A time-tested Hollywood formula for success is to find a harrowing story of a demon possessed house, adapt it into a film, release it as “based on a true story,” and watch the money roll in. The Demon of Brownsville Road, detailing the “harrowing true story of the evil presence” that tormented author Bob Cranmer and his family, is set to join movies such as The Amityville Horror and The Conjuring in receiving the Hollywood treatment as New Line Cinema has hired a writer to adapt the 2014 novel into a movie.

Bob Cranmer, a former Alleghany County Commissioner, bought the house at 3406 Brownsville Road in October 1988. For the next eighteen years, Cranmer claims he and his family heard unexplained sounds and witnessed objects moving on their own and walls bleed. They both claim to have been psychologically and physically assaulted by a demonic entity in 2006 when the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh worked with the Cranmers to perform an exorcism on the house freeing it of demonic infestation. Five years later, the Discovery Channel aired a documentary about the exorcism, and Cranmer would go on to coauthor The Demon of Brownsville Road with Erica Manfred.

According to Bob Cranmer, the Cranmers bought the house from a John McHenry and his wife (an alias used in the novel) and moved in on December 12, 1988. I checked the website realtor.com and verified the last date of sale (knowing that Bob Cranmer is still the current owner) was listed as 12/13/1988. Cranmer states that “For years we would experience things like all of the lights being turned on in the basement when we got up in the morning, and when we went downstairs to check the wood burner, occasionally the radio would be turned on and playing in my workshop area. … The children would tell us that they would hear walking and knocking outside of their bedroom doors in the hallway, and that it would wake them up in the middle of the night” (Cranmer 2014).

I don’t have an explanation for all the phenomena Bob Cranmer alleges he and his family witnessed in their home, as most of what is recounted in the book is based on subjective experience without corroboration. Since the exorcism in 2006, Cranmer says the house is entirely clear and safe, so I doubt any kind of investigation at this time would be informative (additionally, the house has since been converted into a bed and breakfast, so it would be difficult to control the necessary variables for a proper investigation). However, there are several claims that Cranmer makes in his book that he provides photographic evidence in support of—as well as verifiable historical claims—both of which I was able to investigate and I believe can shed some light on.

Cranmer claimed to have spoken to a woman named Barbara Paisley whose parents, Walter and Margaret Wagner, owned the home from 1941 to 1979. In the book, Cranmer claims he asked Mrs. Paisley if she or her family ever experienced anything “spiritual” in the house and alleges that she replied “Oh yes, many times” (Cranmer 2014). However, according to Barbara Paisley’s daughter, Karen Dwyer, “Other than squirrels in the walls, I never experienced anything there. My mother never said anything about the house being haunted. My grandmother never said anything about the house being haunted. And my grandfather never said anything about the house being haunted. If he wants to go and write it from 1988 and go forward, do it; I don’t care, but if you want to lie about other people and things that happened before that, well no, that’s not right.”

Cranmer alleges that Barbara Paisley also told him about their dog who “seemed to be able to sense the presence of a ‘spirit’ and would go from room to room apparently looking for it” (Cranmer 2014). Curiously, Karen Dwyer said of this: “That’s interesting because we never had a dog, and my parents didn’t like to have pets.”

With the help of a priest named Father Ron Lengwin and a Catholic “intuitive” (i.e., psychic) named Connie Valenti, Cranmer claims to have discovered a dark history that explains the demonic activity within his home. First, according to Ms. Valenti, the home was the site of an attack by angry Native Americans: “I see the spirits. I see one man in particular with a big knife. There was a massacre of the mother and her three children by Native Americans who were angry at their land being invaded by settlers. The husband wasn’t there when it occurred” (Cranmer 2014).

Cranmer claims to have found a letter in the archives of the U.S. War Department dated March 31, 1792, from the commander of Fort Pitt, Isaac Craig, to then-Secretary of War, Henry Knox, in which he informed him “that the Indians have killed the wife and three children of a Deliverance Brown—Brown having escaped by being some distance from the house” (Cranmer 2014). This seemed to Cranmer to confirm the psychic’s vision. I was able to find a similarly worded letter from The Freeman’s Journal or The North-American Intelligencer dated April 17, 1792, which states: “We have the following intelligence by a party of men from Muskingum, that at a small station between Bellpræ and Belville, on the west side of the Ohio, the Indians killed the wife and three children of one Deliverance Brown—who, being some distance from the house with his son, made his escape.”

This confirms that such an event did take place. However, based on either this letter or the letter that Bob Cranmer refers to, there’s no way to determine the exact location of the house of Deliverance Brown. Despite several peer-reviewed studies such as The Case for Retrocognition (Dobson 1998) and Direct Contacts with Past and Future: Retrocognition and Precognition (Murphy 1967), retrocognition is not accepted as a valid phenomenon in the scientific community. Wanting to find the exact letter Bob Cranmer claimed to have found, I searched through national archives on the website archives.gov but could not find any such letter. Next, I turned to Historic Pittsburgh, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s library system. Historic Pittsburgh has a collection of the letters of the Craig-Neville family dating 1773–1865; therefore, if such a letter existed, this were probably the best place to look. David Pitt of Historic Pittsburgh determined the letter most likely was part of the collection at the Heinz History Center and forwarded my request to them. Unfortunately, Liz from the History Center replied, “[I] looked through the Craig-Neville collection (MSS 56) and could not find that letter. To be on the safe side, Mary Jones, Chief Librarian, also looked and the result was the same. Maybe there is reason to be skeptical” (Liz 2021). Naturally, I also asked Mr. Cranmer if he had a copy of the letter or could point me in the direction of obtaining it; however, he has not responded to my inquiry. If such a letter from Isaac Craig to Henry Knox exists, its location remains a mystery.

The Mysterious ‘Dr. M’

In addition to the claim that the house at 3406 Brownsville Road was built over a hundred years later over the site of a Native American massacre, psychic Connie Valenti also claimed to have visions revealing the house was once used by a “Dr. M,” rumored to have performed illegal abortions in the 1920s and 1930s. Cranmer claims in his book that he hired a historical specialist to research this “Dr. M” and discovered that he was a pediatrician who started practice around 1915 and was described by a local businessman as “a very rough and profane old man who liked to drink, and always smelled of it … He walked with a limp, and always wore a black hat, white gloves and carried a cane” (Cranmer 2014).

Although the real identity of “Dr. M” is never given in the book, since its publication in 2014 Bob Cranmer has admitted that the eponymous Dr. M was really Dr. James Merton “Clay” Mahan. Born about 1890 in Creekside, Pennsylvania, Dr. Mahan appears on page 147 of the University of Pittsburgh’s Alumni Directory Vol. II dating 1787–1916, confirming his medical background. Additionally, with the help of my friend Kenny Biddle, we were able to find a registration card dated April 25, 1942, which not only confirms Dr. Mahan’s full name, his place of birth (the date is given as January 16, 1890), his status as a medical doctor, but also the fact that he walked “with cane.”

Given the portrayal of Dr. Mahan in the book, one would hope that Cranmer, Lengwin, and Valenti had evidence to support their allegations that he was responsible for the “demon” of Brownsville Road. When asked in an interview about this, Fr. Lengwin replied “I don’t need to verify it in order to tell the story,” and that since Dr. Mahan was never named directly in the book, “we didn’t accuse anyone of anything.” Connie Valenti stated in an interview that, as far as her visions go, the story “is all true” and that “I can only tell you what I saw.” For his part, Bob Cranmer refused to discuss Dr. Mahan at all claiming “Well, I didn’t identify him in the book, so I’m not going to discuss him.”

Unfortunately for Cranmer, it turns out Dr. Mahan actually has some living relatives who—much like Karen Dwyer—take umbrage with his portrayal. Dean Mahan, grandson to Dr. Mahan, argues that his grandfather couldn’t have been performing abortions in the house at 3406 Brownsville Road in the 1920s and 1930s because “My grandfather wasn’t even there on Brownsville Road then.” Census records from 1920 and 1940 both confirm this, showing Dr. Mahan was living at 2400 Berg Street at the time. According to Dean, his grandfather didn’t move to Brentwood (which, according to his death certificate, was 3233 Brownsville Road) until sometime in the 1940s following a scandal and subsequent divorce filing. There is no mention of malpractice suits or back-alley abortions.

Photographic Evidence

Unlike other cases I’ve investigated where both author and publisher maintain their book is a “true and accurate report of the events described,” photographic evidence is offered in the case of The Demon of Brownsville Road. I focus on two photographs in particular, as I would judge them to be the best evidence in support of Bob Cranmer’s story. Both are black and white and rather poor quality, so unfortunately there’s not a lot of detail.

First is a photograph of blood, which allegedly appeared on the walls of the third floor. He describes the scene: “All of the walls including two doors were spattered with large drops of red blood from the ceiling to the floor. The blood was still wet and was running down the walls. It was as if someone had just taken a container and a sponge and sprinkled the walls as Father Mike had done numerous times with holy water. … over the next several weeks the blood continued to be sprinkled down both staircases to the first floor, including my den. Some of the areas where the blood was dripping from were so far up (nine feet) that a person would have had to use a ladder to get there. Another interesting aspect was that it was only on the walls and not on the ceilings so that if it were thrown up there it would have been impossible to miss hitting the ceilings. It looked as if the walls were bleeding” (Cranmer 2014).

That’s a lot of blood, but sadly the photograph only shows two or three spots with Cranmer offering that the camera flash “masked” the dramatic images “to a degree.” Unfortunately, this was such a degree that in the words of Thiago Gasparino, a forensics expert, “From a bloodspatter perspective, the image is quite poor quality for analysis” (Gasparino 2021). Something both Thiago and I found interesting was that the middle stain started at an angle then became vertical. One would expect that gravity, exerting a pull on an otherwise flat surface, would cause the drip to either go straight down or follow the texture of the surface. So, for example, the grain of the wood—or, because it’s an older house, possibly the uneven texture of the wall if it were crumbling plaster and lathe. Additionally, if the inside of the house were a veritable bloodbath as described, one might expect more than a single, poor quality photograph.

The other photograph included in the book was of an alleged four-person grave site in Cranmer’s yard. Cranmer hired Ground Penetrating Radar Systems Inc. (GPR) to scan the yard based on the psychic visions of Connie. I asked Mr. Cranmer about GPR’s findings, and he explained, “What the tech showed me were four images on a screen that he said were buried 4 to 6 feet deep, all lying horizontally. There may have been a printed report, and I may have it in the files, but this service is generally used by construction or service people wanting to know what, where, how deep something is buried. He told me that the site was in keeping with all of the attributes of a grave” (Cranmer 2021).

When I asked Mr. Cranmer if he had a copy of the report he’d be willing to share, he responded “I appreciate your interest JD, but I have so many files I don’t have the motivation to dig through them.” In the book, one of the photographs of the scan of the alleged grave site includes Jacob Lammott, the project manager at the time from GPR. I emailed GPR to see if anyone would discuss the project; however, Mr. Lammott had since left GPR and I was told Mr. Cranmer would have to grant permission for any official disclosure.

Next, I tried reaching out to Jacob Lammot on LinkedIn but received no response. Finally, I reached out to Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology, to see if he had any insight into the technology or process of using ground penetrating radar. I shared with him what Bob Cranmer told me, and Feder passed my questions and the information on to Lawrence Conyers, an anthropologist who literally wrote the book on ground penetrating radar. Unfortunately, having not seen any of the GPR results, Conyer’s responded “This tells me nothing of importance. Although that firm that did the GPR is a large group who mostly makes money finding pipes and such. If they had an image it would really help. Or even some of the raw data that I can process. I suspect they are pretty good at finding ‘anomalies’ in the ground. But it usually takes a little more to interpret them like they have stated in this report” (Conyers 2021). Something that Feder, Conyers, and I all agreed upon was that it was curious that Mr. Cranmer wouldn’t disclose the report publicly. One would expect that, considering Mr. Cranmer has used this report to bolster his claims both in a published book and in advertising his business, he would be more than happy to display it to the public. To be clear: I’m not claiming that there is no gravesite on Mr. Cranmer’s property; however, without producing evidence in support of his claims, I will say he isn’t entitled to make them in the first place.

In addition to the radar analysis, Cranmer also “used an old dowsing technique for finding buried objects that I saw on the History Channel. I held two copper rods and walked around until they moved indicating the grave at the oak tree” (Cranmer 2014). Dowsing, despite its enduring popularity, has never been scientifically validated to work. Decades of tests, some of which were conducted by the late James “the Amazing” Randi, have time and again demonstrated that under controlled conditions dowsers do not perform any better than by chance. Dowsing operates by what’s known as the ideomotor effect—unconscious, involuntary movements that are made by a person, without their awareness, according to preconceived biases, assumptions, and expectations. Without the report from Ground Penetrating Radar Systems Inc., there can be no thorough scientific analysis of the claims that a gravesite resides on Mr. Cranmer’s property. So far as his discovery via dowsing is concerned, a more plausible explanation is that Mr. Cranmer expected to find a grave beneath the oak tree based on what the psychic told him, and when he walked over the spot the copper rods he used, which Mr. Cranmer told me “were actually more accurate than the radar” (Cranmer 2021) responded in accordance with his expectations.

Whatever might have happened to Bob Cranmer and his family during the eighteen years in which they were allegedly tormented by a demonic entity, they have my sympathies. As I’ve previously stated, while demons and demonic activity may or may not exist, assuredly depression, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies are very real and very serious. While I understand that plenty of people find a sense of comfort in religion and in applying a religious interpretation to their experiences, I am also concerned that believing oneself to be the victim of supernatural or demonic forces may, in some cases, make the situation worse. Regardless, people who believe in demons or the devil will probably continue to seek diabolical explanations for the unexplained. Whether it’s finding a greater meaning in one’s misfortunes or simply scaring up a profit, the devil gets all the blame but none of the credit.

References  

Cranmer, B., and Manfred, E. 2014. The Demon of Brownsville Road. New York. The Berkeley Publishing Group.  Cranmer, Bob. 2021. Personal Communication April 19.

Conyers, Laurence. 2021. Personal Communication April 21.

Dobinson, G. 1998. The case for retrocognition. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62, 337–346.

Gasparino, Thiago. 2021. Personal Communication, May 26.

Liz. 2021. Personal Communication, May 28.

Murphy, G. 1967. Direct contacts with past and future: Retrocognition and precognition. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 61, 3–23.