“We saw clouds of dust,” Josh said. With poor air circulation, the dust could easily cause a sense of suffocation.
The apparitions couldn’t be debunked, since that was based on Kathy’s personal experience, nor could our EVPs, but they were faint and inconclusive. We had, however, come up with some solid natural explanations for some of the major recurring phenomena.
That night, CJ Sellers arrived for a psychic walk-through. She picked up on a female presence. In one room she said she kept getting the name “Katie” or “Katherine.” On the third floor, she sensed a female wearing a white gown, who had a servant feeling to her. Lastly, in the kitchen, she “heard” an entity warn we were not supposed to be back there, to keep out.
On the surface that seemed to confirm what Peg’s sister had seen, but I remained unimpressed. Every state and nearly every town has a “lady in white” story. My jaw is not going to drop because a psychic mentions a legend that’s been repeated over and over all across the country. Again, I respect the psychics we use on our show on a regular basis. Obviously I’m not going to invite someone back who I believe doesn’t have the potential of providing legitimate information. That said, despite working with her on two other cases during season one where she gave impressive results, I honestly felt that CJ didn’t give us a whole lot to go with this time.
After the walk-through, I introduced CJ to Peg. When I told her about the woman in white and the name “Katie,” Peg seemed to get terribly excited. She said she thought CJ had been in touch with Katie Hickey, a woman Peg believed worked there in the 1800s. If memory serves, Peg said she’d first heard the name from neighbors, but we were never able to confirm it.
When CJ described the angry entity near the kitchen, Peg gasped.
“Is it a spirit that shows itself before negative things happen in my life?” she asked.
CJ couldn’t answer, but Peg seemed convinced, saying, “It’s an angry spirit that is here.”
As always, CJ attempted to empower Peg. “Whatever angry spirit feels that you’re being intrusive, it really should be the other way around,” she told her. “It’s no different than a human being walking in here and pushing you and your family around. You wouldn’t put up with that. You shouldn’t put up with this.”
Peg listened, but I remained concerned that she was still blaming the spirits for negative events at the hotel, and took CJ’s reading as validation of that belief.
Then something happened that brought things to a head. On the afternoon of the last day, I was gathered with the team in tech HQ, reviewing the EVPs again, when the electricity suddenly went out. Peg was in the kitchen alone, in the area she’d seen the entity. Apparently, she was extremely excited by what happened.
“I told it what she told me to say,” Peg said. “She said to tell it to leave. This was right where it was and I did that. And this whole building went black! Maybe it left.”
When I suggested we look into the possibility of a power outage, Peg remained adamant that she’d gotten a direct response. She spoke with great emotion. “It could’ve just been a power surge, but maybe it was a way of confirming that I was telling it to get out.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I’m just concerned about making sure there’s rational thinking and making sure that you’re fine emotionally.”
“If a priest was standing here and it did that, he’d take it as a sign. I’m sure,” she said.
That took me aback. “You’re right. He would,” I told her. I admitted that if I were standing there at that moment, I’d suspect it was more than a power outage. I also insisted I’d still investigate whether or not it was something that could be explained.
But it seemed that Peg felt so good, so excited about what had happened, her mind was made up.
It was a very awkward moment for me. The result seemed positive, but to my mind she was making such a powerful logical leap.
Meanwhile, my team was already investigating. Serg was making calls to determine if the blackout was natural or possibly supernatural. Katrina and Josh had gone out to the local stores to see if their power went out as well.
I had the sense that as far as Peg was concerned, there was no point, but they did return with answers. Not only did several stores experience the same thing, they told us it was a common occurrence, and that power outages happened a few times a week. I was now certain it wasn’t paranormal.
For me, though, the question became how to present that to Peg. A lively conversation ensued. Katrina wondered why Peg hadn’t mentioned the frequency of the power outages. She must have experienced them, after all.
At the same time, Serg wondered if we should say anything. “If believing in something false makes you feel better, why should someone come by and tell you it’s false . . . ?”
“Are you saying we should withhold this information from her so she feels better?” Eilfie asked.
“If we withheld that from her, though, we wouldn’t be doing our job,” Katrina responded.
I wasn’t sure what to do. It was such an odd twist on things, something I hadn’t encountered before. Yes, I’d devoted my life to believing clients when no one else would, trying to empower them, but here I felt we had a lot of evidence suggesting there was no major paranormal activity going on. I was also frustrated that the client didn’t seem to accept what we were saying. By the time the power outage occurred, I’d had it up to here with Peg’s insistence that it was spirits. “Look, Peg,” I said, “you can’t really say it was paranormal.” I just couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t accept that.
The problem hit me on a deep level. It was a role reversal. After being disbelieved when I was a child, I’d spent my entire career trying to be sympathetic to people who’d encountered these things, and here I was on the other side of the argument. I was trying to explain something away to someone who absolutely believed, trying to argue against their experiences. I had to be alone for a while to think this through.
Peg had presented me with an argument I knew very well, because I’d made it myself so many times. You can say there’s an explanation, but I can still believe the root cause is something else, and nobody can take that away from me. Even recently, in “The Name” and “The Devil in Syracuse,” it’d been a series of coincidences that convinced me the case was demonic—a name appearing on television, radio, and in the newspaper. That was very extreme, very specific, but wasn’t it somehow the same sort of thing, where I decided for myself what the truth was based on faith? Who was I to draw that line for Peg?
Many of us who are spiritual see signs in everything we do and here I was trying to take that from her. It was a good moment for her, a healing thing, something that was resolving a situation. So why was I trying to take it away?
I do think a line needs to be drawn. Say you’re recording EVPs but someone proves you’re picking up a radio signal. Now, someone could still argue that a spirit manipulated the radio signal so that only those parts relevant to the questions being asked were recorded. If you’re getting answers to ten or twenty questions, along with names and addresses, then you’ve got something. But, if it’s one or two ambiguous answers, that explanation becomes very unlikely.
It was the same thing here. Of course, a spirit could have tripped some switch teetering on the edge just to respond to Peg, but a random power outage seemed a better fit. It’s Occam’s razor: The easiest explanation is usually correct. I was comfortable with the reasoning, but I still had to come to grips with the fact that I was a lot more skeptical than I used to be. I was no longer the wide-eyed high school student who wanted to believe so badly that there was something there, that I would I overlook more obvious natural explanations. It was a realization, an awakening, something I had to wrestle with.
In the end, I realized it wasn’t up to me what Peg believed. I could only give her the information I had. It was up to her to accept, reject, or interpret it. Insisting on one explanation was selfish, based on how pleased I was that we could explain thing
s.
I went back to her and told her that while I believed it could have been a sign, we also had an alternate explanation.
Peg was resolute. “I don’t care if it happened in the whole universe. It happened while I was speaking. That was my signal that it was out of here.”
I recommended that in the future, she be careful about who she let in to explore the spirits. Peg said she was “100 percent happy with what happened.”
That night we stayed on the third floor. There was no activity, but in the morning, we heard Prince blasting through the entire hotel. On the surveillance monitors I saw Peg dancing and singing like crazy. Before we left, her husband, Myrle, pulled me aside for a moment that wasn’t caught on-camera and thanked me. He pointed at Peg, who was obviously very happy and more energetic and said he hadn’t see her like that in a while.
So I think she found some real comfort. Later she said that while there was still activity at the hotel, the negative entity had vanished entirely. Peg hosts a Web site devoted to the history and the hauntings at: www.knickerbockerlinesville.com.
I learned some things about myself as well. Working on the show had changed me. Questions that used to be important weren’t so important anymore. Interacting with people across the country was making me rethink things. There were a lot of different viewpoints to explore. I was questioning my role more. Should I always be an interventionist? Some people don’t need to definitively understand everything. They just want help. It seemed that Peg didn’t really care about what was going on exactly, as long as it wasn’t harmful.
On the flipside, I’d become more confident, better able to express what I wanted to do for the show, how best to do it, and to stand firm for what I believe in.
“The Knickerbocker” started an ongoing discussion about debunking. There were concerns that if a case turned out not to be paranormal, that viewers might hate it. I tried to argue that other shows featured debunking all the time. I think it shows the other side of the investigation process. If every episode provided paranormal evidence, especially on a documentary show, I feel that that would make people more skeptical. I’m proud to say that every so often, we take on a case that we legitimately feel isn’t paranormal and it’s turned out to be an excellent episode. For instance, in season two’s “Smoke and Shadows,” we concluded that some photos of a black shadow had been faked.
Looking back, this was one of my favorites because it forced me to face my own skepticism. It didn’t provide the payoff everyone wanted, but it was, in a lot of ways, a better payoff. Because of “The Knickerbocker,” I grew.
Chapter 22
In the End, to Honor the Dead
There are seven . . .
After “The Knickerbocker” we went straight in to filming the last episode of the season, “The Asylum.” It was mid-November 2007, just under a month before the series would air on A&E. Following the premiere of “The Name” at UNIV-CON, our interest in trying to collect more evidence in new ways, led to the appearance in this episode, of the controversial Frank’s Box.
As for the case itself, PRS almost chose not to get involved, due to some objections from my team. Some time earlier, the producers had been contacted by Melvin Williams, superintendent of the Willard Drug Treatment Center in the Finger Lake region of upstate New York. It was a ninety-day program for prisoners with drug issues, but in the past it had been one of the largest insane asylums in the country. It was a sprawling complex, well over a century old, with a rich history.
There’d always been reports of paranormal activity, but recently a section in the oldest building had been reopened as a staff dorm. Two employees, former military people, said they’d sees an apparition—a screaming woman dressed in red. After that, these tough prison guards refused to return. And they weren’t the only ones having experiences. With all the employee complaints, Mr. Williams was interested in seeing what we could learn.
The producers and I were very excited. It was a fantastic location—an archetypal haunting scene—with tons of atmosphere and a lot of activity. They felt it would be great for our final episode. Surprisingly, though, the team, mostly Eilfie and Josh, were against it. It took me a while to understand why.
Part of the reason was that Eilfie feels very protective about places like Willard. It’s a somber space, where thousands suffered over the years, and many died. There’s a sacredness to that sort of location. Because ghost hunting is hugely popular, there are those who disregard that and turn places like it into gaudy amusement parks, making a mockery of the people who’d lived there and the pain they’d endured. What’s worse is that they have no desire to move the spirits on, because then they would stop making money. The mindset is offensive to PRS. It’s why we don’t go to ghost “hot spots” where they only want publicity so they can continue to make money from paranormal tourism.
Granted, on our own show, popularizing haunted locations sometimes worked to our clients’ advantage. In “Beer, Wine & Spirits” the reputation brought business to the bar and helped it survive. In “Pet Cemetery” our client wound up renting the home to ghost seekers. In both of those cases, however, the clients wanted the spirits to move on. This case was the same. This was still a functioning government location. They had no interest in opening it up to ghost hunters or selling Willard Asylum Ghost T-shirts. They called us in because they wanted whatever was in there removed so their employees could remain without fear.
The other issue my team had was that we didn’t know who we were there to help. The guards who’d seen the apparition wouldn’t give us their names or appear on the show. Going in, we didn’t even have a witness. What were we going to do there? How were we going to make a difference?
The team felt so strongly about it that I went back to production and said we didn’t want the case. For my team, it was a moment when we had to sit back and evaluate who we were and what it was we wanted to do. It did seem like an opportunity, but could we investigate this asylum and be okay with it? The right reasons weren’t immediately apparent.
After thinking it over, I came to two conclusions. First, the clients could be the spirits themselves. The asylum patients had extremely difficult lives. If their ghosts were suffering, we could try to bring them resolution. Second, just because others exploited similar places didn’t mean we had to. If others did something we consider wrong, did that mean we shouldn’t try to do the same thing correctly? It took a day or two to convince Eilfie, Josh, and the others, but since then, “Asylum” has become one of their favorite episodes.
Willard is in a very isolated area, so isolated we had to stay about forty-five minutes away. During the drive, we passed literally nothing for miles. Finally we reached a really tiny town. I don’t even remember seeing a restaurant. Willard, which takes up hundreds of acres, really is the town. The locals depend on it for their employment. The only area bank is at the facility.
There was a Soldiers Memorial Library where we shot the briefing. We’d already discussed the case at length, but here was a chance to review some of the history, which I mentioned earlier. Then we headed to the facility, passing barbed wire, walls, and scores of buildings of different ages.
There we met with Mr. Williams for the tour. Activity had been reported in several buildings, but since it was a prison, there were many areas we weren’t permitted to enter: sections where the inmates stayed, sections where private records were kept and so on. Other unused buildings were very run-down and unsafe. We were allowed to enter one of those rickety structures, but only with a guide.
Our investigation focused on the oldest building in the compound, built in 1860. It was a huge stone giant, three stories tall, with a basement and an attic. When Willard was an asylum, it housed patients. As I’ve said, I don’t often feel things when I enter a site, but it was hard not to feel things there. There’s a sense of sadness, isolation, fear. As I walked through the basement the first time, I felt it very heavily. The underground hallways formed a long maze, sometimes cin
der block, sometimes old stone arches with wooden supports, and a series of drywall rooms. Even when it was daylight, down there it was pitch dark.
There was no activity reported in the attic, but I went up there anyway. It was pretty clean, except for all this bird crap. A huge, thin ladder took us to the roof for a nice wide view of the massive property.
The rec room in this building, a common area, was where the two guards said they saw the screaming woman. They packed up and left the next day, about two months prior to our investigation.
Though those former guards didn’t want to speak to us, others did come forward. Michael LePage, a former employee who was now a schoolteacher, told me about a similar experience he’d had. When he first started working there, he was in one of the classrooms and heard a noise. He walked toward the sound and saw a slender woman, who started screaming. We never got a detailed description of her, but others had seen her. And when they did, they would run.
One of the current guards, Lisa Bordeaux, also agreed to an interview. She said she’d been sitting in the rec room watching the news when she felt as if someone were standing over her shoulder. She heard the lock on a doorknob click and the door swing open. When she turned, no one was there. That had happened just a week before our arrival.
The best overview of Willard came to us from Chris Carroll, a former asylum nurse, who’d worked with the patients there for thirty-seven years.
“They were a sad, sad group of folks,” she said. “Mental illness is very difficult. It’s difficult for the person who has it. It’s difficult for the person watching it.” I asked how she dealt with it. She said she just grew with the place. “You become a part of it and it becomes a part of you.”
Among the painful events at Willard, there’d been suicides. Eugene, Chris’s husband, also a former employee, confirmed he’d once had to search for a female patient, known to be depressed, who went missing. He found her dead, hanging by her neck in one of the other buildings.
Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown Page 29