Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown

by Stefan Petrucha

  The most exciting event during that Dead Time occurred when Chip announced that Jim Barnes Jr. would show himself in the barn. “Just watch, that’s what he says, just watch.”

  Then . . . bam, bam, bam, bam—four cameras malfunctioned, one after the other. First it was Kristy’s bedroom, then the kitchen area where Walter died, a second camera in Kristy’s bedroom, then the barn. These were all areas directly related to the activity.

  The cameras didn’t simply go black. Each image dimmed, as if the camera were losing power. Everything got darker until the screen was suddenly tinted a bloody red. Then, it blacked out for half a second. Three to five seconds later the cameras all returned to normal.

  There was no easy explanation. All our cameras pulled power from the same source, a cord that ran to the tech HQ computer. If the electricity had stopped or been interrupted, all the cameras should’ve been affected, but it was only four. It was something that’d never happened before, and to this day we have no idea what caused it.

  Having done all we could, by about 4:00 A.M. we brought the family back to the property, to share what we’d learned about Walter and Jim. Chip explained his sense that Walter was simply mischievous, that his actions were more playful than harmful. He told Kristy that it didn’t seem to him as though there was anything in the house out to get her.

  As for Jim Barnes, I considered exhuming the piece of skull and burying it with the rest of his remains, but it would have been too complicated. Not only did we not know exactly where it was, but the Warrens had expanded the width of the driveway, so the asphalt would have to be ripped up to get to it. With our limited time it seemed futile to even try.

  But I did want to honor Jim’s remains in some way, and possibly release him. So, I asked to have a memorial guard perform a military service for him on the property. I believe that service, coupled with our efforts to tell Jim he no longer had to worry about his disease helped set him at rest. Afterward, the activity in the barn stopped.

  As for Walter, I didn’t have a priest formally come in, but I gathered everyone for a small prayer where we asked him to move on. I also laid some blessed medallions around.

  A few weeks later, Kristy contacted me through Facebook to report she felt much better. A lot of her concern was that the spirit was angry, and Chip’s description of Walter set her mind at rest. The last I heard, Kristy still feels Walter around sometimes, but she is no longer afraid.

  SYNCHRONICITY

  Synchronicity is defined as two or more events that don’t seem to have any physical connection, but occur in a manner that seems meaningful. You think of a friend, the phone rings, and it’s them.

  Throughout the series, we’ve encountered a shocking number of synchronicities, such as in this episode, where we happen to arrive on the anniversary of a suicide. I think it’s happened at least half a dozen times in the first season alone.

  I don’t have an explanation, just some vague thoughts. We relive anniversaries all the time. There’s an energy and concentration around dates that are important to us. People tend to die near their birthdays, for instance. A 1992 study of nearly three million people showed that women are more likely to die in the week following their birthdays than in any other week of the year, while male deaths peak shortly before their birthdays. So, it’d make sense for a spirit to become more active near such a date.

  If the case has already been given to me, if PRS is aware of it, the increased activity would draw our attention to it. Of course, I’d want to investigate while the spirit was active.

  In that sense, it might be like the butterfly effect, the theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado a thousand miles away. But it’s always surprising and often mysterious the way things wind up being interconnected.

  Chapter 21

  I Don’t Believe

  If a priest was standing here and it did that, he’d take it as a sign. I’m sure.

  As with some of our other cases, Peg Knickerbocker got in touch with us through the publicity and articles we’d circulated back around Halloween. She and her husband, Myrle, owned a 131-year-old building in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and ever since they’d bought the place they’d been experiencing activity.

  I knew from the start that Peg welcomed psychics and paranormal investigators to her hotel. The spirits were part of the draw for customers. Since it was evident that Peg was okay with publicity, I did worry about the legitimacy of the haunting, that it might be a stunt. In general, though, PRS doesn’t mind doing a case just because a client wants publicity. We do want to be sure that (1) the client genuinely believes in the phenomena and, (2) that there’s some sort of scientific or ethical merit to doing the case.

  We always have an eye to our overarching goals of furthering the understanding of paranormal phenomena and helping clients, but sometimes an investigation can be more of a fun exercise for the group, like “Mothman.” If, in the process, we can document evidence or improve our technique, then I feel there’s merit in it. Here, the Knickerbocker Hotel seemed like a cool, creepy location. I explored further, wanting to know how active the haunting was and so on.

  Through our preinvestigation and research, I became more dubious about the claims. Aside from all the psychics and investigators who had visited, I also saw a very hokey brochure advertising the spirits in a way that fed my doubts. I didn’t think the client was lying, but rather that, wrapped up in the atmosphere and her own beliefs, she might be misinterpreting natural events.

  When Peg spoke over the phone, even in initially talking to the producers, she seemed very careful about what she said, and kind of passive. I knew, for instance, that there’d been some deaths and injuries involving people close to Peg who’d been at the hotel, but she didn’t want to talk about that directly. She did report that there was a particular bedroom where she wouldn’t stay because she’d wake up feeling choked. Apparently more than one person had seen apparitions and they had mediums over regularly to perform séances.

  I try to start out open-minded, but sometimes I get warning signs that I don’t want to ignore either. As I started theorizing with the others about possible natural explanations, I began to worry that the case could be a disaster—a situation where the client was so set on believing in the ghosts, that there’d be no reasoning with her.

  When we headed to Linesville, and held our briefing on the first floor of a local historical building, I was already taking a slightly more skeptical approach than usual.

  “I definitely do want to pursue debunking some of this stuff,” I said. “As well as trying to give the clients the benefit of the doubt that maybe what they’re experiencing is real.”

  To me, if we’re thinking it isn’t paranormal, that’s a legitimate part of the process, too.

  The Knickerbocker Hotel is a three-story building on the corner of a busy street. The current business was established by Peg and Myrle in 2005. During our tour, she told us it was built in 1882 by Milo Arnold, and originally called the Arnold House.

  Though it was called a hotel, it was set up more as an event space for reunions, meetings, paranormal groups that would come to investigate, and that sort of thing. The rooms are mostly decorative. Peg said she wanted it to be a place where people could come and have their picture taken on the stairwell.

  “But who’s going to have their picture taken on the stairwell if someone is going to try to push you down it?” she asked. According to Peg, many people had felt something come from behind them while they were on the stairs and try to push them down. “That’s happened to my husband, my son-in-law, my daughter-in-law . . .”

  She also showed us the “choking room” where she’d woken up and felt unable to breathe.

  As I sat down to interview her, I kept in mind that she was, in a way, an entertainer, as a hostess for the hotel. I had the sense she felt as if she had to be engaging and entertaining for the camera.

  It was clear she loved the place, and they’d put a lot into pr
eserving it. It didn’t seem as important for their income as much as it was a labor of love. They may have lived there at some point, but at the time of our investigation they were living nearby.

  Peg told me there’d only been two séances at the hotel. The number seemed small, so I was concerned she might be misleading us. In the end I don’t think that was the case. Others interviewed for the case told us about séances there that Peg hadn’t been part of. There’d been so many groups and paranormal teams at the hotel, I don’t think she kept count or even registered it. My sense was that she was much too casual about it to keep track.

  Prior to our arrival, Peg specifically asked that we not bring up the deaths and injuries in her family. If the activity was real, though, that would likely be an important part of any emotional factor here, so I brought it up anyway.

  Peg, to her credit, responded. She told us there was a particular party they’d held in the hotel. “It was an anniversary party for my in-laws,” she explained. “We had a wonderful party. I looked and saw an image go through my kitchen. It was like a dark image. It was a frightening thing to me. I didn’t know what it was.”

  Her husband, Myrle, told me that within the next week or so, four or five major things happened among their family and friends. Peg’s father-in-law had a heart attack and had to go to the hospital. One of their guests had a brain aneurysm. Another relative fell down a staircase and died. A fourth person died within weeks of the party. It seems too much for concidence, but these were all older people, making it possible their suffering was just happenstance.

  Peg, though, told me she was worried it had something to do with her and the hotel. “I just started thinking, if there’s something here, did I bring it? Because I started seeing all these people that I love have all these horrible things going on in their lives.”

  Whatever else might be going on, I was convinced she was absolutely genuine about that fear and her beliefs. To try to set her mind at rest, I explained to her that it was extremely rare for someone to be physically hurt as the result of a haunting. There were usually some very bad phenomena associated with hauntings in those cases, not just a couple of knocking sounds or even a few apparitions. In my experience, here there wasn’t any connection likely. But Peg seemed convinced it was linked to the fact that they’d all been at the party.

  It was understandable. The thought that “I could have done this to them” can become so overpowering you don’t stop to think, “Well, they were all in my building because I know them all.” It’s hard to separate yourself from the underlying grief.

  I held a regroup with the team and shared my concerns about Peg’s emotional state. I was also worried that all the psychics might be provoking things, fanning the flames. Katrina brought up the notion that they might also be putting ideas in Peg’s head, as we’d seen in “Haunted School House.” One thing was clear: While none of us were sure there were spirits present, Peg was.

  I’d gotten in touch with some of the psychics who had previously been in the hotel, hoping to learn something more about the haunting, but here they only reinforced my bias. I’d asked one woman to come alone and conduct a séance for us on-camera, but she brought along a troop of followers, a group that seemed to hang on her every word.

  There was a séance held. We had recorders and a thermal camera running. At one point, a woman claimed she was feeling extremely cold on her right side, but the thermal cam showed her right side was hotter. In the end, nothing much else came of it, so it didn’t make the episode. It did add to my general feeling of doubt about the haunting.

  Part of the problem with the paranormal field is that because it has yet to be legitimized, or organized with any set of standards, it’s one of the few areas where any crazy or fraud can pronounce himself an expert. Without a standard, you have to rely on belief, which is what I feel Peg Knickerbocker was doing. While I do rely on my own faith, I don’t believe that anyone who walks up to me speaks for Jesus Christ just because they say so.

  Since I was worried that Peg’s conviction might interfere with the objectivity of the investigation, for the first night I asked that she not participate in Dead Time.

  Usually, we go into Dead Time with some sense of who we’re trying to contact. Here that just wasn’t the case. We didn’t discover much in the way of historical research, but not because we didn’t try. There were rumors the hotel was part of a train station where there was a fire, but we didn’t find much more.

  For Dead Time, Serg, Josh, and Heather handled tech. I thought about spending time near the staircase Peg had singled out, but the area was too noisy. Even though this was a big location, the place was very creaky and we needed quiet areas to pick up activity. Instead, I decided to move around, starting on the first floor with Heather, while Eilfie and Katrina were on the third floor, another active spot.

  As usual, we tried to communicate, particularly with the black cloud that appeared to Peg.

  In an unusual turn, Katrina and Eilfie heard a voice, very clearly. What made this particularly strange was the fact that Eilfie didn’t generally experience things. Some people do; some don’t. I often don’t have experiences when others do. Here what they both heard had the cadence of a small sentence, but they couldn’t make out any words.

  Not much was happening on the first floor, so Heather and I moved up to the second. I thought I heard a tapping in response to a question, but it was indistinct. Meanwhile, back on the third floor, Katrina was hearing the voice again, so Heather and I headed up there and we all tried to communicate.

  Yet again, Katrina heard something that sounded like a woman speaking, very nearby. I didn’t know what to make of it. It was one thing to go into a house I thought might be haunted and get something, but another when I didn’t think the house was haunted. Even crazier was that we were able to hear the voices on the audio recording.

  The next day, Josh and Serg presented the most distinct of the recordings. A voice, mumbling or speaking gibberish, could clearly be heard. It sounded to Katrina like the same voice, but fainter.

  “It was the same pitch, but what I heard last night was really, really loud,” she said.

  As I’ve mentioned, we’d experienced that before, hearing things loudly only to have the tape either not pick it up, or pick it up faintly. There are two theories I know about why that happens. The first is that the spirits are able to manipulate the recording equipment so they’re not recorded. But why would they? I can’t imagine so many spirits being so camera shy.

  The second is that if the sound a spirit makes isn’t generated by normal means, it can’t necessarily be recorded by normal means. As I’ve experienced them, the knocks and bangs, especially in poltergeist cases, don’t exactly sound like knocks and bangs. They seem more like a distant popping with an echo, not quite natural. So some theorize that our recorders just aren’t designed to pick up whatever medium the sound is generated through. When a paranormal sound is recorded, it may be because at times the spirit does use physical means to manifest.

  I don’t find any of that very satisfying. It strains my credulity to think a spirit can control what you can and can’t hear, and no research at all has been done on the subject.

  Josh brought up radio interference as a possible explanation for what we’d recorded. The only problem was that we’d originally heard it audibly. I didn’t think they were faking anything, but I did wonder if there was a TV or sound system nearby. We couldn’t find anything.

  That made it possible, in my mind, that the hotel did have some supernatural activity. Given the other explanations we soon came up with, I’m convinced Peg was misinterpreting its severity.

  As we continued gathering data that afternoon, I called Peg’s sister, Kathy. She described how, at the top of the third floor, where we’d heard the voices, she’d seen a lady in white. Kathy said she couldn’t see her face because of a veil, but she also smelled a sweet perfume.

  “She speaks,” Kathy said. “But I don’t understan
d what she’s saying. It’s like a foreign language.” That seemed to jibe with what we’d recorded.

  Katrina also spoke with Amber, Peg’s daughter-in-law. She told us about an experience on the staircase. As she was walking down, she said, it sounded as if someone were running on the stairs right behind her. Amber kept looking back, but no one was there. She realized the house was old and creaky, but the sound kept getting louder and louder. She described a cold sensation down her back and felt pushed. By the time she reached the third step, she felt as if she’d fall.

  Amber said she’d never had a paranormal experience before. I’m always a little surprised when someone says that. Everyone generally has some sort of ghost story to tell. Oh, my grandmother appeared to me, or something.

  After that, the team spent some time looking for more natural explanations for the activity, and that night we regrouped to discuss them. Serg told us how the steps on the active staircase bent really low as he stepped on them, then snapped back loudly after he removed his foot. As he walked down, he was continually releasing pressure from the previous step. A second later, it would snap back, sounding like a footstep. As Serg sped up, so did the snapping, making it sound to him just like like someone was running behind him. Once someone is convinced something is running at them from behind, as Amber said she was, a cold shiver is a natural reaction.

  I tried the steps myself. The snapping and cracking really did sound like someone following me.

  Next we discussed the “choking” room. Josh explained that as they were monitoring our surveillance cameras, they saw Peg enter the room to make a phone call. She was afraid to sleep there, but with production occupying a lot of the house, it was one of the few places she could have some privacy. While she was there, she stirred up a lot of dust that floated around the camera lens.