If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out part 1 and part 2 of this blog series!
Debunking a Sound on an Investigation
I thought I would take the opportunity to give you an example of my past couple of blog posts into practice.
In May 2022, the Association of Paranormal Study had the opportunity to investigate the Cabin on 360 in Mechanicsville, VA. You can check out the location at Haunted 360 Houses if you are not familiar with it.
We started our investigation in “The Rancher.” I put my recorder on the window sill of the first floor space that was used as both a living room and the lobby for an office (yes, I know, rookie mistake). We began our first sweep of the house; after a while, we moved on to the “Cabin”, but I left my recorder to run. About 30 minutes later, we came back to start our first official session in The Rancher.
An hour later, the team took a break to prepare for some outside sessions. I collected my recorder from The Rancher and began to listen to some of the audio.
Analyzing the Audio
In the recording, you can hear our team leave The Rancher and head towards the Cabin. About 5 minutes after the sound of our team dies out, there is a sound on the recorder that sounds like papers rustling and then a clicking sound and it dies out. This happens a few times, but at different intervals. Based on the volume of the sound, I knew that whatever happened was really close to where the recorder was. The team could not figure out what it was. We went back to The Rancher to try and recreate the sound, but to no avail. The closest we could get to recreating it was the sound of a dried leaf being stepped on or crumbled, but there was nothing close enough to the recorder for that to be the reason.
Later on, I used my noise-canceling headphones to relisten to the sound. I was able to isolate it and clear up the noise with Audacity and found the answer. The rustling sound turned out to be the sound of wings, and I remembered that when I picked up the recorder, there were a couple of dead flies by the sill. The sound was the flies trying to fly out the window and running into the glass.
Debunked.
Story Conclusion
So what was the squeak that I heard?
After eliminating what I thought were all options, I reached out to my team to let them know what happened, then left the situation alone and let it go. I still wasn’t convinced it was something paranormal, but I had run out of things to eliminate.
Picking up where I left off in Criminal Minds, I rewound the episode back a minute to continue watching and hit “play”.
*squeak squeak*
In the episode I was watching, Jason Gideon did not have handcuffs, so to restrain the criminal, he used zip ties.
It wasn’t a squeak after all, but the sound of the zip ties being pulled taut.
Debunked.
