My name is Carla Maples. I’m a crime scene analyst for the Boston Police Department. But I wasn’t here on official business; this was my night off. You see, I’m also a paranormal investigator for a group called the Foundation for Paranormal Investigation. Personally, I’ve never seen anything that conclusively proves that the paranormal is real, but you can say that I have a professional curiosity.
Anyway, I was standing in the hallway on the second floor of an old house. It was late; probably around two-thirty in the morning, but I wasn’t tired. I had slept throughout the day to prepare for the night’s investigation, and I considered myself at top form.
Up ahead was Alexander J.F. Kinsley. He’s an odd one, but he’s good. He was doing EVP work by the stairs. You know what an EVP is, right? “Electronic Voice Phenomenon?” The idea is that sometimes you can catch the voices of ghosts on tape that you couldn’t hear when you were there. Alexander’s kind of an expert on it.
Me, well, I had a thermal scanner, a flashlight, and my forensics kit. I was looking for…
“Whoa! Alexander! Wait!” I called to him in a hushed voice. “I have a cold spot. My hand is freezing.” It’s true, my hand was freezing. I had put it in front of me as I walked along in the darkness, and then it got really cold. I aimed the thermal scanner directly in front of me and pushed the button. “It says thirty-six degrees!” The ambient temperature there was sixty-two Fahrenheit, so that’s a big difference. AJFK, as he likes to be called, nodded, and began asking questions of the ghost that he assumed the cold spot must be.
I took a more pragmatic approach. I shined the flashlight around the walls, the ceiling, and the floor looking for anything that might cause a draft. There was nothing. Using my hand and the scanner, I identified that the cold spot was restricted to an area about two feet wide, one foot thick, and about five feet high. It was just hovering in place in the middle of the hallway with no apparent cause for it. Of course, there must have been a cause—I just hadn’t found it yet.
He frowned suddenly. “Do you feel that?” he asked, the audio recorder still in his hand. “It’s like the air just got heavier. I don’t like it.”
Then it happened. Even now I’m still not sure what it was. I felt the cold spot move. It whizzed quickly through my arm toward Alexander. He was suddenly thrust to the side and he tumbled down the stairs. Rushing to help him, I felt the cold spot hovering right where he had just been, but it was dissipating; it was just going away. I could feel the temperature rising. Alexander lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs. He was moaning.
It’s getting light out now. The others have taken Alexander to the emergency room, but I chose to stay behind. Something pushed him down those stairs, and that cold spot had something to do with it. I don’t believe it was a disembodied spirit or anything like that. There must have been something real that knocked him down, and that means there is evidence here—somewhere—and I mean to find it!