When the Ghost Screams(17)

Cathy described the ghost as about six years old, with short brown hair. He was covered in blood. “He told me that he was murdered by his mother’s boyfriend in a San Antonio park,” she said.

The family had picnicked in the park with the mother’s boyfriend’s coworkers. As they got ready to leave, the boyfriend told Alex to pick up his toys. When the child did not move fast enough, the man became enraged. He beat the boy to death and buried him in an old well.

The child’s pregnant mother did nothing to help him.

The ghost, Cathy said, told her that a reporter from the San Antonio Morning News had visited his mother to inquire about the missing child’s whereabouts. Apparently, nothing came of the reporter’s investigation.

Cathy also claimed that the murdered spirit told her that he had not meant to hurt Kelsey when he had hit her. “I was just trying to show her what would happen if she was bad,” the dead boy said. “Adults are bad people.”

Shortly after Cathy’s visit, the family headed out for a day at Espada Park. Kelsey curled up in the backseat and refused to get out of the car. “Alex is scared,” she said. “This is where it happened.”

Had Kelsey overheard her parents discussing Cathy’s encounter? Had the power of suggestion wreaked havoc on the little girl’s imagination?

The parents may have been unwittingly feeding their daughter’s fears.

Yet, Kelsey had drawn pictures of the park beforehand. She drew pictures of the turtles Alex had played with in the park.

“I found out that at one time there were turtles at Espada Park. But they have not been seen in years,” said Theresa, who believes that Alex was killed at the park at least a decade before.

It was a sweltering day when Martin Leal and I gathered around the old well in the woods with Theresa’s children. Kelsey seemed hesitant as she gazed into the well, which was now filled with dirt and litter.

Was a little boy really buried there?

Martin got out his electromagnetic field detector, a tool that picks up on anomalies in the environment that many believe to be indicative of ghosts. He aimed at the well and the places where Kelsey said the ghost was. Nothing out of the ordinary registered.

I gently asked Kelsey about Alex.

Her young face clouded as she told me, “His daddy got him dead.”

The weapon? A tire iron.

According to Theresa, her daughter had drawn a picture of a tire iron and claimed that the man had used it to hurt Alex. She insisted that her daughter was not aware of Cathy’s interaction with the boy’s spirit, and that the child had drawn the pictures with no prompting.

I cannot say for certain that a boy named Alex was murdered in San Antonio. But if he was, perhaps this story will ring a bell with someone who is familiar with his story, and we can help a lost child find his way to the light.



For the unprepared, a visit from a ghost can be a disturbing experience. Yet, even those who are prepared and make a practice of contacting spirits sometimes find that the encounters are more than they can stand.

The psychics in the following story will never forget the horror they felt while visiting a murder site.





Waking the Dead


Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children …

Ezekiel 9:6 (KJV)



Brenda Marble, of Harrisonville, Missouri, cannot explain the lure of a simple Iowa farmhouse. It drew her to it, again and again. Each time she visited, she swore it would be the last. Yet, it seemed there was a message that she was chosen to tell the world. The house would not let her go until she and her friends deciphered that message and passed it along.



It should have been a lovely spring day filled with the sounds of birds singing and children laughing. But June 10, 1912, in Villisca, Iowa, was the darkest day in the history of the town.

The first inkling that something was wrong at the Moore house came when Mary Peckman peered down the street and noticed that her neighbors were not up and about. She grew more alarmed when she investigated and found the house tightly closed with all the shades drawn over the windows.

Worried, she spread the word, and before long, the brother of Joe Moore showed up and used his spare key to enter the home.

He stepped into a nightmare. The usually lively home was too quiet and washed in darkness. Every window and mirror in the home was covered with blankets or clothing. As his eyes adjusted, he did not want to believe what he saw.

Everyone was dead.

Someone had crept into the house and killed all the occupants with an axe. Joe, forty-three; Sarah, thirty-eight; Herman, eleven; Catherine, ten; Boyd, seven; and Paul, five; made up the entire Moore family.

The children’s friends Lena and Ina Stillinger, ages twelve and eight, had been spending the night, and they, too, were dead.