Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  But there is one ancient god, predating the Greeks, the Romans, and the Bible, which has yet to be explained—the Trickster. “The trickster is the wily survivor, the mischievous underdog who defies convention, subverts the system, breaks down the power structure, and gives birth to new ideas.”26 In essence, the trickster is the anomalous result of a world awash in chaotic systems. He is the ghost in the machine, and he has never been explained because the trickster’s essence involves a vast amount of complexity, which can probably never be predicted or accurately understood.

  George P. Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, one of the finest books to be written on the paranormal, uses the idea of the trickster to explain paranormal phenomena and how it presents such a conundrum in our world.

  Our way of thinking is governed by Aristotelian logic. It too has a binary aspect; something is either A or not-A. In this system, the ‘law of the excluded middle’ specifies that there is no middle ground. The betwixt and between is excluded from thought … The trickster is not eliminated simply by making sharp distinctions and clear categories. There is still a realm that lies betwixt and between a signifier and a signified, between a word and its referent. Tricksters travel that liminal realm, and ambiguities in communication are their province.27

  It is exactly this realm in which the paranormal operates. Ghosts are neither living nor dead; rather, they are somewhere in between, which our modern, logical thinking does not allow for. Therefore, the ghost presents a great conundrum to our concept of reality. The UFO occupies the realm between the earth and outer space; Bigfoot between man and animal. The paranormal cannot be explained precisely because it occupies the realm of the trickster and the paranormal is evidence of the trickster’s continued existence in our world.

  But there is an even more important blurring of lines in the paranormal—the line between fact and fiction, truth and lies. This is where the hoaxer, the player of tricks, plays his or her part.

  What if there was never a hoax or trick played? How would our understanding of the paranormal differ from what it is today? There would still be people claiming to see things, hear things, and experience things that would be unexplainable by today’s standards, but we wouldn’t be able to say it was a trick. We would be more readily willing to accept these stories as true because we would have no knowledge or understanding of or experience with the hoax. Obviously, this is impossible and completely outside the realm of human behavior, but it does illustrate the basic purpose and effect of the hoax on the world of the paranormal. Because the paranormal lies in the interstitial area between realms of truth and lie, fact and fiction, life and death, it will never be explained or found “true” by any scientific method. The belief thereof is then relegated to “the kooks,” those who exist on the peripheries of our accepted reality. To admit belief in the paranormal feels tantamount to revealing intimacies of one’s sex life—it is hidden from the world. Believers are afraid of ridicule and ostracism—belief in the paranormal is to be kept private. Even as I told friends and coworkers of my work on this book, I experienced a certain feeling of shame and embarrassment even broaching the subject in a mixed social group. Indeed, these worries are often cited by paranormal witnesses as their reasons for not coming forward to tell of their experiences. They do not want to be thought of as crazy or, even worse, gullible and weak-minded. The hoaxer, the trickster, ensures that this remains the case, and it pushes believers to the outskirts of society—outsiders to be laughed at and ridiculed.

  “Hoaxes assist the rationalization and disenchantment of the world. They help consign the paranormal to the realm of fraud and gullibility, so that the phenomena receive little serious study. With the taint they induce, hoaxes protect the paranormal from close examination.”28

  Perhaps it is this blurring of the lines between fact and fiction that creates a different sort of truth. Perhaps the paranormal cannot be interpreted by the terms and conditions put forth by science. Rather, it constitutes a different realm of reality and truth.

  Caitlin lost her mother to cancer during the summer of 2006. She was 19 years old and attending LeMoyne College in northern New York at the time. The loss of her mother was obviously devastating for her and her family, but she returned to school as scheduled in the fall. The previous semester Caitlin had signed up for a course on death and grieving. Caitlin was one person in a rather large class and did not feel ready to discuss her mother’s recent death, so she avoided mentioning it to her professor or classmates. “I didn’t write about it in my papers; instead, I focused on other family members who had died in the past. I wasn’t ready to talk about her.” Over the course of the semester, the professor brought in a psychic medium to speak to the class. “She said that she could read auras and offered to do a reading for anyone who wanted, but no one went forward. I didn’t really think much of it. My family had never been believers in that sort of thing.” Caitlin’s family was 100 percent working-class Irish. The only reason she was able to attend LeMoyne was because her mother had been an employee of a fellow Jesuit school in Connecticut, and therefore, her tuition was free as part of the benefits. Now that her mother was gone, she was left with her father and two brothers, none of whom were much disposed to thinking of things outside the course of daily reality. Caitlin had never been exposed to anything like a medium.

  The very last day of the semester, as the group was filing out of the classroom, the medium asked for Caitlin to stay behind. “She said that for the past couple weeks, the six weeks or whatever of the semester, she had noticed that I didn’t have an aura surrounding me. She said that typically if you don’t see an aura around a person it’s either because they’re very evil or something tragic has just happened in their life, and they haven’t been able to repair, to re-establish themselves yet. I was like, ‘God, I hope I’m not evil, I hope nothing’s wrong’. She said, ‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable or anything, but there has been a woman that has been in the classroom; she seems to be near you, and she has the most beautiful blue eyes that I have ever seen.’ ” Caitlin’s mother had auburn hair and striking bright, blue eyes. Anyone who had ever met her would remember those eyes. “I didn’t say anything; I was kind of just taking it in. Of course, on the inside I was freaking out, but I just didn’t say anything. She said, ‘I don’t know if you know who I’m talking about, but she said you would know her by her birthday being in the very middle of January.’ My mother’s birthday was January 15th. There was no way that this woman could have known these things, and I started just freaking out. She wanted us to know that me and the boys would be okay, and that she was okay. At that point I started to cry, because how in the world would this woman have known those things?

  “I was freaking out because I didn’t buy into her whole spiel in the first place, but after a couple weeks of processing it and talking to family members about it, I kind of felt at peace. It was kind of nice to hear. My Dad thought I was a psycho because he doesn’t buy into that. He thought it was a weird coincidence and nothing more. I told my brothers, but they didn’t really say anything. One of them said that it was good message.”

  The experience ultimately changed Caitlin into a more spiritually focused individual. It opened an entire world of possibility for her—the possibility of life after death, something that was largely closed, or at least foreign, to her before. Following the death of any family member, the usual platitudes are bestowed upon the grieving, “so and so is better off,” or “she’s in heaven now,” but often those platitudes do nothing more than isolate the grieving even more. They are detached from the possibility of life after death because in this world, in this reality, death always wins out. Death looms as the end-all, be-all reality, especially following an untimely death of such a dramatic figure as a mother. It is often not until much later, when we as earth-bound beings begin to reflect, that we begin to find comfort in the old platitudes. Caitlin was plunged into a spiritual understanding through an experience that she ca
n barely comprehend or explain. “Now I totally believe in all that stuff. Before I was skeptical because I was raised not to believe in that stuff, but now I believe. I like thinking that there is something after you die, whether it’s an ‘in between,’ or you’re working your way to heaven or another life—I don’t know. But it’s comforting. It brought some closure for me.”

  Caitlin concedes that there is a possibility, a small one, that the medium could have found her mother’s obituary online and researched her. However, in a large class of college students, why pick Caitlin? The medium wasn’t being paid and didn’t try to solicit anything in return for the information. The medium did not make a spectacle of Caitlin, performing this feat in front of the class in order to gain respect and potential clients. Rather, this information was given to Caitlin with compassion and intimacy in a private conversation. However, the truth of what was said changed Caitlin’s life forever and brought her peace.

  There are two different kinds of truth in the world. There is scientific truth and there is spiritual truth—the kind of truth found through art and personal revelation. What Caitlin experienced was not scientific truth. It, most likely, would not hold up under the scrutiny of the scientific method. But what occurred between Caitlin and the medium was a truth of spiritual and personal revelation; something found in the arts and psychology, rather than in the world of science.

  One of our greatest living writers, Tim O’Brien, wrote that,

  You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer. For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies. Is it true? The answer matters. You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, ‘The fuck you do that for?’ and the jumper says, ‘Story of my life, man,’ and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened.29

  According to O’Brien, “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant.” Caitlin’s experience was a truth that was greater than absolute occurrence. Is it possible that the medium was a sham? Of course. Does it matter? I would say not. The trickster blurs the nature of truth, and because of that, science is probably the least prepared to understand the paranormal and its effects on the individual. Perhaps researching the paranormal would best be left to those who make it their job to unravel the trickster: psychologists, artists, historians, and anthropologists—men and woman who understand the nature of human psyche and its relation to the world, rather than people who understand the physical workings of life and seek to confine them within boundaries. The paranormal, like the trickster, will always blur those boundaries and is therefore not subject to scientific investigation.

  This may come as a shock to both paranormal researchers and traditional scientists; however, to date neither has been able to grasp a foothold on the nature of the paranormal. Each of them tries to confine the paranormal within boundaries and each repeatedly fails. Both sides seek to establish a “reality”; one reality is that the paranormal does not exist—the other reality is that it does exist. Neither can be proven, thanks to the trickster and the hoaxers and pranksters that he enlists to aid in the blurring of lines between fantasy and reality, lies and truth, fact and fiction. The hoaxer may play the most important role in the realm of the paranormal—an agent whose mission is to defy boundaries and maintain its constant mystery.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Native Paranormal

  Yi-Fu Tuan wrote, “The United States of America would seem to be the country in the world least hospitable to ghosts. It does not believe in the sanctity of the past … A new nation, America lacks the favored haunts of ghosts: old houses that belong to families with blood-stained histories, old inns, and abandoned monasteries. The nation has its face to the future, and it projects a public image of bustling cities, lush cornfields, and superhighways.”1

  While many of the paranormal beliefs and traditions in the United States have stemmed from its colonial ties to Europe, the nation was haunted long before the first white European settlers came to its shores. There exists in the United States a different kind of haunting—a paranormal world that stems from the beliefs of the indigenous peoples that were displaced from their lands and, at times, massacred during the settlement of America. There exists in the national consciousness a foreboding belief in the sanctity of native lands, particularly around burial grounds and ancient sacred lands of the Native Americans. To this day hauntings are regularly blamed on the spirits of Native Americans and the disruption of their grounds, and Indian traditions are used to cleanse haunted houses through the use of sage, salt, and incense. People have reported seeing native spirits in full dress; they have reported poltergeist activity tied to desecrations of sacred lands. Even the infamous Amityville Horror was blamed in part on the influence of a Native American site. “It seems the Shinnecock Indians used land on the Amityville River as an enclosure for the sick, mad, and dying. These unfortunates were penned up until they died of exposure. However, the record noted that the Shinnecocks did not use this tract as a consecrated burial mound because they believed it to be infested with demons.”2 The idea of Native American burial grounds being places of dread is also featured in films such as Pet Semetary, in which a child buried in the Native American burial ground returns to life possessed of evil, and in the film Jeremiah Johnson, in which the ground is imbued with a sense of dread. It has even worked its way into pop culture, having been featured as the source of paranormal power in television shows such as South Park. But the tradition of associating Native Americans with ghosts and spirits dates back to the late 1700s and 1800s following the drafting of the Constitution. During this time, the newly formed United States was embroiled in a continuing battle against the Native Americans in an effort to exterminate their numbers and form the boundaries of the United States of America. It was during this time that the American gothic novel appeared in literature. Renée L. Bergland, in her stunning work The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects, critiques the emergence of this new form of a traditionally European literature. According to Bergland, this new American gothic literature featured Indians instead of ghosts and the American wilderness in place of the traditional Gothic castle. U.S. literature “re-imagines the Gothic protagonist as one who struggles to establish order in the chaotic and savage world of his own soul.”3 Thus, the belief in the ghostliness of Native Americans and their lands has been passed down through the centuries through an ostensible tradition of literature, film, and television as well as oral histories and modern-day legends.

  The desecration of sacred Indian grounds was not actually made illegal until 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. So the fear and superstition associated with these sacred grounds did not translate into any real action or protection until the last 20 years. This seems to be one of many contradictions in the United States’ spiritual relationship with its native people, and it is within these contradictions that we may find the Native Americans’ paranormal power over the collective imagination of the United States. While the burial grounds were regarded, in a sense, as sacred (or at least worthy of fear and superstition) by the European settlers and their descendents, no action was taken to preserve the grounds until 1990. Another puzzling contradiction is
the convergence of European Christian belief systems and those of the Native Americans. While the Europeans, at the time, were believers in witches and devils and magic, they feared the spiritual rites and traditions of the “savages” in the New World. The settlers immediately took possession of the native belief systems and coopted them to become part of the Christian tradition. Viewed through the lens of Christianity, the Native American beliefs were thus labeled demonic. But it seems odd that the Christian-centric Europeans would have reason to fear the beliefs of the Native Americans; in actuality, the two belief systems—the totemism of the native people and European Christianity—were not that different. Thus, the Native American belief systems were easily assimilated into the colonialist beliefs. Lastly, Bergland points out the glaring contradiction that defines the United States: the United States defined itself through the rejection of colonialist rule, but formed itself through that very same colonization. “What I mean is that everyone, Czech to Chickasaw, who tried to imagine him or herself as an American subject, must internalize both the colonization of Native Americans and the American stance against colonialism. He or she must simultaneously acknowledge the American horror and celebrate the American triumph.”4 Thus, the continued haunting of the United States by its Native American ghosts can be defined in terms of national guilt, the convergence of Christianity and totemism, and some of the basest human fears regarding the unknown that began when Europeans first set foot on this land—something that continues today, despite our scientific and modern age.