Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (16 page)

Back then, we locked down, stayed overnight, and had a couple of weird experiences. Mandy Bonavita—my cousin and a team member at the time—took a bathroom break and had the lights go out on her. She had enough wits about her to keep quiet during the blackout. She felt like she was being watched, but when she turned on her flashlight, the lights came back on.

In the attic, I and another early member heard some scraping against the concrete floor. Investigating behind some vents, we found a metal chair. It was so old it was covered with rust. A trail of clean scrapes on the floor indicated it had just moved.

It was good to have a chance to look back and think a little about what I’ve learned and how things have changed over five years. In the end, this episode, which would be called “Freshman Fear,” was something of a hodgepodge, but it gave me a few surprises. Despite the problems, maybe because of those problems, we had an opportunity to do something different. There are so many ghost stories told, it kind of becomes
about
ghost stories, a 100 Candles game itself, which made it very atypical very early on. I honestly loved this episode because it tackles a large-scale issue: the power of an urban legend and fear. Both were covered in twenty-two minutes, along with a client case and bits of an origin story for PRS. Quite an accomplishment.

We did play 100 Candles again. While shooting our fifth episode, “Man of the House,” after the crew left we stayed at the site and tried to tell all one hundred stories.

By about 5:30 A.M., we got too tired to continue, and called it a night.

G
AMES AND
G
HOSTS
: T
HE
O
RIGINAL
E
XORCIST

William Peter Blatty’s famous novel
The Exorcist
was inspired by an actual case from 1949 involving a spirit board. Accounts of the story vary, but most agree that the trouble began when a thirteen-year-old boy named Robbie (sometimes called Roland) Doe was taught to use the board by his aunt Tillie. After she grew ill and passed away, he continued using the board to try to contact her spirit. It seems something else answered. The family began hearing scratching sounds in the attic. The noises grew worse whenever they tried to find the source. Soon objects were found moved. Eventually Robbie’s bed started shaking. At one time it shook so hard he couldn’t sleep and his covers were yanked away from him. If he tried to grab them, he’d be pulled onto the floor. Some accounts mention levitating chairs, horrible banging sounds, and words appearing scratched into Robbie’s skin. Father Edward Albert Hughes was believed to have helped conduct the successful exorcism that allowed Robbie to lead a normal life thereafter, but to his death in 1980 Father Hughes never discussed the case.
Possessed
, by Thomas Allen and Thomas B. Allen (
iUniverse,
2000), covers the complete story of this case.

H
YAKUMONOGATARI
K
AIDANKAI
(A G
ATHERING OF
O
NE
H
UNDRED
S
UPERNATURAL
T
ALES
)

A hundred candles are lit in a sealed room. As each participant tells a story, a candle is blown out, until the room is in total darkness, summoning a supernatural entity.

It’s believed the game originated among Samurai warriors as a way to put their bravery to the test. During the Edo period in Japan (1603–1868) it became a popular parlor game. The invention of an inexpensive printing process led to the production of scores of ghost story collections, or
kaidan
, in Japan and China. The popularity of the books continued long after the popularity of the game faded.

More recently the game formed the basis for a Japanese TV series that uses the game to retell classic Japanese ghost stories.

UNIV-CON

UNIV-CON is a national paranormal conference thrown by PRS and its affiliates every year in order to encourage education, diversity, networking, entertainment and new ideas when it comes to the world of the unexplained. The first seven conferences were held at Penn State. Attendance started out at about 300 and grew to over 3,000. Nowadays, attendees can expect to see world-famous talent in every avenue of the paranormal (previous guests include exorcist Father Lebar, psychic/demonologist Lorraine Warren,
Hellraiser
actor Doug Bradley,
Amityville Horror
’s George Lutz and
Skeptic Magazine
’s Dr. Michael Shermer).

Over the course of four days, attendees are given access to dozens of daily workshops, including debates, technology workshops, meditation exercises, and a “paranormal congress,” where paranormal experts debate in a senator-style chamber about protocols, ethics, and other issues. There are also ghost hunts, displays, vendors, ghost tours, parties, film screenings, masquerade balls, and lots more. Plus the entire cast of
Paranormal State
is in attendance, giving lectures and just roaming around to meet guests.

For more information, go to www.univcon.org.

Chapter 8
If Only They All Went Like This

No one can tell me what I saw.

After the relatively laid-back schedule of the last two episodes, we were back on the road, this time not only to the suburbs of Pittsburgh, but also to and from the city for research. The shoot was a lot busier, but definitely worth it, because unlike our previous effort, “The Woman in the Window,” it was solid and fascinating.

The clients came to us through another group of investigators. The Greater Pittsburgh Paranormal Society (GPPS) saw the ads placed back in October, and got in touch with us concerning what they felt was a genuine haunting in a house with a rich history.

While PRS is the first college-based paranormal group, there are lots of others throughout the country and the world with different degrees of skill and seriousness. I’d met some of the members of GPPS when they attended UNIV-CON, and they always appeared quite professional.

The case they told us about involved the Sokolowski family, who lived in an 1820s home that was likely part of the Underground Railroad, a network of “safe houses” that protected runaway slaves as they traveled north to free states before the Civil War. The house had a long history of activity. The tenants heard footsteps and the voices of a man and woman, objects were moved, and there’d been reports of full-body apparitions.

Specifically, my clients were Ally Sokolowski and her boyfriend, Larry Jones. Ally’s stepfather, Peter, told us he’d inherited the house because his sisters were afraid of the ghosts. Ally and her mom, Kim, had lived in the house since 1980, most of Ally’s life. There were other siblings and children living there as well.

Larry’s experience was the most striking. Because Ally’s parents disapproved of their underage relationship, they told us that she and Larry originally saw each other on the sly. The house was really spacious, and most of the bedrooms were situated toward the front. The back, though, had servants’ quarters with stairs that led to Ally’s room. To meet, Larry would sneak around back and Ally would let him in.

Larry told us that one night, he looked up and saw a woman in Ally’s window. She was older, had long hair, and she was looking at him with great disapproval. To him, her expression seemed to be saying, “Who the hell are you to be coming here?”

Then she turned away.

At first Larry worried some family member had spotted him and that the relationship had been discovered, but Ally told him there was no one else in the house. That night it was so cold in her room he could see his breath. Around a year later, after Ally had become pregnant, he saw the woman again one night. He was sleeping with Ally, and woke up to see the woman again looking at him with disapproval.

Ally and her mother, Kim, told me that sometime later, another friend of the family, a young African American named Brandon, walked into the same room and saw someone standing there. Thinking someone had broken in, he found the family and told them. He described the same woman Larry had seen.

Since the only two people who’d seen this woman were African American, Ally and Kim felt the spirit might be related to the Underground Railroad.

I arrived with the team and crew the first week of December 2006, about a year and a half after those incidents. Brandon was no longer around. Larry and Ally had a child together, a toddler name J. J., but Larry reported that he was
still
afraid to be alone in the house. And the activity was ongoing.

In our first interview, I learned that Ally and the baby had just had a bad night because of weird noises. Larry said he also woke up and heard a woman laughing. They were both very sincere. Larry was absolutely adamant, saying, “No one can tell me what I saw.”

Next I wanted to talk to Larry alone. Before I did, the family pointedly asked me not to mention Brandon. Larry and Brandon apparently didn’t get along, making it unlikely they’d make up a ghost story together.

I try to respect the clients’ wishes, but here Brandon was a corroborating witness to an apparition, making him key to establishing the evidence. So, I brought him up anyway, with little result other than making Larry seem defensive.

Brandon aside, I felt as if there was much more awkwardness in the air whenever Larry was around. It seemed to me as if he felt like an outsider, so I asked him about that as well.

“At first they didn’t know me,” he said, talking about Ally’s parents. “This is a white family and I’m African American, so . . .”

A racial or cultural gap may have been part of the issue, but my guess was there was more. Larry was also the guy their daughter had an underage relationship with, and he had wound up raising a child with her as a result. Whether you’re black, white, or green, I assume that’s not going to go over well with parents.

I don’t say that to pass judgment. If Larry had been a lousy person, he would’ve left, but he didn’t. It was clear he cared about Ally and the baby. In spite of the distance, I also got the feeling that Kim and Peter wanted to understand him. He was the father of their grandchild.

At the same time, Ally specifically commented that the ghosts came around more whenever they were fighting. So here again, the spirits seemed wrapped up in the emotional situation. It’s important to note that the human emotion can indeed play an important role in a haunting. It can either be the genesis of a haunting or a contributing factor. A lot of ghost hunters look for evidence. PRS, on the other hand, looks for the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Building a theory about why a haunting might be taking place helps lay out the groundwork for collecting and presenting evidence that goes beyond grainy surveillance of moving doors. Evidence of levitation or moving objects is definitely cool, but is, in my opinion, nothing without a good theory. And that theory almost always comes back to the emotional makeup of the household.

In the case of Ally and Larry, they were raising a small child, which isn’t always a calm, relaxing process. From what I understand, tensions between Larry and Ally’s parents made him defensive, which made Ally defensive. So there were some arguments. All that tension and unresolved frustration could easily fuel the spiritual activity. If you think that’s hard to believe, consider this analogy. Most everyone has experienced seeing a friend or relative, and without them saying a word or making a movement, knew they were angry or sad. That, in turn, affected the way you interacted with them. Maybe you became sympathetic and asked what was wrong, or decided to act like you didn’t notice and tried to leave as quickly as possible.

The bottom line is the moods of others affect the way you act. If ghosts are the souls and personalities of the living, why wouldn’t they have the same reactions? A spirit feeling family tension may have decided to put their two cents into the mix. A widely accepted belief among paranormal researchers is that a high amount of energy within a household is like one big battery to spirits.

I did wonder if there was any relationship between the night Larry saw the apparition and when their baby was conceived. Maybe the spirits were warning, “Hey, not tonight, unless you want a baby.” I never did get an answer to that question.