Bobtown, Ind.-- The night clung to the group assembled in front of the metal farm gate, draping across their shoulders and sneaking up under their coats, making them feel the need to whisper.\n"What I'd like to do is have everybody say their name on this recorder. That way in case there is a voice on the tape, we can say it's not one of us." \nMike, one of the group's two ghost hunters, was as mysterious as the prey he looked for, dodging questions about his last name and refusing to be tape recorded unless he's hunting. Corey, the other ghost hunter, has already begun filming with his camera, pointing his unblinking red light at them -- the psychic, her husband, their friends, and the trailer's owners -- as each says his name into the recorder. \nThey all stood there, shivering in the October night, for a different reason. Mike and Corey were looking for ghosts. Jamie Cooley and her husband Eddie wanted to know more about the spirit that has haunted her family's home since they moved there in the summer of 1987. She hoped Jenny Jarboe, a psychic, would be able to give her answers to her unanswered questions about the haunting. \nJamie was nine when the family moved from nearby Ewing Street into the doublewide trailer on the old hog farm in Bobtown, Ind. and the haunting started. Small at first. Eerie feelings. Doors slamming. One day, Jamie came home from school and heard the sound of a coffee cup being placed on the counter top, even though there were no adults home.\nAs the years went by, the sounds continued, and Jamie and her mother Becky began to see shadows, cartoony blobs without dimension that floated in the air in front of their eyes, or walked through the walls next to them or dove into the mirror in front of them. The family would catch the dogs staring off, looking at something the rest of them couldn't see. Jamie complained to her mother that something shook her bed at night, and she had nightmares where she couldn't speak or scream.\n"I ran across a kid I went to high school with who was a psychic. He came out and actually went through the house and told us what had happened, and why it is the way it is. And there were things he told us that there was no way he could have known. No way. He had a whole scenario of somebody getting in a fight and never making it out of the house. And I had never told him anything. I guess it left such an imprint on that side of the house it's reenacting what it did last. And that's all it's doing, and we're just getting in the way of it. It's like a fossil in the air. It keeps going through what it's been doing all these years, and we're just getting in the way of it."\nNot only did the psychic tell the Cooleys a little about their spirit, but he offered them a way possibly get rid of it.\nJamie, then 18, sat with her family around the Ouija board. She was uncomfortable with using the board, but the psychic said it was the only way to get rid of whatever was haunting her family. The flames of the candles each family member held danced as they put their fingers to the board and began to ask questions into the silence.\n"What do you want with this family?"\nJamie felt a breeze in the room lift her long red hair from her shoulders. She looked. The windows weren't open.\n"What is your purpose in being here?"\nJamie felt someone was standing on top of her, but was too scared to look up to see if she was right.\nThe Ouija board spelled nonsense under their fingers. The breeze turned into a raging wind, but the candles' flames continued to dance. Suddenly, lyrics from Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" filled in the silence.\n"Mama, just killed a man Put a gun against his head Pulled my trigger, now he's dead Mama, life had just begun\nBut now I've gone and thrown it all away"\nIt was Jamie's younger brother's clock radio. The family collapsed into nervous laughter as he ran into his room to turn it off. Then they realized the song was about a murder.\n"We're done. This is it," Jamie's father announced to the family.\nAfter that night, the haunting stopped.
The ground turns from mud to grass as the group trudges closer to the old trailer. The family had moved the trailer to the back of the property when they had bought a new one this summer. The long rectangular body of the trailer emerges from the night, as if lurking out from behind a curtain. It's decomposing; pieces of wood hang on to the structure like hangnails.\n"Everything broke. Everything turned to crap. Oh way before, that's why we had to get a new trailer. This thing was falling apart; the floors were coming apart at the seams around the edges of the walls along the outer edges. The house really started falling apart. You'd lose everything in that house. Things would vanish a lot. I guess it was some sort of game it had. In the end, now it's out here. All by itself."\nThe group huddles around the door of the trailer. Corey's unblinking red light still pierces the night as they wait for Jenny, who peers intently into the darkness inside the trailer, to speak. \nJamie lingers yards away from the rest of the group, holding her husband's hand tightly. Being by the trailer makes her uneasy. She's only this close to hear what Jenny has to say.\nTouching the side of the trailer, Jenny begins to speak.\n "It started right in here and he dragged her from ... by her hair and by her neck, all the way down this hallway, and he got something from over here to start hitting her with..." \n"Maybe a surname, last name?" Mike said.\nThere's no answer from Jenny, who decides she needs to be in the trailer and begins to walk around to the other side, a trail of people behind her. \nJenny's husband and one of their friends help her step up into the trailer. She tests each floorboard before she puts her weight on it because the floor is rotting. Mike and Corey hop into the trailer with her. The plastic sheets nailed to the side of the trailer rustle.\nIt's quiet again until Jenny's voice fills the silence.\n"There's an argument. He hits her once about right there in that area. She falls down. She says something to him. Then he picks something up." There's a question in Jenny's voice as she searches for something more specific. "Something metal ... it wasn't a hammer, but it was something metal, and he starts hitting her with it a few times here, then he drags her back there and hits her a few more times in that room. But he first hit her in the chest a few times and broke her bottom two ribs, and he had her by the throat and by the hair and dragged her all the way through there. But I can't really tell if that's where she died at."
\nWhen the Cooley family moved into the trailer in the summer of 1987, the property had been vacant for four years. The previous owner had been a hog farmer with a mail-order bride and two children who lived in the doublewide with mirrored windows; they could see out, but no one could see in. Then one day, the wife disappeared. The man told his neighbors she had left him alone with the two kids and taken a job with AmWay. The man and his kids moved away and the property was repossessed. When the Cooleys moved in four years later they found animal bones all over the property, including the bones of dogs with their collars still on tied to their doghouses.
\n"Is she buried somewhere out on the property?" Mike asks.\n"About 200 feet from the trailer," Jenny answers as she roams through the house. "In a well. With concrete, but there's so much down there you wouldn't be able to dig her up," She touches the walls and tries to make sense of the scramble she says is going on in her brain. When there's more than one spirit present, she has to decide which piece of information goes with each ghost; it's like putting together five jigsaw puzzles at once on the same table.\n"Can you tell me what the guy's name was?"\n"No. Cause I keep picking up the April, who shot herself across the street. And there's an Indian that keeps giving me a bunch of vibes, right out there in the woods. But he did wash his hands back there in the back bathroom. I see him washing blood off from him."
\nThe Cooley family has always been in love with Halloween. Some of Jamie's earliest memories are of standing in line at the Hannah House haunted house, listening to the screams that floated out. The family hosted elaborate Halloween parties for years before Becky decided they should convert one of the old barns into a haunted house that they could charge people to go through -- The Coffins. For $10 ($6 for those under 12) The Coffins takes each visitor on a terrifying journey through blood spattered rooms and a graveyard haunted by volunteer ghouls who tease and torment the house's visitors with disturbing scenes, whispered threats and roaring chainsaws.\n"We've always loved haunted houses," says Becky. "That's completely separate from our haunting."\nThe Coffins opened in October last year to moderate success, and after working on the house all year, the family hoped for a higher turnout this year. The buzz of the chainsaw followed by piercing screams are a staple to the family's weekend nights, both are welcome sounds.\nHow long it takes to get through the house depends on the visitors.\n"It matters how fast you run," Jamie says with a shrug. "Some people run and some people can't move, they get so scared,"\nThe Coffins recently came under fire from the media when it was revealed that Jamie's father Ron, who built much of the haunted house and is often present when The Coffins is open Friday and Saturday nights, is a convicted child molester. Jamie insists the family wasn't trying to hide anything. "Every last friend and family member, neighbor... knew about my dad's shameful history ... We just thought it was old bones," Jamie said in an e-mail. The Indiana Sex and Violent Offender Registry lists Ron Cooley in its database, but only one charge of child molestation is listed with his name. The last time he registered with the database was June 1.\nBut for the family, the 10-year-old conviction is a ghost from the past that is best forgotten. Sitting in their warm kitchen, far up the gravel road from the barn that houses The Coffins, Jamie and Becky laugh at how good they are at "scaring," especially in the haunted graveyard.\n"Some people get so freaked out. We've lost so many people out in those weeds. They get so freaked out they just keep running the same way they was faced, and we have to go out and get them," Jamie says. "It's not like our ghost. It's fun because you know it's not reality, you know?"
\nBack at the trailer, Jenny can't get anything on the man.\n"Matter of fact, when I see all this going on I don't even picture him at all. I see her."\n"No last name, surname coming?" Mike asks. The camcorder is running. Jenny is bathed in the unblinking red light. \n "I don't like it," Jenny says suddenly. "It's freaking me out. I need to go. I need to go. Lead me out."\nIt's too much for Jamie, who by this time has left the old trailer and hurries back up the gravel road toward the new one, which is situated on the same site, but has never, thankfully, had problems with hauntings. The warm glow of the new trailer appears on the horizon to greet her as the sound of a chainsaw rips apart the night.
\nAfter the psychic and the ghosthunters left that night, Jamie and her mother compared notes from the evening. Becky said she had not been keeping track of what Jenny had told her, and what she had told Jenny. "At first I thought she came up with this stuff on her own." Jamie said, "but after everyone left that evening, Mom and I traded stories and realized she was only playing us," \nStill, the Cooley family believes in its haunting.
