Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (14 page)

Given his concerns regarding demons, I gave them a blessed Benedictine medal. It’s the only medal that has an exorcism prayer on it rebuking Satan and evil spirits.

At the burial, I wound up performing the eulogy. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with that. I felt it wasn’t my place. I’m often seen performing Christian ceremonies, but I constantly worry that my faith isn’t strong enough to make a difference for the clients. Unfortunately, though I ask, beg, and plead for spiritual leaders to come, many are adamantly against helping anyone who claims to be experiencing a haunting, which leaves it up to me.

Once we buried the urn, Chandra’s pains really did go away, so far as she’s told us. When we followed up a while later, for the first time, I heard happiness in Matt’s voice. They’d bought themselves some cats, and he was going on and on about that. I was surprised, and thought, this does
not
sound like the Matt I’d met. It felt like I was talking to a new person, and I genuinely felt happy for him.

Was it the urn being buried? Did it mean that symbolically Matt was able to put something away and say to himself, “You know, I don’t have to deal with that anymore?” Was it just timing? Who knows?

Just as showing up ready to believe can get someone to open up, sometimes doing
anything
can help bring about a change. The fact that a client is calling means they no longer want to keep their problems secret, and that often means they’re ready to deal with it. It’s almost like going to a marriage counselor for the first time. The issues come out. Then, once revealed, they sometimes resolve themselves.

As far as final thoughts, again, a paranormal investigation is usually based on theory and wild hunches that hopefully lead to some sort of answer. In this case, I don’t doubt that the urn played a part. Though we captured no quantifiable evidence, the argument for that is solid. The forensic investigation gave us a strong indication, through the surgical staples, that the deceased went through a major surgery near the time of their death. The phenomena’s escalation in July 2006 coincided with the urn’s burial on the property. That was when Chandra began experiencing severe back pain and arthritis, symptoms that one medical examiner described as more appropriate to “an eighty-year-old.” Chandra’s illness could not otherwise be explained. Once the urn was removed and given a proper burial, not only did the haunting die down, but Chandra’s health returned. Those are the facts.

How does an urn, carrying only the ashes of a human body, affect the physiology of another human being? I can give you theories, but they require that you take the giant leap that maybe the dead stay with us sometimes. The ashes in the urn in particular, lost from home, didn’t seem at rest. History and mythology is full of tales of spirits lingering because of a lack of resolution. Maybe the deceased just wanted to be buried properly and given Christian rites (given the Christian symbol on the box containing the urn).

There are still unanswered questions. Matt claims he had a few experiences prior to the urn’s arrival. But if we accept that the ashes could affect Chandra, what’s not to say that the few thousand dead people buried in his backyard weren’t occasionally poking their heads in?

Sometimes, despite all the technology ghost hunters carry or the plethora of testimony, the only answer amounts to a simple act of human decency: to honor the dead and let them pass on to the next world at peace.

As an interesting side note, when production heard Matt’s original take about a jealous female spirit and a demon, they felt it would be a good idea to frame the episode around the concept of a “succubus,” a female demon that drains the life force from a male victim.

“The Cemetery” remains one of my favorite episodes, for the emotional story, the creepy setting, the urn, and the resolution, but in terms of extra footage, it was a disappointment. We had so much good material left over that at paranormalstate.com online, there’s an interactive game making use of some of the additional footage. Despite that, I think the heart of the story survives very well.

H
YPNAGOGIC
H
ALLUCINATIONS

When Matt originally described his visions as hallucinations, I was ready to consider the possibility he was experiencing what’s called a
hypnagogic hallucination
. This is a well-documented experience that most people have at some point during their lives, though they may never realize what it is.

Hypnagogic hallucinations occur as the brain is falling asleep (another type can occur as the brain wakes, a
hypnopompic hallucination
).

During sleep, chemicals are released in the brain that tell it to stop paying attention to the outside world and start paying attention to dreams. In between, the brain can mix the two, reacting to the inner dream and the outer world at the same time. For instance, you’ll see the bedroom you’re in, but see a dream at the same time.

The brain also secretes a chemical that paralyzes you during sleep, so your body doesn’t start reacting to your dreams.

Some people unknowingly enter that half-awake state, see dream images walking around their bedroom, and feel paralyzed at the same time.

Sleep paralysis combined with a hypnagogic hallucination is often offered as a possible explanation for stories not only of alien abductions, but also of vampire and demon attacks, such as the incubus and succubus.

Since people drift in and out of sleep, these hallucinations can happen anytime during the night. If someone’s sleep deprived or otherwise prone, these hallucinations can even occur in the daytime, during short “microsleeps.”

We regularly receive calls from people who wake up and feel something breathing on them, or see a spirit hovering over their bed, or some other startling image in their room. The experience is so vivid, so real, it’s extremely difficult to convince people that what they’re seeing isn’t there. For this reason, it’s vital for anyone having such experiences to get a professional sleep study to help determine the cause. PRS requires these studies and will not consider such claims paranormal until a formal sleep study has ruled out these hallucinations. Former Penn State professor David J. Hufford wrote a definitive book on the subject,
The Terror That Comes in the Night
, which I highly recommend.

I
NCUBUS AND
S
UCCUBUS

In folklore, a
succubus
is a demon who takes the form of an attractive woman in order to seduce a man. She drains his soul, usually by having sex with him, and then lives off that energy until her victim dies. Lilith, whom some folktales name as the first rebellious wife of Adam, and her daughters, the Lilin, are considered to be forms of succubi.

The
incubus
is a male version of the demon. It will lie atop sleeping women and force itself on them sexually. The earliest reference to these demons is from the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, which was written circa 2500 B.C.

C
HARON
, F
ERRYMAN OF THE
D
EAD

Cemetery caretaker Matt Franson likens himself to the boatman, who carries the dead across the river Styx. In Greek mythology, the ferryman is named Charon, or Kharon. It was a tradition to put a coin in the mouth or on the lips of the dead, to pay the ferryman. Charon would then take them across the river that divides the world of the living from Hades, the world of the dead. People buried without coins were believed to have to wait on the shores of the river Styx for a hundred years.

Roman poets called the river Styx, but the Greeks and later Dante in his
Divine Comedy
, refer to the river as Acheron.

Chapter 7
The Best-Laid Plans

“I’m going to tell you something about me I’ve never told anyone before.”

Once we finished with “The Cemetery,” it was time for Thanksgiving. For the first time since we started, we had two weeks off from the show and school. I went to a great vacation in warm, sunny Puerto Rico and came back rested and relaxed. It turned out I’d need that extra calm for our next case. While it wasn’t the most mysterious, it wound up being the biggest pain of the season. Ultimately, the investigation had to be abandoned. The episode sat on a shelf for months until we could figure out what to do with it.

It began with a lot of promise. Lauren, a Penn State freshman, had approached PRS about an apparition that she and her friends had seen in her dorm room. She’d been regularly playing a spirit game called 100 Candles that seemed related to the activity.

The game, which has a rich history, is played at night in a room lit by a hundred candles. Each player takes a turn telling a ghost story. After each story, the teller blows out a candle. After one hundred stories are told, the players are left in complete darkness, supposedly surrounded by one hundred spirits. Even though Lauren said she was really frightened, she didn’t want to stop playing. For me, this should have been my first warning sign. Most clients, in my experience, who frighten themselves into a problem, then refuse to step away, aren’t really taking the situation seriously.

I was on the lookout for special cases for the show, and this one sounded like it would provide a good opportunity to explore an issue that interested me: how certain games can open up doorways that people aren’t prepared to deal with. I’d been interested in that ever since learning that the true story behind
The Exorcist
(book and film) involved such a game. There, a spirit board was at the center of a possession.

With Lauren on her own, away from home for the first time, there was also a strong emotional aspect. The fact that it was right there on campus was also appealing. I was thinking this would be another laid-back shoot, like “The Cemetery,” where we could focus more on the case. Wrong.

The trouble began right after we shot the case briefing in the school library. Serg told me he wanted to drop out of the case to study for his midterms. He was one of our main cast members, so I didn’t know what to do with that. Heather and Katrina weren’t available in some of the later episodes, but Serg’s absence was the first. And I felt it was way too early for someone to sit out.

Apparently it concerned the producers, too. They even filmed Serg studying—which didn’t make it into the final cut, for obvious reasons. Unless a ghost was looking over his shoulder, I don’t imagine it was very interesting.

As it turned out, that issue was nothing. After one day, our client bailed out completely.

During my initial interview with Lauren, she did seem impressionable to me, that she was someone who frightened easily. She described how she woke up one night and saw a woman sitting on her roommate’s bed. The woman shook her head, and then disappeared. About a month later, it was back, propped up on its elbows, looking at Lauren.

Some of her friends reported similar experiences. One said they saw a face in the window. Another, Matt, claimed he caught a glimpse of a white wispy form in the corner of his eye. It vanished as soon he turned to look at it. Lauren said she was at a point where she wanted to change to a new room.

Despite the descriptions, I had reason to think there might not be too much to this. Like many freshmen, Lauren had been on a haunted tour of the campus, which detailed all the purported ghosts and spooky locations at Penn State. Add to that the candle game, and they were creating a very spooky atmosphere for themselves. Still, her fear was real, and I related to the fact that her parents didn’t believe her.

If this game was scaring her, why keep playing? Then again, lots of people who can’t sleep for days after seeing a horror movie will go back and watch another. The rush of adrenaline is exciting. In this case, Lauren was also under social pressure in a new environment.

By now I was more accustomed to planning out the days with production. After the client interviews, we’d have a psychic visit. This is actually the first time we used a psychic on the show in person. I was introduced to Shaurie by one of the producers, and although she seemed very nice, I didn’t feel that she was the right fit for this case. To be honest, I don’t think a psychic at all was the right fit for the case, which I’ll explain later. That night we’d play the game ourselves, then go back to Lauren’s room for Dead Time.