Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown

by Stefan Petrucha

  Was this another animal victim of Margaret and her dog-killing boyfriend? There was no way to know. The mystery of this place just kept getting deeper.

  That night, there was one major experience that didn’t make it into the episode, basically because no one was awake for it except me. As usual, the team slept at the house that night. After the film crew took the lights and left, the desolation and the dark atmosphere really sank in. I remember thinking that staying might end up being something I’d regret.

  Unlived in for so long, the house had no food, so we decided to get some snacks. To give you a sense of how isolated the house was, we had to drive thirty minutes just to reach a gas station. When we came back we stayed together on the second floor. We put two mattresses together with three blankets so we were literally sharing the sleeping space. We played cards and talked. Around 1:00 or 1:30 I crashed on the bed and passed out. The others had on a radio and listened to music as I fell asleep.

  I don’t remember if I was dreaming anything, but a sound, like an audience’s laughter, but loud, woke me. With my eyes still closed, I was sure it was the team, still playing cards, or the sound of their radio, but when I opened my eyes, it was dark. The radio was off and everyone was asleep.

  I looked at the clock on my cell phone: 3:00 A.M. on the dot. All of a sudden, I heard shuffling downstairs. I had “that” feeling, as if I were being watched. It was a particularly strong, uncomfortable, intimidating feeling.

  I considered waking everyone, but took this as a challenge. After “The Name,” I decided I wouldn’t let my fear get the best of me. I could always shout if something happened. So I got up to investigate.

  As I leaned over the stairs I could see down into the first floor kitchen. There was a light we’d left on below. Near that I saw a moving shadow.

  That really freaked me out, but I walked down. As I made my way down the steps, I was thinking it could be an animal, a ghost, or possibly an intruder. Looking back, it could have been both. I didn’t see anything, and didn’t know exactly where the shuffling had come from, so I checked around. The doors were all locked, the windows all closed. All the while, my instincts were on fire, telling me something was watching.

  The sound came again. It was from behind me, in the kitchen. It sounded like one of Sybil’s boxes was being dragged across the floor. When I went there to check it out, I heard it again, only now it was coming from the living room. It was a game I’d been stuck in before, as if something was teasing me, leading me back and forth just to scare me. And it was working. The feeling of being watched kept growing until it became overpowering. I’d experienced presences, but this was one of the strongest.

  My fear was about to get the best of me. I was ready to run. I was ready to pack up and leave. But I didn’t want to give in, and instead became defiant.

  “You’re not scaring me,” I said to the dark.

  I recited the St. Michael prayer. Saying it again, I walked around the room.

  “You will stay away from me,” I said under my breath. “You’re not going to come near me. You’re not going to drive me out of this house. You tried and you failed. Do not intimidate me or I will get rid of you.”

  The more I talked, the more pissed off I got. In a way this was the fruition of my efforts during our last demonic case. I’d made a decision, and now I wasn’t going to quit. I wasn’t going to give in.

  Finally, the feeling lifted. I had the sense that whatever it was had backed off. I went upstairs and back to sleep. When I woke up, it was morning.

  No one else had an experience that night. Looking back, I wonder if I should’ve woken my team, but my gut tells me that the experience wouldn’t have happened if I had. There are some things you just have to face alone at night.

  I wasn’t thinking this haunting was demonic, per se, but I did believe at the time that this sort of presence was evil, so that’s how I reacted. In the years since, I’ve come to think I could be wrong about that. It’s possible that when you’re around any spirit or sensing anything that you can’t see, the mind automatically interprets that as a threat. These days I try to take a more curious attitude.

  Having found one body, the next day I had everyone spread out and dig at the other stone piles. We got a little trigger happy and started with the bigger stone piles, figuring maybe there’s something bigger buried there, but we didn’t find anything. There were many piles we never got to, but we were running out of time and had to move on.

  Back when we shot “The Devil in Syracuse” and “The Name,” I’d dropped by a Catholic store and bought a book with prayers for all occasions. It came in handy here. As part of the closing for the case, I read a prayer for animals from it:

  God, loving creator of all life,

  Help us to treat with compassion the living creatures entrusted to our care

  May they never be subjected to cruelty or neglect

  So that through them we come to a greater appreciation

  Of your glory and creation. Amen.

  With Lorraine’s help we buried blessed medals on the four corners of the property. Afterward, we went into the house. Sybil felt it was cleaner, lighter. She was laughing. She was back in the house. Lucy was with her, and now roaming about much more freely. Over the closing credits, there’s footage of the dog whisperer walking Lucy around on the second floor.

  Sybil ended up keeping the property. For a while, she promoted it as a house that appeared on Paranormal State, renting it to curious ghost seekers. At the time of this writing she’s been in touch recently and said she was living in the house and doing fine.

  Also, as I mentioned, meeting a dog whisperer created an interesting opportunity. I invited the dog whisperer to the house to meet Lucy. She worked with her awhile, started praising her, conditioning her, and so on. Much in the same way we try to empower the clients to confront whatever’s haunting them, the dog whisperer worked to empower Lucy.

  Soon she was able to bring Lucy into the house. The dog was clearly nervous about it (and she hadn’t been the only dog with that issue), but in she went. Even then, Lucy remained very hesitant about the second floor, but with the dog whisperer, in time, she even went there.

  The whisperer believed that at least part of the reason for Lucy’s refusal to enter could have been the dog’s extreme sensitivity to her owner’s emotional state. This is a common characteristic in dogs, and Lucy could have been sensing and reacting to Sybil’s fear.

  It was fascinating, but I don’t think that proved anything one way or the other about the house. It does call attention to the fact that even with dogs there’s an emotional aspect to activity.

  After leaving Maine and returning to State College, both Chip and I had two very bizarre experiences. Not even a week after being back, my dog, Xander, who has never jumped into our inground pool unaccompanied (he’s a little chicken), was suddenly found out in the backyard, caught in the pool cover. He had been trying to get out, but to no avail. By the time we realized he was no longer in the house and found him out back, he was exhausted. I’m not saying this is necessarily paranormal, but it is a bizarre coincidence. Had I not found him so soon, I shudder to think what would’ve happened.

  Chip, on the other hand, claimed he was on the phone when suddenly all of his dogs went crazy. They started to fight. In the process of trying to break it up, he was scratched and bitten. “That has NEVER happened in all my years of having them,” he said with bewilderment. Later that night, he awoke to a loud pounding on his walls, as if someone was beating their hand against the wall. He looked at the clock. It was 3:00 A.M. Both of our experiences took place on the same day.

  With all the wild experiences and the history behind that place, this is one case I look back on and feel that we definitely missed something. If we ever went back, I’d love to dig up more of the rock piles, do some more historical research, and try to find out more about Margaret and her strange friend who used to kill dogs with a stick.

  Sometimes, th
ough, you have to live with not knowing.

  TRANCE CHANNELING

  Channeling is a form of mediumship that gained popularity in the second half of the twentieth century. With it, psychics claim to become the vessels for spirits, angels, alien entities, and transcendent beings from other dimensions, who speak through them offering everything from advice to apocalyptic warnings.

  Prior to the rise of the concept, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), while trying to cure his chronic laryngitis through hypnosis, would go into trances during which he referred to himself in the plural, as “we.” His laryngitis disappeared and he soon began channeling health cures and a history of the lost continent of Atlantis. Though a devout Christian, he’s considered by some to be one of the founders of the New Age movement.

  J. Z. Knight, another famous channeler, claims to leave her body while the spirit of Ramtha, a 36,000-year-old entity, speaks through her. Ramtha said he was originally a warrior from another lost continent, Lemuria, which once did battle with Atlantis. Through Knight, Ramtha teaches enlightenment and has written a series of books.

  ANIMAL SACRIFICE

  Animal sacrifice is one of the oldest methods of attempting to appease gods or spirit forces. It has appeared in practically every culture, in the Old Testament, and it still exists.

  In Santeria, for instance, today, the blood of the sacrificed animal is thought to contain life energy. Some villages in Greece currently sacrifice animals to Orthodox saints in a practice known as kourbània. It is thought to be a holdover from pre-Christian beliefs. It is also used in various black magic rituals.

  Human sacrifice has also taken place throughout history. Likewise, it still occurs in remote parts of India and sub-Saharan Africa. It is not condoned in any country and is treated as murder.

  Chapter 18

  I Open a Portal

  It doesn’t have a human face.

  Directly after “Pet Cemetery” we went to our next case. With our new schedule, we were doubling up on cases, shooting two back-to-back, taking a break, then shooting the next two. Though we only had six more episodes to do, between UNIV-CON, the series premiere, and promotion for both, a lot was coming up.

  This time we found our client through our previous client. While in Maine, we asked Sybil if she knew anyone else who’d been experiencing activity. She told us about a woman she worked with as a nurse, Georgia Poole. Georgia was single and had lived in the town of Chapley for about ten years in the same house with her daughter, Katie. There’d been activity from the beginning, but more recently, Katie claimed she’d been attacked by a thing she described as half human, half animal. Georgia was concerned for her daughter and we’d never dealt with this sort of creature on the show before, so it was a perfect fit.

  The briefing was again held in the Parsons Memorial Library. This time Heather made it, but Katrina had to go back to Penn State to get some of her schoolwork done. As I explain in the episode, which would come to be called “Shape Shifter,” Georgia and her daughter often heard strange noises, unexplained growls. More interestingly, one night Katie said she heard the fluttering of wings, and then felt something on top of her pinning her down, a squat animal-thing.

  Georgia had seen something herself once, but unlike what Katie experienced, she saw a tall, deformed shadow figure. They were both petrified, so our main concern was trying to get rid of whatever was there so they could get on with their lives.

  Katie was now a college freshman, but she took off from school for the shoot. That made Georgia worry that she’d put her daughter in danger by bringing her back. From the moment we arrived Georgia struck me as very on edge. While it’s natural for people to be a little tense when we show up with the cameras and the crew, this seemed to go beyond that. It was clear it was the house and her fears for her daughter’s safety. Georgia had been feeling the presence more and more, and feared that this thing, whatever it was, was getting bigger and bigger. Worse, at 7:30 that morning Katie had experienced another attack.

  Katie, a very athletic, gorgeous girl, wasn’t quite as nervous as her mom. She told me about her own experiences, saying that for years, she’d sometimes hear someone call her name. As she slept, she heard a sound like an animal scratching near her head. The attack that morning was more extreme.

  “I heard a huge wind,” she said. “Something jumped on the foot of my bed, and slowly crawled on top of my feet, along my body, until it was staring at me. I could feel it breathing hot, hot, hot, awful air right on my neck . . .”

  The creature growled. Katie described the noise it made as being somewhere between a cat’s hiss and a rattlesnake. It wasn’t huge, maybe four feet tall, about the size of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Katie had seen it previously, but generally out of the corner of her eye.

  It sounded as if it might be sleep paralysis. A lot of the signs were present. I asked Katie if she tended to see this thing when she was stressed or tired, but couldn’t find any correlation.

  I also asked about any personal trauma they may have experienced. I never had the sense they were keeping secrets. To make sure, though, I also spoke to them privately. I was comfortable there wasn’t anything else major going on, beyond the fact that Georgia, of course, was concerned for her daughter.

  As Georgia put it, “She’s my baby.”

  Georgia was single and seemed very connected to her daughter. Katie’s recent move to college was big for both of them, and I do think that may have had a lot to do with aggravating the haunting. And there was one important thing that didn’t fit in with sleep paralysis. Katie’s childhood friend Chris had stayed over, and also saw the creature.

  Speaking in a low, frightened voice, Chris managed to give me the fullest description: “It doesn’t have a human face. It’s got really thin lips that are red in color, like there’s a red strip. Its nose isn’t a full nose. It’s like a strip of red. It’s like the nose stopped growing. It had whitish skin and the teeth are narrow and pointy. It’s the scariest thing you’ll ever see.”

  Unless it was hysteria, or Chris was imaginative, it sounded legitimate.

  I also considered the possibility the activity was related to some surrounding cemeteries. The house was in an area with a lot of old graveyards that aren’t fenced off or cared for.

  While staying at the hotel between shoots, I’d go for a run down a road between two woods and think about the case. Right on the side of the road, I’d see a cemetery. It started out as a couple of tombstones, and then there were maybe twenty, very old, possibly from colonial times.

  At the same time, this sort of creature attack isn’t characteristic of a haunting. If something’s assaulting the client this way, it’s generally not a human spirit. Yet, given the descriptions, I didn’t consider it demonic. If anything, it seemed outside the family’s, or my own, cultural experience.

  The possibility that this was some form of nature spirit was something the clients had already considered. They’d worked with a Native American spiritual leader, Brent Allaire, who’d tried a house cleansing that apparently didn’t work.

  Research is always important, but learning anything about the history of this property was particularly difficult. Chapley wasn’t a sprawling city with historical societies or many neighbors to interview. It was a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t even any official town where the documents were kept. We had to go to the next town over, about twenty minutes away, for any information.

  There, though, Eilfie managed to find a deed for the land dated 1660. It stated that a John Henderson and John Scadlocke bought the property from a Native American named Segeweha. That name is common to a tribe called the Almouchiquois that once lived in the area. They paid for the land with very little money and some supplies. Back then there was plenty of land, so many Native Americans figured they’d just move to the next spot, until one day they had nowhere else to go.

  Given this background, the Native American spirit theory began to make more sense. Still, there was no spec
ific indigenous myth we knew of that matched the experiences Georgia and Katie described. There was the wendigo and the trickster, and we discussed both, but neither fit.

  Hoping to learn more, I asked Brent, a member of the local Penobscot tribe, to return. Like the Almouchiquois, the Penobscot were related to the larger Algonquin tribe, sharing language and culture. I don’t think Brent had a title, per se, but he and his people were very open to spirits.

  After arriving, he described his belief that something had been done on Georgia’s property a long time ago that angered the spirits. As he put it, “The ground is unhappy.”

  He felt he’d already pinpointed the source of the problem as a pile of stones in the backyard about a hundred feet from the house. When we examined them, they seemed to me just a pile of rocks, not huge or in a special pattern. We’d just dug up a lot of rocks in “Pet Cemetery,” with interesting results, so I asked Brent what would happen if I disturbed them.

  “It would be extremely dangerous,” he said. “You’ve got good and bad down there and you’ve got to know which one you’re dealing with. They will try to kill you.”

  It was a pretty strong warning. Since Brent’s first effort hadn’t ended the activity, he planned to return the next day with a tribal elder. Though I didn’t know the details, I understood that together they would perform a more complete cleansing.

  Meanwhile, Chip arrived for the psychic walk-through. I believe this is one of the first episodes where I “officially” ask if he knows anything about the case. That’s now a standard part of the show, like a little oath. If memory serves, it came up because we’d all been thinking more about our investigatory process. There are times when Chip has been so accurate that I worry he’d overheard something or read a local article. So I started giving him this one chance to come clean.