During my time in law enforcement I had thousands of calls for service over a 31 year career. Most of these calls were routine. Some were critical incidents of life and death. And a few were categorized as unexplained. I had calls that became criminal cases and incident cases that had a bit of unexplained paranormal activity.
Of course, those paranormal encounters were never written in to a report or talked about openly with personnel, especially supervisors.
I put some of these unexplained paranormal incidents into my own personal X-File hoping I could follow up later to find the truth or to debunk the unexplained.
Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, the unexplained encounters I had while working for the Sheriff’s Office left me with a question mark on life in general. The curiosity of it alone, regardless if you believe in the supernatural or not, should merit a closer look at it. Being curios in law enforcement should be a foundational practice to anything you do in law enforcement. Curiosity is how cases are solved!
To Die Peacefully
In the late 80’s I was a patrol deputy assigned to Aptos, Ca. on day shift for a 6-month rotation. At the time, Aptos had a large population of senior citizens. I was handling elderly deaths 1 to 3 times a week. Most of these calls for service were routine, meaning, an elderly person, usually under a doctors’ care, passed away of natural causes. Super easy service calls to handle, but they were time consuming.
One Saturday afternoon I had a call for service that turned into a supernatural moment. As I have said many times before, I can see, hear, and communicate with spirits. But when I got the job as a deputy sheriff, I shut it down, especially at the time I had to take my state required psych exam. I couldn’t be doing crazy talk about the dead with the psychiatrist after I applied for a job that required carrying a gun, wearing a badge, and driving a fast patrol car!
It was a typical weekend for me. I was driving around Aptos patrolling the neighborhoods and beaches when I got the call for a “welfare” check at a residence. I already knew what that meant, it was going to turn into a dead body call.
I arrived on scene and talked to the neighbor who was waiting for me outside of the residence in question. He told me that his neighbor never misses picking up her newspaper at her front door in the morning and it was now noon. Yes, this was in an era where you had a kid on a bike or an old man in a Ford Pinto car with his radio at full blast tossing newspapers onto porches in the mornings. Of course, if a kid was tossing papers, it never landed at the front of the door. It was always in the bushes, shrubs, or on the roof.
The neighbor had a key to the lady’s house. He was her house sitter when she was away on vacation. He was concerned because her car was still in the driveway and the newspaper was on the porch. He told me the lady always picked up her paper by 8am.
He opened the door for me and left me to do my work. I immediately smelled death. Unfortunately, the heater in the house was still on and all that did was help the death odor be stronger.
I did my usual thing of checking every room and found the lady in bed in her bedroom. She was lying flat on her back perfectly straight in bed. Right down the middle. Sheets were over her body perfectly, not a single wrinkle. She looked peaceful, but dead. It’s how most people would like to die: an overnight death lying in bed looking peaceful.
As I sat beside her, I was making phone calls to her doctor, and I was on the phone with our Coroner Detective giving him ID info, prescription drug info, etc. She had a landline phone on her nightstand that I used. We didn’t have cell phones back then. I was busily handling the phone calls, when I was interrupted by someone tapping my shoulder from behind.
I turned and to my surprise, it was her, the decedent! And I said out loud, “Oh, you’re still here?” She looked at me in despair. I stood up and I looked right at her and I told her she had passed. I went on to tell her that everything was going to be ok. I told her I was going to notify her family, and that her body would be transported to our morgue. And I went on to say that once family figured out what they needed to do we would release her body to her family’s mortuary choice. The despair on her face faded and she nodded her head, not speaking a word a to me, but acknowledging what I told her and in the blink of an eye, she was gone. I could feel the room clear out and not feel so gloomy or heavy. Helping the lady move on to her next destination was a first for me. I had never done that before.
I was hungry and had to wait for the coroner van to arrive (usually 1 or 2 hours wait). So, I grabbed my sandwich from my car and returned to her bedroom, sat in her room chair, ate lunch, and started to write my report. We handwrote reports back then.
Once the coroner arrived, I helped load the lady into the body bag and helped lift the gurney into the van. And off to the next call for service I went.
These ghostly encounters I had while working I kept secret. I never spoke to my colleagues and especially my sergeant about these incidents. If I did, I would be sent to the funny farm in a strait jacket and out of a job.
My First Murder-Suicide
At some point in your law enforcement career, you will have your first murder case experience. Whether that’s by way of being on patrol or as a detective. In 1988, after graduating the police academy in Dec. 1987, I had my first murder-suicide experience.
In the 80’s, California had not yet developed domestic violence laws. So, by the time law enforcement was called to a domestic disturbance, it was out of control and violent with little recourse to enforce anything.
I was assigned to the Soquel beat during part of the 80’s. Dispatch notified me of a domestic dispute in progress. I just happened to be a minute away from that residence. As I parked my patrol car down the road a bit from the residence, dispatch advised that neighbors were calling after hearing shots fired in the area. Another deputy was near by and was also enroute to the house.
We walked up to the house. It was eerily silent. No sounds of arguing and no sounds of gun fire. We entered the home. When we entered the front door, the living room was right in front of us. Standing in that room was a young girl, no more than 6 years old, maybe. She had the look of shock and fear.
We asked the girl where her parents were? She didn’t speak, just pointed her finger down the hallway towards the bedrooms. We cleared each room in the hallway until we reached the master bedroom.
On the way down the hallway, I became enraged in anger and then sadness, then back to anger and could not understand it, but could not deal with it or try to analyze it because we were still in a present danger.
From the doorway of the master bedroom, I looked left and could see a body on the floor. To my right, I saw another body on the floor, a handgun, and blood spattered on the closet door which was also a mirror.
First priority was to secure the handgun, check for pulses on the bodies, and then secure the girl to a safer place. In that order!
Afterwards, I figured out that I was unintentionally picking up and absorbing the energy in that area. Meaning, without control over it, I was picking up the residual spiritual energy left behind by the parents. I had no context to it and didn’t understand it until we found the bodies on the floor.
I learned so much that day professionally. I got a big lesson on how to collect and preserve major evidence. The sergeant in charge of CSI (crime scene investigations) took the time to show and explain to me blood spatter patterns, bullet trajectory, etc. As a rookie in my first year, it was an amazing, exciting, adrenaline high, gnarly incident that I could have ever asked for! It’s what we all signed up to do and I was like, “wow!” this is going to be a great career!
On the flip side of that, I personally gained a lot of experience about how I could absorb spiritual energy in that manner and decipher what I was feeling and how to translate that into making sense to me. Over time I have learned how to control that, shield from it, so I could go about my day without being inundated and overwhelmed by it.
At the start of my career, I made a rule for myself. That rule was to never follow up on what happened to the victims, families, or friends of all involved after a case closed, unless I was mandated by state or local laws and office policies to do so. It was a way for me to stay unattached emotionally from the incident and get to my next call for service. And this stayed true for the little girl I encountered that day. I don’t know how life went for her after that day or if she is even alive anymore.
This case was tragic on many levels and was not taken lightly by me. It was a huge learning experience professionally and personally. It helped me grow up fast as a 22-year-old who was just starting a crazy career (The above photo is me as a punk kid in 1987, 21-years old, at the Police Academy just months before this murder-suicide).
The unexplained is always a fascinating thought, a puzzle to be solved, a truth to be uncovered! My personal X-Files has a few of these cases in it from my law enforcement days. I review them every now and then hoping to find a fresh clue and write about it.
These two cases I just wrote about helped me grow personally. I learned a lot about myself and my abilities. It validated what I was seeing, feeling, and hearing in the spirit world.
Until next time on Haunted Foodie Traveler…
Thank you for sharing your experiences and reflections Paul.
Our contemporary western orientation focuses nearly exclusively on the material aspects of existence. As a result, as a society, we tend to ignore, deny or reject other aspects of reality, as if life occurs in a vacuum. Ironically, the most brilliant scientific minds eventually recognize the limits of reason as a tool for understanding that which is beyond physical reality and acknowledge a higher power is responsible and active in our universe. Most of us call this God.
Thank you Craig! It’s good to hear from you!!
Paul, can the spirits see and move around invisible to the living?