Team leader Nicky Sewell, who managed to get a tape recording of a ghostly grunt, told a reporter, “There’s definitely something at Bodmin Jail which was trying to make its presence known to us that night.”
eight
Stranger Than Fiction
Actress Sharon Tate was one of “the beautiful people.” It was a fact that annoyed Charles Manson, the wild-eyed monster who orchestrated a mass murder that shocked America on August 9, 1969. A sociopath who could charm the last vestige of integrity out of a lost soul, Manson had followers. They were a confused group of young hippies known as his “family.”
Set on destroying those who achieved wealth, he targeted Sharon’s home in Bel Air, California, and directed his followers to savagely kill its five occupants and to write words from The Beatles’ songs on the walls in blood.
Sharon, a lovely blond actress famous for her role as Jennifer North in Valley of the Dolls, was eight months pregnant when she was murdered.
Mercifully, Sharon’s younger sister was not in the house that night. She had asked if she could spend the night, but her big sister had said no, that she was too tired for company.
I’ve often wondered if she had had a premonition that it would not be safe for her little sister and had used fatigue as an excuse.
According to a story that has been circulating for decades, Sharon had had a strange premonition long before the tragic night. While the anecdote has changed over the years as it is told and retold, the earliest version is probably closest to the truth.
Standing at the top of a staircase, Sharon glanced down to see an apparition of herself murdered at the foot of the stairs.
It is not the first time I have heard of ghosts appearing out of our timeline. When it comes to their realm, they do not seem to have the rules that confine us in our world. While Tuesday never comes before Monday on this side, events may be haphazard and out of sequence in theirs.
I experienced this sort of ghostly time warp in 1982. I was walking along Kent-Des Moines Road, in Des Moines, Washington. The normally busy stretch of curving road was unnaturally still, when I heard a pitiful scream.
I turned to see a blond woman standing on the balcony of an apartment in a large complex. She had a little girl about six or seven by the ankles and was dangling her in the air, two stories above the ground. I could not see the child’s face, because she was facing inward.
Her long blond hair rippled in the breeze as she shrieked. In shock, I rushed to the apartment manager’s office, and as I opened my mouth to ask her to phone the police, I began to cry instead. The emotion of witnessing the scene had overwhelmed me to where my lips could barely form words.
A policewoman responded, but when she visited the apartment in question, she was told that there was no one there who matched my description.
I knew what I had seen and assumed that the residents were lying to protect an abusive friend who had left in a hurry with the young victim in tow. When I described the incident to my mother, however, she gently said, “I think you saw a ghost.”
I dismissed the idea. I could not believe that ghosts could appear so solid. This had been real. The event occurred years before I began researching ghosts, and despite my other paranormal experiences, I was skeptical.
I will never forget the surreal quality of the scene. The child’s scream had sounded tinny, almost as if it were echoing from the bottom of a big tin can. And the emotion I’d felt was nearly too much to handle.
Several years later, I was sitting in court in Eugene, Oregon, assisting my mother in researching her second true crime book, Small Sacrifices.
Diane Downs, a letter carrier with an obsession for a married man who did not want children, was accused of shooting her three children as they slept in her car on a lonely stretch of country road.
Nine-year-old Christy and four-year-old Danny survived the shooting, but poor little Cheryl, age seven, was killed.
I could not remember the face of the abusive mother on the balcony, but the slender figure and the blond hairstyle matched Diane’s. The frail ghostly child’s long hair looked exactly like Cheryl’s.
Did I, perhaps, see what was happening to poor Cheryl as it occurred? Or was I witnessing a future event? I do not know if Diane ever actually dangled her sad middle child from a balcony.
If, indeed, the scene on the balcony was of a paranormal nature and connected to the Downs child’s murder, why did I see them? The murder happened in Oregon, and I witnessed the scene in Washington, long before the homicide.
Why me?
Emotion.
We find that emotion plays a huge role in psychic phenomena. My very presence at the trial tied me emotionally to Cheryl. I, like some others who covered the trial, suffered from anxiety throughout, as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that a mother could kill her child.