One guy asked if this was really based on the PRS team “because you are all, coincidentally, very attractive.”
I think people were expecting something more like Ghost Hunters, which at the time was the only major ghost reality show out there. It enjoyed three years of being the only outlet for those interested in the paranormal, but that was about to change. We were going for something different. I explained that finding evidence was only part of what we were about, that the story we wanted to tell also included the client. Still, I could see where someone watching “The Name” might think the whole series was about demons. It was one of our best, but looking back, I wonder if we should have shown something simpler first, more direct, like “Beer, Wine & Spirits” or “Pet Cemetery.” Viewers may have had an easier time appreciating “The Name” if they’d known more about where we were coming from.
At the same time, moving forward, I took the comments to heart. For the last four episodes we became more focused on delivering certain things. We tried harder to bring more evidence in, and to experiment more, by using Frank’s Box (see sidebar on page 353) in our final episode, “Asylum,” for instance. There’s always room for improvement, and now that we had a small sense of what audience reaction might be like, we could look at things from a new perspective.
Chapter 20
Sickness and Suicide
I went out to get it and his skull was still in it.
We went into our next case, which would eventually be called “Requiem,” after the feedback from UNIV-CON. The case itself came to us sometime in September 2007, when we received an e-mail from a college student named Kristy Warren. Her family had moved into their house in Morris, Pennsylvania, about eight years ago. That was the summer before Kristy entered third grade, making her about seven years old at the time, not far from the age I was when I had my first experiences.
She said her experiences centered on her bed, where she’d feel as if someone were there, pushing up and down on the mattress. The problems continued through the years, and more recently she’d said she’d felt icy sensations on her feet, and, most upsetting, a hand across her throat. I knew from her e-mails that a previous owner, after discovering he’d had Alzheimer’s, had committed suicide on the property. There were also rumors that years ago a boy had died in the house.
As a possible multiple haunting, with one of the spirits conceivably experiencing a mental disease, the case sounded interesting and different. After the mess with “Freshman Fear,” though, I was very hesitant about inquiries from younger people.
Kristy herself won everyone over. Her e-mail was thoughtful and well-written and when we spoke, she came across as intelligent and together. The more I found out, the stronger that impression became. She was well respected at her college and her professors thought highly of her. She also didn’t have a huge interest in the paranormal. She wasn’t out investigating haunted houses or reading a lot on the subject, meaning she was less likely to have a bias about what was happening to her. We were also the first investigators she’d contacted and it was clear how honestly upset she was. Once I realized she was serious about the commitment, and unlikely to be making things up, I decided this was worth getting involved in.
The briefing was shot at Pizza Hut—where we’ve gone a few times over the years. As we enjoyed our stuffed pepperoni and Serg dipped into his ranch sauce, I delivered the basics. Aside from the shaking bed, Kristy reported having experiences in a barn on the property. Our goal would be, as it often is, to try to find the source of the haunting and, if it was paranormal, to see if we could get it to leave.
The first day we made the drive and arrived at a nice neighborhood. Until now, many of our cases involved working-class people, but the Warrens were a comfortable upper-middle-class family. Paranormal activity cuts across all socioeconomic boundaries and I was happy to have a chance to show that here.
Much as she’d been in her e-mail and on the phone, Kristy came across as an intelligent, concerned person who was having upsetting experiences. As I interviewed her, she described feeling a “black hand” that touched her throat. Interestingly, she said it didn’t choke her, or do anything aggressive, but simply slid across her neck.
With the activity having gone on for so much of her life, over the years her parents had taken her to doctors, to see if she was having panic attacks, but that was ruled out. She also went to a therapist, to see if she was having trouble adjusting to the house, but that didn’t seem to be the issue either. Kristy didn’t strike me as an anxious person. The tension she expressed seemed centered on finding a resolution. Having tried so hard and so long to find answers, she hoped we could uncover some.
Her parents, Susan and Glen, hadn’t had the same sorts of major experiences themselves, but they told us they’d seen and heard enough to make me think a true haunting was plausible. In this case, I felt that their personal beliefs about the paranormal were irrelevant to them. Kristy had recently moved out to live at college, and their feeling seemed to be “Let’s see what’s wrong, because we care about Kristy and want her to be able to come home and feel comfortable.”
As part of the house tour, they took me out to the barn, where the previous owner had shot himself. Though the house was supposedly haunted, too, the barn had a very different feeling. I didn’t sense anything strongly, like I did in “Pet Cemetery,” but it felt uneven, as if something wasn’t quite right.
Kristy’s bedroom was the source of most of the activity, but she didn’t like even being in the barn. She said that whenever she had to go there, she wouldn’t stay long. It was there too that her mother, Susan, once had a minor experience. While sorting some cans, she said she heard a noise. She turned and saw a black blur, followed by what sounded like a gasp, or some sort of labored breathing.
As for the history of the property, Glen and Susan had learned about the suicide shortly after moving in but kept it from Kristy, who was very young at the time. The former owner, Jim Barnes Jr., had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and, having seen his father go through the stages of the disease, killed himself. After he died, his wife sold the property and ended up moving out of state.
As Kristy got older her parents did tell her the story. When she heard about it, she told us she connected it to the experiences she was having and worried that Jim Barnes’s spirit was lingering. She was afraid he felt there were “people in his house that shouldn’t be.”
As she talked with me about this, she became very emotional. She said she hated the idea someone might feel as if they didn’t belong in their own home. She felt that way herself at times, and wondered if she’d been picking up on his energy.
What she said hit on a big issue in our investigations. Feeling like a stranger in your own home is the major reason many of my clients feel victimized. I reassured her, explaining I didn’t think she’d done anything wrong. If Jim Barnes’s spirit was bothering her, he was the one intruding.
Had Kristy had any experiences away from home I’d have been more concerned about what sort of haunting this was, but the phenomena presented as localized. Her recent move to college did seem linked to an increase in the activity but it was still something she experienced only when she returned home.
I felt there were a number of possible explanations. The spirit may have sensed the change in the household, or could have been using the excess energy that the change generated. I suspect that anyone who’s moved away from home and then returned has that odd feeling: This is my room, but it’s not. I’m living somewhere else now. It’s the sort of emotional shift I believe hauntings thrive on. It’s also possible Kristy was correct, that her feelings about being a stranger were reflected by a spirit that felt invaded itself.
With the barn, and a large house to deal with, setting up for Dead Time was a challenge technically. We’d improved our technique and were pushing ourselves more for these episodes in several ways.
For instance, before the show ever began, we’d have weeks to analyze any ev
idence we gathered. Now, to get the analysis in the episode, we had to do it on the fly, so we now developed an entirely new system for capturing and reviewing data. The system Serg designed could measure EMF and temperature fluctuations through different nodes that were wired back to a central hub. Also, instead of the six monitors we had in season one, we now had twelve, not to mention better cameras, audio recorders, and night-vision equipment.
But this was the first case in which we had to cover such a large area of ground. We had to run cables not just inside the house, but also outside to the barn, and we were working with technology that was still pretty new to us.
Despite our new effort to focus on evidence, Dead Time that first night was probably the deadest of the season. All our efforts to contact Jim Barnes were uneventful. It made me question whether or not the activity was paranormal.
It’s not to say I felt we were being tricked. Here, given the deaths on the property, the Warrens had good reason to believe something was going on. If anything, since we hadn’t experienced any activity, I considered it possible they were misinterpreting or subconsciously overhyping their experiences. We ended Dead Time with nothing to show for it.
Forty minutes later, a very exhausted Chip arrived for the psychic walk-through. He’d been doing a series of college lectures and this case occurred right between two appearances for him. In the edited episode, he lies down in Kristy’s bed and feels as if something is above him. He also picks up on “a child who died” and something that “looks in through the window.” In the barn he detects a nastier presence, but it dodges him.
“It doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. It wants you to keep the fuck away from this place,” Chip said. “He’s being invaded. You’re walking on what he considers his property. Leave it alone. Get out.”
I pressed him on how this person died, but apparently the spirit didn’t want to say. “Fuck with me and I’ll fuck with you. He doesn’t care who’s here. He just wants to be left alone. He doesn’t do anything that’s that bad.”
When I pressed him further, Chip said, “You said something about hand to the throat? That wasn’t him. I really think that’s the kid.”
To be fair, while Chip hit on some things, this was also the first time, in my experience, he was completely off on some big issues. The episode doesn’t show how he felt the barn entity was a presence from thousands of years ago. More important, to my mind, he never picked up on Jim Barnes’s suicide.
I don’t necessarily bring this up to discredit Chip in any way. He’d already blown me away on more than one occasion. And there are those viewers who rightly ask, “Why is Chip always right? No one is right all the time.” It makes some think we’re feeding him information. The truth is, on occasion he is very off. I notice that he tends to be inaccurate, especially when he’s tired. Is that a direct correlation? I don’t know. To me, those mistakes are part of what makes him legitimate.
Meanwhile, for day two, I decided we should focus on the historical aspect, to see what we could uncover about the deaths. Katrina and I interviewed two neighbors, Raymond and Peggy Butters, who knew Jim Barnes Jr. They remembered him as a good friend, always ready to help. While nothing they said matched the angry cursing figure Chip sensed, it’s possible the rage was related to the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and the fear that must have brought with it.
The Butters remembered Jim as a very respectable man, someone who was about honor. Raymond became quite emotional as he talked about it. Neither knew about the Alzheimer’s diagnosis at the time of his death. They had a police scanner in their home and heard the call come through. Raymond felt that Jim had killed himself so he wouldn’t be a burden to his wife. They were both impressed with her strength in moving on after the tragedy.
I asked about the other possible spirit, the child who’d supposedly died in the house. Peggy not only confirmed the rumor, she told us the child was named Walter. She even put us in touch with his sister, Alma Jean Mosier, who was living nearby.
With that productive interview complete, for our next step, Katrina interviewed Alma Jean. The fourth of nine children, she told us that her family had lived in the house nearly six decades, from 1921 to 1984. Walter was an older brother. He’d suffered from croup and died at the age of eleven.
Croup can be a very serious, sometimes fatal respiratory disease involving blockage of the larynx. Interestingly, Kristy’s mother, Susan, described what she heard in the barn as labored breathing. I’d been thinking of that as Jim’s territory, but who’s to say Walter’s spirit hadn’t followed her out there that day?
Alma Jean showed us an old black-and-white photo of her brother. That image of Walter is very evocative, and, frankly, unsettling. His face seemed malformed, parts of his skull swollen. It’s seems he suffered from ailments aside from croup, but it was so long ago, his doctors were likely only guessing at what was wrong. In one of a few coincidences that occurred during this case, Alma told us that Walter passed away at 3:00 A.M., Dead Time.
Spirits often remember houses not as they are, but as they were at the time they’d lived in it, so I invited Alma back to describe what it looked like when she was growing up. She pointed out an area now near the kitchen and said that was where an old potbellied stove once sat, near the bed Walter slept in the night he died.
Having a stronger bead on Walter, we also wanted to continue researching our other spirit, Jim Barnes Jr. I called his widow, Ruth Anne, and she kindly agreed to talk to me about that sad day. She told me they’d moved into the house in 1987, after Jim had retired from the army. About five years later, he was diagnosed. Naturally, they were both depressed by the news, but Jim’s death occurred too suddenly for them to seek any counseling.
“He didn’t wait around for that,” Ruth Anne explained.
She said there wasn’t any sign he was planning to take his own life. That morning, he’d made breakfast for her before she left for work. When she came home from her shift that day, she was surprised to see Jim’s beret in the driveway.
“I went out to get it and his skull was still in it,” she said.
In the barn, she found his corpse, still warm. Apparently the shotgun blast had carried his beret all the way out to the driveway.
There was no way to know if his death was planned or spur-of-the-moment. She felt there wasn’t anything to suggest he was suicidal for a long period of time.
Two big revelations came out during that interview. There was no crime-scene cleanup facility in the area, so while the authorities took the body away there was brain matter left lying around, as well as the hat with a piece of Jim’s skull. As part of her own cleanup, Ruth Anne buried it. It was still there, as far as anyone knew, on the right side of the driveway, near the path to the barn.
The Warrens knew about the death of Jim Barnes Jr., but they had no idea that part of his body was buried on the property. That was a situation we hadn’t dealt with since the urn in “Cemetery.”
In a second surprise, Ruth Anne told us that the day we interviewed her was the anniversary of Jim’s suicide. He had died fifteen years before to the day.
A coincidence? We didn’t plan it, but as Chip later said, “Maybe it planned you.” It certainly was something I should’ve noticed sooner. Once we started compiling articles about Jim, the death date was right there in my face. That sort of thing reminds me how much more I, and everyone else on the team, can do to pay attention. The small details we tend to miss are sometimes the most important.
Since Jim Barnes had Alzheimer’s, it raised the question of whether his spirit might believe and act as if it had the disease as well. To explore the issue, I interviewed a neuroscientist specializing in the subject and asked about the psychological and emotional makeup of someone who has Alzheimer’s. I wondered if it was possible a spirit might somehow still have the disease, or at least behave as if it did. The neuroscientist felt that once you accept the possibility there are spirits—then, yes, it was possible.
Som
e theorize that spirits, especially those that die suddenly, continue to assume things are as they were when they were alive. So, Jim’s concern about his disease may have been part of what was keeping him there.
Since this seemed to be a multiple haunting, I also want to point out that there’s evidence and testimony from many cases suggesting it’s possible for spirits to be aware of one another, even if they’re from different eras. During psychic or EVP sessions, sometimes one spirit names the others. On the flip side, it seems that in some cases one spirit has no idea the others exist. I think that’s fascinating.
That night, when we went into a second Dead Time, I was determined to try to make contact with both spirits. As I spoke, I tried to tell Jim, if he were present, that Alzheimer’s wasn’t something he had to worry about anymore.
Despite the quiet first night, our second session was much more active. Chip sensed Walter edging up to us, in the hall. I try to coax him in, but Chip said he was keeping his distance. Whenever Chip tried to approach, he sensed Walter move away. Serg reports that the door to our headquarters suddenly opened by itself, but on later inspection we were confident it was due to the wind.
Another interesting thing was the fact that Chip had been traveling with a friend, Patti Star, a ghost hunter. They’d been together on a college speaking tour, so she came along with him to the case. Patti claimed to have psychic intuition but didn’t consider herself a full-blown psychic.
During our second Dead Time, a thunderstorm rolled in. Patti was in a truck out in the back when she opened her eyes and saw a tree shaking from the wind. She said she saw a man standing there, holding on to the trunk, and later she pretty accurately described what Jim looked like.
She said he was swaying, rocking, and in her mind she heard him saying, “I did a bad thing. I did a bad thing.”
It’s possible Patti was exposed to some details of the case, but here was something to suggest that Jim’s spirit was remorseful over his suicide. When I heard about this, I wanted to ask Patti back for an interview, but she and Chip left pretty early the next morning.
Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown Page 27