Waking up, Bob searched the house: "There was no evidence of any entry, or of anyone having been in the house. So, I thought perhaps Cindy had just been a bit more asleep than she had thought and had dreamed it.  using an

Shortly after the incident, Cindy began to suspect that it may have not been an actual living person at all: "I had fear, and I was perplexed about what happened. While I was getting to sleep the next night, I suddenly remembered that I hadn't heard any sound as she passed me. I still am unable to figure out why it happened."

As she recalls, two months passed without further incident, and Bob decided as a contractor that he would install an extra bedroom, bathroom and multi-purpose room with a kitchenette in the basement. With the project, Cindy watched her backyard turn into "a mini-Home Depot" with lumber, sheets of dry wall and fixtures. However, with the project, incidents started to occur more on a round the clock basis. Cindy would heard hammering noises downstairs when he wasn't home. At night, they would hear a large crash, run downstairs and find nothing disturbed. Tools often vanished and turned up in weird places, and measurements Bob took always turned out wrong. The length of the basement was never the same; sometimes it was eighty feet, sometimes it was a hundred and twenty. One day, he made five trips to the warehouse trying to fit a pipe in a job he had covered over a hundred times on other jobs. The project was going way over-budget, and the accidents were non-stop. He was almost electrocuted on a circuit he swore he had switched off, a ladder he was standing on suddenly folded itself up while he was on it and the pipes to the re-routed laundry room suddenly burst one night, filling the basement up with water.

One night the following March, Bob was working downstairs on the basement installing plugs when he stopped as Cindy had called him up to dinner. As usual, he made sure to unplug his drill, but as the evening wore on, he decided to watch a movie, while Cindy went out on the back porch to sit an relax. One hour later, she heard the sound of the drill behind her in the kitchen going on and off as if her husband was trying to scare her. Wondering what he was doing, she brushed out her cigarette and entered the house looking for her husband.

"I'm sitting there watching a movie, and she suddenly there asking me what am I doing? I said, "Watching a movie." and she goes, "Why are you playing with the drill?" I had no idea what she was talking about, but then I thought about the boys and they denied it. Eventually, I went to check and see if the drill was where I had left it but it was right there, and it was still unplugged. I reached down and felt it, but it and was ice cold. It had not been turned on.

"During that time, I was very confused. I knew very well that something weird was happening because Cindy is a registered nurse, very rational and very level-headed."

The strange events continued. One night, Cindy heard the sound of coins falling in a bowl while she was alone in the room. Another time, while cooking, she felt two sharp tugs on her blouse as if one of the boys was trying to get her attention:

"After that incident, I decided we had a problem in this house. There was something going on. It wasn't something that we could understand or explain, but there was something definitely going on. They called on a friend, Paul Sherwood, a history teacher with an interest in ghosts, and he came by and documented the stories. He also spent the night on a cot in the basement trying to get some EVPs, but he didn't get any results.

"That's not to say they weren't experiencing things." Paul responds. "I've known Bob and Cindy for years, and they're not the kind to make up stories. Heck, I even had told them about the house when it was for sale and I wasn't aware of any ghost stories connected to it. I tried contacting the Kendalls to see if they had had any experiences, but at that time, I had no way of tracking them down."

To finish the basement he was falling behind on, Bob started pulling in favors from friends and other contractors he had worked with and started pushing forward to completion. He had an intercom installed so Cindy didn't have to keep running up and down the steps. Whenever she used it, it would buzz to get his attention. One weekend, he and neighbor Sam Belcher were downstairs trying to get the finished walls painted in time before the carpeting would arrive, and Cindy was off shopping to get their boys ready for to restart school. As they were painting, the intercom buzzed from the kitchen: 

"I'd grown used to climbing the stairs after hearing the intercom, so after hearing it and not hearing her voice, I called up the staircase for her and failed to get a response. I thought she was running in and out bringing in bags so I ran up to help her, but she wasn't there. After a few more minutes of painting, it buzzed again so I called upstairs for her. Nothing again. It buzzed about three more times, and Sam said something about it being on someone else's frequency and forgot about it. I turned it off, and we stopped using it, but about a week later, I was down there installing a ceiling fan and it buzzed again.

"Sometime later, I was over at Sam's house doing a light plumbing job for him. He needed a new faucet installed on the back of his house, and I did the job for him. After fixing it, we were sitting around having beers on the picnic table in back and the subject of the weird things at the house came up, and he suddenly recalled briefly knowing Ben Kendall. He confessed the Kendalls thought they were haunted too, and when he mentioned the ghost of the little girl, I suddenly flashed on the figure Cindy had said she had seen."

From that point, the Howards turned to discover if the kids had experienced any activity. From their friends in school, they had learned that their house had had a long reputation of being haunted by a girl who had supposed drowned in the creek. Although the boys hadn't had much experiences, they didn't like their room much. Their response was that they felt they were being watched. At night, the feeling was even worse so they finally started sleeping in the living room full time. It was only after they were forced to return to staying in the room that they, who had rarely been sick before, suddenly became ill for no apparent reason. It was while they were sick that they confessed to hearing about the ghost of the young girl in their house from their friends and to making jokes about her. The illness seemed to be revenge for mocking her existence.

Other activity seemed to make itself known in the house. After his parents said goodnight to Danny one night, his clock radio apparently took on a life of its own. It turned itself on and randomly switched the channels under its own power. He reported that he saw the radio's vindicator moving itself. However, his parents did not believe him. On a day to day basis, he was finding his toys and collection being moved during the hours he was at school. Even Cindy noticed things being positioned in odd ways:

"One day, I entered his room to put some clean clothes away, and I noticed his soldier figures seated in a circle on the carpet around a platter on a bowl set up to look like what a little girl would do to play tea party. I looked at it and thought, "Well, that's really unusual for a ten year old boy." but I dismissed it, and never thought about again until a few months after we heard about the ghost."

In actuality, Cindy and the boys went to live with to live with him, but Bob continued living in the house a bit longer because it was so close to his jobs in the area. He tried renting it to his sister, Maureen, and her boyfriend, but they too moved out quickly in the middle of the night five months later. Bob eventually moved on himself and sold the house in August 1978, but it ended up staying empty for five years, apparently based on its reputation as a haunted house. During that time, much of the old farmland along Bishop Road was sold with small suburban houses popping up all over it. The creek Katie Kendall had once played in was covered up by a storm system that crisscrossed under the growing sub-division, but instead of leveling and rebuilding the Old Gastell House, it was built in to the neighborhood. In 1981, it was acquired by Greg and Jennifer Laurie for their two daughters, Helen and Cassandra ("Cassie"), respectively 12 and 10 years old. Shortly after they moved in in February, the girls made friends with a girl they had met in the neighborhood... named Lottie.

"It had completely surprised the hell out of me." Jennifer recalled. "When we had moved into the house, we were told there was only a few other couples in the finished houses, and not a lot of kids. So to hear them racing around the house playing, screaming and having fun with their new friend made me felt better, but after a few months, I started to realize I had never seen Lottie. Oh, she played with the girls upstairs several times, but I never saw her coming and going."

Through her kids, Jennifer heard from Lottie about the Kendalls and the Howards. Her daughters also repeated that Lottie lived nearby with her grandmother and that she had once become very sick. She told them about the creek that once ran through the neighbor and started trying to get them to go exploring underground to find it. That notion terrified Greg, and he had the developers put grates on all the openings to keep the neighborhood kids from going exploring underground in the culverts. At times, Jennifer would hear an extra voice talking to her kids, but when she'd try to meet Lottie she would always "go out the window" or "just miss her."  

"Eventually, I asked the girls about why I never saw Lottie, and they just sort of shrugged me off. After I told them I wanted to meet Lottie the very next time she showed up, they went several days without seeing or hearing from her. Then finally, one day, I came home from the restaurant, entered into my house and I found a young dark-haired girl sitting by herself in the corner of the living room."

"How did you get in here?" I asked.

"Where's Helen and Cassie?"

"They're in school. Are you Lottie?"

"I'll come back later." And she lifted up and made this bouncy little walk out the front door. I didn't even think to look out the door for her, but she looked as if she was around twelve years old and dressed out of time. I'm thinking Amish or Mennonite with long dark hair held back by a ribbon, and a very old-style white dress with stockings and small shoes. She had huge brown eyes and seemed particularly pale, but she looked very real." Jennifer continued.

After hearing this encounter, Jennifer chided her daughters for letting Lottie enter the house when no one was home. Apparently, she always seemed to "just appear" to them in the house, but soon Lorraine Chapel, Jennifer's single divorced sister, picked up the story and started asking the other local parents about Lottie. At this time, Sam Belcher was still living in the area, and he told her about what the Kendalls and Howards had experienced in the house. There were no photos of Lottie available to show Jennifer, but he knew a drawing had been made based on her based on Daniel and Billy's encounters with her. After tracking it down, he and Lorraine showed it to Jennifer. It matched exactly the girl she had seen.  

In 1983, Jennifer became pregnant, and on February 3, 1984, Greg and Jennifer had Heidi, another daughter. Through her infancy, Heidi was often distracted by something not even her other sisters could see as if someone was in the house trying to get her attention. Both Greg and Jennifer thought they heard someone singing to the baby at night, and when Heidi started choking on something she had swallowed one night, they both heard a frantic "Jennifer! Jennifer!! She's choking!" one night through the baby monitor. They raced into the room and rescued Heidi from choking on a toy she had put in her mouth, but they never learned just who had alerted them to the emergency. However, like Katie Kendall, both Helen and Cassie outgrew Lottie and there was less and less activity from her over the years. Heidi even encountered her a few times, but no where as often as her sisters or Katie.

Eventually, the Laurie's moved out after the girls had grown up and moved out, and from 1995 to 2003, Greg rented the house to a few boarders, mostly couples who knew nothing of the activity or had nothing to report. The last boarders were Ted Beauchamp and Zack Cooper, two struggling musicians who ended up trashing the house and left it abandoned one night. Finding it in this state, Robert Howard and Paul Belcher acquired it once more and turned it into a flip, restoring it and turning it over for a profit. It was sold to Peter and Marcia Costello in July 2004, a couple with no kids.

Peter is a computer programmer who specializes in home security. His wife, Marcia, is a party planner, who invited her mother, Rachel Stafford, to live with them in the basement apartment created by Robert Howard some years before. Marcia sometimes worked nights for her clients, and during the day, Peter was often home alone-or so he thought:

“I had taken the afternoon off. I’d come home and I guess it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d finally gotten some sleep when, suddenly, the image of a young girl appeared before him. She was... I don't know, ten to twelve years old, with dark hair, big brown eyes and dressed from another time. She just looked at me smiling then turned away from the door like she was leaving, and by the time I got up and walked three paces to the door, I don’t know what happened, she just turned the corner and disappeared.”

Peter said he looked high and low for the mysterious girl, but even though the doors were locked from the inside, she was nowhere to be found. He told Marcia he thought he’d seen a ghost, but she refused to believe him. Her opinion, though, was about to change.

"Some time after that incident," Marcia remembers. "I was watching the "Willie Wonka" movie on television, and I had my little dog, Prince, beside me on a pillow. When I looked down at the end of the couch, I saw this white smoky thing, and the first thing I thought was fire, but by that time, Prince had gotten up on his feet, and was barking at it... not scared as you might think, but in a playful excited kind of way, and it just disappeared. When Prince came back I said "Prince… I think we've got company.”

Even though Marcia hadn’t seen the apparition, she was convinced the house was haunted. Determined to get the scoop, she enlisted a friend with a Ouija Board and they tried communicated with the ghost in the living room to see who it was.

“The board talked real good with me. I believed in it." Marcia adds. "I’ve believed in that kind of stuff for a while, but I never come across it until then.”

“I thought she was nuts... or putting me on. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. If it was a paranormal experience or something like that, I didn’t want to have to worry about that, I didn’t want to admit it.”

At times, they'd hear strange sounds from the room in the basement, and at night, they'd hear the sounds of someone in the bedroom they had turned into an office. At times, they'd hear voices like a small girl singing a lullaby from the empty room. A Spiritualist told the Costellos to pour salt all around the house, and they began keeping bags of salt under their beds and even tried a homegrown exorcism, but nothing helped.

“Every time we tried something…" Peter comments. "It would settle down and then it would be stronger, you know there’d be more happenings.”

Objects moved around the house a lot and turned up in weird spots. An antique doll Marcia had on the shelf in the extra bedroom appeared several times on her bed accompanied by the imprint of a small person next to it. They had cold spots, felt the sensation of something tugging on their clothes and while they were out, they often returned to the back door hanging open even if it had been meticulously locked. Peter and Marcia tried to act blasé through the activity, but according to Peter, the ghost wasn't about to let them off the hook:

“I had just woken from a nap and was heading down the hall when I felt the cold draft again and stopped right in the middle of the hall. Marcia was in the kitchen, and I said, "Lottie, please don't bother me." Marcia asked me, "Who's Lottie?" and I told her, "I was talking to the ghost." By now, we hadn't had much of a name for the ghosts, but afterward, she calmed down. Somehow, I knew she was a child's ghost, and we put a few toys in the office and the basement and she calmed down. We still heard footsteps and fleeting images of her in the house, but the activity really calmed down."

Before long, word of the Costello's encounters reached the Center for Paranormal Research in Boston, Massachusetts, and the center's three founders showed up at the Costello's residence. Armed with a truckload of electronic equipment, Dan Atkins, Jeff Gibson and Ernie Hedison studied the house and it's history, even tracking down and talking to Katie Kendall and the Howards.

"The house definitely had a different atmosphere inside it than it did outside." Atkins reported. "It wasn't the depressive feeling I've had in other cases, but more of a lost in time feeling. Both of the Costellos described sensations of misplaced time after sleeping in the house." 

According to Atkins, Katie’s old bedroom used as the Costello's office received the highest amount of paranormal activity: “It was very, very high. So I thought it would be a good idea to start taking a series of photographs at that point.”

Ernie Hedison took two Polaroid shots, one during and one after the flux in paranormal activity. The second photograph was normal, but Dan noticed something strange in the first:</p>

“There was a vague humanoid shape in the forefront of the picture. It maybe a reflection of some unusual environmental effect. It may be a strange artifact of the human psyche, or it may be a contact with a dimension of existence that’s beyond our imagination.”