Taunton Paranormal duo take their haunted tale to 'Animal Planet'

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Taunton Paranormal duo take their haunted tale to 'Animal Planet'
October 9, 2010
By MARC LAROCQUE
Taunton Daily Gazette

Taunton —

A duo known for sniffing out the paranormal on their twice-weekly local cable access show in Taunton have now taken their story to national cable television.

Robert Jacobs and Lou Toledo, whose show “Haunted Happenings” appears on Taunton local access, were recently featured on an Animal Planet’s series called “The Haunted.” The show aired last Sunday but was based on an investigation that the two conducted in February, when a supposed demon infiltrated Jacobs’ Duffy Drive home.

The Animal Planet calls the episode “The Demonic Seduction” and said that the demon that haunted Jacobs’ house was a female entity, known as a “Succubus.”

“A paranormal researcher is seduced and then repeatedly attacked by a female demonic entity known as a Succubus,” the show description says. “The researcher's wife battles with the Succubus who has possessed and is trying to steal her husband.”

The story starts at a Norton convenience store, where Jacobs and members of their ghost busting organization, the Taunton Paranormal Group, conducted what they believe would be a “standard hunt.” The group went to the store because they were told items there were being moved around by ghosts.

“It turned out when we went in there, three team members were attacked,” Jacobs said. “One was a woman. She said it felt like something reached inside her and twisted her inside. Another team member was bitten on inner part of his arm. That’s shown in the footage. You can see teeth marks. I suffered an attack when I blacked out and got very nauseous.”

In more than three years of operating as a team, the Taunton Paranormal Group has conducted dozens of investigations into the paranormal, Jacobs said, including about 35 in 2009.



They were joined in Norton, as they always are, by Father Bob Bailey, of St. Maria Goretti church in Pawtucket, R.I., who conducts what is called a “deliverance,” a ceremony that intends to cast out ghosts and spirits who are troubling people and places.

Jacobs said they rid the convenience store of the spirit troubling the establishment, but that was just the beginning of the tale.

“For whatever reason, it followed me from that case to my home,” said Jacobs, 40. “We were able to remove it from his building but unfortunately it followed me.”

Jacobs said that demons don’t like to be challenged and target those that are trying to remove them. The first indication that the demon was haunting the Jacobs home was unusual behavior from the family dog, he said.

“First we started to notice the Pomeranian was acting differently,” he said. “She just all of a sudden would jump up and start barking. She was playful and friendly before and then she started to growl at me as these things were going on.”

Jacobs said he and his family also began to hear screaming coming from the wooded area behind his house every night. The ghost hunter said that he was awoken in the middle of the night to items in his home falling and banging, and that his wife also witnessed him suddenly start screaming and thrashing in bed.

They wanted to document these supposed paranormal activities through night vision cameras that Jacobs set up in his bedroom to stay on throughout the night. One night, he recorded video of a candelabra being thrown off a nightstand by an unseen force.

“We heard something fall and bang,” he said. “I assumed I hit something while thrashing. But the next morning we checked the video and the candelabra on the table next to me moved two feet and then stopped right at the edge of the table and in its path it knocked a family picture off.”

The footage of the candelabra moving appeared in the show and a clip of the incident along with others in the show can be accessed online at www.animal.discovery.com.

Jacobs provides other evidence of the demon’s existence in the show, such as a tape recording of EVPs, or electronic voice phenomenon, in the Duffy Drive home. One tape recording features a deep voice saying what seems to be the phrase, “Praise Satan.”

The demon went away for two weeks, Jacobs said, after Father Bailey conducted a deliverance. However, he said the demon appeared to return, requiring the priest to return once more, he said.

Toledo said that skeptics who say that the two are making the ghost stories up should look at the scar of the “big giant scratch” on his back that the demon inflicted on him during a prayer for the first deliverance in Jacobs’ basement.

“I felt like there was a hot iron on my back,” he said. “I let out a little yell and they checked it out and it looked like a little claw mark on my back.”

Toledo said there are some members of the public that won’t believe in the paranormal even when they are presented with clear evidence.

“There are people out there that won’t believe anything that happened,” he said. “I used to be a skeptic until I started doing this. When you see what’s out there it’s really unexplainable and it really opens your eyes. There are people out there that will say this was fake. Coming from me, everything on the episode was real. Nothing was faked at all.”

Father Bailey calls the Taunton Paranormal Group the investigative arm of his deliverance ministry, which he has been involved in for three years, conducting about 25 deliverances. Bailey described a deliverance as composed of ritual prayers, scripture reading and the use of crosses and holy water to cleanse a place of negative entities, or demons. Bailey said demons can affect humans by oppressing them or inciting obsession in them.

He said that a deliverance is different from an exorcism —which he said he is not sanctioned by the Catholic church — because exorcisms are conducted when a person is entirely taken over, or possessed, by a demon.

Bailey said that although many priests are trained much on deliverance in the seminary, ghosts are something that the Bible implies are real and can be harmful to humans.

“In some circles it’s controversial,” he said. “There is a part of the gospel where Jesus appears after the resurrection and the apostles were frightened because they thought they were seeing a ghost. It was a belief at the time. Jesus didn’t say there was no such thing as a ghost. He said touch my hands and my side and know that a ghost does not have flesh and blood as I do. There was a belief back then and Jesus never came against it.”

Bailey said that he makes casting out demons and ghosts a specialty because he wants to help ride the world of dangerous forces.

“For me, I always was interested in the struggle between good and evil,” Bailey said., “I strongly believe in the power of good against evil, and that there are demonic influences in the world.”