Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (45 page)

The show had given me a distraction. While I was focused on filming, the onslaught of the press sounded cool. Now I didn’t know if I could handle it. It was one thing to be documented, another to go out and do the PR game. I didn’t know if I could handle going out in front of ten million people to talk about the show. After years of interviewing clients, all of a sudden I’d be the one being asked the questions.

The real strangeness hit me in the days that followed, when I arrived to do a live interview at Fox News, for their late-night show,
Red Eye.
Exhausted from being awake nearly twenty-four hours, I was waiting, getting ready to do my five-minute promotion, talk about the seriousness of the work, and maybe share a spooky ghost story.

When the interview started, I realized that wasn’t what they wanted me for, especially when the host asked if “a creepy uncle” was responsible for my childhood haunting. It took me all the way back to when I first started thinking about doing a show, and I realized how the media thought of the paranormal as a novelty. I wanted to do something better. I thought we had, but would anyone listen?

December 10, 2007, was the day of the premiere for
Paranormal State
. A&E had had me in NYC for five days after doing a steady round of press interviews all over the country. That night the rest of the team was with me in New York for a party hosted by A&E. We hadn’t been on an investigation in a while. Instead of skulking around in the shadows searching for the unknown, we were putting on suits and dresses for a bash full of executives.

My nerves were pumping. Throughout the day I was getting text messages and phone calls, all wishing me good luck for the launch. My parents called to tell me how proud they were.

As Serg and the others finished getting dressed, I took a moment to stand alone by the windows and stare out at the nighttime view of the city. Manhattan is beautiful. I tried to calm my nerves, but every time I thought I had it under control, all these questions flooded out: What if it’s a bomb? What if everyone hates it? What if the clients get upset at watching the episode?

I was more nervous about the show coming out than I’d ever been about the paranormal. Now our work would be something the entire world could see. The realization that I was about to lose a piece of my privacy, possibly forever, began to sink in.

A hand clapped on my shoulder. I looked up at a reflection of Serg and me standing in the window.

“You ready to do this, man?” he asked.

It was almost like being at the pier down south, before the tornado hit.

“Not really, but I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“Not really,” he said.

We had Eilfie, Katrina, and Heather come up to the room. I broke open the minibar and we all took out a variety of liquors and beer (thanks, A&E!).

“A toast!” I declared, holding up my Corona. “Guys, we’ve come a long way. I don’t know where the hell we’ll be going after tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a fun ride!”

We all cheered and drank. And, with that, we headed to the door.

We arrived at the party with less than an hour to go before 10:00 P.M. Chip Coffey, Jamie Hernandez, and Lorraine Warren were all there to help celebrate. They congratulated me, told us how excited they were.

“Think of all the millions of people who’ll be watching,” someone said.

In response, my stomach made a strange gurgling sound, not unlike some of the things I’d heard from Frank’s Box, only easier for me to understand.

Before I knew it, the words that would become so familiar to many finally came on the TV screen for the first time: “These are the real stories of Penn State’s Paranormal Research Society . . .”

Well, here we go
, I said to myself. My worries about the inevitable future disappeared. Whatever was coming, I’d find out tomorrow. Why waste the night fearing the future?

Epilogue: Mothman’s Last Word

You want a sign?

In a way the story of the first season, or, technically, season one and “1.5,” completes a circle. After being thrown into the hectic pace of television production, things became exhausting. There were times I couldn’t even speak to the clients until I met them for the first time, times when I felt too drained to give my all. Thrilling as it was, and as much as I feel I stuck to my ideals, trying to get at the truth and help people, the day-to-day experience was very far from where I’d started as a paranormal investigator.

With the last six episodes, a lot of it came back, though. The new pacing of the shooting schedule helped. It felt good, more laid back, more like the sorts of investigations I did before the series began. I think it showed in the final product, too.

As I mentioned,
Paranormal State
’s first year isn’t aired in the order in which it was shot. The six episodes from “Pet Cemetery” to “Asylum” were jumbled throughout the season, but if you watch them as we shot them, I think you’ll see a huge difference as the series progressed. I’m very proud of many of our first thirteen, from “Sixth Sense” to “Mothman,” but the last six were sharper, better, leaner, and they get to the point faster. We had time to develop them and make them great. Is it perfect? No. In some ways, I’d love it if we were doing ninety-minute movies every three months instead of a weekly series, so there’d be time for everyone to get the cases and the episodes just right.

But nothing’s perfect.

It’s in the nature of the process that nothing in this book will convince people one way or another about the existence of ghosts. These are the things I experienced and what I felt and thought about them. What I hope to have done is to have given fans of the show some added depth about who I am, what PRS is, and what we’re about, and, for newcomers, to present a behind-the-scenes story about what it’s really like to be a paranormal investigator.

In trying to serve that purpose, this book is filled with stories: ghost stories, personal stories, stories about what it’s like to work on a show. I tried to cover my successes and failures, what was kept, what was left out, the evidence that was most exciting, the mysteries we never got to the heart of, the clients we managed to help, and the rare one or two who felt in some ways dissatisfied.

That’s the what and the how and the where and the when, but the big question always left over is the why. Why get involved in paranormal investigations, and maybe more important, why stick with it for so long? In part I remain motivated by that first strange encounter I had when I was nine, but it’s since become something more, something that can’t easily be put into words.

I have one more story, a story that I think gets close to it. It was left out of the episode since it was so personal. I’ve told it at a few conferences. Like a lot of what we’ve experienced, it’s open to interpretation.

As you may recall, while shooting “Mothman” we were inside one of those weird concrete igloos that supposedly once housed experimental explosives, trying to contact an ultraterrestrial being. I asked Chip Coffey if whatever he was in touch with could give me some kind of sign that it was really there, that it existed.

“You want a sign?” Chip asked.

John Frick, the Mothman expert who was guiding us, quickly said, “Well, I want a sign.”

“No,” Chip said. “They’ll only give Ryan a sign, and only if he wants one.”

He turned to me. “They will give you a sign, but you have to decide: yes or no.”

I was already pretty creeped out by the way Chip had been acting. I rarely believe in psychics, but here I had the sense he was in touch with something. To me, it felt like a legitimate offer for a Mothman prophecy. I had to think about it. Did it mean I’d get a weird phone call from a higher intelligence, the way John Keel described in his book?

I paused, gulped, and said, “Okay, I’ll take the sign.”

“Okay,” Chip said. “They’ll give you a sign.”

After that, I was like, fuck, what did I get myself into?

Serg, Josh, and I shared a hotel room, so after the shoot we headed back there. I was so on edge; I couldn’t get to sleep. After tossing and turning for hours, I felt a presence in the room.

Slowly, I turned over. By the doorway, I saw a silhouetted black shape . . .

I almost screamed until I realized it was my overcoat hanging on the closet door!

After that, I was like, “Okay, I’ve really got to get to sleep here. It’s all in my head, I’m not going to get a visit.”

Just in case, though, just in case, I put one of my audio recorders on the night table and set it to RECORD. The next day I woke up—no sign of Mothman, no sign of any ultraterrestrials. Nothing.

It was the last day, so we had to pack up and leave the hotel before heading to the final shoot for the case. After that, we’d be going back to State College. I was just about done packing when I noticed something. My tape recorder wasn’t on the night table where I left it.

I thought it was gone, but I opened the drawer, and there it was. Somehow, it’d been moved. I asked Josh and Serg if they had moved it, but neither had any idea I had put a recorder out to begin with.

That was back in 2007. It’s nearly the end of 2010 and I haven’t listened to that recording yet. People think this is crazy. There could be some solid evidence on that recorder, a message from an ultraterrestrial. Why
not
listen to it? They think it’s like Mulder having a box with a piece of a UFO inside, but never opening it up to take a look. They ask if I’m afraid.

It’s not about fear, and I like to think I’m not crazy. The question for me is whether I really want that mystery unraveled right now. If there were a message from the ultraterrestrials, or whatever, what would they say? Maybe I won’t hear anything, or just a weird bird sound. Who knows?

Yes, the possibility that all I have to do is hit PLAY to maybe hear something from another realm excites me, but at the same time I don’t want to press that button. It’s like a present, a gift I don’t want to open yet, a door I’m not quite ready to go through. Part of me believes I’d never be able to shut it. It’d be another moment like seeing that creature at the foot of my bed, or those demonic cases before
Paranormal State
began, something else that would change my life forever.

I’m not naïve. I know that I haven’t fully gone through all the doors the unknown has to offer. I could keep going darker and deeper into the tunnel, but at what cost? When I do cases, I do cases, but if there’s a door that’s going to open for me, it’ll open for me on its own. I don’t plan on pulling the handle.

At the same time I don’t think that if I play the recording an ultraterrestrial will say, “Hi Ryan, well, here’s our bio and a Web site where you can learn more about us.” The excitement is that maybe they did communicate with me and all I had to do was ask. I still have a long life to live. I don’t want the mystery to be over this quickly just because I was impatient. It almost feels like cheating.

So, I want to let it sit there and see how the rest of the decades of my life pan out. It’s a recording. It’s not going anywhere. Unless I delete it accidentally. That would suck. But I’ve got it in a safe spot, carefully marked.

Maybe when I’m seventy I’ll listen to it.

Won’t it be scary if I listen to it and it says, “We’ll see you tomorrow.” And that’s when I
die
?

There’s a quote from Oscar Wilde that sums it up: “The suspense is unbearable. I hope it lasts.”

S
UGGESTED
R
EADING FROM
R
YAN
B
UELL

Belanger, Michelle.
The Ghost Hunter’s Survival Guide
, 1st ed. Woodbury, NY: Llewellyn Publications, 2009.

Blum, Deborah.
Ghost Hunters
. New York, NY: Penguin, 2007.

Martin, Malachi.
Hostage to the Devil
. New York, NY: HarperOne, 1992.

Mercado, Elaine.
Grave’s End: A True Ghost Story.
Woodbury, NY: Llewellyn Publications, 2001.