While some have accused him of holding a grudge against the Warrens because he did not receive money from the film, Garton says that he has been denouncing claims that the book is nonfiction ever since it first appeared in 1992. He says he did this because he was disturbed that it was being promoted on the nonfiction shelves and not as a work of fiction. “I wanted to make sure I had a clear conscience, so I’ve given my account at every opportunity.”33 Carmen Snedeker (now Carmen Reed) has denounced Garton’s comments, claiming that the book was inaccurate and that her family had little or no involvement with it. Garton fired back, “That’s a lie. They were very involved. They signed off on the whole thing. I spent a lot of time with them in their home. But they’ve reinvented this story for the movie and the new book that’s being written about it, so it’s important for their presentation that they dismiss the book I wrote.” Garton chided Carmen by noting, “If my book was inaccurate, it’s because I was told to make up whatever I needed to. I have been telling my story since In A Dark Place was published because my name is on that book.”34
The Film versus the Original Story
The Haunting in Connecticut is a fictitious story that fails to follow key parts of the story that it is supposedly based on. In the film, “Sara Campbell” fears that the long road trips that her son “Matt” (Philip in real life) must endure to receive cancer treatments are proving to be too much of a strain on him. The solution is to rent a house near the clinic. Beyond this point, little else is based on the original claims, as the film quickly plunges into a melodramatic supernatural thriller. Troubled by the many visions reported at the house, when Matt looks into the history of the property, he learns that during the 1920s, mortician Ramsey Aickman mutilated corpses at the funeral home and then held séances in an effort to contact the spirits of the deceased. Not surprisingly, this was a bad idea, as Aickman and several others were killed by the angry spirits. A terminally ill priest (Reverend Popescu) tries to rid the house of the many spirits inhabiting it, but in the process, he angers them and makes matters worse. We also learn that Mr. Aickman had not only desecrated their memories through mutilating their bodies, but that he also placed many of their remains in the walls. Matt is able to save the day when he becomes possessed, locates the various remains, and has them cremated. The haunting ends, and he is cured of cancer.35
One of the most important weapons in the arsenal of a detective is the technique of examining interviews by the same persons, over time. When we engage in this most basic of practices, cracks in the Snedekers’ stories begin to appear. In a 1992 TV interview, Carmen states emphatically that when her family first moved in, she “didn’t realize it was a funeral home.” In 2012, the producers of Paranormal Witness, which tells paranormal accounts in the words of the witnesses, reenacted a scene in which the Snedekers first entered the house. They immediately realized that the home had been a funeral parlor.36 To get out of this apparent discrepancy, Carmen later claimed that her first realization that the house had been a funeral home appeared to her in a dream.37
Another red flag is the odd behavior of the parents. While the “haunting” included an array of minor events such as flickering lights or ghostly images in windows at night, far more sinister violations occurred, such as the claim that Carmen and her husband were raped by an unseen entity! If we are to believe the Snedekers, they were harassed and terrified by these events. Carmen said there was no pleasure: “[I]t was horrible pain . . . it was so penetrating and so much pain.” She said that after intercourse, a voice could be heard laughing. She described the experience as “the most crippling thing I’ve ever been through in my life.”38 Meanwhile, Alan claimed that he was raped by a demon one night while he lay next to his wife in bed. Why would anyone remain in a house where they are the victims of ongoing sexual attacks by demons? It is not as if they claimed that these were rare events. In one interview, Carmen said, “It physically engulfed me [raped her], and every night since I’ve been under some sort of attack. The next night I was sodomized. The following night I was raped. My husband’s been sodomized. My husband’s been taken into a deep trance and showed horrible things.” They also claimed that the bed would vibrate and that a tiny invisible entity would occasionally walk around it.39 During one interview, Carmen said, “It told me it would kill my daughter . . . it told my husband it would kill our son.”40 It is difficult to imagine anyone being subjected to such experiences yet remaining in the house for two years! Certainly, most people would have fled at the first signs of trouble, in the interests of their safety and that of their children. While these strange events were supposedly happening, the woman living above them said that she neither heard nor experienced anything unusual.41
While many of the claims appear to have been fabricated, others can be explained by mass suggestion after the family members realized they were living in a former funeral parlor. We also have classic poltergeist elements, with a central figure—an angry, frustrated adolescent—suspiciously at the center of many of the claims, one who later confesses to molesting his cousin. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that Carmen and her niece Tammy perceived one key event to have happened. When Tammy reported feeling that she had been inappropriately groped in the night, Carmen came to the conclusion that Philip was the culprit. “She was very frightened because she didn’t see what was pulling at her . . . but at the end of the day there is no way I believed that it was ghosts. The only conclusion I could come up with was that it was my son.”42 Carmen said that the realization that Philip was the perpetrator left her numb and emotionally distraught. “I didn’t know what to feel or what to think. I was like a robot running on battery power.” She called his psychologist, who had him committed to a mental hospital. She said, “My emotions were just completely void.” Carmen said that as she drove home from the hospital, Philip’s last words to her—“Now that I’m gone, they’re going to come after you”—played in her mind. “I felt very conflicted . . . I was in such a rage that I was ready to believe anything other than that my son was going to be a schizophrenic the rest of his life.”43 She went into the house, sat at the bottom of the stairs, and said, “Alright you . . . want to play, you come play with me.” She sat there for several hours, but nothing happened. As she and Tammy claimed, that night they saw the outline of a hand move under Tammy’s clothing and up to her chest on two occasions.44 However, given their emotional state and the intense desire to believe that Philip was innocent, Carmen and Tammy may have allowed their imaginations to deceive them. This was the year 1987. Given all of the events that allegedly occurred in the house—and the invisible hand that supposedly moved up Tammy’s nightshirt—why didn’t anyone think to grab a camera and take a picture in order to convince others? The circumstances of this supposed encounter are suspicious. Tammy had come to Carmen and said she felt that an unseen force was coming for her; Carmen says she grabbed her bible, went to Tammy’s room, and began reading from Psalms 24. It was within this emotionally charged environment, where she was expecting something supernatural to happen, that she thought she saw the hand move under Tammy’s shirt.45
It is now clear that the events as claimed by the Snedekers did not happen, and for Hollywood to promote the film as “based on true events” is a stretch of the imagination. It is an interesting story that was made into a chilling movie, but the film bears little resemblance to the alleged story, which lacks tangible evidence that any paranormal events took place. But as with The Amityville Horror and The Conjuring, while the new homeowners failed to experience any paranormal happenings, they were forced to endure the aftermath. Susan Trotta-Smith lived in the house for over a decade after the alleged events and says that she and her neighbors have been in contact with police about the house—not out of a fear of ghosts, but because of inconsiderate sightseers.46 Even before the film officially appeared in theaters, the publicity about the house had unleashed a torrent of curiosity seekers who shattered the peace and tranquility of the neighborhood. Trotta-S
mith observed, “It’s been a total change from a very quiet house in a very quiet neighborhood to looking out the window and seeing cars stopping all the time. It’s been very, very stressful, and sometimes worrisome.”47
CHAPTER 8
Weighing the Evidence: Separating Fact from Fiction
I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything . . . if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
—Isaac Asimov1
There is nothing with greater emotional appeal than to think that when our physical bodies die, our consciousness lives on as a spirit or soul. It is also appealing to think that the human mind is capable of extraordinary feats that could someday be harnessed. For these reasons, we must approach the subject of poltergeists and hauntings with caution and stick to the facts as we know them, not as we wish them to be. Keeping our emotions from influencing our conclusions is a cardinal rule of scientific investigation. When we carefully examined the best cases that were chosen by film and documentary makers for their compelling nature, we found no tangible evidence to support the existence of haunted houses and poltergeists. When we surveyed the literature, a curious pattern emerged: a pattern that dates back centuries, is clustered around adolescents, and is best described as “poltergeist faking syndrome.” We also found complicity within the film and television industries, which were quick to promote “true” aspects of these storylines, despite clear evidence to the contrary. The “based on a true story” genre and the paranormal continue to be characterized by a disregard for facts and a desire to place profit over truth. When there is a vested interest in something as alluring as the evidence for life after death, people are susceptible to self-deception. Hollywood producers know this feature of human nature all too well. But as the saying goes, “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
The Social History of Poltergeists
To the novice and the uninitiated, the evidence for poltergeists appears formidable if not indisputable; for how could so many people in so many parts of the world report similar experiences over the centuries? Surely there must be some truth to these reports. Yet the uniformity of poltergeist reports appears mythical. Pagan folklore tells of malicious ghosts with many poltergeist qualities, who lived in the countryside on the outskirts of human settlements. These spirits could enter villages when someone cut down a tree they inhabited and incorporated it into a house, transforming the spirit into a benign, domesticated one. Paranormal historian James Houran observes that until the early sixteenth century, there are many accounts of friendly ghosts coexisting in domestic harmony with humans. He writes, “They have been described as supporting and caring, giving advice and telling the future, taking the blankets away when children have been sleeping too long, and so on. They lived in friendship with humans.”2 This state of affairs changed abruptly when Christianity began to view paganism as a threat, and poltergeists were transformed into more demonic entities. Houran continues, “From Martin Luther onward, we have documents about threatening ghosts being perceived now around and inside of houses instead of far away in the countryside . . . [and they] became the noisy and stone-throwing ghosts later known as poltergeists.”3 This shifting nature of poltergeist activity suggests that they are a human creation. But even if we accept Houran’s historical evolution of the poltergeist, it is undeniable that for the past five hundred years, the descriptions of cases have been relatively uniform and consistent. There are essentially two explanations for poltergeists: they are either real or imaginary. Of course, “real” refers to manifestations of psychic powers, such as telekinesis, or to supernatural entities. The term “imaginary” not only includes hoaxes but also incidents of self-deception. In either case, the scientific community remains overwhelmingly skeptical of their reality, and it must do so, in accordance with the tenets of science, until more concrete evidence is produced.
The many hundreds of documented cases of poltergeists present us with a conundrum. On the one hand, scores of people from different parts of the world have reported remarkably similar experiences for centuries. It seems inconceivable that they could all be the product of tall tales, fraudsters, hallucinations, and misperception. Time and again the same key features crop up: strange knocking sounds with no apparent cause; stones, pebbles, and other small objects flying through the air; or larger objects, such as furniture, found mysteriously smashed to pieces. Occasionally, people and objects are said to levitate. On the other hand, with the proliferation of mobile phones capable of capturing images, and with the widespread use of video surveillance cameras, why are there so few claims by everyday citizens recording poltergeist images? Why are there so many photos from paranormal investigators that were taken under dubious circumstances or are indistinguishable blurs? Why can’t scientists replicate these results in laboratory or in field studies? This is why, despite the persistence of reports and many credible witnesses, most scientists remain steadfastly unwilling to accept that poltergeists exist. Are they being so conservative and inflexible in their thinking as to deny a significant body of evidence amassed over the years? The trouble is that the evidence compiled to date is “soft” and is mostly based on unsubstantiated claims and eyewitness testimony.
It is possible that we live in a mysterious world filled with strange creatures, otherworldly spirits, and nefarious entities—an exciting, enchanted universe where, like in the TV show The Twilight Zone, the known laws of physics do not apply. While at times scary, this world is also seductive, because the creatures and forces that inhabit it defy what science says is possible. Strange phenomena such as poltergeists serve as cautionary tales about the inadequacy of science. In this sense, mysterious entities may be viewed as anti-scientific symbols undermining conventional paradigms of reality. The underlying message in poltergeist cases is clear: the mainstream scientific community has yet to accept their existence, but each year, ordinary people continue to report instances of these “noisy ghosts.” The stubborn persistence of these encounters, like sightings of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, challenges the authority of science for those people who are unfamiliar with rules of evidence and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. This helps to explain the gulf between the skepticism that typifies most scientists and popular beliefs as reflected in opinion polls. Some people conclude that scientists are either close-minded or are afraid to publicly support the existence of the supernatural, for fear of hurting their careers. The truth is that for scientists to conclude that the paranormal is real will not inhibit their career advancement, if they can produce the evidence to support their conclusions—and if they are able to replicate their findings. If they could do this, the scientific community would be forced to accept their findings. But this has not happened, because to date, they have been unable to produce the evidence.
Fraud: A Universal Human Tradition
Poltergeist believers often argue that it stretches credulity to think that so many people would be creating hoaxes and deceptions in such a similar fashion, across vastly different cultures and time periods. Yet throughout all cultures and every period of recorded history, humans have been known to engage in guile and trickery. It is part of the human condition. This raises the question of whether there are precedents in nature involving similar phenomena. One only need pick up a basic anthropology textbook. A classic example that has been thoroughly studied is “the sucking cure.” All over the world, anthropologists have observed a curious act practiced by native healers, shamans, witch doctors, and medicine men. These tribal priests claim to rid people of diseases and evil spirits by literally sucking the illness from their patients and spitting it out as a tangible object such as pebble, a piece of wood, or a chunk of bone. Observers often note that shamans appear to believe they possess special powers to heal, but that they use this technique—what is essentially a magic trick—to bolster the patients’ b
elief in their cure. While it can be interpreted as a tradition, ritual, or secret practice, it is still deception. A typical example can be found among in various tribal groups that reside throughout the Andes mountains of Chile. When people get sick, it is widely believed that it is from an imbalance caused by a foreign spirit or object that has invaded the body. The shaman supposedly enters a deep trance, and amid the sounds of pounding drums, bells, and rattles, he sucks the entity into his mouth, restoring the patient’s natural balance. He then typically spits out the entity.4 Ruth Underhill observes that the “sucking cure” is found in every Northern American Indian group. She writes, “The medicine men whom I knew believed in their powers, although they were quite aware that sucking out the disease object was a matter of sleight of hand.” As one shaman admitted, “[P]eople need something to see.”5 At best, one could rationalize their actions and view it as a form of primitive placebo.
A regional example of a tradition of deception occurred when Robert Bartholomew investigated the so-called mental disorder of latah in Malaysia and Indonesia. He concluded that it is not a disorder at all but instead a local idiom of distress that has developed throughout parts of Southeast Asia and always involves deception and fraud. Latah is a bizarre behavior whereupon being startled, ordinarily shy, timid women may react with obscenities and outrageous sexual gestures. Severe cases almost always involve elderly women, who may engage in “automatic obedience,” doing whatever they are told. Yet there is a pattern to these cases: “severes” are almost always elderly Malay women who are socially isolated and depressed, often after losing a husband. Until recently, psychiatrists have assumed that stress from their social situation triggered this culture-specific form of mental disorder. Instead they should have been looking at the conditions under which people are likely to feign behavior for attention.6 Michael Kenny concludes that “severe” subjects do not enter trance states but are instead engaging in a latah “performance” or “theater.” Never are the words “fraud” or “fakery” used, yet anthropologists may be guilty of using double standards here. For instance, when studied, Western faith healers are typically viewed as fraudulent, but place an exotic label on essentially the same behavior involving a shaman in an exotic tribe, and anthropologists are quick to point to their “symbolic” qualities. A fraud explanation explains the appearance of latah in a waxing and waning fashion in Malaysia and Indonesia since the latter 1800s. Today the condition has nearly died out. In a similar manner, Bigfoot and kindred monster traditions exist around the world, and people often create hoaxes involving footprints and sightings. Feigning poltergeist outbreaks is just one more example.
American Hauntings: The True Stories behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring: The True Stories behind Hollywood’s Scariest Movies—from The Exorcist to The Conjuring Page 18