photo, it came out as a blurry "thing of light."
Despite the failure of technology to back up her vision, Stone nonetheless found the experience stirring.
"I had never seen anything like that before."
Reynolds and others believe the reason the town is so paranormally active and popular with psychics is because "Cassadaga sits on a fault," Reynolds says. "This is why George Colby founded Cassadaga … where it is. It's an actual vortex; it's a fault.
"It jump starts people with that natural ability and allows their sixth sense to kick in. It's a more pure reading that your mediums get from living around a place like this. There's more energy. I have seen a healing down there; I know what I'm talking about."
However, according to University of Florida Professor of Geology Douglas Smith, "There are no known active faults in Florida — those known to presently be experiencing displacement. There are numerous geologically old faults — those active perhaps 60 million years or more ago."
Mainstream science, the science we all know and recognize under the name, has never authenticated a single ghost.— Joe Nickell, Paranormal Investigator, Skeptical Inquirer
About a week later, late in the day, Damian and Sara Stone visit the 113-year-old El Pasaje Plaza in Ybor City to summon the spirits thought to reside in this building, which at various points in its history housed a hotel, casino, brothel and speakeasy. Visitors to the club and hotel included Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti and two American presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland.
In the 1920s, the speakeasy was raided several times by Prohibition agents, and word went around Ybor that sometimes people who entered El Pasaje didn't make it back out.
Despite warnings from Jeff Reynolds — his Ghost Hunting 101 expressly warns against seances and Ouija Boards — we are going to surf the outer limits on Sara's new Hasbro Ouija Board.
To protect us, Sara lights some homemade incense in a small bowl and reads: "We purify this place with lavender, rosemary and thyme," pronouncing the last word phonetically. "We call upon the spirits of long ago times. Protect us with a sacred space so that no evil can enter this place."
No coworkers walk in. Must be working.
"We ask to please talk to you and lend us your knowledge of what's to be true."
The planchette is supposed to glow in the dark, but it's not yet night. The afternoon glare all but ignites the dusty air through the cracks in the blinds. At least one candle burns alongside the incense. A ceiling fan whirs overhead, driving smoke into the empty hall.
The board is grippy at first. Results run from inconclusive to downright incomprehensible. A Karen drops by, but she is not one of the former prostitutes from El Pasaje's whorey days.
Then we summon Nick Ajax. Nick spells out "E-X-A-M."
"Nick, were you a student?" asks Sara Stone.
No.
"Were you a doctor?"
Yes.
"An M.D.?"
Yes.
He was an M.D. in 1926. It's unclear for how long he was a doctor or how he became one without first being a student, but then again it was the Roaring '20s. Maybe everyone was having too much fun to notice ol' Nick holding that scalpel.
One former owner, Gen. Joseph Louis Avellanal y Jiminez, did run Pan American University, a diploma mill, from El Pasaje — which could explain how Nick became a doctor without taking any tests. But Avellanal didn't come along until 1943, almost 20 years after Nick, who tells us his medical career was cut short by his 1928 death.
"Did you work here?" Sara asks. "Did you live here?"
"L-A-T-A-Z" says Nick.
Like so many in his field, Nick writes illegibly.
"N-U-N-J-A."
"I don't understand your language," Sara says. Maybe it's Nick who is snockered.
He isn't the only incomprehensible visitor, either. Walt had next to nothing to say. Perhaps if there were a linguist, pharmacist, or hieroglyphicist in the house, we could divine the meaning Nick Ajax's wacky semantics.
Unfortunately, I'm a features writer, Damian's an aspiring Gothic horror novelist and Sara is a sociology major and non-psychic paranormal investigator.
Our powers fail us.
A later search for the name Nick Ajax in the Polk City Directories was fruitless.
Call me, Sara Stone, paranormal investigator; trained, sensitive, experienced and highly recommended. You will not be disappointed!
— Who is Sara Stone? by Sara Stone
When Schroeder's friend and coworker Callie Lawson stayed in the house while she and Middendorf were in Europe, Lawson was awakened in the dead of night by a shaking bed.
Schroeder laughs. "After (Mike) died, we had to clean up the room and he had a lot of young girl magazines. And we're thinking, "Oh great, young college girl in the house, and Mike's mackin' on her.'" Schroeder herself was awakened by a rocking bed one night, but she thinks she may have been sleeping, a phenomenon known as wakeful dreaming.
Most of the strange events have taken place in the back of the house, near the stairs to the attic — among them a brief, blurry sighting by the house sitter, Callie Lawson, after which she described Hampton perfectly without ever having met him before.
She saw him through the glass door behind the wooden staircase that climbs steeply to the attic.
"You've got to see up here, man," Middendorf says. He starts up the ladder and pushes open the trap doors. The high-ceilinged room is crowded with stowed stuff, boxes of books. The dark, exposed rafters and dusty wooden smell contrast starkly with the cheery decor downstairs. A long white board bridges the gaps between trusses, leading to a small, finished white room. There's even a window, and with the addition of an A/C duct he's funneled in, the small space makes a comfortable, almost secret office for Middendorf.
The previous owners lived in the house for the last half of the century and had several kids.
"This was the dungeon for the two boys," Middendorf says, referring to the two boys whose bedroom was in the attic.
One stormy day during hurricane season, Middendorf was working on the computer in the finished attic room. Schroeder wasn't home and their cat was somewhere outside. Suddenly, he heard the trap doors, which he'd left open behind him, rattle and slam shut.
It was windy out, he concedes, and he points out small holes in the corners of the attic, where Lite-Brite-like holes puncture the roof, admitting daylight and, presumably, wind.
"So," Middendorf says, "I'm thinking, "OK. That's wind. Gotta be.' So I walked out of the room, and both of the trap doors were solid open, the way that they were before. And there was a box — I had a stack of boxes — the box was pretty much in the middle of the walkway to get from here to there." Middendorf and Schroeder have a theory about why they believe Hampton — his spirit, his energy, his incorporeal soul — might be loitering around a house he lived in for just three weeks: mortal toil.
"He was a hard lifer," says Middendorf. "He was getting his act together. You know, he'd been in prison for a while. But now he was really trying to get together.
"One of his inspirational figures … was this guy that could build a staircase by eye; he didn't even really need to measure it. He could build a staircase, and you know, really elaborate things — very rich, very wealthy. This was his storybook character. …
"Well, we were going to build in the area where the door is; we were going to build a stairway that went up and around and up to the attic. Because the attic is livable. It's not finished, but it's big enough to live in. And everything that's happened that's weird about Mike has happened sort of in that general area.
"Which is real funny to me, because like, when he found out that he was supposed to build a staircase, he brought all his friends over, he was telling everybody who wanted to know, this was (to be) his masterpiece."
In light of the shaking bed, the almost-tossed letter and Lawson's peek at a man through the glass door, Schroeder and Middendorf haven't done anything with the ladder.
As I lower myself out of the attic, Middendorf asks me to turn off the light.
"And pull the doors shut?"
"Yeah, please," he says. "I don't know why, but I do."
Contact Features Writer David Jasper via mental telepathy, at 813-248-8888, ext. 111, or jasper@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2001.
