Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  SINCE THE BEGINNING OF recorded history, men and women have told tales of ghosts and hauntings and things, in our case, that went boom in the night. These events are, I’d argue, a part of who we are—if not as individuals, then certainly as a species.

  Besides that, as a journalist, I adhere to a code of ethics that requires me to explain any personal connections I might have to the subject at hand. It just doesn’t seem right for me to write a book about the paranormal without letting you know where I come from. Most of the events and places that colored my childhood have fallen away. My family stopped attending any regular organized religious services when I was twelve. I’ve moved more times than I can count. But I’m resurrecting the Family Ghost, so to speak, because as a society, we hear plenty of ghost stories from people who believe everything they hear, and from people who don’t think anything labeled “paranormal” could be possible. I think it’s time to hear one of these stories from someone who, no matter what he believes, is prepared to focus on what he knows. And folks, that ain’t much.

  Consider my own memories: every last one of them could be false. In one of the most famous studies demonstrating the unreliability of memory, 120 people who attended the Disneyland theme park were shown an ad in which Bugs Bunny was depicted. Then they were asked, “Did you shake hands with Bugs Bunny when you attended Disneyland?”

  One third said yes, they had shaken hands with that wascally wabbit. Problem is, Bugs is a Warner Bros. character—not a Disney creation at all. So Bugs had never appeared in the park. The researchers had created a false memory in their subjects merely by suggesting the idea of this impossible meeting. In another study, researchers convinced half of the participants that they had taken a hot air balloon ride that never occurred.

  The functioning of an adult’s memory is suspect. But childhood memories are the most highly suggestible. The most famous example is given by psychologist Jean Piaget, whose 1951 book, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, includes the following passage: “I can still see, most clearly, the following scene… . I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station.”

  Piaget believed in the reality of this event, which he had heard as fact, till he was fifteen years old, when it was discovered that his nanny had made the story up to get a reward. In setting out to write this chapter, then, I considered the testimony of everyone older than me more reliable. And I further considered the collective picture they presented to be more important than individual accounts. In sum, when they agreed on the details I granted those details more validity.

  In that sense, the Family Ghost story sails right past Piaget’s kidnapping. The accounts of the close witnesses agree on the details related so far, for instance.

  Over the years, as I mulled over whether or not to ever write about the episode, I had conversations with my older siblings, parents, and some other relatives.

  I spoke about it to my oldest brother, Jerry, in fact, the last time I saw him before he died. He recounted the basic particulars I describe but resisted searching his memory any further than this: lots of banging over lots of nights, more stories from our sisters, the appearance of the family priest. Then he confessed that he didn’t want to talk about it at all. “I don’t know why,” he said, multiple times, until finally he admitted, “It freaked me out.”

  A cousin, and my aunt, still remember hearing about it. They learned some of the details as they happened—including the banging, and the bit about the blessing of the house. My other brother and my sisters retain their own memories. But for our purposes, the most detailed account came from my parents, who were charged with figuring it all out. Shortly after I graduated from college, many years before my mother died, I sat down with them and talked about the whole thing. And this is the story they told me.

  The banging occurred only after midnight and seemed to respond to their actions: that is, when they came upstairs, it stopped. But if they came back down too soon, it started again. “Too soon” was never an amount of time they quantified. But they did develop some standards and practices. Any time the banging started, which they described as “booming” and “incredibly loud,” they took to spending an hour or more sleeping alongside us before going back to their own bedroom on the first floor.

  It was not, as it were, an inside job. The kids were all accounted for, and under observation by each other during at least some of these episodes. The sound was loud and seemed to originate from the second-floor walls or ceiling, and we never succeeded in recreating it. It seems clear to me, anyway: this particular ghost story will not yield to a Scooby-Doo solution, the climax coming when that smart Velma tears the sheet off one of us.

  My sisters shared stories with my parents of those more far-out paranormal happenings: the covers yanked from their beds, the woman who swept through their room. My parents agreed it was easier not to believe them. For one thing, the sound was the only strange experience they had encountered themselves. And, more pressingly, who wants to think their daughters are plagued by some paranormal force?

  They dismissed my sisters’ stories, then, and focused on the sound. Skeptics don’t like to acknowledge this sort of thing, but not all believers want to think their house is haunted. My parents spent months, and more than a few sleep-deprived nights, looking for prosaic explanations: Each of us swore the banging sounded powerful, like someone trying to pound in through the roof or wall with a hammer. And yes, my parents briefly wondered if the source of the noise might be raccoons jumping on the roof. But more seriously, they wondered if it was some sound in the pipes. Many supposed hauntings can be explained by simple plumbing problems or the expansion of pipes inside the house’s walls. Water hammers, or fluid hammers, typically occur when dishwashers, washing machines, or toilets suddenly stop the flow of water. When the water is shut off, there is a loud banging sound. All that energy in the flowing water needs some place to go and converts into acoustic energy. Though admittedly my parents’ analysis was that of a middle-class couple, busy with the rigors of child rearing, they ultimately concluded the water or heating pipes couldn’t be responsible: The sound happened at regular times, after midnight, as everyone slept, and this big, banging sound went on longer and louder, every time it occurred, than any plumping problem with which they were familiar, including the water hammer.

  Eventually, feeling they had run out of potential prosaic explanations, and tired of the phenomenon, which often interrupted a precious night’s sleep, they settled on a paranormal possibility. They contacted the priest of the parish we attended. An appointment was set. Big Father Crowley entered, flicking holy water and saying prayers. And that night, things got even more surreal.

  I talked to my parents about this whole episode maybe twenty years after it happened. I was staying with them in Florida briefly, after graduating college. They had retired there and I would be moving to the Northeast. We had eaten lunch, cleaned up the dishes, and sat back down at the table to talk. What struck me most was this part of the story, not only because the details were so outlandish, but because of the way they reacted to telling it. They had shared the same general account with me in the past, as had my brothers and sisters. But this was the first time I’d led them through the telling, in as much detail as they could remember. Looking back, it was my first post-grad reporting experience. I wanted to get past the history that had accrued in my own mind, having lived around the story for so long. And that required going straight to the sources closest to it. What I learned is that sometimes the way a story is told is as telling as the story itself.

  WE HAD STARTED OFF our “interview” almost playfully
. But maybe an hour in, when I asked them to walk me through the last night, the color drained from their faces. Their bodies seemed to grow heavier as they sagged forward in their chairs. Their voices lost volume and vigor. They seemed not just to be recalling the details but reliving them. They looked as gut-sick and scared as they claimed to feel that night. “We didn’t know what was happening,” my father said. “And we didn’t think we could stop it.”

  So, what did happen?

  Well, usually, when the banging started, we waited for them to come and comfort us. But that night the thumping was so loud, so encompassing, so threatening, that everyone congregated downstairs. The lamp over the dining room table swung, side to side, with the force of the blows on the house. (I have one additional memory of my mother hollering, to my father, “Jerry, the whole house is going to come apart!”)

  My parents talked, briefly, about packing an overnight bag. They were going to take us to a hotel. And then, suddenly, something new happened. The noises shifted. For the first time ever, the banging lost its amorphous quality, and assumed a precise location. It hit upon the stairs.

  Retelling the story, my parents fell quiet.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “We were so scared,” my mother said.

  So what they did was, they reached out and held hands. In fact, when they shared this detail, they reached out and held hands again, all these years later, across the dining room table. “I was in the lead, a little in front of your mother,” my father said, “because I figured I had to protect everybody.”

  From their position, my parents could see down the hallway to the front door. The stairway banister ran parallel to that same hallway. And from their vantage point, my parents could not see the stairs themselves—or what was on them. Booms sounded from the stairway as whatever it was came down, one step—boom!—at a time. To my father, the sound suggested a child throwing a tantrum. But this was one hulking child. Both my parents felt tremors in the floor every time another bang sounded. And when it reached the very bottom, there was a small change in the rhythm, an extension of the patterned silence between explosions, as if the Family Ghost, the water hammer(?), whatever it was, having reached the last step, was regathering itself to hit upon the landing—and my parents’ hearts—with one last, ferocious, floor-shaking effort.

  And then it did.

  The last sound was the loudest—a big, two-footed dismount. The noise stopped then.

  And it never happened again.

  I RECOGNIZE HOW TRULY fantastic every word of the Family Ghost story is, and here I am, a reporter. I can hear the skeptics chortling, and I laugh right along with them. I realize that the ending of this story is particularly unbelievable. And I know for some people it will undermine my credibility. But what if I told you that I don’t believe it myself? And what if I told you, further, that I don’t disbelieve it either?

  The truth is, as a teenager and into my early twenties, I used to love telling this story. But over time, as the people I told it to were themselves older and more committed to a worldview, I pretty much stopped telling it altogether. Because believers left me utterly cold—through their unblinking acceptance of the story’s every particular, and the way they prattled on, afterward, about the nature of poltergeists, negative spirits, and the afterlife. Here I was, thinking all this stuff was mysterious and unproven. And there they were, encyclopedias of the unknown.

  Skeptics, on the other hand, greeted this story with scorn. And I was surprised to find that they delivered their prosaic explanations with greater emotion than any believers offered their more amorphous visions. The usual explanations have revolved around plumbing and the house settling. In response, I nod. Neither explanation strikes me as sufficient. Water hammers, expanding pipes, and settling floorboards don’t strike repeatedly, incessantly, at that volume, over tens of minutes—or come down the stairs and then disappear forever. Further, my father says the water pipes extended only partly up into the walls of the second floor and could not account for a noise that seemed to originate higher than that, in the walls and ceiling.

  One young skeptic once told me it had to be the plumbing. I explained why that particular prosaic explanation seemed unlikely, then said, in what I hoped was a conciliatory fashion, “But, hey, maybe it was.”

  “Wh-wh-what do you mean?” he sputtered. “Maybe? It has to be.”

  Taken aback by all this emotion, and from a rationalist, no less, I tried my best to ease the tension. But he seemed incredulous that I maintained the matter was simply … unexplained.

  “I’m not saying it was a ghost or a spirit being,” I said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t. I’m saying we don’t know what it was.”

  What I learned, over the years, was that for many skeptics, even an unlikely materialistic explanation that doesn’t fit the stated facts is immensely, emotionally preferable to simply saying, I don’t know. And so I have most enjoyed sharing the story with people who occupy a spot somewhere in the middle, who offered prosaic explanations and listened to my responses in a spirit of inquiry and conversation—in the playful spirit, in fact, that I have endeavored to write this book.

  I’ve lived with this story for so long, in all its ambiguity, that the ongoing debate over the paranormal has seemingly always been one of my abiding interests. And yet, I also feel as if I had little choice in the matter. I was born into this, in other words—the Family Ghost is something I never, ever asked for. And so, for most of my years, I’ve watched all this from what might most accurately be termed the fringe of the fringe—not participating directly, but monitoring what skeptics and believers say about the possibilities. And I’ve looked for a prosaic explanation that does justice to my parents’ version of events.

  There are some intriguing ideas out there, like infrasound—sound waves too low to be audible to the human ear but powerful enough to influence our perception. Infrasound is produced by low-and high-pressure weather systems, storms, and human-made objects like large subwoofer speakers, diesel engines, and some wind turbines. The most well-known researcher in the area of infrasound and hauntings is engineer Vic Tandy, who saw a gray blob out of the corner of his eye one night and ultimately traced the experience to infrasound. He subsequently hit the road, looking for infrasound in reportedly haunted sites, with mixed success. And there are now others out there, pursuing his work and that of Dr. Michael Persinger, who believes electromagnetic waves can explain both religious experiences and ghosts.

  In 2003 researchers in the United Kingdom reported an experiment in which low-frequency sound waves were played during a concert. Reports of unusual experiences increased by 22 percent during the periods in which the sound waves played, including anxiety, sorrow, chills, tingling in the spine, and pressure on the chest. But no one had visual or auditory hallucinations.

  In another experiment, dubbed the “Haunt Project,” organizers locked seventy-nine people, individually, inside a specially constructed chamber for fifty minutes—bombarding them with infrasound and Persinger-styled EMF (electromagnetic field) waves. Such waves are found mostly near volcanoes and fault lines. But this study found no effect from the waves or the infrasound. In fact, people reported just as many odd experiences when the EMF waves and infrasound were turned off.

  Of course, there can be no one-size-fits-all explanation for an experience that has occurred in humankind for millennia, long before subwoofer speakers and the diesel engine made the scene. And so one other possibility to toss on the pile is that of a psychological explanation, beginning with “the fantasy-prone personality” or FPP, for short. Proposed in 1981 by the psychologists Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber, the FPP is a kind of debunker’s dream. In this formulation, the fantasy prone are people who not only lead rich fantasy lives—they can actually blur the lines between fantasy and reality. Wilson and Barber identify fourteen characteristics of fantasy proneness:

  1. Being an excellent hypnotic subject

  2. Having imaginary pla
ymates as a child

  3. Fantasizing frequently as a child

  4. Adopting a fantasy identity

  5. Experiencing imagined sensations as real

  6. Having vivid sensory perceptions

  7. Reliving past experiences

  8. Claiming psychic powers

  9. Having out-of-body or floating experiences

  10. Receiving poems, messages, and such, from spirits, higher intelligences, and the like

  11. Being involved in “healing”

  12. Encountering apparitions

  13. Experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams)

  14. Seeing classical hypnagogic imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space)

  In other words, the fantasy prone are more likely to believe, among other things, that they experienced something that mainstream science rejects. And yes, the reasoning sounds a bit circular. Like any diagnosis in psychology, fantasy proneness lies, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. Most people probably have some of these traits. But answering yes to any six of the fourteen questions is believed to mark one as fantasy prone. (For the record, my tally is four; I answered yes to 1, 2, 3, and 6.) But I also wonder, Could having a single strange, unexplained experience make someone fantasy prone?

  We do reevaluate our life experiences as we go along. Some events are forgotten entirely. Others seem to grow more vivid, depending on what’s happening in our lives right now. Could Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychologist with whom our tale first started, have been made fantasy prone by hearing the incredible tales told to her by her patients?

  Those who knew Kübler-Ross claim they initially took her to be like most scientists—the kind of woman who considered death to be the end. It was only years after she started encountering other information, in the near-death experiences and deathbed encounters of her patients, that she started visiting psychics and the like. Based on what we know of her biography, if Kübler-Ross took the FPP test before her conversion, she might have scored under six. But if she took the test after, say, 1975, she would have answered yes to about nine of the FPP traits—at the least.