Paranormal Nation

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by Marc E. Fitch


  But why have these murders entered into the narrative of the United States, whereas others have not? One reason might be that these particular trials fit into the kind of narrative that the United States is writing for itself. Mark Edmundson, professor of English and author of the book Nightmare on Main Street, believes that the narrative of the United States may be a gothic tale, and these stories reinforce that tale. “Gothic shows the dark side, the world of cruelty, lust, perversion, and crime that, many of us at least half believe, is hidden beneath the established conventions … Gothic shows time and time again that life, even at its most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the past. All are guilty. All must, in time, pay up.”5 The Simpson and Borden cases, involving wealthy families, brutal murders, circumstantial evidence, and issues that are generally hidden behind closed doors, captured the public fascination because they fed into this gothic narrative of people being two-faced—inwardly violent while outwardly kind. And perhaps this American gothic narrative is what has kept the Lizzie Borden mythology alive, as people still seek out the ghosts of those who died to find a final answer to the question, who killed the Bordens?

  And this is certainly not the only case that feeds into the gothic narrative. The Rosenberg trial fed the U.S. fascination with the double life, as well as the trial of the Menendez brothers in the murder of their parents. Both revealed inner realities far different from the exterior façade, and both became media sensations.

  Perhaps one of the most evident and repeated of these story lines is that of the Salem witch trials. Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1690s was a puritanical society in which outward appearances of piousness and God-fearing morality were the standard by which a person was judged. However, the people were all too willing to accept a story about witches who hid beneath the veneer of godliness while convening with the devil in the woods by firelight and casting spells. The light was trying to reconcile with the darkness, the known with the unknown, and, unfortunately, the results were disastrous. In his work “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, a descendent of one of the witch trial judges, describes Goodman Brown’s nighttime journey into the forest, where he stumbles upon all the good and decent townsfolk celebrating a witch’s mass around a fire. He is unable to reconcile one image of reality with the other, and he is forever changed by his experience. One of the themes of “Young Goodman Brown,” which has led to its inclusion in so many anthologies, is that the true nature of people is often hidden in the dark—in the woods. It wasn’t just some odd coven of witches, but rather the entire town that was guilty. Those who died, died for the sins of all, not just their own.

  Witch trials and witch-hunts have repeated through the ages in the American narrative. During World War II, Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps for fear that they could be spies. In the 1950s McCarthyism tried to root hidden Communists from society, focusing mainly on rich Hollywood elites. During the 1980s the paranormal aspect of gothicism made a triumphant return with the satanic panic. Today, the witch-hunt is still on with the media frenzy that surrounds celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan. We follow their every move with moral criticism, as if none of us who watch the reports has ever had a few too many drinks in our early twenties. Also, fascination with the celebrity sex videos allows the moral public to shake a finger and say, “Shame on you,” and ask, “What is happening to our young women?” More often than not, these issues end up in court with a vast amount of media coverage. They are our modern witches, guilty of not upholding imagined morals before a hypocritical public. Truly, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

  The literal witch-hunt may not be behind us, either. Feminism often asserts that the hunt for witches is actually nothing more than a hunt for strong, independent-minded women who do not conform to social norms. Wendy Kaminer, attorney and feminist author, wrote in 2000, “It has long been clear to feminists that crusades against witchcraft reflect a primal fear of feminine power and aim to punish women, most brutally, for transgressing gender roles.”6 She goes on to tell a story about a young aspiring writer who attended Columbine High School, the infamous site of the worst school shooting in U.S. history—an event, incidentally, that was surrounded by rumors of occult involvement on the part of the two perpetrators. The young girl, Brandi Blackbear, had apparently written a story about an incident at school, which prompted school officials to search her locker and confiscate her notebooks.

  School officials found a story involving a shooting on a school bus and promptly suspended her. Ostracized and harassed by fellow students, Blackbear returned to school in the fall of 1999 and began a private study of Wicca. Within a few months, a teacher was hospitalized for a still unknown ailment, and Blackbear says she was blamed: An aptly named assistant principal, Charles Bushyhead, accused her of practicing Wicca, casting spells, and causing the hospitalization of the mysteriously ill teacher. According to the lawsuit, Bushyhead called Blackbear an immediate threat to the school and suspended her for another 15 days.7

  School officials being overly concerned about a girl writing a story about a shooting on a bus is understandable, particularly considering the context of what had just happened at Columbine. However, the charges of witchcraft due to an unforeseen illness illustrates how, in times of fear, misunderstanding, and chaos, people tend to revert back to the old gothic narratives which have persisted in the American culture.

  During the 2010 Senate race in Delaware, Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell, favored by the newly formed and highly influential Tea Party, was targeted by the media, who cited O’Donnell’s appearance on the Bill Maher show where she said that she had dabbled in witchcraft in high school. O’Donnell was already far behind in the polls but her presence in the race was highly polarizing, and the charges of witchcraft gained national media attention and was addressed by all sides of the political race.8 While officially the statements were laughed off as the product of imaginative youth, the fact that this tactic was used in the first place and that it received so much attention attests to the fact that, as a nation, we are only a few nooses beyond Salem.

  Christine O’Donnell is actually the perfect gothic figure when discussing the existing narrative in the United States; she’s young, attractive, strong, independent, and Christian; but the idea that she is secretly involved in the demonic, the summoning of ancient, invisible powers, supercedes anything that she may be or profess to be. She is a metaphor for the modern American gothic, an attractive structure that hides deep, dark, supernatural secrets. Such is the fascination with the gothic narrative in the modern world.

  Gothic castles are the classic haunted houses, and while there are very few castles remaining in the world, the ones that do remain are purportedly haunted. However, it’s the American haunted house that now occupies the spotlight. They are places of old where, within their faded walls, great torture and pain and drama have unfolded which were often not realized by the public of that day and have only come to light through history’s intervention. For children, the haunted house on the block is the old, run-down house with boarded windows and overgrown grass. Why? Because its look is that of abandonment, of secrecy behind its walls and the belief that something terrible must have happened to cause it to look this way. The haunted house is never believed to be the newly built raised ranch next door. But the gothic narrative, which repeats in the American culture, tells us that behind that new home there’s something dark lurking in the depths of history. Edmundson paints a portrait with the Bates Motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho:

  Alfred Hitchcock, in his most influential film, struck a blow against modern hubris. The way we signify our satisfaction with the highway motel we’re compelled to stop at on our car trek cross-country is to say that it looks like no one has ever been there, it’s so clean. In other words, it has no past. The ranch-style highway motel is a feat of architectural low modernism. But after Hitchcock it is difficult
to say of a motel, especially while in the shower, that no one’s ever been there. Hitchcock saw that the blank slate of modernist architecture could easily be invaded by the Gothic monster. After Psycho, motels are indissociable from loony Norman Bates and the glowering mansion next door (which Hitchcock thought of as one of the stars of the film).9

  Edmundson was writing in the late 1990s as the nation was at the precipice of a new millennium and at the beginning of the paranormal revival in the United States. Perhaps, if we look at it from the Psycho standpoint, while the United States was realizing there was a gothic monster that stood behind its modern façade during the nineties, the new millennium has found the United States exploring that gothic construction, looking for the ghosts and demons that reside there. Programs like Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State are trying to find the ghosts that haunt the ancient castle that is the American landscape, and the public is fascinated. In this aspect, the United States is constantly in the midst of a narrative that involves ghosts, trying to reconcile the past with the present, the light with the dark, the known with the unknown, the mundane with the horror. For this reason our paranormal belief systems run the gamut from haunted histories to recollections of horror and pain. The stories that survive and get passed into mythology are the ones that best capture the gothic nature of the United States. The witch-hunts, the double lives, the murders, and the ghosts of houses where horror has unfolded are all part of the American landscape and the gothic narrative of our time.

  BIGFOOT AND THE INNER WILD MAN

  If the paranormal is a window to the unknown past, then what do we see when we view Bigfoot lumbering toward the dark reaches of the Pacific Northwest wilderness through the lens of Patterson and Gimlin? Dr. Jeff Meldrum, with a PhD in anatomical sciences and an MS in zoology, may provide part of the answer.

  Gigantopithecus blacki is theorized to have been a giant bipedal, ape-like creature that existed less than 1.6 million years ago on the Asian continent. It stood approximately nine feet tall and is estimated to have weighed around 700 pounds. The first remains of Gigantopithecus were found in the late 1950s in China, which, oddly enough, was when the Bigfoot phenomena began to manifest in the United States (though the abominable snowman was earlier, in the 1930s). Since that time, Gigantopithecus has been suspected as being both the abominable snowman of the Himalayas and the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest. Dr. Meldrum, in his immense work, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, theorizes that during the Ice Age Gigantopithecus migrated across the Bering land bridge and made its way into North America. “The compelling reason for this distinct possibility is that the land bridge between Asia and North America is known to have existed several times within the last million years, at various intervals during the Pleistocene or Ice Age. It appears that these hairy, human-like creatures, sometimes called sasquatch, could easily have migrated to North America at several times during the Ice Age.”10

  The world today is obviously not as it was during the Ice Age and the ages before. Whale fossils have been found in the deserts of Egypt and Peru, the Arctic Circle once averaged a balmy 74 degrees year round, and in July of 2010, scuba divers discovered the fossils of an extinct species of monkey in the ocean off the coast of the Dominican Republic. Probably most telling is the discovery of fossilized red panda remains in Tennessee, which was notably first reported by the Cryptomundo website, a site dedicated to the research and discovery of mysterious and unknown species. The scientific establishment often derides groups such as Cryptomundo because they search for Bigfoot and various other creatures of myth and legend. The Huffington Post reported on the discovery of the red panda remains: “It has the face of a giant panda bear and the body of a small raccoon. This unusual, cuddly-looking animal is the red panda, and until recently, was only believed to be native to the mountains of Nepal, Burma and China. Now, according to recent fossil findings, it appears the enigmatic red cousin to the black-and-white panda once roamed the long-ago forests of Tennessee.”11 The ancient world was a vastly different place. “It’s here, at the Gray Fossil Site, where a startling number of mammal bones have been uncovered, including a saber-toothed cat, ground sloth, rhinoceros, alligator, camel, shovel-tusked elephant, Eurasian badger and a red panda, dating back more than 4 million years to the period known as the late Miocene era.”12 Many of these creatures, particularly the red panda, would have had to cross into North America via some land bridge, Bering or other.

  The number and variety of species that have existed and disappeared greatly outnumber the number of current existing species. It is largely thought that humans, along with a number of other species, migrated from the Asian continent to the North American continent across the Bering land bridge when it was in existence. There is controversial evidence of early forms of man having existed on the North American continent before the officially recognized crossing approximately 12,000 years ago.

  Nearly as controversial as the sasquatch itself is the interpretation that a fragment of a fossilized human brow ridge found at Mexico’s Lake Chapala may be from the skull of a relic Homo erectus … This Asian hominid is thought to have gone extinct within the last 100,000 years, possibly persisting until quite late, until less than 30,000 years ago on isolated Indonesian islands. That the notion of Homo erectus in North America is even entertained by serious researchers has implications for the potential range of Gigantopithecus. If red pandas, and perhaps Homo erectus, both sympatric contemporaries of Gigantopithecus in Asia, successfully migrated to North America, what would prevent a similar distribution of Gigantopithecus?13

  Meldrum, of course, is not the first person to believe that the reports of Yetis and Sasquatch in Asia and North America were possibly sightings of an ancestral relative of man. During the 1930s Adolf Hitler dispatched a group of scientists to the Himalayas to search for the Yeti. Hitler believed that the Yeti might provide a link to the ancestry of the Aryan race. They came back empty-handed.

  It is possible, though not probable, that a species such as Gigantopithecus could have survived undiscovered. New species are discovered every year, though they are usually quite small in size or minor variations of already known species. However, there have been a few exceptions. The megamouth shark, a 16-foot long, unusual-looking beast, was not discovered until 1976. The snub-nosed dolphin was discovered off Australia in 2005, and in 2008 a population of approximately 125,000 gorillas was discovered in the Congo; this discovery doubled the number of gorillas known to be alive worldwide. Obviously, these are rare cases, but there are still undiscovered areas of the world that occasionally reveal their secrets. Could a species like Sasquatch exist in the wilds of Canada and the Pacific Northwest? There are certainly plenty of people who claim to have seen them, and many more who believe that it is a distinct possibility.

  So what do we see when we gaze upon the Patterson-Gimlin film of a Bigfoot hulking into the dark forest? What is it that confronts us when we see the footprints in the mud or sand? Is it an unknown past—a time in which the world was something alien and odd, when strange creatures wandered through areas that are now populated with suburbs, highways, and strip malls? The discovery, or even the possibility, of a creature like Sasquatch is a beacon to the modern world, a figure from an ancient time that serves to remind us of our short existence here and of the history and mysteries that the earth has hidden beneath our modern veneer. As we try to understand the history of our planet, Bigfoot is history staring right back at us. It exists as a window to the past, a reconciliation of the past and the present, the known and the unknown. It is no wonder that we seek him out or see him in the reaches of the forest and mountains. Even if Bigfoot isn’t “real,” even if visions of him walking in the forest and footprints in the sand are only anomalies or some kind of mass delusion, we still see him and create him in our minds for a reason. The symbol of Bigfoot and what he represents may be just as important as whether or not the creature is real.

  There is a sociological aspect to Bigfoot as well. Bigfoot r
epresents an ancient form of man: the Wildman, the Hairy Man that lurks beneath the modern man. The Sasquatch has entered into and remained a part of the American conscious for a reason; it represents a wildness that exists in the hearts of humans. While we may have civilized our lives over the course of history, there exists an animal element in our biological and psychological makeup, and Bigfoot feeds that element. Hence, throughout history there have been reports of “wildmen” who roam the forest, sometimes kidnapping women, sometimes savage, sometimes gentle, sometimes hairy and other times nearly completely human. Wildmen are part of the folklore and mythology of many different cultures and civilizations around the world, particularly the Pacific Northwest Native American lore.

  Gayle Highpine is a Native American who has traveled extensively throughout the different tribes and studied Bigfoot in mythology. “Here in the Northwest, and west of the Rockies generally, Indian people regard Bigfoot with great respect. He is seen as a special kind of being, because of his obvious close relationship with humans. Some elders regard him as standing on the ‘border’ between animal-style consciousness and human-style consciousness, which gives him a special kind of power.”14 In many of the tales and traditions, Bigfoot is a supernatural being, a messenger that will warn the tribe that the Creator is angry with them.

  Kathy Moskowitz Strain, the Heritage Resource and Tribal Relations Programs Manager for the Stanislaus National Forest in Sonora, California, is a frequent speaker at Bigfoot symposiums and has done extensive lecturing regarding Bigfoot in Native American folklore. One of her well-known contributions concerns Native American pictographs at Painted Rock, which depict a large, hairy, man-like creature (called Hairy Man) alongside several other known species. According to Moskowitz, the creature embodied several different narratives, from “protector of man” to “predator of man,” and his legend is even associated with the beginning of the world.15

 

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