Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (20 page)

After this episode aired, I received a tiny bit of slack from some ghost hunters who thought it was absolutely ridiculous to think that one can be harmed trying to collect EVPs. I love ghost hunters, but sometimes they can be really thick and immature. Paranormal investigation, as well as ghost hunting, is not a game. It’s not a toy board you can buy in a store, use to conjure up some spirits for “ooh’s” and “ahh’s” and then put underneath your bed until the next time you decide to get some kicks.

If you accept the possibility that there are spirits you can communicate with, then you have to accept that there are risks, negatives. In the case of Carol Anne, if she was indeed dealing with a spirit who committed suicide, then there must be some emotional and mental anguish still residing in that spirit’s consciousness—unless you believe someone who commits suicide due to depression would decide to stick around the house for shits and giggles. There’s clearly trauma and a lack of resolution that needs to be cleared. The spirits do not need a bunch of overweight, fashionless ghost geeks walking in and asking for the spirit to do parlor tricks for their amusement.

In the past I’d seen the emotions of the client play in to the haunting in different ways, sometimes creating an
in
for the spirits. Here, for the first time, I thought it could be
causing
the activity.

While I don’t think the haunting was completely demonic, there may have been those elements present in some form. Due to the change of focus from the investigation to an intervention with Carol Anne, we didn’t have time to conduct a full test to determine whether the phenomena were demonic. To be safe, however, we did arrange a formal Catholic blessing for Carol Anne. Ultimately, though, as long as that door stayed open and Carol Anne kept inviting things in, it could have gone that way. Regardless, the bottom line was that Carol Anne was, as she said, unhappy.

By now, Brian told us that he recognized a problem. While at first he wanted to be supportive, he confided in me and others that he was really kind of sick of this. It made sense to me. After all, they were in their retirement years. Instead of enjoying their life with family and friends, Carol Anne spent her time up in a room listening to dead people.

I don’t like to tell people how to lead their lives, but in this case, I felt it was important to her for us not to hold back. Rather than continue with a standard investigation, I suggested we hold an intervention. Lorraine and I sat down with Carol Anne and tried to make it as clear as possible that regardless of whether the activity was genuinely paranormal or not, we felt that Carol Anne had an obsession, and that obsession was dragging her down. At the time, she seemed very receptive.

“There definitely was a change in me after I [moved into the house],” she said. When we pressed her to stop the recording, she agreed. “I really have to get out of it,” she said.

As a symbolic gesture, I asked her to throw her recorder into the ocean, to tell herself she was really letting go of her EVPs. She did throw
a
recorder into the sea, but not the one she used. That one belonged to her sister-in-law, so she said she couldn’t destroy it. She did promise to return it to her sister-in-law, and she gave me all her tapes. Two bags full. That, I thought, was a big step.

Meanwhile, though it didn’t make it into the edit, we did try to help Mary’s spirit. Through Lorraine, we contacted a priest who said a mass for Mary, and prayed for her soul to move on. He also did a house blessing, asking for the spirit of Mary or any other spirits Carol Anne knew of, to move on.

Afterward, as happens with many cases, Carol Anne seemed lighter. When I called to check in a short while after we left, she told me her friends had come over. They all sat by the water, chatted, and she’d gone into the hot tub. Brian also seemed very grateful for the change.

In the closing director’s log, I expressed confidence that Carol Anne would keep her promise. She said she was grateful we’d come and eager to change. If she followed through, I felt it would’ve been one of the best things we’d helped accomplish, more than removing a ghost or collecting some evidence.

Looking back, though, her apparent change of heart happened quickly. Just as she’d enthusiastically filled in details for our psychic walk-through, here she may have been filling in the blanks for the “recovery” story we presented. And, over time, things didn’t go so well.

A few weeks after the priest did the house blessing, Carol Anne told me she was still having activity. “Don’t try to contact it yourself,” I said. “If you need help, contact the priest again.”

A month later, she she told me she’d gone back to the psychic. She said there was a new spirit, a boy she felt very strongly she should help.

I urged her not to get involved. At the time, she still agreed she had a problem. But, when next we spoke, she said she’d visited three psychics and was recording EVPs again. I didn’t know how to respond.

“Carol Anne,” I said, “you’re going down this path, and you’re doing it at a bigger pace. By the time you get back to where you were, you’re going to be three times more obsessive.”

She didn’t seem to listen.

I’ve since become more dubious about the psychological shifts our clients sometimes seem to go through immediately after an investigation. I said earlier that just bringing a problem to light could help fix it. We also bring a lot of energy. Suddenly, you’ve got all these people showing up with cameras. Someone believes you, tells you how you can help yourself, that things will be fine, great. Clients often want that help badly. They also sometimes want, in some sense, to appease us.

But I know that effect is limited. We’re there for forty-eight hours. I can present possible solutions, but it’s up to the clients to walk through those doors and deal with their lives. So, sometimes, if things
don’t
get better right away, a client is devastated. “I did what you said and it’s still here!” I try to explain that it takes time. “It’s like a habit. It can’t go away cold turkey.”

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

A B
RIEF
H
ISTORY OF
EVP
S

EVPs, electronic voice phenomena, are recordings that many believe contain the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities. Importantly, the voices are not heard while the recording is made, only during playback.

With interest in speaking to the dead gaining popularity during the spiritualism movement (1840s–1920s), Thomas Edison was asked in the prestigious
Scientific American
if he believed it was possible. He didn’t come down on either side, but said that if it were, the recording device would have to be extremely sensitive.

In the 1930s, Latvian photographer Attila von Szalay tried recording spirit voices. At first, he used a 78 rpm record, then a wire recorder, but achieved his best success in the 1950s using a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Some of his recordings include voices saying, “Help me!” the ever-popular “Get out!” and a young boy apparently saying, “Do you want to hear a fart?”

On September 15, 1952, two Catholic priests and music enthusiasts, Father Ernetti and Father Gemelli, were recording a Gregorian chant on an early device called a Magnetophon. When it kept breaking, a frustrated Father Gemelli called out to his dead father for help. He was shocked to hear an answer play back, “Of course I shall help you. I’m always with you.”

In 1959, when Swedish painter and film producer Friedrich Jürgenson replayed a recording he’d made of bird songs, he heard what he thought were the voices of his dead father and wife calling his name. He made several more such recordings, including one he felt contained a message from his late mother.

Over the years hundreds of thousands of such recordings have been made, both friendly and malevolent, with varying clarity and integrity. The process of attempting to gather EVPs has become a staple of paranormal investigations. With high-quality recorders incorporating filters that can remove possible spirit voices, the best results are said to be obtained from poorer quality recorders that allow “noise” or “static” to be picked up, which, some believe, the spirits use to speak.

For more information on EVP research, I suggest visiting the Association TransCommunication group (formerly known as the American Association for EVP) at their Web site, www.atransc.org.

P
AREIDOLIA

In some ways, the human brain is a machine geared to pick patterns from the mass of information provided by its senses. To think about it as a survival mechanism, the faster you recognize a predator running toward you, the better chance you have of living long enough to have children—even if sometimes you see or hear a tiger that isn’t there.

When the brain gets it wrong, seeing a pattern where there isn’t one, it’s called
pareidolia
. Importantly, once the brain decides there is a pattern, it’s extremely difficult to convince it there isn’t one.

That’s a big problem with EVPs and the reason why, on
Paranormal State
and other shows, investigators play the recording to a client
before
telling them what they think it sounds like. Otherwise, they’ll listen for what they’ve been told is there, and then tend to hear it.

T
HE
S
TAGES OF
D
EMONIC
P
OSSESSION

Many demonologists believe that when a malevolent entity takes over a victim, it does so in stages. There are often other explanations for many of the stages, ranging from the psychological to biological, save the last.

Regression
is when the victim returns to an earlier state, backsliding in his personal or spiritual progress. Typically the person begins to slowly loosen their grip on their faith and other strengths they’d previously enjoyed.

Repression
happens as the victim loses the ability to express his feelings, be they joy or sadness. Here, the possessed always undergo a dislodging of their emotional self. The individual will often no longer feel happiness, but a hollow or paranoid sensation. This is where the demonic takes control of one’s emotions, in itself a powerful form of attack.

Suppression
occurs when the victim begins to purposefully hide information about himself, lying to friends and loved ones. This is confusing to the victim, for they have yet to make sense of what is actually happening.

Depression
is when the victim experiences extreme and consistent sadness, even despair. Other signs include insomnia and an inability to concentrate. (Of course many people experience depression
without
any demonic influence.) The lack of sleep and constant depression creates a hole big enough for the demonic to begin their final rounds of attack.

Oppression
is like depression, but the source feels more external, as if something outside the victim is weighing him down.

Obsession
occurs when the victim is so preoccupied with an idea or habit that he begins to pursue it to the point of damaging the other parts of his life.

Possession
is the final stage, where the demonic entity takes control of the victim, partly or completely.

My experience has convinced me that possession does take place, but there’ve also been many mislabeled situations, and attempts at driving away a nonextant entity that have led to tragedy—including the mental incapacitation or death of the victim. Anyone experiencing extreme emotional symptoms should first consult a doctor or other professional health practitioner.

A lot of people ask me if they’re at risk of possession because they played with a Ouija board or watched a horror movie. I don’t think it’s that simple. You have to understand that there are rules to the demonic (if you already believe in the possibility of the demonic, is it so hard to believe that there are rules?!?). Free will, for example, is the gatekeeper to our soul. We can either make decisions that bring us closer to the divine, or the light, or to darkness. Some tend to think of the demonic as a bogeyman living under our beds. Closer to the truth is the idea that the demonic lives in the deep psyche of our minds. The attack is more psychological than physical. In the seven steps, the process to demonic possession is almost entirely mental.

Once I explain this, the next question is often, “Why would someone
allow
themselves to be possessed?” But that again pictures the demonic as a simple force of black-and-white. Millions of men and women subject themselves to abusive relationships. Often, they go through one abusive relationship after another. No one goes in consciously saying to themselves, “I want to be abused for the rest of my life,” but for whatever unfortunate reasons, bad choices, attractions to bad people, they become trapped. Likewise, the process of the demonic is not as dramatic as
The Exorcist
plays it out to be.