Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (23 page)

It started when I was a teenager with a Ouija board and kept expanding since. I still have a strong interest in Ouija boards, especially the way things can change for some people if they use it.

Life on other planets is something I’ve also been reading about lately. When I was in third grade and first reading about UFOs, I told people I was an alien. I think I still believe that a bit. In this crazy world, anything’s possible.

What was it like taking over for the “Beer, Wine & Spirits” case?

When Buell broke the news, I thought it was one of his clever jokes. Then I realized it was the real deal and started scrambling to remember everything I’d observed.

It was tricky completing an investigation with two people. We did forget some key points, but overall I think Katrina and I did all right.

What’s the one unanswered question from the first season episodes you’d most like to have the solution to?

There are many unanswered questions and I like it that way. If every question had an answer, the mind couldn’t wander. If I had to pick, I would like to know why some see and experience things that others don’t. Why did Savannah, from “Vegas” or Matthew in “Sixth Sense”? It just seems so crazy that only some individuals have that ability.

E
ILFIE
M
USIC ON
“B
EER
, W
INE
& S
PIRITS
”

When Heather and Katrina took over the case, I observed them as they did tech (which took forever) and conducted interviews. It was a great case, but I was bored since I couldn’t really do much other than watch their joined-at-the-hip investigating.

The one thing that I regret, which seems to happen often, is that we had a camera on one of the wineglasses set out for the spirit to move. At the last moment, we moved the camera to a different wineglass. Of course, the wineglass that originally had had the camera on it was the one that moved. It sometimes seems like the ghosts know where the cameras are and stay out of range on purpose.

Chapter 11
Our First Controversy

“I sense there was a girl that recently walked away?”
“No.”
“Watch for it.”

After “Beer, Wine & Spirits,” we were due for one final case on our road trip. On a cold, snowy January day, exhausted from having investigated for eight straight days, we drove for six hours up to Leominster, Massachusetts. We were all drained and not feeling at our best. Our “break” off for Christmas had been just one week. For me, that meant a twelve-hour drive to South Carolina to visit my family, and then another twelve hours to New York City for shooting. Looking back, I think what kept us going was that we were on the final stretch. After this case, we’d get a week off in State College to relax and prepare for the final five cases.

This case, “School House Haunting,” wound up being surprisingly controversial when the client, Shannon Sylvia, later became a trainee investigator on another show,
Ghost Hunters International
. I also had a chance to debunk a psychic in this one.

Throughout the first season initial contact with clients often came from our producers’ efforts. It wasn’t like the days before the show, or even more recently, when we’ll receive an e-mail saying, “Please help us.” More often production worked hard on following up leads, handed us the client name, e-mail, and address and asked if we were interested. That’s how we met Shannon.

She lived with her husband, Jeff, in Leominster, Massachusetts, in an old schoolhouse that’d been converted into condos. They reported hearing children playing, as if inside their apartment, though there were no children in the building. One evening Shannon said she heard the wall creaking. The bathroom door hammered open and hit the wall behind it so hard, it put a hole in it. She also said she was having disturbing dreams but did not want to discuss them on-camera.

She said that half of her thought her home was truly haunted and half of her wondered if it was stress. She was in the process of opening up her own health spa, and talked about having trouble with the business as well as tough times with her personal life.

From the beginning, she was also open about the fact she’d had psychics and paranormal teams investigate her home before us, and that she wanted to be a paranormal investigator. We knew she’d worked with New England Paranormal and helped TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the organization behind Syfy Channel’s
Ghost Hunters
) in Rhode Island. Her take at the time was well, the phenomena are still happening, why not get a different perspective?

The trip from Long Island to Massachusetts took six hours. By the time we arrived, we didn’t have a lot of energy. But, when I’m in a new town, I like to check out the local papers to get a sense of the community, so, the day we arrived, I looked at the
Leominster Champion
. On the front page was a picture of Shannon next to a headline about her being featured on a new A&E TV series,
Paranormal U
, the shooting title of our show.

At first I thought production was doing promotion, though typically we like to keep a low profile while shooting. When I found out they weren’t, I contacted the paper, trying to figure out how the story could have been leaked. One of the staff members told me, matter-of-factly, that Shannon contacted them. This did, of course, raise a red flag about Shannon’s motives, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel that Shannon was
only
doing this for publicity.

Beyond that, we had big problems with the size of the space. The site was an old schoolhouse broken up into twelve apartments. Shannon’s home was nice for a one-bedroom living space, but tiny for a TV crew. The crew had to stay out in the apartment complex hallway, which wound up angering the other residents. Production-wise, it was so difficult we promised ourselves we’d never do an episode in a space like that again.

During the primary interview, Shannon said her experiences began immediately after moving in. In a loft area, she’d once felt something flick her ear. On a few occasions, lightbulbs were found completely unscrewed. At night, she and her husband sometimes heard voices in the hallway that sounded like their own.

The fact that they were hearing their own voices was interesting, but not uncommon. Some theorize that certain places can record events. I understand that Shannon and Jeff sometimes had arguments, and the excess emotional energy may have been captured and played back.

While others had investigated this case, a psychic named Trish was key to the clients’ beliefs about the haunting. I don’t remember how Shannon came in contact with Trish. I do know Shannon told us she’d been to psychics she’d seen advertised along the road, but Trish may have been referred to her by friends. In either case, when Shannon first wanted to contact Trish, Jeff was skeptical and worried about the cost.

“But,” he said, “she identified four spirits by name and never charged a dime.”

After that Jeff felt he couldn’t discount the possibility there was something going on. In fact, they told us they based a lot of their beliefs about the haunting on the information that psychic gave them. Trish claimed to have seen apparitions, a little boy and a little girl, and told them she’d “seen” a murder-suicide that took place in their apartment before the building was a school.

With that possibility in mind, Katrina and Eilfie spent a lot of time researching the building, but rather than confirm what Trish sensed, the information they found contradicted it. Most of the structure dated back to the 1880s, but the section with Shannon’s condo wasn’t added until 1919–20, after it was no longer a school. They also spoke to a librarian who’d never heard or read anything about any murders or accidents at the location. That in itself didn’t mean a murder-suicide didn’t take place, but it’s likely that if something that dramatic had happened, the newspapers would have covered it.

Despite the residents being unhappy with our crew in the hallway, I asked around about any activity others may have experienced. One young couple didn’t want to appear on-camera, but said they had an attic in their apartment and would hear things up there. When they went to check, they found it empty. We’d heard another resident had experiences, but no one answered the door.

I know this will shock some of our fans, but hey, I want to make sure you get your money’s worth for this book, so I’ll now reveal, at great personal risk, that there is a moment in the final version of this episode in which we look very weird. It’s the sequence where Heather “catches” Serg playing with some plastic toy ponies. In our off moments, we like to have fun. Here, without many leads to follow, Heather and Serg were bored, so they taped a “skit” where Heather pretends to catch him playing with toy ponies. When we saw that production actually used it in the episode, it surprised us all in a funny sort of way. I did say they included some of our weirder moments. When it aired, people thought it was real, as if maybe Serg had secret toy-pony issues.

Anyway, after the pony incident, we regrouped for an EVP session and did encounter some activity. As we tried to contact the spirits, Katrina heard heavy breathing in one ear. I, meanwhile, heard a woman’s voice. It was the first clearly audible voice I’d heard in a long while. It said something that sounded like “Katie” but it was so soft it might have been “eighty” or “Haiti.”

Neither the voice nor the breathing were recorded, which left us little to analyze. There wasn’t enough historical information to piece together anything about the haunting, but I did want to interview the psychic, Trish. From what I understand, she’d visited a few times, as far back as three years prior to our investigation, and Shannon seemed to swear by her.

After arriving, Trish assured me the place was haunted. “There’s a little boy; his name is Billy. He comes up to me and wants to play.” She also felt the presence of a woman, Elizabeth, and was certain a male had hung himself in the apartment in the year 1856.

When the team met to discuss the interview, Katrina pointed out that what Trish told us had apparently changed drastically from what she’d told Shannon. Originally, according to Shannon, the children were Jacob and Elizabeth; now they were Jenny and Billy. Aside from that, we knew that the section of the building where Trish sensed that a suicide occurred in 1856 hadn’t been built until sixty years later.

Given the other questionable psychic experiences I’d been having, and the lack of anything else to investigate, I decided this would be an opportunity for the show to take a good hard look at the psychic process. So, we asked Trish to do a reading with Serg, to test her accuracy.

“I sense there was a girl that recently walked away?” she asked him.

“No,” Serg says with a shrug.

“Watch for it,” Trish assures him.

It went on like that for twenty minutes, one miss after another. Despite getting everything wrong, Trish walked away seemingly convinced it wasn’t her abilities, that the problem was with Serg, that even though he didn’t know what she was talking about right now, one day he would.

I’d been wanting to do some debunking like this and I was pleased to be able to.

Shannon had apparently put a lot of faith in this woman, but to her credit, admitted she was still learning. When I pointed out the variations in what Trish said about the ghosts, and the historical inaccuracies, Shannon said, “I’ve known those stories for three years and just repeated those facts over and over again in my mind so often I believed them.”

We did have our own experiences now, though, and that night, during Dead Time, we tried to contact whatever spirit may have said “Katie.” While the size of the apartment made it tough for production, it was much easier for us to set up our monitoring cameras. There were fewer places to cover, but nothing was picked up on video. A motion detector went off and there were a few knocking sounds, but nothing noteworthy.

To be honest, this episode aside, Dead Time can be very uneventful. The method of paranormal investigating where you take a bunch of gizmos and walk around looking for ghosts is not, in my opinion, always the best. Our original investigations weren’t one-hour efforts; they were long, drawn-out experiences. When things did happen, it was almost at random, while I was talking to someone, or asleep, not when I was walking around looking for it.

The next day something did happen, not activity per se so much as a strange coincidence, a synchronicity. Jeff told us he’d been talking to a friend at work who mentioned his wife knew someone who used to live in the apartment and heard they’d had similar experiences. Jeff didn’t know the woman’s name at first, but while arranging for us to speak to her, was surprised to learn it was Katie, Katie Gahl.

I was tired and eager to get home. If I hadn’t heard that voice, we might not have gotten in touch with Katie at all. As it was, arranging the interview was a crazed, last-minute thing.

On the phone, Katie told me she’d lived in the condo starting in August 1986. She said she’d hear children playing, and wake up in the morning to find everything in her home messed up, as if twenty kids had just run through. Here was some apparently independent confirmation of the activity, and it seemed related to my own experience. I invited her over to share more details.