Áilín Quinlan: Wide awake at 3am, a spooky audiobook cured my insomnia

So, I got through the hot spell when half the country couldn’t sleep.

I got through years of every imaginable kind of ups and downs, crises and turmoil of every sort and - mostly - I slept.

Now here I was; wide awake at 1am for no damn reason at all.

Well, I stayed in bed like they tell you to and patiently counted sheep.

When that didn’t work, I dragged myself up. Went downstairs, made tea, read a book, got tired again, and returned to bed.

Still wide awake by 3am. Back downstairs. More tea. Found the armchair, took out the phone and searched for an audiobook to listen to because I no longer had the energy to turn a page, let alone read.

And I stumbled upon pure gold.

A treasure-trove of 21 ghost tales from the casebook of the late Robert ‘Bob’ Lee Dean, a veteran cop and later police chief, who spent years patrolling the long and lonely highways of west Texas. A lawman with more than four decades of experience under his gun-belt, Dean also served on the Alamo Area/Narcotics Task Force in San Antonio, engaging with violent gangs.

Eventually, after deciding that some of the cases he dealt with over the years had bordered on paranormal, he decided to document the stranger ones.

A Paranormal Casebook, which is the name of Dean’s collection of beautifully told stories, is narrated by Steven A Gannett.

The tales - which last from under two minutes to 14 - are mostly gentle, always unsettling and, without exception, mystifying.

His experiences as a ranger at a rural Sheriff’s Department in west Texas, a place he describes as “miles and miles of miles and miles - two-lane blacktop and dirt roads and desolate places”, gradually changed him, he admits, from “sceptic to sceptical believer to believer” after the paranormal events he encountered over the decades.

Dean’s ability to pull you in with no attempt at drama, just the calm perspective of an experienced policeman, is unerring and electrifying.

You feel the silence of the dark Texan night, see the tilt of his battered, sweat-stained Stetson, taste the dust kicking up behind his car, hear the scrunch of his tyres on Tarmac.

“Things I had seen had no other explanation other than being paranormal,” he says, “so I had started accepting it for what it was.”

It is what it is, he comments of the eerie experiences over a lifetime of law enforcement during which he rose to the rank of Police Chief.

Dean tells of encounters with the ghost of a beloved maid who cannot leave the terrified family she has served for decades, a strange “weeping” house and a creepy thing he describes as a shadow walker. There is an Indian Death Horse and a voodoo doll.

He hikes to a remote haunted cave which the locals avoid - and which, not to put too fine a point on it, growls at him when he attempts to enter it.

There is the story of the ancient, broken sabre which the elderly woman he buys his tamales from, unearthed in her garden. The sword, Dean decides, urgently needs to be reburied because of the terrifying disturbances that have erupted in the old lady’s home since she brought it inside.

Saddest of all is his quiet encounter with the spirit of an eight-year-old girl named Rose Elizabeth Carter, whose remote and weathered tombstone he stumbles across in the middle of nowhere late at night.

Intrigued by the lonely little grave, Dean leaves his patrol car and leans down to read the headstone, which dates from 1911. There is a faint crying, which he tells himself, he is most definitely imagining.

Touchingly, he returns the following night with a rose which he places on the little one’s grave. A rose for a Rose, he recounts. To his shock, as he returns to his patrol car, he distinctly hears a small voice murmur “thank you.”

“I got a chill,” he recalls.

He replies “You’re welcome. Rest now, rest.”

Dean receives a summons from a priest struggling to exorcise demons from a house which had been the site of a murder-suicide.

The priest does not want to enter this house alone, and, as Dean recounts his experiences there, you can see why.

It’s all recited very calmly and matter-of-fact. En route to a burglary call in his patrol car one evening, Dean recalls that when he saw a local woman called Fannie standing in her yard, “I didn’t flinch”. Fannie had been dead for a year.

Told from the front seat of the patrol car and narrated in Gannett’s gravelly Alabama drawl, the stories are gripping.

One stormy night, Dean attends the scene of a horrific traffic accident and finds the body of a little girl lying dead in a nearby ditch. Her parents are later discovered in the front seat of their car, still alive.

Later on, when this formidable Texan lawman has occasion to drive that road again in pursuit of his duty, he sees the same girl, her hair wet, standing in the same spot at the side of the road, staring into the headlights of his Tahoe. He recognises her straight away - and keeps driving.

“I had long since stopped trying to rationalise the things I had seen as a cop,” he says, adding: “Cops have a saying. ‘If my mind could forget what my eyes have seen’.”

Maybe this was not the best thing to start reading in the early hours of the morning. Not because it was ghoulish – it most certainly was not - but because it was so interesting.

I didn’t get back to bed till nearly five, but when I did, the restlessness was gone and I slept.

Dean’s case book only lasts, sadly, for just over three hours, so the next night, when the insomnia returned, I didn’t linger in bed trying to get back to sleep. I got up, listened to the end of the book, and then started listening all over again.

I’ve tried and failed to find more stories by Officer Dean, who held a degree in Criminal Justice and served 40 years in law enforcement across Texas. He passed away in 2021 at the age of 72. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.