by Matt Weiland
“I’ve never tried to convince anyone into accepting my experiences, or my beliefs,” says Dwyer.
“It’s not about beliefs, it’s about facts for me,” Ping says. “Ghost stories are the only stories I loved when I was a kid. They’re very important. Just like the Bible or any other mythology. But what’s important is that people give these stories a life of their own, that people know why things happen that inspire the legends.”
“What I love is that ghost stories often take us outside history texts, into the unknown histories of ordinary people, everyday lives,” Dwyer says. “It opens our eyes to the realities experienced by people we can relate to. I have always held a fascination with the day-to-day existence of people who lived a hundred years ago or more. I wonder where they would get a drink of cold water in August. Or what you might spend all your time looking at if you were a little girl my daughter’s age, feeling that your death is coming from some plague, or a fire or flood, a hurricane, then to be so quickly forgotten when it passes.”
Ping nods, sucks down the last of his coffee, and says, “The ghost is secondary.”
“So why don’t you just do history tours?”
“We’ve tried it. People won’t go on them,” Ping says. “You can’t sell history here.”
It’s 3 a.m. and my girlfriend is sitting up in my bed screaming hell at me and I’m too afraid to open my eyes. I might see what she sees. She says there’s five of them, all men. One of them is standing on my bedside table over me, she says, his head bobbing back and forth, pupils all white, laughing soundlessly. I keep telling her she’s dreaming. She tells me the one by the foot of the bed is fat, so fat the buttons on his shirt have burst. She buries her head into my shoulder, swears she’s wide awake. And I still can’t open my eyes. They’re wearing prison uniforms, she says, with big black-and-white stripes. Their ankles chained to each other. One is pointing, shouting at her. “Go away! Get out of here!” she keeps screaming. I hold her with one arm, the other fumbling blindly for the lamp switch. Light! They’re gone, she says. I open my eyes.
I sleep with the lights on for the next month. For weeks she hears chains dragging over the floor of our rooms in the oldest apartment building in America. But I don’t. And I still haven’t seen a ghost. Not ever. Instead I often lie in bed ashamed of my gutless instincts, how I wouldn’t open my eyes that night, blowing my one chance to see—or just as importantly, not to see—a ghost.
I’ve had psychics in my apartment describe white fluffy spirit dogs that follow me around, the kid who likes to sit on my washing machine, an enraged lover who murdered his spouses and wants to murder me. None of it matches anything in my real world. I’ve worked the graveyard shift in supposedly haunted bars and the only zombies I’ve seen are the sunken ones hunched in a dark corner, endlessly shoving their paychecks into video poker machines.
But I hope. I hear the strange tapping on my dresser some nights, the dozens of little voices speaking to me in that second before sleep when my rational mind has quit. Sometimes I tell them to just shut up and get in bed with me, go to sleep, dammit.
Tagging along with people who could see ghosts is fine, but I want to see them too. And so much for the one-man shows, I’m going to get myself a full team, science and gadgets—electromagnetic field readers, electronic voice phenomena recorders, cameras, infrared, thermometers, barometers, the works. But none of the paranormal organizations within Louisiana is willing to brave the Ninth Ward. The largest balks—“You want us to bring $10,000 worth of equipment into that neighborhood?!”—despite never having set foot there.
After months of research, it seems the National Paranormal Society, based in Miami, each member boasting over ten years experience in paranormal investigation, is the most capable, organized, and, if such a thing can exist, legitimate.
After several emails, Rich Valdes, president of the National Paranormal Society, calls me back. None of his team has ever been to Louisiana. Perfect. I tell him I have a futon and plenty of floor space, and two months later they drive the fifteen hours from Miami.
A church-going Christian and home-studied demonologist, Valdes is a big bear of a man—half teddy, half grizzly—with the slit eyes of a pit bull, the obligatory shaved head and goatee of a nightclub bouncer, and a mortal fear of clowns and frogs. By contrast, Angel—Pagan practitioner, Reiki master, and the team’s “medium”—seems a gentle giant. He uses psychometry: the alleged ability to obtain information about a person or event by touching a related object. Olga, the field analyst, is a bleached platinum blonde, with little vampire canine teeth, the tiniest bit of eyeliner on her eyelids to set off her angelic face in all its paleness, and bits of a DISCIPLINE back tattoo, from her days in the Marines, peeking out from her tank top.
Olga handles the scientific, Rich the historical, and Angel the metaphysical. Like doctors, they diagnose hauntings from symptoms. There are three types of ghosts: apparition, residual haunt, and an actual haunting. They boast about all the simple explanations they’ve found to debunk supposed hauntings, and they show me proof of their greatest catches, like a child’s voice crying, “Save our souls,” caught on tape in the middle of an abandoned cemetery at night.
I brief the team about the city, the affected areas, specific homes of the deceased. But first Angel leaves the apartment. He always goes into a case cold. This way only when his spiritual findings align with the historical and scientific ones are they credible. The metaphysical confirmed by the physical. When he returns, Angel asks me to stand in front of a window, facing away from him. Without telling me what he’s doing, he stands five feet behind me and manages to push me forward into the window, then I watch him manipulate divining rods with trembling hands.
Angel got his start helping his grandmother with an exorcism in Puerto Rico at the age of thirteen. He tries to remove the fear people often have of their deceased loved ones. “I’ve never charged money,” he says. “I was given this gift for free, so it’s not my right to charge others for it.” He recalls a run-in with O. J. Simpson in the Miami Home Depot where he works—“He stayed far away from me.” He remembers seeing the numbers 911 continuously but not knowing what they meant before the towers fell and later discovering that some of the hijackers had learned to fly planes just down the street from him; a little girl’s ghost waking him up, telling him to get out, minutes before he would have been trapped in his apartment by a fire downstairs; the Creole woman singing in the courtyard beside us on our way to the Ninth Ward.
“I see body bags all over the floor,” says Angel, an hour later, standing in the center of a gutted Baptist church, their video cameras’ lights and flashes hardly making a dent in the cavernous darkness. “I can hear them praying. Someone is saying, ‘I was here. Nobody found my body.’ ”
It’s midnight in the Lower Ninth. We’re scouting. The farther we crawl into the mangled houses, the path to the bathroom, to the kitchen, the bedrooms, a few pictures laid out on an overturned sofa, the more we feel what was once a home. The human things are still here, the viscera of other peoples’ material lives splayed beneath our dirty sneakers. I find Rich standing in the middle of a dark street, staring lost into block after block after block that once contained homes, chest-high weeds surrounding the concrete slabs of their foundations. “I’m embarrassed to be an American right now,” he says. “This is bullshit. Just absolute bullshit.”
Like the rest of Miami, they suffered Hurricane Andrew in 1992. But only now do they understand the vast difference between tidal surge and flooding, between natural disasters and manmade ones.
“Ummmm, guys …” Olga mutters. “I think we’re getting carjacked.” And so we are.
We spend the next few days visiting sites where people died from Katrina’s aftermath.
Some had made the news, but most hadn’t even warranted an obituary. Angel touches each house, tells us the age and sex of the deceased, but there’s only residual energy left—like an analog recording, a fingerprint, nothing s
entient. Until one afternoon we find a house with 1 DEAD IN ATTIC still spray-painted in yellow across its door. Angel leans onto the side of the house, head bowed, his arms resting upon an open window sill, hands inside the dark. “He’s holding my hand right now,” he whispers. “Feel how cold it is right here, inside the sill.”
Olga and I shove in the back door. I’ve long since dismissed any guilt over trespassing into these abandoned properties. On the contrary, I feel it’s criminal to leave these spaces unexplored, untold, and that they’ve remained that way for too long already. We find a firm route through the sagging, shattered belly of the gutted house. Flashes and beeps kill the dark and the silence as Rich and Olga take pictures. The EMF meter chirps wildly in my hands, then stops. “I’m getting a D initial,” Angel says. “Daryl.” He stands in the center of the house, looking up into the exposed attic. “This spirit, he’s asking me, ‘Can you show me how to get out?’ ”
We return to the house that night. “I call on you Gabriel, archangel of light, to illuminate the path for this lost soul!” Angel cries. He claps once, louder than I’ve ever heard a clap. A second later there is a loud swooshing sound, like something shooting out the window. “Did you hear that?” Olga asks. Rich says it went right beside his ear.
Two hours later we’re watching the footage in a booth at the back of drag queen show while they sip on sodas. The shots taken while Angel was supposedly talking to the ghost reveal an “orb,” a hazy bubble of light the size of a baseball, about two feet in front of his eyes, directly in his line of sight.
The next day, after visiting the tomb of New Orleans’s most famed voodoo priestess and the temple of the most famed live one, we’re in a booth at the back of Flanagan’s Pub. The morning after Katrina, plywood over the bar’s front door reads, we WILL NOT DIE SOBER! Randy Ping joins us for lunch and quickly echoes his earlier sentiments with Jeff Dwyer: “Never in twenty years have I ever seen anything I couldn’t explain scientifically.”
The supernatural, as I’m learning, is a bit like faith or God or love—proving it scientifically can get sticky. Sensitives like Angel and Jeff Dwyer argue that you just have to be able to open yourself enough to absorb the proof all around us. And indeed, when your eyes and ears (and nose and fingers) are completely open to signs, they seem to be everywhere. But are you simply choosing a few convenient needles from the billion-needle haystack of sensory input that humans receive every second?
“We will not ever incorporate any Katrina ghost stories into our tour,” Ping says. “It is too recent. And it is a large event. And there’s still some people who believe that their missing relative is going to be found. I don’t want to be the person who has to go and tell them they’re dead. I think it would be so improper for anyone to tell a ghost story about it for at least 100 years, and that’s our promise.”
He relates a horrific, true story of slaves being tortured and experimented on just down the street, in 1834, and how it was kept alive by a ghost story that began 100 years later. “This city wanted to ignore it. The polite white society was so humiliated by it, because it flew in the face of everything they said they represented and the laws protecting slaves, the Code Noir, here was supposed to be saying.”
“Like Katrina,” says Olga.
On the National Paranormal Society’s last night in town we venture back into the Lower Ninth, this time searching for life rather than death, a more daunting task. And there it is, a lone FEMA trailer sitting just a block from where the levee breached.
We hear the trailer door unlatch, then slam shut. A man, fiftyish, graying hair and goatee, a good six feet in T-shirt and slacks, comes strutting around the corner, walks right through us, and lobs a small brown bag full of something into the chest-high weeds across the street. “Just feeding the cats,” he says.
He shakes our hands with a wet palm, says his name is Robert Green, tells us to come inside, his momentum hunching him forward. We follow him into the cramped trailer strewn with papers, a printer taking up the bulk of his kitchen table. The place is hot from a turkey he’s cooking.
“We went to the Superdome the day before the storm,” he says, eyes still burning with hope beneath heavy lids, his drooping eyelids a side effect of the asthma medication he now takes because of the formaldehyde in the trailer. “It was worse than a football game, the lines were so long. My mother couldn’t take standing up outside. So then we came back home. We were afraid of trees falling. But we didn’t think we’d have to face a barge coming through the levee wall.
“This is before the storm even hit. Barely light enough for us to see. We were fighting water at four in the morning. Five minutes to get into the attic. Then I fell through the ceiling, cut my hand. Water was so filthy I had to get surgery three days later in Houston. We floated on the roof of our house two blocks. My mother fell in, she drowned. But we resuscitated her. Then the hurricane hits.
“This one here’s my granddaughter, Nai Nai,” he says, handing us a photo. “My daughter, her mother, lived down the street, but she already had her hands full, so I took care of Nai Nai, raised her in my house like a daughter. I pulled her up out of the attic, put her on the roof, and when I turned around, she fell in the water. I know when she was in the water, she expected me to stick my hands in and pull her out. That’ll haunt me for a while.”
Green says he can swim in a pool, but wasn’t going to be able to in the dirty, flowing water. And at three, Nai Nai was simply too young. “When my baby fell in the water I screamed, ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’ and then I stopped yelling because I couldn’t blame Him anymore.”
Only later would Angel tell me it was at this moment that he heard Green’s mother say, “As soon as you stopped calling His name, He picked her up.”
“Then my mother died,” Green says.
He lifts a small wooden cross off his VCR. A picture of his granddaughter Nai Nai is taped to it. “Sometimes she knocks this cross off the TV. And I’ll say Nai Nai, quit cutting up up there!
“I don’t feel that they’re unsettled souls. I feel like they’re here, but they’re watching over us. This is home for them. As long as there’s rebuilding, they out guarding their home. Everybody’s content. My granddaughter’s content. She’s happy with the way things are going. That’s one reason I’m here all by myself and I don’t feel scared. That’s the reason I can talk about them and I don’t cry in the corner after you all leave. And I don’t want to lose my pain, because my pain is actually what made me who I am today, strong enough to take what I’m going through now.”
He walks us outside, where a folding table is propped lengthwise against his trailer, scrawled wide with black marker. It begins, WE JUST WANT OUR COUNTRY TO LOVE US AS MUCH AS WE LOVE OUR COUNTRY. “Yeah, one
night I was watching Rambo 2, and he said that,” says Green. “And then the song at the end was pretty good and I wrote this line from it right here, see—THE STRENGTH OF OUR COUNTRY BELONGS TO US.”
I’ve never seen a place look so weak as he walks the path his house took down the street, shows us where it snagged on an elm beneath the water, before the water again tore it loose, rammed it into another tree, then kept going until it hit a truck and finally another house.
“My other grandkids are doing really well in Houston. When the time comes and I can build my house, they’ll come back. I fought like hell to get back to this spot where we were. This is home. I’m not afraid to be here at nighttime. This is still where we grew up. I used to play football in the streets. My son grew up playing football in the streets. Me and my granddaughters, we would take a walk in the nighttime, check out the sun setting, tell them about the stars. Used to walk around the block every day and say hi to my elderly neighbors. This is where we all felt comfortable. Here. This is the spot. I found my mother’s body here on December 29. It was four months to the day after the storm. We could smell her from 100 feet away. It was not bloated. All her hair was gone off her head, but all her organs were inside.”
I
remember that Halloween night just weeks after the storm. I snuck between Humvee patrols through the shards of this neighborhood, right by this very spot, into the last region of New Orleans off limits, feeling the little ghosts watching me, begging them to take my hand, but none would show themselves.
“From here I could see her skull,” says Green, standing in the weeds. “And see the clothes she had on that day. I used to help her dress every day, so I recognized her clothing. I said, ‘There’s momma’s body right there.’ Simple as that. Her lower jawbone fell out. So the next day I had to come back to this spot and find her jaw, her dentures, brought them to the coroner and then he released the body to us.
“We buried my granddaughter first because her sister kept making deals that ‘I won’t worry about no Christmas presents if you bring my sister back.’ So I felt we should put her to rest like that. She would have been four years old. … Now it’s quiet like this. It’ll be quiet like this for a long time.”
He turns to Angel, asks him, “So, you feel anything?”
“I can see the houses still standing,” says Angel.
“I never saw the houses gone,” says Green.
Later, Angel stands in the center of the Lower Ninth smiling, seeing houses still standing where now lay only concrete slabs. Lawns where there are now chest-high weeds. People where now live only insects. “There’s nothing to say to Green,” he says. “He knows it all already.”
We walk to the final resting place of a house in which ten people perished, four blocks from Green’s trailer. “The family ranged from a five-year-old to someone in their seventies,” Angel says. “William, Yvonne, Miss Clara are three names. I can hear buildings crashing into each other. The sound was horrible. Like a monster coming through here. They keep reliving it.”
After his team returns to Miami, I spend days trying to verify these names, but anyone who might have known them is gone, and I can find no record of the survivors anywhere in the United States.