Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  The story of Joe and Kathy’s house, Bob assures me, is very typical of a negative presence that has attached itself to a family. Joe and Kathy tell me that they themselves have never experienced anything out of the ordinary. “We hear creaks and knocks sometimes but just figured it was the house settling,” Joe said. The children in the house had been the most greatly affected, and that was what led to Kathy contacting CPI. It began with Kathy’s eldest daughter, Erica, who was from her first marriage. The problems started about nine years prior, when Erica was sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. She began hearing voices telling her to do things, and she believed that her stuffed animals were coming to life and telling her to kill her youngest siblings—two infant boys from Joe and Kathy’s marriage. The voices persisted to the point that Erica had pushed the infants’ cribs to the window of the second floor and was prepared to throw them out until she was found and stopped. In another incident she placed the two boys, toddlers at this point, in the middle of the steep road running in front of the house and positioned them in such a way that it was nearly impossible to see them. Again, she was found and the boys were unharmed. After that she was evaluated for psychological problems, but all the while she insisted that the voices were coming from the house and from her stuffed animals. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to live with her biological father, where she remains today. “Negative presences prey on the weak, and often that is the children,” Bob explained.

  Following the trouble with Erica, their second daughter, Ashley, moved into Erica’s old room. Ashley was Kathy’s daughter from a previous marriage whose father had passed away. At about 4 years old Ashley began to wake in the night screaming that there was a man in her room. Joe and Kathy would tell her that it was only a dream, but she repeatedly insisted that there was a dark shadow man in her room. When this “dream” persisted, Kathy began to open herself up to the idea that maybe it was the girl’s biological father looking in on her from time to time; but Ashley was frightened and said that it wasn’t her father, that her father wouldn’t scare her like that. Ashley eventually moved to a room downstairs, but the figure kept returning to loom over her bedside during the following years. Finally, one night she went to the kitchen for a glass of water and the figure stood before her, cloaked in black shadow. It spoke and told her its name.

  “What was its name?” I interrupted.

  “We can’t say the name,” Kathy said. I looked to Bob, “You should never speak its name because that calls it forth and gives it power.”

  “We told her to never say its name,” Kathy said, “but she did tell me what it was at the time.”

  The next day Ashley left a note for Kathy explaining that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t live in this house with the shadow man. Ashley was beginning high school by this time, and she went to stay with a friend. Kathy was now at her wit’s end and frightened. It wasn’t just the girls—the two boys were also affected. The door to their room would refuse to open, despite there being no locks on the door; a large burn was found on the wall above their bed, but there had been no smoke and no fire and the boys claimed to know nothing about it. Joe explained that he had to replace a section of the wall and paint the room again because of it. The boys would frequently claim that in their nightmares predatory animals would come to speak with them. Wolves and sharks would show the boys their teeth and tell the boys they would eat them. During one afternoon BBQ with family and friends, Toby refused to show off his newly acquired swimming skills because the shark in his nightmare said he would kill Toby if he went in the water.

  More frightening yet was 3-year-old Alex’s wandering onto the roof in the middle of the night. He claimed that a voice had told him to go out onto the roof in the middle of the night while everyone was asleep. It told him to go to the highest point, which was probably about 35 feet off the paved driveway. Alex went but became frightened, and instead walked the roof to the back of the house where the pool and patio were located. There he managed to hang from the gutter and drop down about six feet to the ground. He stayed locked outside for a couple hours until he was finally heard by the family. When they found him he was trying to stack patio chairs up so that he could climb back on the roof. Kathy showed me exactly where he touched down from the roof, just outside the sliding glass doors. I couldn’t imagine the fright a parent would feel knowing that their toddler had been wandering the rooftop at three in the morning.

  Amidst all of this, the family was deteriorating. One daughter had already left and was diagnosed as being mentally ill and the other daughter with similar symptoms was afraid to stay in the house any longer. The boys were experiencing frequent nightmares and dangerous nighttime wanderings, and on top of all that, Kathy and Joe were fighting. “You should have seen them,” Bob told me when Joe and Kathy stepped outside for a cigarette. “When we first arrived here they were nearly ready to kill each other.” It seemed a far cry from what I saw now, though Joe and Kathy did seem to have the potential for an abusive relationship. “That’s what a negative entity tries to do,” Bob explained, “they try to tear the family apart, break everyone down; and it just feeds off that negative energy and gets stronger and stronger.” The house looked calm and serene to me, not the home of bedeviled stuffed animals, shadow men, and knock-down, drag-out marital disputes, but that is what Joe and Kathy’s family had been, until CPI came along.

  Like many victims of the paranormal, Kathy had thought her family was falling apart, going insane. When she turned to a friend for help, the friend researched online and contacted Bob. As Bob had indicated previously, he has heard the same story many times before. “This is their MO,” he said. “They function the same way every time, and their goal is chaos.”

  After meeting and interviewing the family, CPI called in Bishop McKenna to perform an exorcism on the house. Few people realize that exorcisms can be performed on places as well as people. While Bishop McKenna has performed exorcisms on people in the past, he no longer does so and will only do properties. Following the exorcism, the house was blessed and CPI brought the family together and taught them prayers of protection. “We were never religious before,” Kathy said. “But now we pray together as a family.” I asked her if she ever believed in the paranormal prior to these events. “Not really,” she said. “It wasn’t anything that really crossed my mind.” Since the intervention of CPI, the activity in the house is nearly gone, but it has taken over a year of working with the family. Bob even commented that he felt like a member of the family because he had spent so much time at the house and knew the family so intimately. Indeed, exorcisms, prayer groups, and fearful children breed intimacy much more quickly than the run-of-the-mill visit, and the family is quite grateful. “We used to fight so much,” Kathy said. “We didn’t even realize that the stress of it all was tearing us apart, but we’re much better now.” They had recently called Bob and Rich when the negative energy in the house seemed to be rising again. They wanted it stopped before it grew any stronger.

  I, of course, want to the see the bedroom(s) where all this had taken place. Bob indicates that they felt the spirit had been emanating from the master bedroom upstairs where they had previously recorded electronic voice phenomenon. Directly across the hall from the master bedroom was the children’s room where both daughters and the boys had previously slept. I keep my digital voice recorder that I have been using for the interview on, and together all of us make our way up the steep, wooden stairs to the second floor and a thin, hardwood hallway that runs perpendicular to the staircase. The bathroom, located in the center of the house, had been torn out to be remodeled. Bob explains (and I am aware from watching paranormal programs) that often a disruption in the structure of the house can lead to a resurgence of activity because the energies are disrupted. In any case, Joe proudly shows off the new bathtub system he has personally installed and the new shower walls made of faux stonework.

  We enter the master bedroom, and immediately I can feel a chang
e; there’s a sensation of entering a tunnel, as if the walls are closing in. It is a claustrophobic feeling, which is amplified by the rather gloomy, Gothic nature of the room. It is at least 15 degrees colder; a chandelier is suspended over the king-sized bed. The wall is dappled with small mirrors in a puzzle-like framework and the ceilings slant downward at the edges. This part of the house appears much older than the rest; the walls are not the standard sheetrock so common in newly built homes, but rather a hard, textured plaster that probably adds to the ambiance of the room. There are several wall lights, like candles, and a small television area complete with loveseat and chair in a section of the bedroom that is much wider than the rest. It could easily pass for a hotel room charging $200 per night, but there is genuinely something creepy about the room, and I feel it immediately upon entering. Whether it’s the textured, angled walls, the chandelier, or the wall-mounted electric candles, the room appears to actually be something out of a haunted house movie, part of an old, Gothic mansion rather than a suburban homestead. As we all gather in the bedroom I notice an eerie feeling that there is someone standing behind me. It is something that persists throughout our time there. I realize that it very well may be caused by what is known as the “funhouse effect.” The style of the room plays with your peripheral vision and constantly alerts your brain that there is something at the periphery and makes you want to spin around to find it, only to find that there is nothing there. Rose has an electromagnetic frequency detector, and she scans the room and the closets, occasionally getting spikes in the readings. It is in the small, deep closet that pushes behind the wall to the edge of the house where Bob believes the entity emanates from. From there it works its way throughout the house, including the room across the hall where the boys currently sleep. I wander into their room. There is a set of bunk beds decorated with baseball logos, but the similar lighting and wall/ceiling structure again give me that eerie sense of being followed. I could understand, being young and impressionable and possibly afraid of the dark, how this room could affect a child. Hell, it was affecting me.

  We gathered again in the master bedroom in a circle. We each pulled our precious medals or crucifixes from beneath our shirts, and Rich led us in a prayer, blessing the house and the family. Then Bob and Rich went from corner to corner, room to room with holy water blessed by the bishop, sprinkling droplets anywhere an entity could hide and warning away any evil spirits. I followed them throughout the house with my voice recorder and Rose followed with the EMF. We wandered to the basement where we were hit with the smell of dirty laundry and cat litter, the boxes of which sit beneath the stairs. To the right is a two-car garage filled with bikes and toys and tools and to the left there is a large room furnished with a bed, couch, computer, and television. I walked into the room with Rose and looked around. It was dark and gloomy, far from the light above ground, and there is something odd about the bed. It is a full-sized bed, but the head of it sits in what appears to be an old fireplace; an alcove of the wall made of wood and brick and surrounded by darker recesses of the room that go farther back. For some reason, to me it looks like an ominous altar, and my mind immediately begins to wonder about the history of the house. Who was here before? Who is here now? As much as we like to pretend we know people, we are often wrong; and as forthcoming and kind as this family has been to me during my visit, I know little to nothing about them. It is an odd feeling when you’re unsure as to what the truth is, especially when you’re walking through a stranger’s house.

  When Bob and Rich are finished blessing the house, they anoint Joe and Kathy with oil, a right bestowed upon them by the bishop. I ask about the history of the house; who was here before? Is there any reason for the haunting? The house was built in the 1950s and occupied by only one family prior to Kathy buying it. So what is the source of the haunting?

  “It could be anything,” Bob said.

  “Yes, but I get a sneaking suspicion that it comes from that house over there,” Rich adds. I look at the house next door, a replica of the one I’m standing in. However, the owner, as Joe explains, has a habit of smoking too much marijuana, retreating to the backyard, and engaging in Native American tribal rituals, banging on drums and chanting. “He could have summoned something accidentally and not even know what he’s doing.” According to many of the paranormal programs, it wouldn’t be the first time that someone had accidentally summoned bad spirits through dabbling in ancient practices. Many ancient religions used to chant and summon demons to sic on their enemies. Something from another world could have been sent to this house through a ceremony that the reefer-smoking neighbor did not fully understand. I am struck by the connection to the ancient ways and customs, good or bad.

  CPI had been working with this family for over a year. When they first began, things were bad; the children were frightened, the parents were fighting, and there was a general negativity to the house. After initially quelling the negativity and educating the family on the paranormal and negative forces that can breed in such an environment, things began to calm down. But it took a long time, and the truth is that it may never end. “If something has attached itself to you,” Bob said, “it will follow you wherever you go until it is either fully defeated or attaches itself to another person.” So CPI’s purpose with this family is ongoing. They are always on call for Joe and Kathy; when things start to slip downward into chaos, they come and investigate, counsel them, and bless their house and their family. This is the way in which the reality of the paranormal differs from what is shown on television and what the Ghost Hunters do weekly; theirs is not a one-night investigation, but potentially a lifetime commitment. They are spiritual family counselors as well as paranormal investigators; they try to bring people back from the edge of chaos, and whether or not the forces at work in these families are empirically “real” takes a back seat to the real good that they do. Joe and Kathy’s family is closer and more at peace with each other than they had been previously, and when they need counsel, Bob and Rich hop in their van and make the hour-plus drive to be with them and lead them toward tranquility.

  Can it be proven scientifically? Probably not. But CPI claims positive results across the board, and Joe and Kathy are just two of their testimonials. Bob and Rich see themselves as being on the front line of a spiritual war over people’s lives; the negative wants to pull people into chaos, and CPI is there trying to help people stay at peace both physically and spiritually. Perhaps the most eye-opening aspect of working with CPI was realizing that, unlike the movies and television programs, it is not places that are haunted, but rather people.

  Not long after this writing, Richard left the Connecticut Paranormal Investigators. Bob cited differences of opinion between him and Rich; while Rich largely handled the religious aspects of their investigations, Bob felt that lines had been crossed. “Instead of calling clergy in on a case, he would want to handle that end of the case himself; and in some of the cases dragged the case out for weeks or months at a time. I decided I no longer wanted to be part of that. This was needlessly making people deal with their paranormal problems much longer then was necessary.”

  Bob also severed ties with Rose, the medium, indicating that he believed she had been making things up during the investigation. This has always been a problem with mediums, and has occasionally resulted in embarrassing moments on such popular programs as Most Haunted. The paranormal community is notoriously polluted with infighting, rivalry, philosophical disagreements, and nearly incestuous relationships between different organizations. George P. Hansen cited a “fluidity of belief”6 and attributes the difficulty in remaining cohesive and organized as an effect rendered by the ambiguity of the paranormal. “Historically, many groups that attempted to engage paranormal phenomena became unstable.”7 As Bob said, “This is so much the norm in the paranormal community. If you haven’t thrown out at least half a dozen members, you better start doing background checks.”

  However, Connecticut Paranormal Investigators rema
ins stronger than ever and began receiving national attention when it was featured on Animal Planet’s The Haunted. In one of the more chilling episodes, Bob reveals the supposed voice of a demon on a digital recorder that clearly states “Get out” in a very threatening voice. They were featured a second time on the same program, and Bob reports that CPI remains busy working in Connecticut. Joe and Kathy have reported no further problems.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Paranormal Economy

  There is a money-making industry behind belief in the paranormal, and it is one that touches the imagination of people from every walk of life—believer and skeptic alike. The paranormal economy is most obvious in the film, television, and book industries. Films such as E.T., The Exorcist, and The Sixth Sense topped the box office around the world. Perhaps even more importantly, these films have become a part of the fabric of American culture and have made alien abductions, demon possession, and ghosts everyday forms of entertainment, thus making them part of our cultural language. Furthermore, films claiming to be based on true stories such as The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, and, more recently, The Haunting in Connecticut, have become legendary and are part of the American mythology. Much to the frustration of skeptics and ghost hunters alike, the films are accepted by audiences as representations of actual events. However, it may not be that filmgoers actually believe that events such as the Amityville Horror actually happened; their belief may be spurred from a desire to believe and a conscious effort not to look skeptically or scientifically at the real truth of the film. Audiences expect Hollywood to dramatize and embellish. Simultaneously, the rumors surrounding these films had spread through communities, largely among the adolescent population who were eager to imbue their widening world with a sense of supernatural wonder. It is part of the fun of both the film experience and the maturing process. In essence, the films and the stories they tell become part of the American folklore and legend history. Jan Harold Brunvand writes in The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meaning,