Ghost Hands

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Story 1.

What killed Olivia Mabel?

One afternoon in 1994, a series of silent 911 calls from a remote Texas property would result in several police officers descending upon the scene.

What they found after breaking in through the front entrance would shock them to their core and leave them questioning, what killed Olivia Mabel?

The death of a child is one of the greatest pains any loving parent could possibly bear.

To lose something so special, which brings so much joy to one's life, would be every mother and father's worst nightmare.

A journey far too agonizing to take, one which would leave them feeling desolate and alone, and on the verge of self-destruction.

The tragedy of burying one's own child often results in ongoing lifelong depression, and in many cases, even suicide for those bearing the brunt of this kind of heartbreak.

They end up living in a world of memories which they can no longer recreate, torturing themselves within a prison from which they cannot escape.

Back in March of 1990, this very misfortune descended upon a household located in Salina, Texas.

The Footlights Ranch, a 13-acre property situated about an hour north of Dallas, was owned by Travis and Olivia Mabel.

They had relocated there in 1983, shortly after Olivia had given birth to their son, Aidan.

As a happily married couple, they hoped that in purchasing a larger home, they might extend their small family.

Although during those first years, they doted heavily on their only child.

On the afternoon of the 13th of March, seven-year-old Aidan had asked his mother if he could go off and play in the grounds surrounding the property.

She had of course agreed, as she did so every day on the proviso that he was back in time for his dinner.

Aiden had whooped and cheered as he set off on yet another boyhood adventure, and Olivia didn't see him for the rest of the afternoon.

By 5.30pm however, he had still not returned.

even though his dinner was sitting on the table going cold.

Both parents set out to look for him thinking he was probably probably having too much fun and that he'd simply lost track of time.

But the reality was tragically very different.

Not too far from the household, they found their son floating face down in a pond.

He had fallen in and drowned.

Travis and Olivia were beside themselves with grief over the death of their child.

And unfortunately for them, their relationship just wasn't strong enough to withstand the pain and heartache they both felt.

They blamed themselves.

They blamed each other.

Both of them were racked with a guilt that would never cease to weigh them down.

Olivia withdrew into herself.

She did not return to work, rarely left the house, ceased attending her local church, and began to shut out her friends, family and eventually even her husband.

The couple divorced the following year and Travis moved east to make a fresh start.

Olivia, on the other hand, chose to remain at the house, living alone and in seclusion surrounded by the memories of her lost child.

No one ever saw or heard from her again, save for a brief sighting by a neighbour late in 1991.

Visitors to the house were ignored, except for the groceries which she had delivered.

But for all other intents and purposes, she was completely closed off from the rest of the world.

Years went by without so much as a peep from her and people began to wonder whether she even lived at the property anymore.

That was until the 27th of February 1994, when the police department in Salina received a 911 call from an unknown source.

The operator who answered heard only silence on the other end.

before the line eventually cut off after a couple of minutes.

As procedure dictated, the police department began to trace the call, but before long, the phone rang a second time and the operator was again met with the same eerie silence.

In all, three calls were made from the same number, all of them silent and all of them traced to the same address.

The Footlights Ranch, the home of Olivia Mabel.

A patrol car was sent to check on the house, but police officers found that it was completely locked down.

They couldn't see in through any of the windows which were whitewashed and the front door had not been used in so long that it had swelled and bowed outwards into the doorframe, so that it was jammed shut.

Thinking that someone could be in distress, the police officers forced open the front entrance and entered the stricken home, and what they found defied all logic.

The interior of the house was in a serious state of neglect, with layers of dust piled upon the furniture and cobwebs infesting every crack, corner and crevice.

Each room looked as though it had not been touched in years, let alone lived in, and this was the same scene that greeted the officers as they explored the rest of the household.

That was until they reached what had once been Aiden's room.

Inside they found all his clothing and toys stored neatly away in drawers and cupboards.

Everything was pristine and tidy.

No dust, no cobwebs.

It had all been perfectly well kept.

In the centre of the room, they found Olivia Mabel, in a nightgown and slippers, sitting in a rocking chair, deceased.

Clutched in her hands was a small doll made in her son's image, wrapped in pieces of his clothing.

Officers reported that it looked as though she had been dead for a couple of months.

In front of her was a makeshift altar made in Aiden's honour, decorated with candles, fresh flowers and her late son's possessions as well as photographs and drawings of him.

Amongst his toys they found heartbreaking letters written by a grieving mother to her lost son.

Needless to say it was quite upsetting for those present but there was one question which hung over the whole scene.

Who had made the 911 call?

Francesca Santiago was one of the first officers on the scene and she described what they found that day.

She reported that there was no sign of forced entry other than the main entrance which had been forcibly opened by police.

All doors and windows were locked from the inside and even the phone exhibited a layer of dust showing no indication of having been lifted in order to make a call.

And as if that wasn't strange enough, things took an even more bizarre turn when an officer examined one of the letters, which had obviously been written by Olivia.

The exact wording was as follows:

My Aiden, I'm sorry.

I am so sorry.

I should have never let it get like this.

I'm leaving.

I will not let you keep me, you vile evil creature.

Mommy's coming for you, Aiden.

My sweet Aiden.

Mommy loves you.

The thing that both mystified and disturbed investigators about this letter was that it was dated the 27th of February 1994,

the day the police had entered the home and discovered her body.

Other worrying signs pointed to the possibility that Olivia had been dabbling in occult practices.

Adorning the makeshift altar dedicated to Aden, there was a number of characters written in Sanskrit, which when translated were found to spell construct or to build.

It is believed that Olivia had been trying to construct a tulpa or thought form.

Given the altar, Sanskrit and the doll which was found clutched in her hand, along with the isolation and obsession she obviously felt, this could be seen as a fair assumption.

Olivia might have been channeling her boundless grief into manifesting an entity in her son's image.

Tibetan Buddhism sheds some light on this practice, saying that a being can be created through sheer spiritual or mental discipline and powerful concentration of thought.

Considering her desperate and powerful emotional state, could Olivia have constructed a being of pure thought?

And based on her letter dated the 27th of February, could this being have slipped the shackles of her control and turned against her, perhaps taking her life in the process?

Francesca in particular notes that she and other officers felt a strong angry presence looming over the household when they arrived.

And it is difficult to explain certain aspects of the case without considering the paranormal.

The current owner Christopher Hagen has been unable to sell the property and it has remained empty for over three decades.

Prospective buyers are apparently put off by the oppressive atmosphere they feel upon entering the home.

Christopher himself reported multiple paranormal occurrences during renovation work and beyond.

In 2005, he invited Austin-based paranormal investigator Drew Navarro to visit the property.

Navarro claimed that out of the hundreds of locations he has studied, he has never felt such an imposing force and went on to report how he could not breathe upon entering the home.

He described feeling a constant shifting energy, which behaved erratically like a jealous child throwing a tantrum.

and at no point did it feel inviting.

He finished by saying that the house should be avoided and a serious intervention is needed as he didn't quite know what he was dealing with.

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So, what killed Olivia Mabel?

Did she die of a broken heart, or was there something far more sinister at work?

Before we make any assumptions, allow us to consider the alternatives.

It is, of course, possible that someone entered the home, wrote the letter, and placed the call to the police.

But as there was no sign of forced entry, and coupled with the fact that the phone and house in general had not been disturbed in months, this seems unlikely.

Our minds are drawn then to question whether this whole incident even took place at all.

Whilst a death certificate does exist for 7-year-old Aidan Mabel, which determines a death by misadventure and lists both Travis and Olivia as his parents, amateur investigators have found no such death certificate for his mother.

Secondly, there is no coroner's report detailing the cause of Olivia's death.

Also noted is the complete absence of any online news articles regarding the bizarre circumstances in which her body was found.

One would think that local press at the very least would have jumped on such a strange story.

Interestingly, the earliest known reports of this eerie case didn't emerge until 2016.

Shortly afterwards, a Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund a film called Thought Form, said to be inspired by the story of Olivia Mabel.

This timing has led many sceptics to suspect a coordinated viral marketing effort, a strategy commonly used in today's digital landscape to generate intrigue and online buzz ahead of a release.

For some, that overlap alone is enough to cast serious doubt on the case's authenticity.

However, as questionable as some of these details may seem, none of them offer definitive proof that the story is a fabrication.

The absence of an official death certificate for Olivia Mabel doesn't necessarily indicate it was was never issued.

Records can be lost, sealed or kept private at the family's request.

And the fact that a pair of filmmakers discovered the tale and chose to adapt it into a film which was never actually made doesn't automatically suggest it was all concocted for publicity.

People are drawn to the strange, the tragic and the unexplained, and sometimes art simply imitates mystery.

When all is said and done, this story is out there, and whether it is true or not, it's sad enough to bring a tear to the eye and creepy enough to send a chill up the spine.

If it is fictional, then it has done its job as a piece of art in making the viewer, listener, or reader feel at least something.

If it is indeed true, however, then we can only hope that Olivia has finally been reunited with her beloved Aiden and that they both rest in everlasting peace together.

Story 2

The Strange Death of Gaurav Tuari

In July 2016, a young ghost hunter died in mysterious circumstances after visiting a supposedly haunted property.

Authorities hastily ruled it a suicide, but this was not a satisfactory answer for many people, including those closest to him, who are still trying to understand the strange death of Gaurav Tuari.

Uraya glanced up from the magazine she was reading and looked across the room at the clock on the opposite wall.

It had been nearly an hour since her husband had finally risen from his bed and lumbered into the shower, but he had yet to make his way downstairs where she was sat waiting with Uday, his father.

That said, given the events of the previous evening, this was perhaps unsurprising.

Despite having obtained his pilot's license while studying abroad in the US and successfully auditioning for speaking roles in a few Bollywood movies, Gaurav Tuari instead chose to spend his time chasing reports of ghostly manifestations and other paranormal encounters.

This was hardly a career choice that paid the family bills, and when he had returned home at 2am from yet another investigation, she had decided it was time to make her feelings known.

The subsequent argument had lasted well into the morning and ended with Gaurav sleeping on his own in another bedroom.

On passing the door to the spare room at 10am,

She had found her husband awake, perusing the new emails that had arrived in his inbox during the previous evening.

When Uraya had asked him to come and join her downstairs, he had mumbled in reply that he would do so after he'd had a shower, before continuing to trawl through his correspondence.

As she sat on the sofa dejectedly reflecting on the previous five or six months the couple had been married, Araya suddenly heard a loud thud above her head.

Concerned, she made her way upstairs to find the spare room empty and the bathroom door closed.

Assuming that Gorav had dropped something whilst in the shower, she proceeded to knock on the door and ask if everything was okay, but there was no reply.

On finding that the door was apparently locked from the inside and realising that she could not hear the shower running, Araya had shouted downstairs to Ghorav's father.

Moments later he had successfully forced the door open and simultaneously they both let out a cry of alarm.

Gaurav Tuari was lying on his back, gasping for air and sweating profusely.

Uraya watched in horror as he clawed desperately at his neck, his eyes bulging in their sockets.

An ambulance was called but the paramedics who arrived at the family home were unable to revive him.

As Gaurav's lifeless body was lifted onto the stretcher, Uraya had caught a glimpse of an inexplicable thin line of mysterious dark bruising that ran around the front of his neck.

Her husband had been killed in such a way that offered no reason or explanation for how the incident had occurred.

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From an early age, Gaurav had been determined to carve his own path through life.

Born in the Indian city of Patna in 1984, He was raised a strict Hindu and came from a wealthy family, with his father serving as the director of an international company.

But despite assumptions that he would follow the family career path into big business, as a young boy he instead announced his intention to become a famous actor.

As soon as his school years were finally behind him, the teenage Gaurav had immediately started to audition for speaking roles in a wide variety of both film and television productions.

But after successfully appearing in a number of major cinematic releases, acting roles unfortunately began to dry up and and he was forced to consider alternative career paths.

He was deeply convinced that he was destined for great things and eventually made the decision to move to America in order to train as a pilot.

And it was whilst he was living in a shared apartment in Florida that he had his first encounter with the supernatural.

The young Indian student and his housemates began to find their personal possessions inexplicably moved from room to room within the accommodation.

Even items that had been securely locked away in drawers and cupboards would somehow mysteriously find their way out into the communal areas.

But this was only the start of a much more protracted and intimidating phenomenon.

Items of furniture began to move of their own accord.

Doors were observed to open and close when nobody was near them, and at night, the students began to hear the whispering of disembodied voices.

These incidents culminated in one of the apartment's inhabitants witnessing a ghostly apparition apparently move across from one side of his bedroom to the other.

But whilst these occurrences proved terrifying for his housemates, they had exactly the opposite effect on the young trainee pilot.

Rather than being scared by what he was experiencing, he was instead filled with a burning desire to understand the mechanics of what was taking place.

Alongside his flying lessons, he began to research any aspect of the supernatural or paranormal that he could find.

At the same time as he graduated from the MVP Aero Academy in Texas, Gaurav found himself being certified as a lead investigator for the U.S.

Paranexus Association, an organization devoted to the research and understanding of unexplained phenomena.

Immediately upon returning to his native homeland in 2009, He decided to found an equivalent national body, which he named the Indian Paranormal Society.

Gaurav and his team soon found themselves being inundated with the reports of inexplicable and terrifying events taking place all over India.

At its peak, the organisation was flooded with in excess of 500 phone calls and over 250 emails per day, far more than it could hope to effectively deal with.

And as Gaurav began to tackle the mysteries that were being presented to him, he inadvertently found himself drawn back into a familiar career path.

As the work of the Indian Paranormal Society progressed, their exploits began to attract significant media attention, which then evolved into offers from various television networks asking that film crews accompany them and record their findings.

The team's assignments were soon being documented by the likes of MTV, who went on to broadcast them to a global audience.

By 2014, Gaurav Tuari was something of a household name in his homeland, and he had managed to achieve a prominent position in the field of paranormal analysis and evaluation.

His investigations were now no longer limited to India, and he found himself appearing alongside other supernatural experts in television shows being filmed in America, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

One of the reasons that Gaurav proved so appealing to both TV producers and audiences alike was his overwhelming commitment to his craft.

He would push himself beyond the boundaries of a normal investigator, trusting his instincts and taking risks that nobody else was prepared to.

A perfect example of this was the hour he spent lying alone in a morgue chiller whilst investigating an abandoned mental institution.

Unfortunately, any successful entertainment format immediately spawns imitators.

and the market soon became saturated with copycat material from across the globe.

Despite successfully capturing a wealth of apparent poltergeist activity and ghostly apparitions on camera, the television appearances started to dry up.

Gaurav now found himself returning to the Indian Paranormal Society and its day-to-day activities.

In truth, despite having quite enjoyed the fame and notoriety that his international work had achieved, the ghost hunter was at his most passionate when pursuing the mysteries of his native India.

Rather than fully embracing the colourful legends and beliefs of his homeland, Gaurav instead approached each reported incident from a firmly grounded and critical standpoint.

He would analyse each investigation to its full extent, exhausting all rational and scientific explanations before agreeing to allow his team to conduct the religious rituals believed necessary to remove whatever troublesome spirit they had encountered.

But in January 2016, when he married his girlfriend Oraya, Gaurav soon began to find it difficult to balance his passion for the unexplained with that of his married life.

On the evening of the 6th of July 2016, he and his colleagues attended a residential property in the Yanakpuri neighborhood of West Delhi.

The family who lived there explained to the team that their young daughter was being menaced by an invisible entity.

The paranormal investigators spent most of the evening with the family before blessing the house and leaving.

When Gaurav arrived home in the early hours, he was confronted by his angry wife who demanded that he give up ghost hunting for the sake of their marriage.

They argued for two hours before going to sleep in separate rooms.

At 11am the following morning, there was a desperate phone call to the authorities describing how he had been found struggling to breathe in the bathroom before passing away.

A tearful Araya explained to the attending officers how it was as if some unseen force was preventing her husband from breathing, his face filled with terror as he had fought to stay alive.

Uday Tuari provided an equally disturbing account, describing how his son had seemed worried and distant in the last few weeks of his life, confiding to him that an invisible and negative force was somehow pulling him towards it.

The investigating officers were naturally sceptical of such stories, and when some of Gaurav's friends and colleagues misguidedly took to social media to inform people that he had died of a heart attack, the police immediately started to suspect a more sinister reason behind his death.

All family members living in the Tuari household were questioned for an 8-hour period, and the bathroom was forensically analysed for any signs of foul play.

These interrogations yielded a number of developments, which the police began to work through and evaluate.

It became apparent that all was not well within the family and that Gaurav's refusal to change his employment had resulted in a few aggressive confrontations with both his wife and his father in the weeks leading up to his demise.

The cause of his death was confirmed as asphyxiation, with the black line of bruising around Gaurav's neck indicating the use of a ligature of some kind, and yet none had been found either attached to the body or lying anywhere on the bathroom floor itself.

In addition to this, Gaurav's colleagues testified that he had consumed his last meal at approximately 6pm on the previous evening.

When that food was later found still undigested in his stomach, suspicions were raised that he may have died much earlier than the time his family had reported the incident.

Unable to compile enough evidence in building a prosecution, the police eventually announced that Gorav had died as a result of suicide.

having hanged himself from a cloth found on top of a nearby towel rail.

Almost immediately this verdict was met with suspicion and hostility.

There was no reason for Gorav to have committed suicide.

He had not left a note behind and the fact that he had been checking his emails mere minutes before he died seemed to contradict the idea that he planned to end his own life.

With each year that has passed, new theories have continued to come to light about the truth behind his senseless death.

Some commentators claim that a second mobile phone, which allegedly belonged to him, was discovered by the police when they were searching the house.

Rumours persist that this was linked to an extramarital affair which he had been pursuing and that the family had killed him when they discovered this.

Another hypothesis is that the death was indeed self-inflicted, but that someone within the family had hidden the ligature that Gaurav had used.

Suicide is still considered something of a disgrace within Hindu culture.

It may have been that Gaurav's relatives were trying to cover up this fact, or that they had chosen to invent the story in order to gain some form of sensationalism and to forever enshrine his name in the field of paranormal research.

Others have pointed to the possibility of autoerotic asphyxiation.

But underneath these very earthly explanations, far more sinister and disturbing explanations persist.

Many believers in the paranormal have theorised that the malevolent spirit who was terrorising the little girl on the evening of Gaurav's death death may have been responsible.

Prevented from causing further harm to its intended target, this entity may have decided to pursue and punish Gaurav for possessing the temerity to intervene.

Others believe the two days' comments indicate that some sinister force may have been stalking his son for a far more protracted period.

In subsequent interviews, he alleged that over dinner, Gaurav had sometimes mentioned mysterious and unexplained bruising similar to that which was later found on his neck.

He had also seen jumpy and distracted during his final days, claiming to have witnessed shadowy figures stalking him around the residence.

Over the course of his ghost hunting career, Ghourav Tuari had apparently visited the scenes of as many as 6,000 alleged hauntings.

Is it possible that as a result of his repeated encounters with the paranormal, some malevolent force may have taken an unhealthy interest in him?

Did this entity's power or control over him somehow increase as time progressed, to a point where it was ultimately able to destroy the subject of its obsession?

In truth, we will likely never know the real cause of Gaurav's death.

So much controversy and uncertainty has been generated by the haphazard investigation that it's now almost impossible to distinguish the fact from the fiction.

For those who believe in the supernatural, no natural explanation will ever prove satisfactory.

On the other hand, those who do not believe in evil spirits feel that the evidence that implicates the rest of the Tuari family is overwhelming.

The only immutable truth of the whole affair is that whatever people's private opinions of Ghorav Tuari,

there is no detracting from the obvious determination and passion that he displayed in his pursuit of the unexplained.

He was deeply loved, not only by those closest to him, but also by the countless people he he helped during the course of his journey into the unknown.

If there are any positives to be taken from the circumstances surrounding Gaurav's death, it's that it raised the profile of his chosen profession and potentially inspired a new generation of paranormal investigators.

Just as we hope that he has found a place of peace since his demise, we also hope that more brave souls will step forward to fill the void that he left behind.