In 1995 Patrick Cross, who is also an accomplished musician, bought a white electric guitar in the shape of a “V,” a copy of the more famous guitar made by Gibson, called a Gibson “Flying V.” The guitar purchased by Cross was made of heavy maple wood and looked like it had been passed down by various musicians.
He said, it was made in 1989, and it was in very good shape considering it was used. Other than a slight crack on the top of the neck of the guitar, as if it had been dropped, it played well. The mysterious part is, the guitar has survived from a fire in a Michigan bar, where a band was playing and all of sudden a fire broke out.
Everything in the bar was burned to a crisp—all except the guitar, which survived without any burn marks and fully intact. Apparently, someone in the band had died in the fire, and the guitar was sold, ending up in Oakville, Ontario.
Cross recalled that he was strangely drawn to the guitar. It was as if it called him saying, ‘play me.’ As soon as he picked it up to play, he felt a tingling electric sensation, like it knew he wanted it and it was right for him. He didn’t even check out the other guitars, since he couldn’t put this one down. It was an odd feeling, but most musicians will understand, he said.
The guitar played fine in the store, jamming to some bluesy rock riffs and some classic chords, but when he got it home, it seemed to go out of tune when he picked it up to play it. He thought this was odd, since it played fine before—and now it started de-tuning itself.
When he started playing something like ‘Smoke On the Water,’ by Deep Purple, and ‘Purple Haze,’ by Jimi Hendrix, the guitar played back in tune. It felt like it really liked a dark, heavy sound, and it played better than ever.
After two days, Cross began to hear weird sounds in the apartment. The noises seemed to be coming from the closet in the second bedroom where the guitar was stored. He opened the closet door, heard nothing, looked at the guitar, looked around, didn’t see anything—but he heard what sounded like men’s voices arguing with each other.
It was as if an argument was going on in the closet between two men. One sounded Spanish, the other Mexican, and they were talking about money. He heard this from the front room, then went into the bedroom to the closet to look. Again, suddenly everything stopped.
As the days passed, weird things started happening around the inside of Cross’s apartment: His car keys would disappear, then re-appear sometime later. He saw shadows move on the wall, heard footsteps and bangs or knocks. Cupboard doors opened and closed on their own.
Lights turned back on after he shut them off. The television set was on when he would come home, even though he remembered turning it off before went out. His cat would look in the air, as if she saw something move in the air, and then look in the other bedroom as if she could see someone walking around. If the guitar was left out, he could feel a chill around it—like cold air or cold wind.
As Cross began to use the guitar in his rock band, “SCI-FI Prodigy,” strange things would also happen at music rehearsals and band performances. They experienced power failures on their equipment and heard weird voices coming through the music amplifiers.
Lights would go off and on and blow out and on several occasions, actual fires started from the floodlights in the room for no reason. The drummer experienced his cymbals falling off and his drums go out of tune every time he started to play. The band members also heard other people talking in the room around the guitar when they were out of the room.
The guitar could not be played and would de-tune itself when anyone would try to play it except for songs of bad or loud negative music such as “heavy metal” or aggressive rock songs with death and destruction meanings.
The guitar particularly liked one song he wrote and played, entitled “Something Is Out There,” which is about ghosts and evil entities and fear of the unknown with a heavy ‘X-Files’ type edge. This was one of the very few songs the guitar would stay in tune with.
“The guitar had a presence of evil—a bad aura around it. It seemed to be three feet of cold presence. Other people, including Rob McConnell from the X-Zone Radio Show and Janet Russell from Beyond the Unexplained, also felt this,” said Cross.
More things of a paranormal nature occurred to Cross as time went on. He said he had a series of bad luck, which he believe was related to the guitar being in his apartment. He lost his job; his health started to suffer; rashes and sores appeared on his legs for no apparent reason.
His car would shoot out flames from the top of the engine every time he started it, even though there was no mechanical reason to account for this. One day, there was a horrible stench that seemed to come from the guitar—like a burnt dead smell. Then the terrible odor would go away as quickly as it appeared.
Cross began to take pictures of the guitar and investigate why all these bizarre happenings and bad luck occurrences should be taking place. He captured some “ghost orbs” around the guitar many times, and on occasion he could see a misty presence.
It always felt cold when he would pick up the guitar, and he would get small electrical shocks even when it wasn’t plugged in. He said, everywhere he went with the guitar, it seemed to cause things to happen. On one occasion in Ontario, where his band was performing, a fire broke out in the bar area. Glasses filled with water would shatter as they passed near the table where the guitar lay.
On May 16, 1999, Cross was a guest speaker at a UFO-ghost conference, the X Zone Symposium, in St. Catharines, Ontario. He brought his ‘devil guitar’ (also known as haunted guitar) along to see if he could find some individuals who could psychically channel anything that might explain the phenomena surrounding it.
“Psychics said that they felt weird around the guitar and expressed their opinion that it contained an evil presence,” Cross recalled. “Two people who said they could help were psychic-sensitives Janet Russell and Eugenia Macer-Story.
Eugenia proceeded to channel the guitar and found out it had a living entity attached to it. The entity was inside the wood of the guitar. She found it had a controlling effect on Cross and anyone who touched or felt it.
It seemed to have intelligence and was clearly talking to Eugenia, saying it did not wish to be put on display, but wanted to cause evil and destruction. It wanted to fly like a condor with large wings, and it called itself, ‘Eye of the Condor.’ They later found out this was a popular song in Mexico and South America, where condors do live. The guitar wanted to start fires. It wanted Cross to kill with it. Actually use it to kill, swinging it like an axe.
Cross felt sickened when he heard these words being channeled by Eugenia, for many times, he had had frightening images enter his mind of wanting to kill when he was around the guitar. He had also experienced very vivid dreams of going out to commit murder, using the instrument as if it were an axe.
The entity that possessed the guitar went on, saying that it had started many fires and survived while all else burned. It said it had been spawned by the Devil, and it was here to rise up to do its father’s bidding in the world. It wanted to fly free, like a condor, spreading evil throughout the world.
Eugenia found the guitar had the most powerful of Voodoo hexes, EXU (pronounced ‘Echu’), placed on it by previous musicians who had owned it. The hex was supposed to bring wealth to anyone who owned it and did its bidding. The EXU hex back-fired on the owners who were involved with drug money and they were killed.
The spirit inside the guitar wanted to be released into human form in order to kill and destroy. It liked Cross to play only dark, evil music and said it de-tuned itself if the music was good, happy, or up-tempo. The entity said that it never wished to become good. It only wanted to commit evil acts.
“It used profanity, swearing, and vulgar language as it spoke to Eugenia, trying to latch onto her,” Cross said. “The spirit said that it wanted to come into her body and kick out her soul. Eugenia felt the presence coming into her, and she let go and moved away from the guitar as it tried to possess her.”
After 2 hour psychic talk with the spirit, Eugenia suggested the guitar be destroyed or re-blessed to change the evil inside it. When she asked the guitar if it wanted to be blessed, the entity responded by saying no, and speaking in Spanish, began blaspheming Christ and God.
On the advice of Eugenia, Cross did destroy the guitar by taking it to a remote park, putting it in a steel garbage can and dousing it with gasoline and lighter fluid. Before lighting the guitar aflame, Cross put a circle of salt around the container to stop the evil entity from escaping or attaching itself somewhere else. He recited the Lord’s Prayer three times and told the evil entity to go back to its source.
After that, he saw a misty cloud of air rise up inside the garbage can. There was wind all around him. Minutes before, it had been calm. He attempted to light the guitar, but the fire kept going out. He poured more gasoline all over it. He also found some wood to put around it. It took a while to light the fire and a while to get the guitar to burn. Obviously, the entity did not want to be destroyed.
As the flames went higher, Cross heard a high-pitched shriek coming from the burning guitar. It sounded like a sick, wounded animal. He was standing there, watching it burn, adding more gasoline to the fire, when some of the flames jumped on his arm.
Now he was on fire, and as he tried to put it out, he dropped the full can of gasoline. He was horrified—because now the whole can of gas could explode and engulf him in flames.
Cross said, at that time he was panicked, but somehow he managed to put out the flames that had begun to burn his clothes. He breathed a sigh of relief as he watched the guitar burn away, into a charred chunk of wood. After an hour, he made sure the flames had burned out.
He poured more salt over the burned up guitar, just to make sure it would contain whatever spirit energy was still left. He left the guitar in the garbage can and took the case, closed it up with salt inside it, and wrapped the blue cloth back around the case. He was shaking, but he felt good that he had destroyed the evil entity. Hoping that it wouldn’t haunt or possess anything else again, he left the park around 10:30 P.M.
Immediately after returning home, Cross felt a sense of relief. He didn’t hear any voices or see or feel any more ghostly activity around him. The next day, Monday, everything immediately changed for the better.
He had a phone call for a new job, his health was coming back, his sores and rashes had all disappeared, and his plants came back to life, he said. Also he won $150 on a Bingo scratch ticket, there were no more power failures on his TV, and his car started normally. Miraculously, everything that had been going bad changed over night since getting rid of the haunted guitar.
Since 1999 Cross has investigated all sorts of hauntings and ghost activity, but he has never had anything happen as bad or bizarre as when he owned the haunted guitar.
Sources: Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger; The Midnight Hour: Canadian Accounts of Eerie Experiences edited by John Robert Colombo
