Haunted Hinsdale House - from the inside

The late Fr. Alphonsus Trabold.

PART 3

HINDSALE, NY - The Hinsdale House haunting had received a fair amount of press before I ever arrived on the scene - especially media from nearby Buffalo. The events leading up to the 1973 exorcism there were well known in that region.

If you have not read Part 1 and Part 2 to this series - you may want to start from the beginning. As a college student, I listened to the campus lecture by Fr. Alphonsus Trabold, and walked away from several attempts by people to get me to stay away from the secluded place. I soon encountered first hand how a "force" was able to take control of the car I was driving, manipulate the steering and excelerator and cause an accident. The "force" also seemingly caused the back-up lights to not work on the property. We also encountered the "ghost car" that both the family and Fr. Trabold described - watching it disappear in a fog of dust.

That midnight excursion into the unknown ended when my three companions refused to follow me into the home - and we returned to campus.

Follow-up investigation

The following day, though, we set out again in daylight to investigate further.

We first retraced our path from the driveway - where we first encountered the "ghost car" - to the point where the car disappeared. The first part of that roadway was discounted, because we knew we could still see the car's tail lights through the dust that the car was throwing behind it. We moved to a point in the road where we apparently lost the car and drove slowly to the spot where the dust seemed to end as though you had driven through a brick wall.

This short piece of roadway was searched for any driveway jutting off of the road - any means of escape for our "ghost car." And what we found were ditches on both sides of the road, impassable for a car, and a thick woods on both sides of the road. We could not figure out how this huge piece of metal and bolts and rubber had simply vanished in front of us - so we returned to the house.

I drove my own car this day - a 1975 Datson B210 - with the same group from the previous night. I first photographed the home from the outside, and then we entered through a back door. Based on our experiences the night before, I have to say I was a little cautious entering this home even on a bright sunny day, and moved slowly from one room to the other. And nothing happened. It just felt like an old home with no traces of the paranormal.

Attic crawl space

Some of the anomalous activity that the family reported here in the early 1970s came from a crawl space area accessed from the second floor. We moved to that area, opened the door and looked in. The family had reported hearing odd sounds from this spot during the night. When the father and a son investigated, they discovered that the piece of the brick chimney that connects a first floor fireplace to the roof, had been disassembled - brick by brick - and the bricks piled neatly nearby. The story was told that each time the family attempted to rebuild the chimney, the sounds would come again - and again - they would find the chimney in this piece of the house disassembled and stacked nearby.

The area did not have a floor - only beams of wood with a space between them that housed pink insallation. We could see the chimney, its missing pieces, and the stack of bricks close by. Three of us decided to go in for a closer look.

Somehow I just wanted to get near that chimney and check out the bricks. Bob and Dennis followed. But as we moved across the small room, Dennis slipped - and tried to catch himself, but failed. The weight of his body tilted left as he was falling, and instead of catching one of the beams, his hand went down into the insallation. His quick scream caught our attention and everyone stopped for a moment unti he got his bearings again. But Dennis stared at us in a strange way.

"There's something down there," he said, pointing to the area where his hand had just been. It was a tough move thinking you are in a haunted house, and with the previous night's events still fresh in our minds, it was even tougher to reach down into this unknown area - but we did. Buried in this attic spot was a notebook, a cassette tape, a piece of folded paper and a doll.

The notebook turned out to be a diary written by one of the children who lived in the house. The cassette tape was a recording of two children - a boy and a girl - talking about spooky activity happening in the house. The folded paper opened up to a drawing of "spirits" in the house. I kept three of the items. Bob kept the doll, later tossing it into the trunk of his car and forgetting about it.

We also walked out the door that day with one of the bricks from the chimney - a local relic to remember the event.

I ended up writing a feature story for the school newspaper - the Bona Venture - in October 1975 - the Halloween issue. What I did not know was that the family who once lived here, who moved to California, had decided the media had calmed down and it was safe to return to the area. Now my story was out - including quoted pieces of the diary.

Diary writer calls

My telephone on campus soon rang. It was the young woman, now in her 20s, who had written the diary and who had returned to the area. My recollection of this phone call is that the woman was screaming from the start and never stopped. She wanted her diary back. Whether or not I made the right decision at the time, I asked her to call me back when she could talk to me in a civil toungue, and I hung up.

My friend Bob, whose car we used that first night, experienced trouble with his vehicle beginning that night - and as told in a previous feature, got into an accident and his car was totaled. I spoke with Bob recently, now a colonel with the U.S. Army, and he said that after the accident, while watiing for a tow truck, he opened the trunk to remove some personal items, saw the doll, became very afraid, and tossed the doll along the road side.

And the brick. The four of us haunted explorers got together one night at St. Bonaventure University, and we buried the brick alongside a campus statue. No one dared keep it.

Network makes a movie

Many years would pass before I saw the one-hour network film made on the house, and checking the credits, I found Michael Rambacher. Michael is a paranormal researcher local to the house. I first called Michael in 2007, discovered that he had been researching the house since 1985, and listened to his update.

Huge pieces of the story had been missing for me. Michael had become close friends with Fr. Alphonsus Trabold, and recieved intimate details on the exorcism there and other anomalies occuring at the site. Michael also told me that the young woman whose diary I had discovered there, had taken her own life; that the husband passed away, and that the mother had moved away to a distant state.

But a huge piece of the story that I did not know, was that Fr. Trabold invited a psychic to the house with him for the exorcism - Alex Tannous - and that Alex had procurred a four-person film crew from New York University (NYU) to shoot the exorcism. Michael also recounted personal details of the exorcism he received from Fr. Trabold, including the fact that the "entire house shook" at one point and that all of this was caught on film. Both Fr. Trabold and Alex Tannous are now dead.

Exorcism filmed

Now if all of this isn't strange enough, Michael recounted that after that shoot, the NYU film team was never heard from again. This is not to imply that they were killed, or carried off by the Catholic Church to preserve the sanctity of the exorcism. Michael says it is a fact that neither Fr. Trabold or Alex Tannous was ever able to get in touch with these people (we only presume they were students) - three male and one female.

We agreed to stay in touch.

But while working on these stories here, I had the urge to call Michael again last week. And we had a wild coincidence. Michael was glad to hear from me - and he had interesting news - news he had just received from the woman who lived in this house with her husband and children from 1970 to 1973. Incredible news regarding the film.

New details emerge

Stay tuned for Part 4 where Michael Rambacher will help us put the pieces of this strange puzzle together and reveal details about this 1973 exorcism never before revealed.