Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown

by Stefan Petrucha

  What I consider the first full, legitimate PRS investigation took place in March 2002, in Schwab Auditorium, the building where George Atherton was buried. The Daily Collegian’s Web site still has an article posted about it that was written at the time. Some people claim a woman haunts the auditorium, and there’ve been reports of people seeing a giant-sized Civil War soldier.

  Back then, we locked down, stayed overnight, and had a couple of weird experiences. Mandy Bonavita—my cousin and a team member at the time—took a bathroom break and had the lights go out on her. She had enough wits about her to keep quiet during the blackout. She felt like she was being watched, but when she turned on her flashlight, the lights came back on.

  In the attic, I and another early member heard some scraping against the concrete floor. Investigating behind some vents, we found a metal chair. It was so old it was covered with rust. A trail of clean scrapes on the floor indicated it had just moved.

  It was good to have a chance to look back and think a little about what I’ve learned and how things have changed over five years. In the end, this episode, which would be called “Freshman Fear,” was something of a hodgepodge, but it gave me a few surprises. Despite the problems, maybe because of those problems, we had an opportunity to do something different. There are so many ghost stories told, it kind of becomes about ghost stories, a 100 Candles game itself, which made it very atypical very early on. I honestly loved this episode because it tackles a large-scale issue: the power of an urban legend and fear. Both were covered in twenty-two minutes, along with a client case and bits of an origin story for PRS. Quite an accomplishment.

  We did play 100 Candles again. While shooting our fifth episode, “Man of the House,” after the crew left we stayed at the site and tried to tell all one hundred stories.

  By about 5:30 A.M., we got too tired to continue, and called it a night.

  GAMES AND GHOSTS: THE ORIGINAL EXORCIST

  William Peter Blatty’s famous novel The Exorcist was inspired by an actual case from 1949 involving a spirit board. Accounts of the story vary, but most agree that the trouble began when a thirteen-year-old boy named Robbie (sometimes called Roland) Doe was taught to use the board by his aunt Tillie. After she grew ill and passed away, he continued using the board to try to contact her spirit. It seems something else answered. The family began hearing scratching sounds in the attic. The noises grew worse whenever they tried to find the source. Soon objects were found moved. Eventually Robbie’s bed started shaking. At one time it shook so hard he couldn’t sleep and his covers were yanked away from him. If he tried to grab them, he’d be pulled onto the floor. Some accounts mention levitating chairs, horrible banging sounds, and words appearing scratched into Robbie’s skin. Father Edward Albert Hughes was believed to have helped conduct the successful exorcism that allowed Robbie to lead a normal life thereafter, but to his death in 1980 Father Hughes never discussed the case. Possessed, by Thomas Allen and Thomas B. Allen (iUniverse, 2000), covers the complete story of this case.

  HYAKUMONOGATARI KAIDANKAI (A GATHERING OF ONE HUNDRED SUPERNATURAL TALES)

  A hundred candles are lit in a sealed room. As each participant tells a story, a candle is blown out, until the room is in total darkness, summoning a supernatural entity.

  It’s believed the game originated among Samurai warriors as a way to put their bravery to the test. During the Edo period in Japan (1603–1868) it became a popular parlor game. The invention of an inexpensive printing process led to the production of scores of ghost story collections, or kaidan, in Japan and China. The popularity of the books continued long after the popularity of the game faded.

  More recently the game formed the basis for a Japanese TV series that uses the game to retell classic Japanese ghost stories.

  UNIV-CON

  UNIV-CON is a national paranormal conference thrown by PRS and its affiliates every year in order to encourage education, diversity, networking, entertainment and new ideas when it comes to the world of the unexplained. The first seven conferences were held at Penn State. Attendance started out at about 300 and grew to over 3,000. Nowadays, attendees can expect to see world-famous talent in every avenue of the paranormal (previous guests include exorcist Father Lebar, psychic/demonologist Lorraine Warren, Hellraiser actor Doug Bradley, Amityville Horror’s George Lutz and Skeptic Magazine’s Dr. Michael Shermer).

  Over the course of four days, attendees are given access to dozens of daily workshops, including debates, technology workshops, meditation exercises, and a “paranormal congress,” where paranormal experts debate in a senator-style chamber about protocols, ethics, and other issues. There are also ghost hunts, displays, vendors, ghost tours, parties, film screenings, masquerade balls, and lots more. Plus the entire cast of Paranormal State is in attendance, giving lectures and just roaming around to meet guests.

  For more information, go to www.univcon.org.

  Chapter 8

  If Only They All Went Like This

  No one can tell me what I saw.

  After the relatively laid-back schedule of the last two episodes, we were back on the road, this time not only to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, but also to and from the city for research. The shoot was a lot busier, but definitely worth it, because unlike our previous effort, “The Woman in the Window,” it was solid and fascinating.

  The clients came to us through another group of investigators. The Greater Pittsburgh Paranormal Society (GPPS) saw the ads placed back in October, and got in touch with us concerning what they felt was a genuine haunting in a house with a rich history.

  While PRS is the first college-based paranormal group, there are lots of others throughout the country and the world with different degrees of skill and seriousness. I’d met some of the members of GPPS when they attended UNIV-CON, and they always appeared quite professional.

  The case they told us about involved the Sokolowski family, who lived in an 1820s home that was likely part of the Underground Railroad, a network of “safe houses” that protected runaway slaves as they traveled north to free states before the Civil War. The house had a long history of activity. The tenants heard footsteps and the voices of a man and woman, objects were moved, and there’d been reports of full-body apparitions.

  Specifically, my clients were Ally Sokolowski and her boyfriend, Larry Jones. Ally’s stepfather, Peter, told us he’d inherited the house because his sisters were afraid of the ghosts. Ally and her mom, Kim, had lived in the house since 1980, most of Ally’s life. There were other siblings and children living there as well.

  Larry’s experience was the most striking. Because Ally’s parents disapproved of their underage relationship, they told us that she and Larry originally saw each other on the sly. The house was really spacious, and most of the bedrooms were situated toward the front. The back, though, had servants’ quarters with stairs that led to Ally’s room. To meet, Larry would sneak around back and Ally would let him in.

  Larry told us that one night, he looked up and saw a woman in Ally’s window. She was older, had long hair, and she was looking at him with great disapproval. To him, her expression seemed to be saying, “Who the hell are you to be coming here?”

  Then she turned away.

  At first Larry worried some family member had spotted him and that the relationship had been discovered, but Ally told him there was no one else in the house. That night it was so cold in her room he could see his breath. Around a year later, after Ally had become pregnant, he saw the woman again one night. He was sleeping with Ally, and woke up to see the woman again looking at him with disapproval.

  Ally and her mother, Kim, told me that sometime later, another friend of the family, a young African American named Brandon, walked into the same room and saw someone standing there. Thinking someone had broken in, he found the family and told them. He described the same woman Larry had seen.

  Since the only two people who’d seen this woman were African American, Ally and Kim felt the spirit might be rela
ted to the Underground Railroad.

  I arrived with the team and crew the first week of December 2006, about a year and a half after those incidents. Brandon was no longer around. Larry and Ally had a child together, a toddler name J. J., but Larry reported that he was still afraid to be alone in the house. And the activity was ongoing.

  In our first interview, I learned that Ally and the baby had just had a bad night because of weird noises. Larry said he also woke up and heard a woman laughing. They were both very sincere. Larry was absolutely adamant, saying, “No one can tell me what I saw.”

  Next I wanted to talk to Larry alone. Before I did, the family pointedly asked me not to mention Brandon. Larry and Brandon apparently didn’t get along, making it unlikely they’d make up a ghost story together.

  I try to respect the clients’ wishes, but here Brandon was a corroborating witness to an apparition, making him key to establishing the evidence. So, I brought him up anyway, with little result other than making Larry seem defensive.

  Brandon aside, I felt as if there was much more awkwardness in the air whenever Larry was around. It seemed to me as if he felt like an outsider, so I asked him about that as well.

  “At first they didn’t know me,” he said, talking about Ally’s parents. “This is a white family and I’m African American, so . . .”

  A racial or cultural gap may have been part of the issue, but my guess was there was more. Larry was also the guy their daughter had an underage relationship with, and he had wound up raising a child with her as a result. Whether you’re black, white, or green, I assume that’s not going to go over well with parents.

  I don’t say that to pass judgment. If Larry had been a lousy person, he would’ve left, but he didn’t. It was clear he cared about Ally and the baby. In spite of the distance, I also got the feeling that Kim and Peter wanted to understand him. He was the father of their grandchild.

  At the same time, Ally specifically commented that the ghosts came around more whenever they were fighting. So here again, the spirits seemed wrapped up in the emotional situation. It’s important to note that the human emotion can indeed play an important role in a haunting. It can either be the genesis of a haunting or a contributing factor. A lot of ghost hunters look for evidence. PRS, on the other hand, looks for the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Building a theory about why a haunting might be taking place helps lay out the groundwork for collecting and presenting evidence that goes beyond grainy surveillance of moving doors. Evidence of levitation or moving objects is definitely cool, but is, in my opinion, nothing without a good theory. And that theory almost always comes back to the emotional makeup of the household.

  In the case of Ally and Larry, they were raising a small child, which isn’t always a calm, relaxing process. From what I understand, tensions between Larry and Ally’s parents made him defensive, which made Ally defensive. So there were some arguments. All that tension and unresolved frustration could easily fuel the spiritual activity. If you think that’s hard to believe, consider this analogy. Most everyone has experienced seeing a friend or relative, and without them saying a word or making a movement, knew they were angry or sad. That, in turn, affected the way you interacted with them. Maybe you became sympathetic and asked what was wrong, or decided to act like you didn’t notice and tried to leave as quickly as possible.

  The bottom line is the moods of others affect the way you act. If ghosts are the souls and personalities of the living, why wouldn’t they have the same reactions? A spirit feeling family tension may have decided to put their two cents into the mix. A widely accepted belief among paranormal researchers is that a high amount of energy within a household is like one big battery to spirits.

  I did wonder if there was any relationship between the night Larry saw the apparition and when their baby was conceived. Maybe the spirits were warning, “Hey, not tonight, unless you want a baby.” I never did get an answer to that question.

  With the emotional aspects clearer, I turned to a closer look at the phenomena. The most common activity was the sound of footsteps in the attic. The house was over two hundred years old, and no one had been up there in years. We decided to take a look.

  When Peter opened up the entrance for us, insulation came down like snow. It was one of those places investigating takes you that you have to think twice about. The whole team put on masks, climbed on up, and found ourselves ankle-deep in dust and insulation. As we walked, it flew into the air, glowing in our flashlight beams. Even with the face mask, I ended up coughing pretty badly.

  Serg spotted a little area of light in one corner, but it turned out to be a light shining up from Ally’s room. There was no animal smell or evidence of nests, so we eliminated some possible explanations for the sounds. Otherwise, nothing.

  Beneath the house, though, there were two sealed-up tunnels. One, mostly collapsed, ran under the kitchen all the way to an old barn. The other, short and filthy but more intact, ran beneath the parents’ bedroom. It was a tricky, awkward space to investigate, but I felt there might be something in the tunnel that could connect us to the history of the house and possibly the haunting.

  I’d seen robot cameras on television documentaries used for everything from exploring sealed rooms in the pyramids to hunting for alligators in sewer systems. PRS couldn’t afford anything like that, but I thought we could do something similar by getting a remote-controlled toy car, sticking a camera on it, and sending it into the tunnel.

  It didn’t work. The car kept getting stuck, and the picture kept blanking out.

  Instead, I went in myself. The tunnel was a crawl space, the entrance about five feet off the basement floor. I stood on a chair and jumped in. The tunnel’s floor was dirt, its ceiling the wooden floor of the house. It was a tight space, and, worse, there were enough spider webs to get my arachnophobia going. I did manage to stay long enough to find an old-fashioned hat, a tin cup, and some old newspapers.

  Shortly afterward in the episode we examine an old photo. Over the years the families living there discovered these things, and collected what they found. The items were kept and passed along to the new owners. There was even a handwritten letter by someone who’d worked with Abraham Lincoln.

  Most interesting was a very old photo of an unidentified couple. The image wasn’t on paper; it was on thin metal, which meant it might have been what’s called a daguerreotype—an early photographic process. Daguerreotypes were invented and used around the middle of the nineteenth century, the time of the Underground Railroad. So it was very possible that this was an image of whoever lived in the house back then. That meant it could be a photo of our apparition.

  It was exciting to hold that kind of relic. Historical research has always been one of the best ways to uncover the reasons for a haunting and here was a situation begging for it. It was a great opportunity to inject that process into the show, and something we’d do much more in later episodes.

  Attempting to identify the couple in the photo, we headed to Pittsburgh and visited John Ford at the Heinz History Center. An authority on the Underground Railroad, as well as a curator for an exhibit on the subject, he’d been collecting similar artifacts for years. With his help, some of the puzzle pieces began to fit together. He confirmed that the photo was mid–nineteenth century, and he shared some of the history from that period. Meanwhile, Eilfie, researching the clothing the couple wore, concluded that it was also consistent with the period.

  The Underground Railroad, of course, wasn’t an actual railroad. It was a series of safe houses and secret routes used to help escaped slaves. Some wanted to reach free states; others headed farther north to Canada, down south to Mexico, or overseas. Over the years of its existence, it helped roughly thirty thousand slaves reach freedom.

  Pennsylvania had been a free state since 1780. At the time of the railroad’s height, between 1810 and 1850, there were already a number of strong African American communities there, so it wasn’t unusual for Pennsylvanians to be sympa
thetic to runaway slaves.

  As for our case, things were opening up. With Mr. Ford’s help, a search of the property records turned up the names of the home’s original owners: Jacob and Jane Anne Witzel. With confirmed names to investigate, I quickly learned that Jane Anne Witzel had been active in the Highlands Presbyterian Church. According to Mr. Ford, that increased the likelihood that the Witzels were abolitionists involved in the railroad. Not only that, we confirmed that the house was near an Underground Railroad route coming up from West Virginia.

  Given the location, the owners, the tunnels, and the timing, it seemed likely that not only was the house used to hide runaway slaves, but also that the photo was of the original owners, the Witzels. Frustratingly often, our research efforts lead nowhere, as was the case with the urn from “The Cemetery,” but here the pieces fit. Historical evidence is an unbelievably useful method of paranormal investigation. If you can sift through the dust of yesterday to see how things evolved, you can look for signs, clues, or patterns. Finding out that there was an untimely death in the house, or a fire, gives us hints about where else to look. In this case, thanks to the Heinz Center, we had a lot of facts piling up that were very useful.

  If this was a photo of the Witzels, we could use it to try to identify the apparition. Though the photo had been in the house, according to the Sokolowskis, Larry had never seen it. From what I saw, it hadn’t been hanging on the wall or kept anywhere visible. It was stored in a tin box that they had some trouble digging out.