Post by Zak Bagans on May 9, 2011 3:01:45 GMT -5
Zak Bagans
“Stephen King once said that there are three types of terror and this is how he described them. ‘The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there.’
I believe there is a fourth type of fear, and it’s worse than anything imagined in a half-remembered nightmare, worse than that strange feeling you get that there might be something behind you breathing down your neck. It’s worse than turning around and seeing nothing.
The scariest feeling in the world, the absolute worst fear, is knowing that there’s something there, knowing when you get that feeling something’s right behind you, that you will turn around and see something.
Then you do turn around, and there it is.
It’s been my mission for years to capture one of these encounters on film to share with the world. I am joined by my friends, Nick and Aaron, as we set out on a quest to capture our experiences with the supernatural.
We traveled to Browning, Minnesota to investigate a local high school rumored to be haunted. We had no idea going into this adventure that we would be led on an investigation far more intense than any we had ever done before. When we stopped at a diner for some lunch, we received some information from the locals that completely changed the course of our investigation…”-+-
Zak dug his hand-held camera out of the bag beside him in the booth. He was in such a rush he almost dropped the camera. He flipped open the mini screen and pressed the power button. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds for the camera to turn on, but to Zak it felt like hours. He was excited and anxious to interview these fine people on camera.
Finally the camera was ready and its battery was fully charged.
“Okay, I’m about to start recording,” he said. “You good to go, man?”
The man he was talking to was Joseph Henry. He was eighty-three and owned a farm not too far from the diner. He came to the diner every day at lunch time and ordered the same thing: a three-egg omlette with a side of sausage, and a coffee, black with two sugars. Zak, Nick and Aaron had learned a lot about this man as they’d been eating lunch at the booth across from his. He’d overheard them talking about the haunting they were about to investigate.
Joseph took off his baseball cap and ran a hand through his silver, thinning hair. He nodded.
“Ready when you are, son,” he said.
Zak smiled.
“Alright, that’s what I like to hear, my man.”
He pressed record as he cleared his throat, turning the camera toward himself.
“This is Zak. I’m here with Nick and Aaron.”
He panned the camera around to Nick and Aaron, sitting across from him, then turned it back on himself and tried to angle the camera so it still got Nick and Aaron in the shot. He had no idea if he was even angling the thing right, but that wasn’t important right now. The important thing was to get Joseph talking before he changed his mind. But, he wanted to get a quick intro. out first.
“We stopped at, uh, Browning, Minnesota to investigate a high school rumored to be haunted, and we stopped at this little diner in town. We met this gentleman here…”
Zak pointed the camera at Joseph, who looked slightly startled and then waved sheepishly to the camera.
“His name’s Joseph,” Zak continued, “and he’s been telling us some really interesting stuff about this town. Have a seat, man.”
Joseph walked over to the booth and sat down beside Zak, who quickly realized his close proximity to Joseph now made it impossible for him to film him right.
“Hey, Aaron, take the camera. You have a better angle than me.”
He handed the camera to Aaron, who took it and tinkered with it for a second, pressing buttons and whatever else he had to do to get the picture he wanted. That was why Aaron was the tech. guy. He was way better at the behind-the-lens stuff than Zak. When it looked like Aaron had stopped tinkering, Zak gave him a questioning look.
“We good, man?”
“Yeah, you’re good,” Aaron said.
“Okay.”
Zak turned to Joseph.
“Could you just talk about what you were saying earlier, about Old Browning?”
It took an effort for Zak to contain his excitement as he spoke and he hoped he sounded like a seasoned professional instead of an amped up kid on Christmas morning. Joseph shrugged.
“Well, there’s not a lot to say about it anymore,” he began. “It used to be a pretty well settled area up until fifty-sixty years ago.”
“What happened around then to change that?” Zak asked.
“Well, there was a storm. Cut off the whole town for a good week, maybe more. It was a real harsh winter, you see, and a lot of the trees and things were already in rough shape when this storm hit. So when it did, a lot o’ them trees fell. Some of ‘em blocked roads, some of ‘em downed power lines. This storm went on for almost two whole days. By the time it was done, Browning was buried and most of the roads leading into town weren’t passable. People were trapped for days with no power, some of ‘em without even a roof over their heads.”
“Jesus,” Zak muttered.
“By the time anyone got in there to help ‘em, a good lot of the residents had died or gone missing. Big chunks of the town were in sore shape.”
“Oh, yeah. I can imagine they would be,” Zak agreed.
“Then a while later, when the snow melted, there was quite a bit of flooding. Then the spring rain started. Basically a lot of the roads got washed out and the ground caved in on itself in some places. All the residents got relocated to another parts of Browning until the town could repair the other end. They rebuilt a few of the buildings, but over the years the town had other hardships and the money just went elsewhere. Eventually the town moved a bit, expanded in one direction and let itself go in another. Now that part of town’s just sittin’ there.”
Zak leaned forward, having been listening intently.
“So everyone pretty much left this whole chunk of Browning alone and pretended it didn’t exist?”
Joseph chuckled and shrugged.
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s one way o’ puttin’ it.”
“How come they didn’t do something with it? I mean, you said there wasn’t enough money to build it back up, but how come they didn’t demolish it, put some condos up or something?”
“’Cause of the history.”
“The history?” Zak asked.
“Yup. Old Browning was the first section of the town to be settled in the late eighteen-hundreds or so. The first church is there, a lot of the first houses ever built. Most of the buildings still standing are historical landmarks of one kind or another.”
“Really?” Zak asked.
He couldn’t hide the interest and excitement in his voice. Historical landmarks meant a place was old, and an old place always had a lot of death in it, which meant a lot of potential spirits.
“Oh, yeah, there’s an awful lot o’ memories attached to Old Browning. People around here respect it.”
Zak wrinkled his brows.
“What do you mean, they respect it?”
Joseph gave Zak a pointed look.
“We leave it alone,” he said.
Zak glanced over at Nick, then back to Joseph.
“Is there a reason you leave it alone?” Zak asked. “I mean, what happens if people don’t?”
Joseph looked around at Aaron and Nick before settling his gaze back on Zak.
“Nothin’ good,” Joseph said.
Zak felt a chill go up his spine.-+-
“At this point in the interview, I asked Joseph to tell us what people had experienced going into Old Browning, but he refused to continue talking to us. He also warned us not to go into Old Browning ourselves because it was believed to be haunted by a large number of restless spirits.
By the time we got back in our van, we knew we had to go to Old Browning, regardless of Joseph’s many warnings.
I didn’t know at the time just how big of a mess I was getting us into…”-+-
Joseph hadn’t been messing around when he said most of the roads into Old Browning were impassable. By the time they found the one narrow road leading into town it was almost dark.
Zak had a flashlight in one hand and his camera in another. He switched on the night vision and pointed the camera out the windshield from the passenger seat.
“As you can see, we have arrived in Old Browning. The road’s not in very good shape, but you can see a few houses around if you look. It’s already dark out, and Joseph said parts of the ground caved in and stuff, so we’re gonna have to be really careful makin’ our way around here.”
Aaron sat beside Zak in the driver’s seat. While Zak and Nick had been talking excitedly about this investigation, Aaron had been quiet for most of the ride. Occasionally he’d muttered a few words of discouragement, but that had never stopped Zak and Nick before. Tonight was no different.
“My buddy Aaron’s in the driver’s seat, here, and Nick’s in the back gettin’ his supplies together. I’m gonna go out there too and get my stuff and we’ll talk about some of the equipment we’ll be using.”
Zak shut the camera off and hung it around his neck by its strap. He got out of the car and walked around to the back, where Nick was rummaging around. He gave Nick a nod.
“How’s it goin’, man?”
Zak set his flashlight down on the floor of the van and grabbed a duffle bag, which had a few changes of clothes inside. He grabbed a few packs of batteries and tossed them inside.
