Eleanor’s situation is such that she has nothing about herself to tell to the others; she has no likes, no dislikes, no stories, and no experiences by which to define herself in relation to the others in the group and, tragically, in relation to the house. She creates a false life and false memories during her drive to Hill House, adopting images and characteristics of other people along the way. She imagines a life of definition and character; when she stops at a diner for lunch she admires a little girl who refuses to drink milk from anything other than her “cup of stars.” “Don’t do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again; don’t do it; and the little girl glanced at her, and smiled a little subtle, dimpling, wholly comprehending smile and shook her head stubbornly at the glass. Brave girl, Eleanor thought; wise, brave girl.”4 She admires the character and definition that the little girl has established. Eleanor later passes the “cup of stars” story off as her own.
When she meets Theodora and they walk together down to the brook to talk and explore, Theodora tells Eleanor about her family, and Eleanor mimics and mirrors Theodora’s stories and creates a nonexistent family and history for herself. She lies about having extended family members and memories of picnics in parks to such an extent that Theodora believes they must be long-lost cousins.
Does the United States lack such definition? Does humanity? We exist in a state of perpetual change on a small planet spinning alone in the vastness of space. Thus far, we cannot find any other species remotely like us, and it is our very aloneness in the universe that creates such a quandary for the understanding of humanity. Were we one of many other civilizations in our solar system, a scientific explanation of humanity would probably be more acceptable and comforting. However, as we are alone and, thus far, unique, we have no way to define ourselves. We feel more than animal but less than gods.
The United States is the melting pot of various cultures and peoples, some who have maintained their cultural identity and heritage and some who have not; there are some who have been relegated to the boundaries of our civilization, and some who are perhaps lost in the bubbling cauldron. Modern technology has added to the existential feeling of being alone and undefined. The Internet has expanded our world to vast proportions and has left us ill-defined in a world of competing “facts,” opinions, and versions of reality. We interact with anonymous beings that, despite our best efforts, remain unknown and foreign because they exist in a computer—and we sit alone at a desk. In a particularly telling and prophetic scene in Jackson’s work, the four newly acquainted participants make idle chatter in the parlor. During the conversation they humorously begin to make up false identities for themselves with elaborate and exotic backgrounds; Theodora claims to be the daughter of a lord, Luke claims to be a bullfighter, Dr. Montague claims to live in Bangkok where he habitually bothers women, and Eleanor claims to be an artist’s model. As we try to establish our identity in this new world we are faced with people whose true identities remain unknown to us. We use false names and images to present ourselves to the outside world, all the while concealing the perhaps all-too-mundane truth about ourselves. The anonymity of the Internet allows us to become different people and act outside the standards that we would normally hold in front of seeing eyes and listening ears. We sit safe, protected, and alone before the computer screen, and when we no longer want to interact, we simply walk away or change our names and identities. Never before have we had the ability to function in such a manner. We are ghosts, and the ghost hunt is a search for ourselves; and, just as in Jackson’s story, when confronted with a new world we turn to the Gothic castle as a place in which to define ourselves in this new world. The Gothic castle is our very own construction of reality, one that harbors secrets, darkness, and insanity. Thus, in those times of change and stress, the gothic nature of humanity reveals itself. We stalk the empty corridors, basements, and attics of the haunted houses that belie our modern, common, roadside motels. Perhaps that is why Hitchcock’s Psycho resonated so deeply with audiences—we recognized the ancient, frightening house on the hill because there is one that looms over our own personal façade of reality.
The danger in this gothicism comes when we lose ourselves in that haunted place; when we can no longer separate ourselves from the Gothic castle, much like what happens to Eleanor in Hill House and which results in her death. This has happened before on massive social scales during such times as the European witch craze and the satanic panic. The public institutionalization of the gothic resulted in ruined lives and death. However, the same is true on an individual basis. The world of the paranormal can be dangerous territory for one’s sanity. Whether real, imagined, or symbolic, demons, ghosts, and monsters do invade and haunt the psyche. If we lose ourselves in that haunted place or if we seek to define ourselves through that haunted place, we risk losing our sanity and even our lives. The history of the paranormal is littered with broken lives, ruined finances, insanity, and death.
Critic John G. Parks claimed that the new American gothic is narcissistic—a turning inward rather than outward. And Stephen King writes, “The new American gothic provides a closed loop of character, and in what might be termed a psychological pathetic fallacy, the physical surroundings often mimic the inward turning of the characters themselves…”5 The terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent world upheaval caused us to look inward. The mapping of the human genome was the closest look at what constitutes humanity that man has ever endeavored. And the Internet is a virtual altar to narcissistic impulses as we broadcast ourselves out into the world, only so that we can gaze upon ourselves. In this Internet age, we digitally record ourselves doing any and everything and post it on the Internet as if we are stars, as if the world is hanging on our every word, our every foible, our every pseudo-intellectual, opinionated word rant. It is all so that we can gaze upon the glory of ourselves—become movie stars, as it were. Is there any doubt as to the narcissism of this ghost hunter age? But, according to the original myth, Narcissus dies—having wasted away at the edge of a reflective pool, gazing upon his own image. Eleanor also dies, unable to separate herself from Hill House. Likewise, perhaps we should beware the path that today’s technology is taking. Without a strong identity and an understanding of ourselves, we can easily get lost and drown in a pool of ambiguity and emptiness.
The paranormal has always been with us and will continue to be with us. It is a uniquely human experience, and the mystery and wonder it breeds is a necessary part of existence. But as we explore the haunted house that is our world, it is important that we not try to define ourselves by it. The paranormal is the trickster’s paradise, a place of ill-defined boundaries, shifting ideas, and ambiguous realities. To seek definition in such a place is to embrace such things, and this can be both fortuitous and dangerous. Just like the trickster, absolute reality is made up of ill-defined boundaries, shifting ideas, and ambiguous realities and, as Shirley Jackson said, no living thing can exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. We seek to establish scientific fact everywhere we look, but the more we try the less we succeed. We assign scientific-sounding names so that we can identify some sort of solid ground on which to stand, but that ground shakes in the changing landscape of an information-saturated world. We try to define ourselves through science and logic and reason, but we continually fail.
In the past few chapters we have discussed the ways in which faith has taken on the veneer of different movements, from science to politics to the paranormal, and the way in which that faith has turned them into totems. But this is not true faith—it is totemism. Faith is the belief in that which cannot be proven and for which there is no evidence. Faith’s greatest attribute is the one least often used: the recognition that one’s belief cannot be proven as fact—that is precisely what makes it faith rather than science. As Dr. Montague so articulately said, we try to pull things that defy definition, coherence, r
ationality, and institutionalization out of the darkness and into the light by giving it some scientific credence or “facts” for which there exist antithetical “facts.” Just as the ghost hunter tries to define the indefinable world of the paranormal through science and technology, the political activist seizes upon “facts” by which to march in the street, and the religious fanatic, driven by “facts,” bombs a building. They have supplanted their faith with totems and rendered it a reality by which to act upon the world. Faith, however, acknowledges that while we may believe something to be true, it cannot be known for sure, and therefore, does not, or should not, compel us to act or declare something as fact. True faith is the recognition that we might be wrong.
But these totems cannot stand forever, and their shadows leave a long darkness on our civilization. It is the Gothic castle—that representation of the hidden and unknown—in which we search for ourselves. To search for identity is noble and time-worthy, but to try to create identity where one does not exist, as Eleanor did, will lead to a path of destruction, particularly when trapped within the haunted confines of our history. We parade our false identities online, but only to look upon ourselves and contemplate our image. It is not truth, and it is not character, and it is not faith. It is technology filling a void, creating something where there is nothing. The past 12 years have caused us to look inward, to confront questions and to seek answers. We try to form a firm ground on which to stand and by which we can understand ourselves and our world, but science and technology alone cannot create that understanding and cannot form that identity. That comes from something more—faith without the veneer of fact or truth or science.
As we search for meaning and identity at the dawn of this new century, we may begin to realize that the traditions shrugged off from years past that anchored our cultures in belief may be the only thing that can save us from drowning in ourselves. Awash in a sea of ever-changing truths, we may find that, perhaps, some things are better left to faith.
CHAPTER 16
Why Does the United States Need Ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot?
Despite centuries of scientific and social progress, we remain, at our most intimate level, believers. Religion, paranormal beliefs, politics, and sometimes even science have become beliefs that continue to be rationalized in lieu of our continuing history. Religion and paranormal beliefs must often change in the face of scientific developments and technologies; the believer, therefore, must somehow account for these new developments in his or her belief system or risk abandoning those beliefs altogether and be sucked into a pit of cognitive dissonance. Likewise, true followers of a politician or political party must somehow forgive or account for the many errors, poor decisions, and indiscretions within their particular affiliation. And, alas, science occasionally has to deal with their predictions going awry, their numbers being rendered inaccurate, their theories and hypotheses not panning out in reality. Unfortunately, the true believer, bound by the need for order in the universe based on his or her belief system, will often undertake the Sisyphean task of maintaining and rationalizing that belief to fit the new world. The result is dogma, unquestioning faith, irrationalism, and occasionally violence; but this inherent need for belief surmounts all of that and renders any possible lessons learned in history without value and easily forgotten. So why is there so great a need to believe in something?
Matthew Alper is the author of The God Part of the Brain and postulates that mankind is genetically hardwired to believe in something more than the reality of the empirical world. He believes that it is a coping mechanism that the brain developed as a way of handling the knowledge of our own mortality. As he stated on the radio program Coast to Coast AM, “I believe that the anxiety was so overwhelming that it forced the selection of this cognitive modification which … compels us to believe that there is this other transcendental force … through which, even though we know the physical body will die, we now believe this spiritual component will live on forever.”1 He cites decreased blood flow to areas of the brain during prayer and meditation that may account for the feeling of spiritual serenity and also account for the sensations of religious experiences with the chemical interaction of the temporal lobe of the brain with the neurotransmitter glutamate. He also feels that the belief in UFOs and aliens is another way that people can escape the anxiety of death by believing that there is a deeper, supernatural and transcendent reality. That, of course, can be extrapolated to include ghosts, demons, and Bigfoot.
Why else would people devote their lives, careers, and reputations to pursuing these mysteries that have so eluded mankind for centuries? The mysterious—the paranormal—plays a necessary role in the development of society and in the personal lives of each and every individual. It satisfies a need for belief; whether genetically encoded, scientifically evidenced, personally experienced, or transcendent from God—humanity needs its mysteries.
Medieval maps used to depict beasts that inhabited the oceans and unknown lands, dragon-like serpents that warned of dangerous waters and places. They were places to encounter danger, but, more importantly, places to encounter the divine. Legends told of mermaids and various monsters that became folklore and legend, sometimes new and sometimes passed down through ancient texts.
Similar to Homer’s The Odyssey, ancient mariners were warned of confronting the gods, of the sirens sent to tempt them, and the monsters, spirits, and unexplained phenomena that challenged them if they dared venture to the very limits of the known world. By pushing the limits of knowledge and human experience the adventurer would go forth into the frightening and dangerous world, well aware that he might face supernatural challenges; but if he overcame them, he would attain a new knowledge that could better the world. In many cases, the reward of the adventurer was the discovery of new lands. He would return to the old world and tell of the new, and the bounty that awaited those willing to make the dangerous trip. In effect, he came back enlightened; he had faced death, fear, and the unknown and had returned a hero. He had ventured to the limits—the very periphery of the earth, to encounter the unknown, the mysterious.
Today, the world is mapped. Our maps are filled with roads and cities. Nearly every piece of inhabitable land is occupied by mankind; our maps are no longer documents of the mysterious and unknown, but rather, the very details of the known world—every road rational, every highway another human vein on the body of earth. The modern map is a testament to the known world.
But there exists an unseen world not shown on maps; there are places in our world that occupy the realm of the mysterious. They form our legends and folklore, and they are celebrated in small towns and tourist areas throughout the country. They are not a part of the empirical world but, instead, have become part of the unknown recesses of our psyche. These places represent the dark unknown that has come to occupy a small but mysterious part of the human experience—places that have become epitomized by the paranormal.
Massachusetts, of course, boasts Salem, a monument to old belief systems and fears, but it also contains the Freetown State Forest, an area that has attained legendary status for its paranormal phenomena. The stories were collected and documented by Christopher Balzano, and he illustrates all the darkness that our candle of modern illumination cannot brighten.
Most of what makes up this book comes from the people who experienced it, but much of it is also the child of legend and urban legend. Over three hundred and fifty years those lines get blurred, and looking at official documents can never tell the full story. Some of the stories come from news reports about true crime, but police reports only tell us the facts and leave out the emotion … Any story of a town is never the full story.2
Hidden within our official modern histories are stories that have become legends, even myths, and the people who seek out these legends for the purpose of understanding the world or, perhaps, finding new questions.
In the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, there stands an eight-foot stainless steel sculpture known a
s the Mothman. It symbolizes a year in Point Pleasant’s history when residents were reporting a giant, winged, human-like creature that was appearing on their roads and in their yards. It made local headlines, attracted author John Keel to the area, and spawned numerous theories concerning UFOs and otherworldly creatures. When the Silver Bridge collapsed in 1967, killing 46 people, the sightings of the Mothman abruptly ended; some concluded that the creature was somehow a warning to the town of the impending disaster. It became a book by John Keel and a subsequent film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. The sculpture stands as a symbol of that strange, tragic, and sometimes terrifying year in the town’s history. The inscription on the sculpture reads,
On a chilly, fall night in November 1966, two young couples drove to the TNT area north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they realized they were not alone. What they saw that night has evolved into one of the great mysteries of all time, hence, the Mothman legacy began. It has grown into a phenomenon known all over the world by millions of curious people asking questions. What really happened? What did these people see? Has it been seen since? It still sparks the world’s curiosity—the mystery behind Point Pleasant, West Virginia’s Mothman.
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