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Non-Fiction, Unexplained

A Haunting: Don’t Go in the Basement

September 16, 2014 by Troy Larson 1 Comment
light switch

Its one thing to see and hear a few things in your house, but it becomes quite another when it begins scaring members of your family, changing their behavior.

We’d been in our home for a few months and we set up a home video system in the basement family room. A couple times every week, my son would go down there and play video games, a habit that went on for some time without incident. One day, out of the blue, he would just not go in the basement anymore. If I suggested we go down and play some video games, he would just change the subject. If we had a traffic jam in the upstairs bathroom and suggested he use the one downstairs, he would find some reason to avoid it.

I asked him if there was something that scared him, but he never really articulated anything specific. He just didn’t want to go in the basement. I got frustrated one day, I think over one of the aforementioned bathroom traffic jams, and decided I was going to take Cole in the basement and show him there was nothing to be afraid of. I wanted to get this over once and for all. I took him by the hand and said, “C’mon, I’m gonna show you there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

As we approached the top of the steps, he leaned back and planted both feet into the floor, pulling back against me and said, “No daddy! I don’t want to.” I tried to comfort him with words, reassure him that everything would be fine and — Hey buddy, I’ll be down there with you — to no avail. I leaned down to pick him up — to carry him into the basement — and that’s when I saw an expression of genuine terror on his face. I mean, it freaked me out a little bit. He was scared. I think it was that moment that, as a rational adult, I started to lose a little of my confidence that this was nothing out of the ordinary. As I said in the previous post, I’ve been creeped out in the basement stairwell more than once. I had to wonder whether something a little more mysterious was going on.

I did some reading on the paranormal, which is to say, I attempted to wade through a bazillion links on hauntings on the web.  Ghost Hunters was becoming hugely popular at the time, and there was no shortage of experts on the subject, each with their own opinion.  Dave Juliano of “The Shadowlands” defines a residual haunting as “a playback of a past event. The apparitions involved are not spirits, they are ‘recordings’ of the event. I believe that this will be the first type of haunting that mainstream researchers will recognize and study.” That definition felt familiar to me when I first read it.

I was in the radio industry at the time, as a morning show host on a local Fargo radio station, and after telling one of these stories on the air, the response was considerable. People started asking about the history of the property and I realized I didn’t know nearly enough about North Fargo or the lot my house occupies, or even the house. At the suggestion of one of my listeners, I went down and took possession of my abstract so I could investigate the history of the property.  We eventually had a local paranormal research organization investigate our home, I have some audio to share from that experience, and there’s also a story about the thing that Cole said one night that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, but I can’t get ahead of myself.

Go on to chapter four, or go back and read from the beginning.



Troy Larson

Troy Larson is a father, author, and photographer originally from Minot, North Dakota, now residing in Fargo.

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Local History

What Happened to the Fargo Sleepwatcher?

by Troy Larson No Comments
prison

Fargo-area residents might remember the “Sleepwatcher” case. In 2006 and 2007, a man crept into homes in the Fargo-Moorhead area and watched people sleep. In some cases, he actually climbed into bed with them and watched them until they woke up. I was reminded of the case when I saw a similar story in the local media awhile back. I got curious and decided to do some digging on it.

Court records cited by the Fargo Forum in an April 17th, 2007 report named a Washington man, Casmer Volk, as a suspect in the Sleepwatcher case. Volk spent a lot of time traveling back and forth between Kittitas County, Washington, and the Fargo area, where he has family. Volk was given two years of probation for 2006 and 2007 window peeping incidents in the Fargo area, but he was never conclusively linked to other Sleepwatcher home intrusions.

As a Fargo resident who paid some attention to the cases, I vaguely remember some law enforcement sources poo-pooing the notion that Volk was responsible for all the Sleepwatcher home intrusions, but I always suspected Volk was the guy, partly based on eyewitness descriptions of the man. I have no doubt the police worked very hard to convict the guy, and to connect him to the other Sleepwatcher cases, but the community wasn’t really in a panic over it — the Sleepwatcher has not harmed anybody seemed to be the attitude.

Casmer-J-VolkI saw a newspaper headline awhile back about a man who walked into a West Fargo woman’s home and climbed into bed with her and I immediately wondered if the Sleepwatcher had returned, but as I read the story on this latest incident, it seemed obvious that this guy was just a drunk who wandered into the wrong house ala Robert Downey Jr during his lost years. Nevertheless, my interest was piqued on whatever happened to the Sleepwatcher and I decided to do some searching. I searched for stories on the Sleepwatcher and Casmer Volk and this is what I discovered.

In September of 2008, after returning to Kittitas County, Volk was caught in a Washington woman’s apartment while she was showering. Volk was returned to North Dakota and his probation was revoked by Judge John Irby, who gave him one year with credit for 128 days served.

I can find no record of Volk’s release from jail in North Dakota, but he must have been released because he promptly went back to Washington state and started getting in trouble. In January of 2012, Volk was convicted of raping a four year old boy in Kittitas County. The rape occurred in May of 2011 while Volk’s girlfriend was babysitting the boy. I think Volk was sentenced to 28 years to life, but the link is no longer available online. In early 2014, Volk’s attorney appealed his conviction and the appeal was denied. You can see the document here, but a word of caution, the details of his assault on the little boy are graphic.

I was pretty surprised to find all this information since I had no idea that he had such a criminal history outside North Dakota, but a few thoughts come immediately to mind. First, the Fargo area dodged a bullet with this sicko. To my knowledge, he never actually assaulted anyone during his time here, probably due to the fact that our police force kept him back on his heels once they were onto him. And second, I’m reminded why it’s important to take seemingly petty crimes like peeping seriously. This guy started out as a peeper, then became an intruder, and eventually went on to become a child rapist.

Kudos to the authorities who finally put him away.

Troy Larson

Troy Larson is a father, author, and photographer originally from Minot, North Dakota, now residing in Fargo.

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