Welcome

Coming Soon!

From Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Trauma, Addiction, and the Supernatural, by Joe and Cheryl Cetrone. 

Welcome. If you scanned the code in the back of Chasing Shadows, you’re in the right place.

You don’t have to take my word for any of it.

Everything on this page comes from the cases in the book. These are the recordings my own little Panasonic tape recorder caught, the prints my mother had developed the day after my son was attacked, and the photos I took in the Sallie House. Nothing here has been dressed up for television. Nobody laid music under it.

I’ll tell you what each one is, where it came from and who was there. What you make of it is up to you.

Before you listen

Use headphones, in a quiet room. Most of these sounds are short, and they sit under the hiss of the tape. Play each one a few times before you decide what you heard.

I’ll be fair with you, the same way I am in the book. A handheld cassette recorder hears every furnace, pipe and footstep in a house. Old machines click. Our ears are built to find voices in noise. I know all that. I believe these recordings caught something anyway. Listen and decide for yourself.

Back then, I trimmed each file and ran it through WavePad to cut the background noise. Nothing more has been done to any of them.

The Recordings

“Get out!”
A toddler’s bedroom in Connecticut, 2005. Case File 18, Fear of the Dark.

This was my first case, and the first voice my own recorder ever caught. I set the recorder on the dresser, pressed record and shut the door behind me. Nobody was in that room. When I came back to flip the tape, the recorder had shut itself off after about ten seconds. On the tape, you hear my footsteps leave and the door close. Then a sharp click, like somebody flipping a switch, and a voice, rough and angry.

I’ve never known who it meant.

[AUDIO: Connecticut EVP]

The Everett Growl
A basement in Everett, Massachusetts. Saturday night, December 3, 2005. Case File 19, Bark at the Moon.

Mike and I went to bless a family’s home. In the basement, Mike finished the prayer: “And you are no longer welcome here, evil spirit. And you know you must obey our command.” Nobody in that basement heard a thing. The next day, I put on the headphones, and right behind the word command, something growled.

Keith Johnson heard it the next day. Later, EVP analysts Todd Bates and Joe Bodman and demonologist Dwayne Claud reviewed it. All three called it a genuine EVP. All three come from the paranormal world, so weigh their word knowing that.

When my faith wavers, I play it. Give it a few seconds. Then Mike, telling it to obey.

[AUDIO: Everett EVP]

The Providence Growl
A home in Providence, Rhode Island. Case File 19, Bark at the Moon.

Mike and I blessed a house for a man who had buried himself in drugs and alcohol after a divorce. When we reached the room where he said the oppression sat heaviest, Mike ended the prayer and I said, “Thank you, Jesus.” Something growled over the recorder, low and rough, like a dog. Nobody heard it in the room.

All three of these recordings landed on the same machine. Mine.

[AUDIO: Providence EVP]

The Photographs

Saint Michael the Archangel
Outside Saint Michael’s Church, Oxford Street, Providence. Photo by the author.

The book opens and closes here, in front of Saint Michael with the dragon under his heel.

[PHOTO: Saint Michael]

My Brother Michael’s Family Photograph
Case File 18, Fear of the Dark.

In the months after my father died, my brother Michael showed me an old photograph of himself with his family. Four people stand indoors against a tiled wall. Michael is the tall one in the middle, with long hair, and his father stands beside him in a cap. A white streak curves down out of the dark above them, and of everybody in the picture, it comes down over his head alone. It still gets me.

[PHOTO: Michael’s family photograph]

Joey, August 2007
My mother’s aunt’s house in New York. Saturday, August 11, 2007. Case File 20, Don’t Talk to Strangers.

My son was ten. He was watching TV when something threw him backward about five feet. Seconds later, fresh scratches crossed his forehead. My mother grabbed a disposable camera and took pictures, and the next day she had them developed at a CVS.

The print from the disposable camera. On the front, my son’s forehead and the scratches across it, as it came out of the drugstore envelope, photographed as is. The white haze near the top is glare and wear on the print itself, not anything on his skin.

[PHOTO: Exhibit 2]

A second print from the same roll. Joey, looking into the camera. The scratches run across his forehead, with a smaller mark at the inside of one eyebrow.

[PHOTO: Exhibit 3]

The back of the print. The drugstore stamp reads “CVS 1951 PHOTO0012 CD 8/12/2007” and “CETRONE.” The film was developed the day after the attack.

[PHOTO: back of the print]

Everything else in that case file is memory or somebody’s word. That stamp is the one thing a stranger put there. Nothing like it ever happened to Joey again. Joey, now grown, has agreed to be part of this book.

The Sallie House
Atchison, Kansas. January 25 to 27, 2008. Case File 21, Hotel California.

Over three days in the Sallie House, Tony Pickman was scratched three times: on his back the first night, on his arm on Saturday, and on his forehead on Sunday, the last two in front of all of us. Tony and Debra Pickman gave me permission years ago to tell their story, and they signed releases that weekend.

Tony Pickman in the basement of the Sallie House on Sunday, minutes after the scratches came. Three of them, running down his forehead from the hairline, bleeding. I took this one, and it hasn’t been cleaned up or enhanced.

[PHOTO: Tony’s forehead]

Tony’s arm, Saturday, in the basement.

[PHOTO: Tony’s arm]

Orbs from that weekend.

[PHOTOS: Sallie House orbs]

The Doll
Our den in Warwick, Rhode Island, 2008. Case File 22, I Want to Break Free.

One night my mother and my daughter Briana were in the den watching TV. They both said this porcelain doll lifted off the end table and flew into the wall, about two feet from where Briana was sitting. It left a nick in the wall.

The porcelain doll from our den, held up beside the lamp on the end table where it sat. A still from my own footage.

[PHOTO: the doll]

Orbs and Other Photos

Over the years, my cameras caught a lot of orbs. Most of them can be explained: dust, moisture, insects or a camera flash. A few, I can’t explain. Here are some of those.

[PHOTOS: orbs, with a one-line caption under each: place, year, who was there]

What you make of it

I’ve told you what I believe. I’d say 98 percent of the houses I investigated were not haunted. These come from the other two percent.

The full story behind every recording and photograph on this page is in Chasing Shadows. Coming soon.

A note on this page

Some of these photographs show injuries, including to a child. All recordings and photographs on this page belong to Joe Cetrone, except where noted. Please don’t copy or repost them without permission.