Haunted Objects: Stories of Ghosts on Your Shelf by Christopher Balzano, Tim Weisberg Page A

there were so few children’s books in the house, he read to them from Jackie’s work. He noticed that the book moved around more frequently when he was working, and when he read the book, activity in other parts of the house decreased. It was as if the spirits of the children were listening to him read instead of roaming the halls. Ben became a common site, reading aloud to the young spirits until he enrolled in college and quit working at Lizzie’s.
    Jackie is not sure what to make of it all. Some of the first reports of hauntings at the bed and breakfast involved the original children who died on the property, drowned by their own insane mother, a distant relative of Lizzie’s.
    There is nothing about the haunted book that specifically points to her little girl spirit, but Jackie doesn’t live her life by facts alone. “Part of the reason I invited her to come was so she could play with the other kids trapped in the house. She never got to play with other kids when she was alive. I like to think she is just telling me she stayed and is happy there,” Jackie said.
    Jackie gets another message, too—the girl wants her to come back—but a part of her doesn’t trust the messenger. During her many paranormal experiences, she has been lured to locations and situations by dark forces, and what walks that property is not always truthful.
    “I think they have her trapped,” Jackie said. She believes something stronger (although she refuses to say demonic ) may have started all the trouble on the property and that it remains there. She also thinks they either kidnapped the girl ghost to use her energy and light, or to get Jackie to come back. “It’s a fun place to go, but there is also something not fun about it,” she said.
    Darker forces have found other ways to get into Jackie’s life. Through a series of bizarre events, Jackie came to possess boxes of evidence, court documents, and personal correspondence of Ronnie “Butch” DeFeo, the man who murdered his family in the famous “Amityville Horror” house. His killings made the price of the house fall so low it became attractive to the Lutz family, who moved in and eventually had to move out because of the evil spirits there.
    While the Lutz family and their experiences have been open to scrutiny, no one can dispute that DeFeo’s family was murdered in the house. Over the years, there have been whispers that Ronnie was possessed at the time of the murders, that he made a pact with the devil, and that there was something about the man and the house that was evil.
    Jackie was drawn to Ronnie before she knew who he was, almost as if he was whispering in her ear. She eventually began to correspond with him and then met him face-to-face. Trust and bonds were formed, or to hear Jackie tell it, reformed.
    “Ronnie gave me power of attorney to help him. He was very ill, and I agreed to get him medical attention. And Ronnie gave me his story,” she said.
    Along with the story came the paperwork of a lifetime as well as court documents, stored in a room in the Amityville house, which told the other side of one of the most famous cases in paranormal history. But when Jackie got the papers, something else came along with them.

    Jackie (wearing a scarf) at the séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast.
    Bad things began to happen. Jackie, who was used to seeing spirits, saw darker things than she was accustomed to seeing. In the matter of a few weeks after getting the documents, her cat mysteriously died. Over the course of working with DeFeo, three other pets died and he seemed to have knowledge about some of them.
    People around her were getting seriously sick without explanation, and she herself was suffering from a physical and emotional attack. “I had things come into my own mind and questioned my own sanity,” she said.
    Through working with the murderer, she unlocked doors to her past that had been shut tight for decades. She and Ronnie were destined to