Horrific Hauntings : The Demon of the Brownsville Road

 After retiring from military intelligence, a 32-year-old man named Bob Cranmer moved into his dream mansion on Brownsville Road with his family. The Mansion had 14 rooms, leaded glass windows, big white pillars, ornate woodwork and a large yard. Hearing that its previous owners were selling it, Bob offered them a bid they couldn’t refuse. Thus, after finalizing the deal, Bob, his wife and their four kids moved into their new mansion at 3406 Brownsville Road, Pennsylvania in the December of 1988. Right from the day the family moved in, they started feeling the strangeness of their new home.

Portrait of The Cranmer Family

A Strange Beginning

 According to what Bob writes in his autobiographical book The Demon of Brownsville Road, his eldest son named Bobby Jr wandered away from his parents while moving in. After searching for him for quite some time, his parents found him crying with his mouth wide open and eyes squeezed shut. After hearing his cries, the first one to reach him was Mrs McHenry, the mansion's previous owner.

 She immediately embraced him as if she already expected it to happen. After letting him go, she told Bob and his wife Lisa that they had to keep track of their children in the house. Although it sounded creepy, the Cranmer's dismissed the incident attributing Mrs McHenry's words to her old personality and reluctance to leave a home that she and her husband had put so much work into. According to Bob, walking into the house for the first time felt like walking into the bowels of a large ship. The strangeness of the house was overwhelming for the family but they were trying their best to live with it.

 The kids of the family started acting strange and they became extremely scared to be alone during the night. As a result, they would often sneak into their parents’ bed by morning. Bobby, the eldest child, seemed to have developed a special dislike for his bed as he would often be found curled up inside his closet sound asleep. His parents tried their best to make him sleep in his bed but as their efforts were not having any result, they put a small mattress in the closet for him to sleep.

 To help the family adapt better to their new house, Bob’s mother suggested that they ask a priest to visit the house and bless it. Thus, Bob invited Fr. Victor, his mother’s favourite priest to bless the house. The priest was able to walk through and bless all the rooms of the house except Bobby’s bedroom. Bobby stood in the doorway of his room and with tears pooling in his eyes, refused to let the priest go in. To avoid agitating the kid, the priest just blessed the outside of the room and left.

 Following this, the family learnt to live with the strangeness of the house. Also, it appeared as if the family was hit with good luck as Bob started earning well and the family got a brand-new car as well. In short, despite the strangeness in their new house, the family were enjoying good fortunes.

Beginning of the Paranormal

 While Bob was digging his garden to plant flowers one day in their first spring after moving in, he found a metal box buried six inches into the ground. When he opened it, he found religious artefacts that included crucifix and rosary beads. Not knowing what it was, he called the previous owners to enquire. When Bob told them about this box on the call, their voice started to tremble with fear and they told him to put it back in the same place. Following this event, creepy things started to happen in the already creepy house.

 The initial paranormal events were benign but annoying. Bob would often find the pull string of the light under the stairs messily tangled up on the nail near it. With the children not tall enough to reach the string and Lisa firmly denying doing it, Bob couldn’t come up with a rational explanation. Also, the lights in the house, mainly the basement, kept turning on by themselves. Bob would often find his work chair pulled out to the middle of the room from his table and the chair would be present facing the furnace. Even the children of the family complained of hearing knocks and footsteps outside of their rooms during the night but Bob and Lisa put the blame on their imaginations jokingly. They, however, started taking their claims seriously when they started complaining about a dark hooded figure that was stalking the corners, hallways and doorways of the house.

The Creepy Blue Room

 With the renovation of a part of the house commencing and Bob rarely staying at home because of his new career in politics, Lisa started sleeping in Bobby’s bedroom which was called “The Blue Room” by the family. After moving into this room, Lisa started having a mental breakdown. Her condition worsened so much that she was admitted to a psychiatric ward for two weeks. According to the family, this room was somehow connected to darkness.

 Following her institutionalisation, the tempers in the family flared up. Adding up the fact that Bob was spending less time in the house, the relationship between the family members started to strain and fights for petty things became inevitable. According to Bob, the blue room acted as a catalyst for the flaring tempers in the house.

 Bobby who had used the blue room as his bedroom for more than six years reported seeing unsettling things in the room. He often saw a tall, dark, grim reaper-Esque figure inside the room. It terrified him so much that he felt that it would, one day, surely kill him. One day, while he was all alone in the house lying down on the bed in the blue room, the then 10-year-old Bobby, started hearing a strange noise. The noise resembled the sound of bagpipes and it kept getting louder and louder. Suddenly, the door to his room opened on its own and a static childlike figure without a face entered his room. After this figure reached the end of his bed, another really tall, dark and hooded figure appeared in the doorway. With its hand extending outside its robe, it ran towards him.

 Bobby pulled his blanket over his face in fear but his blanket was forcefully ripped away from him. With his terrified glaring eyes, he saw another glowing figure floating above him and it was faceless. He shut his eyes and started screaming in fear. Luckily, his mother soon returned and all three figures disappeared.

Two Priests Intervene

 By early 2004, the paranormal events in the house escalated so much that creepiness became a norm. Seeing dark figures and hearing strange sounds that included footsteps and knocks became normal. The family started sensing the odour of burning sulphur inside the house. These events paved way for two priests named Ed Moran and Michael Salvagna and after investigation, they concluded that the family were experiencing a demonic infestation.

 The first one to visit the family was Fr. Ed who offered to conduct a mass in their house after listening to their story. After Fr. Ed's mass in the house, the strangeness in the house escalated. The very next day after the mass, all the picture frames in the house were somehow moved. In the days that followed, the furniture in the house started moving on its own. The taps on the bath opened on their own, clocks and watches stopped working, electrical appliances broke inexplicably, plugs were getting pulled off their sockets and the computers in the house were malfunctioning.

 One day after the mass, while Bobby and his girlfriend were in their bedroom, a CD flew out of nowhere towards him. With Bobby ducking down in time, it slammed into the wall and broke into pieces. In short, the house was in paranormal mayhem. Soon, the second priest, Fr Michael visited the house. Although not an out-and-out exorcist, he had built up a reputation for deliverance.

 By then, the paranormal entity in the house had become more aggressive. It appeared as if its only purpose was to break the family into pieces. The events in the house were pushing the family members away from each other and instead of fighting it together, they were fighting amongst themselves. Bob and Lisa came close to divorce multiple times and they were fighting a war with themselves. Also, Bobby and Charlie, the couple’s other son, tried killing themselves.

 Everyone who slept in the house started having terrible nightmares and occasionally, when they woke up, they found long deep scratches and bite marks on their body. Also, after Fr Michael's visit, the family started finding strange puddles of liquid that resembled blood on the floor and walls of the house. Mostly red in colour, it was also found on the metal threads of burnt-out bulbs. At times, they were found nine feet up the wall on the staircase. Bob who thought that it was one of the family members doing it, couldn’t rationalise it now as no one in the house was tall enough to reach that high. The liquid felt like amniotic fluid and according to Bob, it appeared as if the walls were bleeding. This, however, did not stop Fr Michael and he continued visiting the house and conducting masses for them.

Bleeding Walls

Introduction of a Clairvoyant Woman

 After being suggested by one of Ron’s political friends, another Priest named Ron joined the paranormal party. Strangely, Fr Ron did not visit the property and he only instructed them what to do on the phone. Fr Ron sought the help of a Christian Mystic named Connie Valenti. She was a clairvoyant with the power to remotely view places and with this power, she helped the Cranmer family.

 Through Ron, she instructed Bob to cover a mirror in the house. She also asked Bob to walk through the house room by room while placing a small pinch of salt in every corner and doorway. While doing this, she asked him to authoritatively ask the evil entity in his house to leave. All the while, Fr Michael continued to do masses for the family but the paranormal activity worsened.

History Behind the Haunting

 Through her visions, Connie saw two past happenings that she considered as the reason behind the paranormal events in the house. The first event was about a doctor who lived on the same street and the second was about a mother and her three children.

 Long before the Cranmers moved in, there lived a doctor on Brownsville Road. He lived a few blocks away from the haunted mansion and he had a bad reputation for performing illegal abortions. He was a rude man who was drunk while performing procedures on his patients. Also, he was extremely careless and never focused on sanitation. This led to the loss of lives and extreme bloodshed. To cover up his crimes, he rented a small room in the Cranmer's mansion and made it his covert clinic. He stored the remains of termination and the bodies of his dead patients in this room and when no one was around, he took these remains to the basement and burnt them in the furnace. The room he rented was none other than the Blue Room.

 Also, back in the 18^th century, a woman with her three children was brutally murdered by the Native Americans in order to discourage continued pioneer settlement. Her husband, who had been away fighting in the Northwest Indian war, returned only to find the dead bodies of his family members. He buried them under the Oak tree on the porch of the Cranmer’s house and left the place.

 Thus, according to Connie, the grave combined with the blood-soaked medical procedures that followed manifested a dark entity that fed on the pain and suffering of the innocent. To add on, while the property was being built, one of the workers started developing a romantic attraction towards the original owner’s wife. But when she rejected his advances, he cursed the family and the house and left.

Paranormal Investigation

 With the paranormal events in the house not reducing, Fr Roy decided to reach out to the church and ask them to send a trained exorcist. So, to get the needed verification, Bob reached out to a third-party paranormal investigation group led by a man named Adam. During their investigation, Adam had inexplicable claw marks appear on his forehead. They noted temperature changes inside the house and their technical equipment started malfunctioning.

 The paranormal investigation group found a secret space in the middle of the house. The small L-Shaped Area was filled with black coal dust and it had a palm-sized Amber stone, a complete skeleton of a bird, some of Bob’s old Lego toys and a crumpled piece of paper with creepy drawings on both sides. The atmosphere inside this space was heavy and it emitted darkness.

The Exorcism

 With the findings of the investigation, Fr Roy successfully persuaded the church to send the chief exorcist of the Archdiocese of New York named James. Thus, in the September of 2005, Fr James accompanied by a young priest named Fr Ben and Fr Michael started the exorcism ritual in Cramer’s Mansion. For Bob, this exorcism was a disappointment. He expected a lot of paranormal action just as he saw in movies but nothing strange happened during the exorcism ritual. Fr James, however, told him that the exorcism was successful. He warned the family to expect echo events for a few months before leaving.

 Just as Fr James predicted, traces of the paranormal kept dwindling in the house but they were merely benign. Finally, on 24 February 2006, the activity completely seized after Fr Michael held a mass in the basement of the house. During the mass, a black hazy outline of a figure appeared out of nowhere. The figure started moving towards the secret space in the house and Bob and Fr Michael closely followed it. Michael raised his crucifix and started praying loudly asking it to leave. The entity that was haunting the family and driving them to insanity, melted into the floor and disappeared. Thus, after 17 long years, the family were finally out of the clutches of the demon that haunted them.