Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown

by Stefan Petrucha

  She lived with her husband, Jeff, in Leominster, Massachusetts, in an old schoolhouse that’d been converted into condos. They reported hearing children playing, as if inside their apartment, though there were no children in the building. One evening Shannon said she heard the wall creaking. The bathroom door hammered open and hit the wall behind it so hard, it put a hole in it. She also said she was having disturbing dreams but did not want to discuss them on-camera.

  She said that half of her thought her home was truly haunted and half of her wondered if it was stress. She was in the process of opening up her own health spa, and talked about having trouble with the business as well as tough times with her personal life.

  From the beginning, she was also open about the fact she’d had psychics and paranormal teams investigate her home before us, and that she wanted to be a paranormal investigator. We knew she’d worked with New England Paranormal and helped TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the organization behind Syfy Channel’s Ghost Hunters) in Rhode Island. Her take at the time was well, the phenomena are still happening, why not get a different perspective?

  The trip from Long Island to Massachusetts took six hours. By the time we arrived, we didn’t have a lot of energy. But, when I’m in a new town, I like to check out the local papers to get a sense of the community, so, the day we arrived, I looked at the Leominster Champion. On the front page was a picture of Shannon next to a headline about her being featured on a new A&E TV series, Paranormal U, the shooting title of our show.

  At first I thought production was doing promotion, though typically we like to keep a low profile while shooting. When I found out they weren’t, I contacted the paper, trying to figure out how the story could have been leaked. One of the staff members told me, matter-of-factly, that Shannon contacted them. This did, of course, raise a red flag about Shannon’s motives, but it wasn’t enough to make me feel that Shannon was only doing this for publicity.

  Beyond that, we had big problems with the size of the space. The site was an old schoolhouse broken up into twelve apartments. Shannon’s home was nice for a one-bedroom living space, but tiny for a TV crew. The crew had to stay out in the apartment complex hallway, which wound up angering the other residents. Production-wise, it was so difficult we promised ourselves we’d never do an episode in a space like that again.

  During the primary interview, Shannon said her experiences began immediately after moving in. In a loft area, she’d once felt something flick her ear. On a few occasions, lightbulbs were found completely unscrewed. At night, she and her husband sometimes heard voices in the hallway that sounded like their own.

  The fact that they were hearing their own voices was interesting, but not uncommon. Some theorize that certain places can record events. I understand that Shannon and Jeff sometimes had arguments, and the excess emotional energy may have been captured and played back.

  While others had investigated this case, a psychic named Trish was key to the clients’ beliefs about the haunting. I don’t remember how Shannon came in contact with Trish. I do know Shannon told us she’d been to psychics she’d seen advertised along the road, but Trish may have been referred to her by friends. In either case, when Shannon first wanted to contact Trish, Jeff was skeptical and worried about the cost.

  “But,” he said, “she identified four spirits by name and never charged a dime.”

  After that Jeff felt he couldn’t discount the possibility there was something going on. In fact, they told us they based a lot of their beliefs about the haunting on the information that psychic gave them. Trish claimed to have seen apparitions, a little boy and a little girl, and told them she’d “seen” a murder-suicide that took place in their apartment before the building was a school.

  With that possibility in mind, Katrina and Eilfie spent a lot of time researching the building, but rather than confirm what Trish sensed, the information they found contradicted it. Most of the structure dated back to the 1880s, but the section with Shannon’s condo wasn’t added until 1919–20, after it was no longer a school. They also spoke to a librarian who’d never heard or read anything about any murders or accidents at the location. That in itself didn’t mean a murder-suicide didn’t take place, but it’s likely that if something that dramatic had happened, the newspapers would have covered it.

  Despite the residents being unhappy with our crew in the hallway, I asked around about any activity others may have experienced. One young couple didn’t want to appear on-camera, but said they had an attic in their apartment and would hear things up there. When they went to check, they found it empty. We’d heard another resident had experiences, but no one answered the door.

  I know this will shock some of our fans, but hey, I want to make sure you get your money’s worth for this book, so I’ll now reveal, at great personal risk, that there is a moment in the final version of this episode in which we look very weird. It’s the sequence where Heather “catches” Serg playing with some plastic toy ponies. In our off moments, we like to have fun. Here, without many leads to follow, Heather and Serg were bored, so they taped a “skit” where Heather pretends to catch him playing with toy ponies. When we saw that production actually used it in the episode, it surprised us all in a funny sort of way. I did say they included some of our weirder moments. When it aired, people thought it was real, as if maybe Serg had secret toy-pony issues.

  Anyway, after the pony incident, we regrouped for an EVP session and did encounter some activity. As we tried to contact the spirits, Katrina heard heavy breathing in one ear. I, meanwhile, heard a woman’s voice. It was the first clearly audible voice I’d heard in a long while. It said something that sounded like “Katie” but it was so soft it might have been “eighty” or “Haiti.”

  Neither the voice nor the breathing were recorded, which left us little to analyze. There wasn’t enough historical information to piece together anything about the haunting, but I did want to interview the psychic, Trish. From what I understand, she’d visited a few times, as far back as three years prior to our investigation, and Shannon seemed to swear by her.

  After arriving, Trish assured me the place was haunted. “There’s a little boy; his name is Billy. He comes up to me and wants to play.” She also felt the presence of a woman, Elizabeth, and was certain a male had hung himself in the apartment in the year 1856.

  When the team met to discuss the interview, Katrina pointed out that what Trish told us had apparently changed drastically from what she’d told Shannon. Originally, according to Shannon, the children were Jacob and Elizabeth; now they were Jenny and Billy. Aside from that, we knew that the section of the building where Trish sensed that a suicide occurred in 1856 hadn’t been built until sixty years later.

  Given the other questionable psychic experiences I’d been having, and the lack of anything else to investigate, I decided this would be an opportunity for the show to take a good hard look at the psychic process. So, we asked Trish to do a reading with Serg, to test her accuracy.

  “I sense there was a girl that recently walked away?” she asked him.

  “No,” Serg says with a shrug.

  “Watch for it,” Trish assures him.

  It went on like that for twenty minutes, one miss after another. Despite getting everything wrong, Trish walked away seemingly convinced it wasn’t her abilities, that the problem was with Serg, that even though he didn’t know what she was talking about right now, one day he would.

  I’d been wanting to do some debunking like this and I was pleased to be able to.

  Shannon had apparently put a lot of faith in this woman, but to her credit, admitted she was still learning. When I pointed out the variations in what Trish said about the ghosts, and the historical inaccuracies, Shannon said, “I’ve known those stories for three years and just repeated those facts over and over again in my mind so often I believed them.”

  We did have our own experiences now, though, and that night, during Dead Time, we tried to contact whatever
spirit may have said “Katie.” While the size of the apartment made it tough for production, it was much easier for us to set up our monitoring cameras. There were fewer places to cover, but nothing was picked up on video. A motion detector went off and there were a few knocking sounds, but nothing noteworthy.

  To be honest, this episode aside, Dead Time can be very uneventful. The method of paranormal investigating where you take a bunch of gizmos and walk around looking for ghosts is not, in my opinion, always the best. Our original investigations weren’t one-hour efforts; they were long, drawn-out experiences. When things did happen, it was almost at random, while I was talking to someone, or asleep, not when I was walking around looking for it.

  The next day something did happen, not activity per se so much as a strange coincidence, a synchronicity. Jeff told us he’d been talking to a friend at work who mentioned his wife knew someone who used to live in the apartment and heard they’d had similar experiences. Jeff didn’t know the woman’s name at first, but while arranging for us to speak to her, was surprised to learn it was Katie, Katie Gahl.

  I was tired and eager to get home. If I hadn’t heard that voice, we might not have gotten in touch with Katie at all. As it was, arranging the interview was a crazed, last-minute thing.

  On the phone, Katie told me she’d lived in the condo starting in August 1986. She said she’d hear children playing, and wake up in the morning to find everything in her home messed up, as if twenty kids had just run through. Here was some apparently independent confirmation of the activity, and it seemed related to my own experience. I invited her over to share more details.

  Katie was a very pleasant woman who’d lived with her elderly mother in the apartment. She told us she remembered the sound of the children, clear conversations they were having, but not what was actually said. Things were always being tampered with, she reported, the toilet seat left up, the refrigerator door open, the doors locked. Her mother was bedridden, but Katie would come home from work and find everything changed.

  Why did I hear her name? It’s possible I’d heard a spirit calling her. There’ve been cases where spirits have memories, and this one may have been comfortable with her. Or, maybe her mother called her name repeatedly while they lived there, and that was recorded as a residual haunting.

  Having confirmed some activity, but debunked the background story, there wasn’t much more I felt we could do. Shannon did feel uncomfortable in her home, so I contacted Keith and Sandra Johnson, a team of demonologists, to perform a blessing. Keith had appeared previously on Ghost Hunters, but wasn’t with the show any longer, and I thought it’d be cool for paranormal enthusiasts to see him.

  Brian told us he felt more comfortable after the blessing and Shannon said it was a great experience.

  That was it . . . until about a year later.

  We’d filmed with the Sylvias in January 2007. That summer, casting began for Ghost Hunters International. As I mentioned, Shannon wanted to be a paranormal investigator and had already worked with TAPS. She tried out for the show and got in as a trainee.

  GHI premiered January 9, 2008, as a big hit for Syfy. There was a strong buzz about the show in the paranormal community. Our episode, “School House Haunting¸” originally aired later that same month, January 28. So Shannon was first seen as an investigator for GHI, then as a client on Paranormal State. To anyone who didn’t know the shooting dates, it appeared as if she’d gone from being an investigator to a client.

  For some, the timing of Shannon’s dual appearance raised the question: Why not have your own team investigate your home unless you have something to hide?

  These were early episodes for both series, and when you’re new, your credibility is questioned very heavily in the paranormal community. Worse, since, honestly, this wasn’t our best investigation, one of the biggest thing viewers took away was, “Hey, that’s the girl from Ghost Hunters International. What’s she doing here?”

  Shannon tried to explain it, get the truth out, but she was pereceived as a sellout. A huge online storm started. Ultimately, Shannon left the show.

  She didn’t expect a problem, and neither did we. When we advertised our episode, we said up front that our client was Shannon Sylvia from Ghost Hunters International. Still, she seemed angry at us for a little while. She sent me an e-mail questioning why we hadn’t mentioned in the episode itself that she’d wanted to be a paranormal investigator or had been involved with TAPS.

  Frankly I’m not the editor, but I could see how Shannon’s paranormal background wasn’t relevant to the story. Had it been mentioned in passing, the thread would’ve had to be picked up, followed through, and resolved.

  In the end, I don’t think there was anything Shannon, or the rest of us, should’ve done differently. I’ve no doubt that if Paranormal State had aired first, it would’ve been less of an issue. It does go to show how incredibly important credibility is in the field. There’s a dedicated group of people who watch paranormal shows and try to prove that they’re faked.

  Some of them try to argue that all paranormal reality shows, including Paranormal State, are staged. I can’t speak for the other shows, but other than some honest mistakes, and time-crunched editing, which I discuss in this book, it’s not true so, in our case, no one’s able to back up that accusation. In fact, an employee of James Randi, the world’s best-known debunker, told me they tried to debunk our show but couldn’t. We present people’s experiences, the factual evidence and research we have, and offer theories. As the employee put it, “How can you debunk someone’s testimony? It’s just a he-said, she-said argument. So we just gave up on your show!” I laughed. I do enjoy being difficult.

  I hate to say it, but in the end, the scandal was actually good for our show. Any publicity at that point was good. It got people talking about Paranormal State. And hey, I’m all for having controversy on the show, as long as we do our best.

  Past that, I do want to say that while I remain proud and excited about a number of first season episodes, in all honesty, this wasn’t one of them. It lacked a compelling psychological story, the evidence was weak, and I don’t feel as if I gave it my best effort.

  Normally, we did some research and interviews beforehand. Here, we were just stumbling in. I also don’t mind winging it, but only when my gut feels right, after I’ve planned things in advance. We’d done three cases in eleven days, our system wasn’t set up for that, and I was disappointed. I knew then we’d have to seriously rethink our scheduling if we were going to do more good work.

  I didn’t realize it yet, but this was actually a rest break, compared with what came next.

  COLD READINGS

  Cold reading is a series of techniques used by psychics and other fortune-tellers to convince clients they can see hidden knowledge, when in fact they’re using nonparanormal methods that can be learned by anyone and have been demonstrated in numerous documentaries. With a little practice, you can tell a lot about someone just by paying attention to their clothing, their body language, and their tone of voice, a process closer to what a detective does than someone with extrasensory perception.

  These techniques result in a lot of “hits” or correct statements about the subject that can convince the unwary that the information was gleaned through psychic means. There are a variety of examples:

  Shotgunning is a technique in which the psychic will rattle off a lot of vague information hoping they’ll hit on something specific to the client. Every hit a psychic makes allows him to narrow things down and appear more specific.

  While shotgunning, psychics rely on Barnum statements (named after famous huckster P. T. Barnum, also referred to as the Forer effect). In an effort to gain trust, they’ll say very general things that are true about most people, such as “You’re having a problem with a friend or family member” or “You tend to be a bit insecure around people you don’t know.”

  The rainbow ruse is another way to elicit trust, by saying that the client has two contradi
ctory characteristics, such as “Sometimes you’re happy, but sometimes you’re sad” or “You can be friendly, but like to keep to yourself at times.” The purpose of the process is to glean more and more accurate details by watching the subject’s reactions, their agreement and disagreement. Ultimately, they leave the impression that the information was achieved through extrasensory means.

  While in a cold reading the fortune-teller genuinely doesn’t know anything about the client, in a hot reading, they’ve researched their subject beforehand and then pretend to “see” what they already know.

  People tend to bring personal, sometimes traumatic issues to psychics, making them vulnerable. That’s why I’m often more concerned with what sort of person the psychic is rather than whether their abilities are genuine. Some false psychics use these techniques to try to bring their clients help and closure. Others may be inexperienced, or more interested in money, and may do psychological harm. While I’ve been very impressed by a few psychics and consider it possible their abilities are genuine, others may honestly believe themselves to be psychic, but use these methods subconsciously.

  BUYER BEWARE: WARNING SIGNS ON WHAT TYPES OF PSYCHICS TO AVOID

  They charge . . . a lot!

  I understand the argument that psychics, who are so in demand for their talents that they’ve decided to quit their day job at Walmart in order to devote their time to the profession on a full-time basis, need to charge to earn a living. But $500.00 an hour?!? That’s more than some hotshot lawyers or doctors get paid!

  They charge to remove a spirit.

  I get e-mails from sobbing women who say they’ve emptied their bank accounts to a psychic who promised to remove a haunting but it didn’t work. They ask me how much I charge and if they can work on a payment plan. When I tell them I never charge, I think it sinks in that they were taken advantage of by their psychic. Again, I understand a psychic charging for a general reading, but if they have “add-ons” like spirit removal, or to offer their assistance in passing a loved one on, that’s pretty much psychic fraud in my book. There’s no governing body determining who can and can’t actually remove spirits, so for psychics to take advantage of the pain and desperation of others is a little concerning. Why not pass on the loved one as a free bonus to the reading? It seems heartless not to. You can walk down to a priest and he’ll say an entire mass for your loved one with no financial expectation.