By Martin Montoya, Staff Reporter
Interested in the unexplainable? Former web design student Bryan Higgins said he was a paranormal investigator, who retired after years of encounters with the unknown.
After about 50 paranormal encounters throughout his life and all his local investigations, Higgins still shows pictures and videos of what he claims is his scariest encounter, he said.
In November 2011, Higgins investigated a supposed haunted house with a few friends along to help, he said.
To make the study as thorough as possible, a daytime walkthrough was required to catch anything unusual before night fell, Higgins said.
Searching through the house with a video camera, Higgins said he and his team spent a long time in a particular room, where a member of his team spotted a red substance on the floor right before they were going to leave.
Higgins told his team that it was probably only candle wax because of its shiny red appearance, he said.
In a video shown to the Chronicle, a member of Higgins’ team can be seen crouching down to touch the liquid, which wicked up onto his finger and caused him to drag his finger across the floor in confusion while he desperately tried to rid himself of what they now believe to be blood.
In the video, Higgins pointed out how the team’s footprints were underneath the red liquid, which had not been there previously and seemed to be undisturbed and fresh, he said.
“We didn’t spot it, didn’t trample it, step on anything, all of a sudden this red stuff shows up on the floor,” Higgins said.
Later that night, traveling back to the house again, the team wandered into the attic of the abandoned house, and Higgins said that he and his team were tearing up floor boards when they came across old newspaper articles.
In the articles were stories discussing appearances of blood. Higgins said the articles called them “blood miracles,” and a church was calling it the “blood of Christ.”
Also among their findings were books and other documents containing blood appearances, and the description of the substance in the documents correlated to exactly what they saw, he said.
“This place is so damn haunted,” Higgins said.
Upon another visit to this house, Higgins said their equipment, infrar e d cameras, electromagnetic force detector and regular cameras, which had been charged up and ready to go, no longer had sufficient battery life 20 minutes after arriving at the house.
The only piece of equipment working was the voice recorder, Higgins said, which allowed him to continue his investigation by going into the blood room alone.
H i g g i n s was going into the room to t r y and record an Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP, a technique used by ghost hunters who want to try and communicate with entities not of this world, he said.
Higgins said to conduct an EVP session, everyone present must remain as still and quiet as possible while someone asks a question out loud and then falls immediately silent, so as not to contaminate anyone’s recordings, making sure to note any sounds made.
This allows investigators to turn up the white noise in the recording around the silent area, where essentially no noise should be in the house, he said.
“It’s real as hell. It’s not a joke, I thought it was and found out the hard way,” Higgins said.
After his team made their thoughts clear that Higgins is crazy to go in the room by himself at night, he went into the blood room alone, only equipped with his voice recorder, he said.
“I have the scariest stuff you will ever hear,” Higgins said.
In the room, Higgins started talking in a not-so-friendly way to whoever may have been listening, and as he spoke a shadow moved across the back window of the room, he said.
“Don’t go there, NO! Chill,” he said in the recording.
Higgins can be heard in the recording saying the encounter was creepy and leaving the room, afraid and aware that he was not alone.
“You should hear this, there is this unearthly voice,” Higgins said.
Upon later examination of his EVP session when Higgins turned up the white noise on the recording, a voice can be heard plain as day, he said.
“I told you not to come in here, AHHHH!” said a voice heard in the EVP recording.
Higgins said his thoughts are that the voice heard is not a person who has passed from our world.
“It sounds like a damn demon,” he said.
Shortly after his investigations, Higgins said something started following him, and messing with him.
Higgins said noises were coming from all corners of his home, the door was being knocked on and the doorbell rang with no one around and no lights on outside triggered by the motion sensor.
Higgins said a streak of blood came out of his wall, which he has left there for the chance to be able to test it.
“Things don’t make sense, but there is some kind of supernatural explanation as well,” he said.
After having these encounters persistently occur over time, Higgins said he decided to have a medium accompany him and his team to the investigation site to perform a cleansing.
Higgins said the medium did her own walk around through the house, when she came to the filthy basement, she entered alone.
Upon ascending back into the house, Higgins said the medium was crying uncontrollably, because she had sensed bodies buried down in the basement.
As the team and the medium continued through the house to go on with the cleansing, she began to communicate with something in the house.
Higgins said that she told him, “It’s here. It’s right behind me.”
Higgins said he has video and photo evidence of the medium becoming inhabited by something not of this world, and said he had to perform an exorcism on the medium, who was there to cleanse the house and yet needed to be cleansed herself.
“I didn’t think I was going to have to participate in the actual exorcism,” Higgins said.
Using oils and holy water the medium brought with her, Higgins said he and his team started saying prayers and burning sage while sprinkling the inhabited medium to rid her of whatever invisible evil was making her jerk violently and make wretched faces.
“She was a nice lady until she became possessed,” Higgins said.
After exorcising the medium, Higgins said they then consecrated the house so no evil spirits could escape.
“It scared me. I was pretending I wasn’t scared, but I was deathly afraid,” Higgins said.
Higgins said he can’t explain what happened at the investigation site that night, but he thinks it was a demonic entity.
“Everybody has their demons, I just think it’s part of our own experiences we have to deal with,” he said.
Having had encounters with the unexplainable at a young age, Higgins said he first came across a ghost at the age of five.
Higgins said he used to live in a house that was itself haunted, and living there definitely affected his outlook on life.
“All those experiences really affected me as a kid and it kind of left stains in my mind,” he said.
