Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown

by Stefan Petrucha

  Though I knew what I believed in my heart, it took a very long time for me to fully accept they were wrong. There was even a moment when it finally dawned on me, but that wouldn’t happen until we were in the middle of shooting season 1.5.

  I’d invited Father James LeBar, an exorcism consultant on several films, including Constantine, to appear at UNIV-CON. After agreeing, he suddenly backed out. Surprised, I asked Lorraine Warren, who knew him, to ask what happened.

  Apparently Father LeBar told her he’d been approached with disturbing information about my sexual practices and my acceptance of paganism. When Lorraine heard that these stories had come from my former friend, she contacted him. It seemed that during that conversation, he not only revealed every confidence I’d shared with him as a friend, but also told her a series of sexually graphic lies.

  I remember Lorraine calling and saying, “He told me the most horrible things about you. Are they true?”

  I was shaken. I hadn’t told her about my sexual orientation because I’d thought of her as an old-fashioned Catholic. She’d been married to one man for fifty years, and worked very closely with the Church. Plus, she was an icon to me and had she judged me that probably would have been it for me. I felt at that moment that I was about to lose her in my life. But I knew I couldn’t lie to her.

  “Lorraine, yes, I’m bisexual,” I confessed. “If I was ever asked by a priest, I told them. I know you may think it’s a sin, but I can’t change who I am. I didn’t ask to be this way . . .”

  “Honey,” she interrupted, “I don’t care that you’re bisexual. Tony (her son-in-law) doesn’t care. It doesn’t make you any less of a person in the eyes of God or in my eyes. I love and respect you just the same.”

  My eyes watered as I heard her say this. It wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, least of all from someone very steep in her Catholic faith.

  “I can’t believe this man is going around saying these things about you,” she shouted, “and to priests? That is not his place. That is between you, the father, and in confession. How dare he, as a Christian?”

  At that moment, Lorraine made me realize there was no need to feel guilty about who I am. In a way, it was instant closure to a part of my life. So, I spoke with Father LeBar myself. Apparently, my sexuality hadn’t been an issue for him, or my working with pagans. It seemed the people who spoke to him about me made it sound more like I worked with devil worshippers. He told me, though, that he’d once shared a stage with Anton LaVey, the Satanist, to debate him.

  I remember him saying, “Not everyone’s Catholic. How are you supposed to teach others unless you work with them? You know what, I’ll come to your conference. To hell with what they think!”

  He did appear at UNIV-CON. Sadly, he passed away in 2008.

  In the end, I learned what I should have realized all along: I shouldn’t be ashamed of who I am. The people who mattered most, like Lorraine, stood up for me.

  So, yes, I’ve had a complex relationship with religion, but a funny thing happened along the way. Instead of becoming anti-religious, I found my faith. I stayed with the Church. Yes, there are prejudices within it, but if I leave, what good am I doing? I don’t need to leave my faith. The prejudice needs to leave my faith.

  I’m not saying it’s perfect. I continue to go through cycles of doubt and frustration, but I’m going to continue to do what I do, and if I influence anybody spiritually, I’ll say I’m a Catholic.

  In January 2007, as I spoke to Teena, though, I’d yet to have had that final revelation about myself, and her story had an effect on me that carried strongly into the days ahead. I had deep concerns about engaging in a demonic case, yes, but B—meant nothing to me, yet.

  Prior to shooting our three out-of-state cases, I’d found a new house. I’d been living with Serg and a third roommate in a low-rent townhouse, but because of the show we now had an office, we’d gotten a dog, and had run out of space. The new place had an in-ground pool, front and back yards, a screened-in deck, a fireplace, and from the first-floor windows you could see the mountains.

  The point is that when we returned from shooting “School House,” it was moving time. I dumped my luggage off at the new place, and then went to the townhouse to pack. As I worked, the radio was on. I don’t remember the details. But out of nowhere the announcer—talking about some weird thing that happened—said something like “Hey, maybe it’s the demon B—.”

  If I hadn’t had that conversation with Teena, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it at all. As it was, I dismissed it as a coincidence. But, a few days after the move, I was watching TV and heard the name again. Again, I don’t remember the context—it was a news program referencing something religious—but the name was clearly mentioned. This second occurrence of the name didn’t set bells off, either, but I did think it strange.

  I hadn’t mentioned the name to anyone. Other than the e-mails our producer read, which didn’t mention B—, I was the only one who’d spoken with Teena. I wasn’t trying to hide it. I just didn’t think to bring it up.

  I was also having more conversations with Teena. She was opening up more, revealing more frightening details about her experiences. I don’t like to reveal personal details about clients, and never will when asked not to, but in this instance it’s important to understand the extreme nature of the situation. Teena told me she’d been raped by an unseen entity. She said she’d even woken up one night and found blisters on her genitals. Apparently, she went to a doctor, whose sole advice was for her to stop masturbating with a hair iron, which he insisted was the only thing that could have caused the blisters. Teena was obviously shocked and embarrassed by this accusation from her doctor.

  As we spoke more, she reported that the activity was getting worse, saying that her husband, Raymond, had also been physically attacked. These days it’s not unusual for clients to claim things are getting worse. Some just want to get on the show, but this was before we were even on the air. I took it as another sign there was something legitimate going on.

  Compelled as I was to pursue the investigation, I knew this wasn’t something we could rush into. We needed to spend time researching the situation, especially if it wound up being demonic. As part of that, we decided that Jamie, our counselor, should interview the family first to try to understand what might be going on.

  This was after the rush of winter break, so there was some time to develop cases. My request to delay was easily accepted, but, meanwhile, we did have to shoot something.

  We’d gotten another e-mail, this one from Jodi, a single mother in Elizabethtown with a teen son, Nate. They’d responded to a newspaper article about us. Among the activity they reported experiencing was the behavior of a doll they thought was haunted. I don’t recall the exact details, but it’d been given to Jodi by her husband or boyfriend as an anniversary present. When they pulled the string, it supposedly sometimes said things like “I’m going to kill you, bitch.”

  The doll was also based on the main character from an extremely popular, long-running animated series. I thought it was great, certainly less complicated than what I’d been hearing from Teena. We agreed to do this case next and had the doll shipped to us ahead of time.

  Serg and Josh took it to an Applied Research Lab at Penn State. Everyone there thought it was a hoot; the engineers were totally stoked. They analyzed the chip and found no defects or defaults. As far as they could tell, it was a normal, healthy doll.

  Without that, the case didn’t seem particularly interesting. I’d never say this to a client, but the other activity, as Jodi described it—a child’s voice, an imprint on a couch—sounded mundane. We’d go in, maybe get some almost-interesting evidence, and then help the family cope with their fear. Big deal. I’d already had problems with “Schoolhouse Haunting.” But I’d already agreed.

  Recently a mutual friend had suggested a psychic named Chip Coffey, so before the shoot, I gave him a call. As I spoke with Chip for the first time, I was standing in t
he new house, looking out the windows at the mountains and feeling pretty relaxed. I didn’t ask for a reading so he could “prove himself.” My goal was to try to find out if he was a good human being. The rest would come out in the wash. He sounded like a nice guy, very sincere. If anything, he seemed pretty down-to-earth, different from my usual impression of a psychic. He also had a background in psychology. I particularly appreciated the fact that, like me, he was a paranormal investigator, not a TV psychic. So I said, “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

  Production arranged to fly him up from Atlanta to Elizabethtown, being careful to keep him in the dark about what I thought was a simple little case.

  My conversations with Teena were ongoing, so my mind was focused on Syracuse as the next exciting thing. Even so, hearing that demon name on radio and television was still, to my mind, likely in the realm of coincidence. It did remind me though, that back in 2005, on the same day, three people experienced the name of the force we dealt with then, much in the same way I was experiencing B—.

  As we drove to Elizabethtown, I remained comfortable it was random, a fluke. That is, until I happened to be reading an article in a local newspaper—and in it was the name.

  THE MORNING STAR

  While many cultures have stories of evil spirits, the Catholic viewpoint is that a demon was once an angel. This belief doesn’t appear in the Bible, but it does turn up in other ancient sources, such as the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which mentions a figure known as Lucifer—the morning star, brightest in the sky—who led a war in the heavens.

  Many believe that Lucifer is the same as Satan, the Adversary, who appears in the Old Testament, but some believe they’re different beings.

  Seventeenth-century poet John Milton details the battle, the creation of the world, and the Fall of Mankind in his epic work, Paradise Lost, famous partly for the well-known line uttered by Satan: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

  The basic story is that before the world was made, God’s favored angel, Lucifer, decided to challenge him for his throne, resulting in a civil war. Some claim Milton made Satan too sympathetic, but the poem makes it clear Satan is doomed to fail, and exists in eternal torment.

  According to this story, the rebel angels, banished to hell, are what we now refer to as demons. They retain their angelic powers, and follow a hierarchy, with Satan at the top, or, rather, bottom. As a way to avenge themselves against what they see as their conqueror, they seek to corrupt the works of God. Their goal is the ruin of souls, the destruction of Creation.

  Some see the existence of demons as part of a necessary step in our spiritual evolution. Eating the fruit of the forbidden tree gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, and the ability to choose between them. As opposed to already accepting God, we each must find our way back to the divine.

  Chapter 13

  Blindsided in Elizabethtown

  I’ll get them all.

  To restate the obvious from the previous chapter, I didn’t consider the Elizabethtown haunting demonic in any way. Everything the client, Jodi, described sounded light. She and her son heard footsteps and voices at night. They’d seen a couch pillow that rose as if someone had been sitting on it. Jodi sometimes felt as if she were being touched by an unseen presence. She’d also seen a purple x hanging in the air. It all seemed easily explainable. The footsteps could be the house settling, the voices could mean anything, pillows sometimes pop up like that when the heat goes on, and the x could have been some sort of optical quirk. Once I knew we couldn’t use the trademarked doll, I was concerned that the episode wouldn’t be very good. Production agreed.

  But nothing in Elizabethtown turned out the way any of us expected.

  “The Name” wound up being one of the most frenetic, convoluted investigations I’d ever been on. The time line is jumbled, partly due to a heroically impressive effort on the part of the editors to squeeze more than forty-two hours of video into twenty-two minutes and still tell an engaging, coherent story, and partly because the case was completed in two sessions. I’ll try to sort it all out as we go along.

  Our first shoot was the briefing, done in the PRS office. Ryan Heiser was there as well as our regulars. I ran through the few details I knew at the time. Single mother, Jodi, and her teen son, Nate, had moved into a house in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and said they instantly started having experiences. Jodi described herself as being raised Catholic, but no longer practiced. She worked as a forensic accountant, someone who prepares books for use in court cases. She was very tight-lipped about her work for legal reasons.

  During the drive, after I’d seen the name B— in the local paper, I received a call from Jodi. She said she was having a fight with Nate. In the past she’d ended communication with both his biological and then his adoptive father, which had been difficult for him. Out of necessity the episode abbreviates these factors, making it seem as if these were the only two men in their lives recently, but Jodi also had a boyfriend. She told us that it was her recent problems with him that left Jodi and Nate at odds. Because the full story would have been too complicated to explain, the boyfriend appears only briefly in the episode, sitting around the dining room table. Blink and you’ll miss him.

  Once we arrived, Jamie and I interviewed the clients separately to give us a better sense of the family situation. First I spoke with her boyfriend, who felt that the paranormal phenomena were making Jodi erratic, affecting their relationship. He said she’d kick him out, and then invite him back, leaving him feeling used. At first I felt sympathetic, but Jodi later told a different story, saying she’d asked him to leave for other reasons. I don’t know what was true, but it did point to the sort of excess emotional energy that so often surrounds activity.

  Meanwhile, Jodi spoke with Jamie about her divorce five years prior, and how difficult it was being a single parent. She talked more specifically about the activity, too, stressing how often they heard footsteps.

  We also learned that her grandmother, who was in her eighties, had lived in the house the first week and seemed to have some encounters of her own. According to Jodi, she claimed to see two small children, girls, who would pull at her. Jodi said the activity upset her grandmother. In fact, it was one of the reasons the grandmother left to live in a home. When asked, Jodi explained that her greatest fear now was that if what was going on was real, it might hurt her son.

  Nate was fourteen, but well-spoken and forthcoming with his feelings. “I don’t really have a father figure right now,” he said. “Even if it’s not [my mother’s] fault, I feel like there’s something inside me blaming her.”

  I don’t usually get involved with these situations; it’s not why we’re there, or what we do, but I felt like I understood where Nate was coming from. Though my father stayed in my life, my parents’ marriage ended very, very badly and I’d grown up feeling stuck in the middle of someone else’s failed relationship.

  There were times I’d have a fairly normal fight with my mother over something stupid, but it would boil over, and I’d end up accusing her of driving my father away. The feelings were bottled up, and when I was younger they erupted at inappropriate moments. Nate reminded me of that. He said he would get angry and punch walls, or claim his mom drove his father away, that sort of thing.

  I remember trying to give him some advice, but I have no idea if it helped any.

  Nate also talked about his paranormal experiences. “I’ll just be looking out the front door, and I’ll feel like someone is standing behind me, or has a hand on my shoulder.”

  I still considered the activity light, but during my interview with Jodi I began to notice things. At one point, she became visibly uncomfortable and said she was feeling cold. Since she’d reported feeling touched, I asked if she felt that way at that moment.

  She nodded vigorously. “On my back.”

  At that moment, I felt that something strange was going on. The touching and the cold were signs there might be a connection betwe
en her and whatever was going on in the house, especially if this thing was bold enough to be doing it during an interview. There was something about the way she carried herself that made me worry she had experienced more than she was saying. At the same time, I was aware that I’d been thinking so much about Teena’s problems in Syracuse my interest in that case could have been biasing me.

  I did try to follow up by pointedly asking if the spirit had done anything else. She didn’t answer. She just looked at me kind of funny.

  “Okay, we’ll come back to that,” I said.

  Then she showed me some crystals she’d found on the property, thinking they were peculiar and possibly related. I had Eilfie take a look at them, but nothing came of it. Some may have been broken glass, the sort found in cheap landfills used in construction. I also asked about the previous owner of the house, but at that point, she didn’t answer.

  By the end of the interview, my sense that there was something she wasn’t saying was stronger. So I asked again if there was anything else.

  “No, no,” she insisted. “That’s it.”

  Right after we ended, though, she suddenly said, “I have something I forgot to show you . . .”

  She pulled out a copy of a newspaper article, said the previous owner had given it to her, and handed it to me. The headline read:

  SIX SILENCED BY SLAYER, ONE OF CLASSIC MURDER STORIES.

  PARENTS AND FOUR OF EIGHT CHILDREN WIPED OUT 52 YEARS AGO.

  At that moment, despite whatever else Jodi may have been afraid to discuss, I was convinced I’d been set up. A paranormal investigator is at her home and she forgot about a mass murder? How was that possible? The only thing I could think of was that she’d been coached, that production, worried the episode might be boring, had stepped over the line and asked her to spring this on me while the cameras were running, to create some drama.