Two young girls who were grief-stricken at the loss of their mum from cancer were left horrified after discovering the source of “tapping” in the walls.
Karen and Tina Bowen, aged nine and 15 respectively, were spending a lot of time home alone after their mother’s death as their dad, Frank Bowen, had to work two jobs to replace his wife’s income. Podcaster Mr Ballen describes how Tina told her younger sister: “Why don’t we get our Ouija board out and have a séance? Let’s try to communicate with mum and see if she manipulates the board and gives us a sign that she’s here with us.”
But, almost immediately after their paranormal experiment, they started hearing an eerie tapping sound coming from the basement of their home in Townsend, Massachusetts. Later that night, when Frank Bowen arrived home fro work, he was surprised to see his daughters still up and about – and listened patiently to their takes of a supernatural visitation from their late mum.
Frank put their stories down to natural grief, and a lively imagination, but the tapping continued. Mr Ballen explains: “Over the next few days, is the tapping sounds in the house would continue, and they were no longer just coming from the basement.
“They were also coming from the kitchen. They were coming sometimes from the second floor. They were coming from all over the house. But the girls were the only ones who could hear the sounds.”
After a few days, though, the girls were no longer excited by the mysterious tapping sound. They were terrified. Especially as it seemed to be no longer confined to the basement, but could be heard all over the the house.
Eventually, Karen and Tina plucked up the courage to go down to the basement to see if they could identify the source of the sound, half-expecting to find a racoon or other small animal trapped down there. Tina armed herself with a kitchen knife and led the way.
But after a brief search, their nerve deserted them and they began to make their way back upstairs. It was on they way back up to their bedroom that they found a terrifying message scrawled on the wall. In dripping red lettering, it read “I’M IN YOUR CLOSET. COME FIND ME.”
The terrified pair ran straight out of the house and took refuge with one of their neighbours. They stayed there until Frank got home, and then breathlessly told him the whole story. Frank concluded that his daughters’ grief had push them into a dangerous delusion, and resolved then and there to organise some counselling for them.
The chilling message on the wall was real enough, written in ketchup, but Frank could only assume that one of the girls had written it themselves in a bid for attention.
After the counselling sessions began, a few weeks went by with no more tapping, and the Bowens began to feel as if whatever had been plaguing them, was now over.
But a few weeks later, in December 1986, the mystery unravelled in a deeply disturbing way. Frank had taken his daughters and their friend Kathleen out for a meal. When they got home, the house was lit up – with lights on in several rooms and the TV blaring. Still, in the back of his mind suspecting that his daughters had somehow engineered this “haunting”, he began to carefully explore his house.
Not only were all the lights on, but Frank noticed that some of the furniture had been moved around. Mr Ballen explains: “He’s thinking to himself ‘They’ve been with me. We’ve been out of the house. How could they do this?’ But again, Frank is caught. On the one hand, he knows this could be his girls, but he’s also thinking, ‘I think that’s not possible’.”
Room by room, Frank went through the house – even peering into the attic and basement – but finding nothing. Until he checked one final room on the ground floor: “Frank goes into this room, and right away, he sees on the wall right in front of him, written in shaving cream, are the words “MARRY ME.”. Frank’s staring at them being like, What is this? Who wrote this? The girls, again, are right behind him, tucked up against the back of his legs.”
“As he’s doing that. He hears movement in the closet, in the room that he’s in. Frank turns and he looks at this closet. The doors are open to this closet, but it’s a dark closet. And out of the closet, walks a man who is wearing a dress, Frank’s dead wife’s dress. This person had clown makeup on their face, and they were wielding a hatchet.”
The three girls fled upstairs, with Frank protecting them as they retreated. Tina, the older girl, threw herself out of the bedroom window into the garden, running to the neighbour’s house in order to call the police.
By the time officers arrived, the mystery attacker had disappeared, leaving his hatchet behind as the only evidence that he had been there. But police took the case seriously and arranged for the Bowens to stay somewhere else for a few days while they monitored the house to see if the man returned.
When Frank popped back to pick up some clean clothes, a day or two later, he was surprised to find that there was no police car outside his door. He did, however, see some movement at a first-floor window and assumed that the officers were, for some reason, searching his house again. He called the local police station to be sure. They told him there was no reason for an officer to be inside his house, and told him to wait until another police car could be sent.
The cop, who had simply been a little late starting his shift, warily went inside. “He opens it up, he looks inside, and he can’t believe what he’s looking at,” said Mr Ballen. “In the first floor of Frank’s house, it’s just madness. There are pennies glued to the ceiling of the first floor, and the furniture clearly has been moved all over the place, but it’s been stacked in these weird arrangements.
“There are glasses of champagne all over the first floor, and there are kitchen knives that have been driven into family photos on the wall. Like the knives are still sticking into the photo, and where these knives have been driven through the photo is always on a picture of either Tina or Karen, the two daughters. Where there are knives in these pictures, above those pictures is written, ‘I’m going to kill you, Tina,’ or ‘I’m going to kill you, Karen.’ This officer obviously knows we have a problem here. He backs out of the house and he calls for reinforcements.”
A second search of the Bowen home turned up nothing. Until one of the investigators, leaning on a washing machine in the basement, noticed a hole in the wall behind and is greeted with a chilling sight: “Looking back at this officer is Danny LaPlante. He’s crouched down, he’s got a hatchet over his shoulder, he’s wearing a dress, and he’s staring back at this officer.”
LaPlante was a 16-year-old who attended the same school as Tina. He had apparently asked her out and been turned down, although she didn’t remember even speaking to him. He had broken into the Bowens’ house and for six months had been living in their walls.
LaPlante was arrested, but 10 months later he was freed on bail while he awaited trial. It was then that he broke into another house in the town, the home of the Gustafson family.
When 33-year-old Priscilla Gustafson returned home and surprised LaPlante, he tied her to a bed, raped and shot her, then drowned her children, 7-year-old Abigail and 5-year-old William, in a bathtub.
Andrew Gustafson discovered the bodies of his wife and children when he returned home from work that day.
LaPlante was arrested for the crime and originally sentenced to life in prison without parole, before lawyers argued that because he was a juvenile, that sentence was unconstitutional.
He remains behind bars. Mr Ballen concluded: “He was actually put up for parole recently. He didn’t get it. But during his hearing for his parole, when he was rejected, he said he was determined to be one of the most psychopathic inmates in the entire prison system.”
