Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (10 page)

I repeated my question for her from our first meeting.
Why
did she think he was still there?

She explained she’d had a dream where she saw him, and his eyes had gone all dark.

“That is not my son,” she told herself. “That is not my son.”

Helen wasn’t convinced anything paranormal was going on. She just wanted to make sure her son
wasn’t
there, that he was at rest. I had the sense there was more going on here, but I didn’t know yet what it was.

After that interview, our new adviser, Joyce, asked Helen about Justin, why he was upset we were there. She explained he did believe in the paranormal, but didn’t want to be involved. “He’s afraid something might happen.”

As I tried to get my bearings on the case, the producers asked Joyce and me to sit down to discuss the interview. As we did, they kept stopping us, asking us to talk about this or that, discussions they felt they’d need for the edit. I tried to stay focused, but I wasn’t used to any of this. It got to a point where I wasn’t saying anything that was on my mind.

I don’t think for a minute they intended to be disorienting. Like me, they wanted a great investigation. But it was too much for me. My thinking was getting fuzzy.

Finally, Alan asked us to follow him out to the old front porch.

“I can tell all this input is distracting you,” he said. “Just go back in there and do whatever it is you want to do. We’re just here to follow you. All right?”

I couldn’t describe how thankful I was. “Sounds great.”

Things got easier for me after that. We split up into teams to tour the site and hear about the different phenomena reported over the years. Helen took me to a room with an old Victrola, explaining how one night it started playing by itself. Katrina and Heiser spoke with Ray, Helen’s husband. The death must have been hard on him as well, but he didn’t show us much emotion or care to interact, which of course we respected. He did describe hearing heavy breathing, and footsteps. Whenever he went to check out a strange sound, there’d be nothing there. “It’s always like hide and seek,” he said.

In the basement, Helen explained they’d had some activity in a small room. Her friend Delores was grabbed around the arm there. Delores later told Joyce and Eilfie that the resulting mark started as a sort of hole, and then became a rash. She also reported that a man had drowned in the pond on the property.

I’d heard that story when we first spoke to Helen. Then she’d told me that a patient of hers, suffering from severe schizophrenia, committed suicide on the property. Repeating the story for us on-camera, Helen described him as quiet and a little intimidating. He also had a box he kept with him at all times. It was never out of his sight. What was in it? She had no idea. One night, he left his bed and drowned himself in the pond. His box went missing at the same time.

Ray described the weather at the time, saying it was a drought season, so someone wanting to drown himself would have had to walk to the center of the pond.

“And he wanted to take that walk,” he said.

This was around the time Chris was five years old, the same age his experiences began, according to Helen. I asked if she felt if the entity was related to the suicide.

“I don’t know. It seems to fit in, but I don’t know.”

I pushed for more information about this patient, but Helen was reluctant.

Originally, we planned to hire a diver to go down to the bottom of the pond and search for the box. That was a great investigatory opportunity that was now affordable thanks to the show. It was less than twenty feet deep, so I had high hopes we’d find it. At the last minute, though, Helen decided against it. She never gave us a reason.

I felt confident the clients were being truthful about their experiences, but there seemed to be something else going on. There had to be something more to this Dark Man and its relationship with Chris. Could Helen’s patient have abused Chris, either physically or mentally? Unfortunately, we never found out, but there were things we could research.

To verify the timing of Chris’s experiences, I asked Eilfie if she’d found any records of the suicide. She had found one, a vague newspaper account, and the article did have a date. If it were correct, the death did occur when Chris was five—the same year he began seeing the Dark Man.

That connection seemed strong, but there wasn’t much to go on. Maybe this man had been hostile to Chris in life and was continuing to be in death. Then again, it could all be psychological. I obviously couldn’t ask Chris. I also couldn’t look Helen in the eyes and tell her anything.

Hoping Dead Time would give us something more, we broke off into two teams. The first, led by Joyce, Eilfie, and Serg, was out by the pond. I was with Josh and Heather on the second floor, in Chris’s room.

We’d all already decided that during Dead Time that everyone except necessary camera and sound people would leave the house to keep the investigation as pure as possible. Often, the crew and producers were outside in the cold or in cars for the hours of Dead Time. The crew, meanwhile, wanting the best possible picture, brought in a slew of lighting equipment. Two large crane lights were aimed at the house from outside. It was like the gods had gotten drunk and turned the moonlight switch to “wake the dead.”

Realizing the conditions weren’t perfect, I tried to get some response from the spirit.

“They say you bang on the walls all the time. Why can’t you do it for us now?” I said. “Either communicate with us, or we’ll get rid of you.”

Aside from walkie-talkie chatter and creaking floorboards from the crew, nothing happened. After nearly an hour, I decided to end it. Even under the best circumstances the paranormal won’t show up on command. I did realize I’d have to be clearer and more vocal about what conditions we needed to conduct our investigations.

And then, as I turned off the recorders, and the film crew powered down, we had our first activity.

In the hall, a motion detector, hand-built by Sergey and Josh, went off. It was the first time we’d been using these, and I had a hunch about putting one in the hallway. What could have set it off? Reviewing the surveillance footage from our cameras, we saw that no one was there. Could the detector be defective? Serg walked near and around it, but couldn’t trigger it until he stepped directly in front of it. It was working perfectly.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was something.

It was customary for PRS to spend every night at the location, to embed ourselves and see if anything happened. The crew packed up, but we stayed. Serg and I spent the night in Chris’s room, but there was no activity. In the morning, our eight investigators battled to use the one bathroom. With no water heater, we were greeted with ice-cold water. Serg, being of Russian descent, said he felt the shower was refreshing.

Despite the bumpy start, the second day was surprisingly more fluid. In less than 24 hours, we’d learned a lot about balancing the needs of production and our investigation.

Aside from the single article on the suicide, our historical research didn’t turn up anything significant. Ultimately, I didn’t think that mattered. My sense was that the information we needed to help resided with the family. As we delved into their personal lives, Helen seemed more and more emotional, increasingly somber. She apparently felt guilt, pain, and a deep-seated anger toward the supernatural force in the house.

Though she’d originally said she wasn’t sure there was a connection, she slowly opened up and told us she was convinced the Dark Man was responsible for the death of her son. Still, I wasn’t sure
how
the spirit could have anything to do with Chris’s death until I finally spoke to Justin.

From the beginning he’d been avoiding us. There was no explanation, other than Helen telling us, “He’s busy.” He’d had two weeks’ notice about when we’d be there, so that seemed suspect. Justin also wasn’t answering any phone calls.

To my surprise, though, when the time came for his scheduled interview, Justin showed up. At first glance, he came across as a tough guy, the sort who’d volunteer to rough you up if you pushed him. At the same time, his eyes seemed locked in sorrow. He was reticent, but when he did speak, that tough guy demeanor disappeared.

Justin told me that Chris didn’t just
see
the Dark Man since he was five. He claimed the thing had
tormented
him. That was news, and it made a lot of sense.

Justin described the first time Chris saw the Dark Man. They shared bunk beds and had a dog sleeping in the room. Late one night, it started howling. The sound woke Justin and he found Chris huddled in a fetal position. Chris was shaking, unable or unwilling to discuss what happened. All he would say was that he’d seen a dark figure. He wasn’t just seeing it. He was tortured by it. Whatever it was terrified him beyond belief.

Justin handed me a photograph of Chris. He looked like a tough guy too. Justin said his brother lived “a lot of life” and no one dared to mess with him. He had a weak spot, though, since he was five, a chink in his armor: the Dark Man.

“There was a time when we couldn’t even mention the name without him breaking down in tears,” Justin said.

I never knew him, but I felt a connection to Chris. As a child, he’d had a life-altering paranormal experience that continued to eat away at him. His family believed it had resulted in his death. Part of me wondered if that could be my fate someday. Why not? I was only six years older than Chris was when he died.

“Why do you think he was so terrified of this figure?” I asked.

There was a pause. Justin seemed to have disappeared into a troubling thought, one that had bothered him deeply for years, deeper than the almost twenty-foot-deep pond out back. Ultimately, he couldn’t say, or maybe he just didn’t know. The full story of Chris would probably always remain out of reach.

And it wasn’t over. Since his brother’s death, Justin had seen the Dark Man himself. Hearing breathing one night, he looked in the corner of the room and saw the shadowy figure.

“It had like a head and shoulders. I jumped up and turned on the light and there was nothing there.”

Like his mother, he’d been dreaming about Chris. One dream in particular upset him. “I asked him what heaven was like and he didn’t say anything. So I said, ‘Are you in hell?’ He turned to me and his eyes were all black, as if his pupils had dilated completely. And his voice changed. It wasn’t a demonic voice. It was a man’s voice that I’d never heard before. It said, ‘No, it’s cold. It’s very cold.’ ”

It’s not unusual for a grieving family to dream about their loved one, but Helen and Justin both dreamt of Chris having dark eyes. Was he reaching out to them, or was something darker invading their sleep? It was as if the pain Chris had experienced was living on through them.

The reasons for Helen’s concerns were clearer to me now. Whether Chris was trapped or not, it seemed she and Justin
were
. They were trapped in their grief for him, yes, but it was also possible that whatever had been victimizing Chris was now victimizing them.

Because Helen was so worried about Chris, she was adamant about asking a psychic to try to communicate with him. Given my concerns about psychics, I tried to point out the downside. “What if the psychic is wrong or tells you something that might convince you but isn’t true?”

Helen listened politely, but her mind was made up. For her it must have felt like her one chance of finding out if the Dark Man was truly responsible for Chris’s death. I tried to put myself in her shoes. A loved one of mine died suddenly, with no warning and no good reason. Now he may be trapped in a personal hell. Wouldn’t I try anything to get at the truth?

I decided to contact CJ Sellers, a psychic who had come to UNIV-CON the month prior. She struck me as unusually trustworthy and I was comfortable that she was genuinely interested in helping people. Though she lived in Missouri, I hoped she’d be able to give a reading over the phone. A time was set for that evening.

Our adviser, Joyce, was even more skeptical about any psychic reading than I was. I agreed we should try to test CJ’s accuracy. Joyce suggested that if we had to respond to questions at all, we should only give yes or no answers. I asked Helen not to spill any information, to be as discreet as possible.

As the time for the call grew closer, the atmosphere became intense. Helen really wanted that contact, that confirmation, so much so that I became concerned about what would happen. What answers would she get? What emotional state would that put her in? How would it affect the case?

“I do have Chris with me,” CJ said over the phone. “What specifically do you want to know?”

I asked about the Dark Man. According to CJ, Chris spoke of him as someone who’d died but was still hanging around. She saw something on the property connected with water. There was a man there, silhouetted. CJ wasn’t able to see him; she felt he wouldn’t let her see him. He was covered in darkness.

“It has hands,” she said. “Could it grab somebody? Could it push somebody? Yes.”

I looked at Helen. She nodded. She seemed convinced this was the Dark Man.

CJ said Chris was concerned for their safety, but also felt his mother had the power to challenge this thing. While any one bit of information might not have swayed me, between the water, the darkness, and the concern, I felt our psychic had “hit” often enough to move on.