Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (27 page)

But nothing in Elizabethtown turned out the way any of us expected.

“The Name” wound up being one of the most frenetic, convoluted investigations I’d ever been on. The time line is jumbled, partly due to a heroically impressive effort on the part of the editors to squeeze more than forty-two hours of video into twenty-two minutes and still tell an engaging, coherent story, and partly because the case was completed in two sessions. I’ll try to sort it all out as we go along.

Our first shoot was the briefing, done in the PRS office. Ryan Heiser was there as well as our regulars. I ran through the few details I knew at the time. Single mother, Jodi, and her teen son, Nate, had moved into a house in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, and said they instantly started having experiences. Jodi described herself as being raised Catholic, but no longer practiced. She worked as a forensic accountant, someone who prepares books for use in court cases. She was very tight-lipped about her work for legal reasons.

During the drive, after I’d seen the name B— in the local paper, I received a call from Jodi. She said she was having a fight with Nate. In the past she’d ended communication with both his biological and then his adoptive father, which had been difficult for him. Out of necessity the episode abbreviates these factors, making it seem as if these were the only two men in their lives recently, but Jodi also had a boyfriend. She told us that it was her recent problems with him that left Jodi and Nate at odds. Because the full story would have been too complicated to explain, the boyfriend appears only briefly in the episode, sitting around the dining room table. Blink and you’ll miss him.

Once we arrived, Jamie and I interviewed the clients separately to give us a better sense of the family situation. First I spoke with her boyfriend, who felt that the paranormal phenomena were making Jodi erratic, affecting their relationship. He said she’d kick him out, and then invite him back, leaving him feeling used. At first I felt sympathetic, but Jodi later told a different story, saying she’d asked him to leave for other reasons. I don’t know what was true, but it did point to the sort of excess emotional energy that so often surrounds activity.

Meanwhile, Jodi spoke with Jamie about her divorce five years prior, and how difficult it was being a single parent. She talked more specifically about the activity, too, stressing how often they heard footsteps.

We also learned that her grandmother, who was in her eighties, had lived in the house the first week and seemed to have some encounters of her own. According to Jodi, she claimed to see two small children, girls, who would pull at her. Jodi said the activity upset her grandmother. In fact, it was one of the reasons the grandmother left to live in a home. When asked, Jodi explained that her greatest fear now was that if what was going on was real, it might hurt her son.

Nate was fourteen, but well-spoken and forthcoming with his feelings. “I don’t really have a father figure right now,” he said. “Even if it’s not [my mother’s] fault, I feel like there’s something inside me blaming her.”

I don’t usually get involved with these situations; it’s not why we’re there, or what we do, but I felt like I understood where Nate was coming from. Though my father stayed in my life, my parents’ marriage ended very, very badly and I’d grown up feeling stuck in the middle of someone else’s failed relationship.

There were times I’d have a fairly normal fight with my mother over something stupid, but it would boil over, and I’d end up accusing her of driving my father away. The feelings were bottled up, and when I was younger they erupted at inappropriate moments. Nate reminded me of that. He said he would get angry and punch walls, or claim his mom drove his father away, that sort of thing.

I remember trying to give him some advice, but I have no idea if it helped any.

Nate also talked about his paranormal experiences. “I’ll just be looking out the front door, and I’ll feel like someone is standing behind me, or has a hand on my shoulder.”

I still considered the activity light, but during my interview with Jodi I began to notice things. At one point, she became visibly uncomfortable and said she was feeling cold. Since she’d reported feeling touched, I asked if she felt that way at that moment.

She nodded vigorously. “On my back.”

At that moment, I felt that something strange was going on. The touching and the cold were signs there might be a connection between her and whatever was going on in the house, especially if this thing was bold enough to be doing it during an interview. There was something about the way she carried herself that made me worry she had experienced more than she was saying. At the same time, I was aware that I’d been thinking so much about Teena’s problems in Syracuse my interest in that case could have been biasing me.

I did try to follow up by pointedly asking if the spirit had done anything else. She didn’t answer. She just looked at me kind of funny.

“Okay, we’ll come back to that,” I said.

Then she showed me some crystals she’d found on the property, thinking they were peculiar and possibly related. I had Eilfie take a look at them, but nothing came of it. Some may have been broken glass, the sort found in cheap landfills used in construction. I also asked about the previous owner of the house, but at that point, she didn’t answer.

By the end of the interview, my sense that there was something she wasn’t saying was stronger. So I asked again if there was anything else.

“No, no,” she insisted. “That’s it.”

Right after we ended, though, she suddenly said, “I have something I forgot to show you . . .”

She pulled out a copy of a newspaper article, said the previous owner had given it to her, and handed it to me. The headline read:

SIX SILENCED BY SLAYER, ONE OF CLASSIC MURDER STORIES.

PARENTS AND FOUR OF EIGHT CHILDREN WIPED OUT 52 YEARS AGO
.

At that moment, despite whatever else Jodi may have been afraid to discuss, I was convinced I’d been set up. A paranormal investigator is at her home and she
forgot
about a mass murder? How was that possible? The only thing I could think of was that she’d been coached, that production, worried the episode might be boring, had stepped over the line and asked her to spring this on me while the cameras were running, to create some drama.

“This happened here?” I asked. Instead of fascinated, I was angry. I didn’t say anything else. I just walked away. If this was true, it was big. I had to understand what was going on. So I headed over to production.

“I’m trying to do a real investigation. If you coached my client, that’s against everything we stand for. If they’re not going to be truthful, we can’t help them.”

Worse, I didn’t know if Jodi had been coached about anything else. I actually threatened to leave.

I remember the director being apologetic because a producer did know about the information and hadn’t told me, but there was nothing else any of them was aware of.

The producers and our crew work tirelessly, following us at all hours of the day into some deeply bizarre places, then crafting a great show. I appreciate that enormously, but the integrity of the investigation is more personal to me and my life. Over the years, my reaction to this sort of issue has given me a reputation for being difficult.

I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but the surprise distracted me from pursuing my hunch that there were things Jodi had yet to be open about. For now, I had to figure out how to deal with this article. The mass murder, after all, was something PRS hadn’t uncovered about the case ourselves, so I was blindsided.

Regarding that article about the murders, there’s another misconception about the details of this case, partly caused by my initial question, “This happened here?”

The victims, members of the Kreider family, were originally from the area but had moved to and were murdered in North Dakota. Their bodies were transported back to Elizabethtown, and buried in a cemetery literally across the street from Jodi’s house.

Once I’d calmed down about the sudden appearance of the article, I began to wonder why Jodi never called the previous owner to ask about them. “You don’t think he was trying to tell you something?” I asked her.

When I contacted Brian, the former owner, he was very forthcoming. “I’ve been waiting for
someone
to call about that,” he said. He definitely believed the house was haunted. He said that he and his ex-wife heard children laughing in the basement. According to Brian, she even claimed to have seen them, corroborating what Jodi’s grandmother saw. Brian’s wife had also gone to the state library, found out about the murders, and learned the family was buried across the street.

Brian explained that he hadn’t told Jodi outright, fearing she’d think he was crazy. “I felt so guilty about not telling her that when I realized I hadn’t given her the ownership title, I gave her that article, too. I was hoping she’d ask questions, but she didn’t.”

Jodi’s reticence about certain things was becoming more curious.

Meanwhile, I asked Eilfie to find out if there were any surviving family members of the victims still in the area. She managed to track down a grandson, Robert Greiner.

Our first psychic walk-through with Chip Coffey came next. When he walked in, that was literally the first moment I physically met him, a moment captured on the show. Our first phone call aside, my initial impressions weren’t positive, but as viewers know, my impression changed radically and he became a staple of the show for the first three seasons.

After talking about how “hard” the cemetery struck him as he drove in, he almost immediately started talking demons, which sent up warning bells for me about his accuracy. There’d been no indication of that kind of activity at all, but Chip felt that not only might one be present, but that Jodi was drawing it in. He didn’t offer any details, making it sound even more unconnected to what I’d seen. I became more and more skeptical about him by the second.

We walked through the house, then into a bedroom with a painted mural. Jodi had painted the mural as a sort of bonding experience.

There, Chip became even more dramatic. “There’s definitely residual energy with a little girl in the house but there’s also that male energy. There’s something that tells me it’s demonic. Interestingly enough, I have to tell you something about you. You amuse it. It feels like it knows what you know inside your head. Can I be real honest with you about what I just got in my head? I just got ‘I’ll get them all.’ So be careful.”

Under other conditions, this would have been frightening news, but based on what I believed about the case at the time, I was thinking, “This guy is full of shit. This is the last time I work with him.”

That night, along with Jodi and Nate, we visited the graveyard and located the tombstones of the murdered Kreider family. Jodi and Nate seemed very moved. Nate even teared up. There were a lot of emotions floating around.

Since Chip was already here, I felt obliged to give him another chance and invited him to sit in on Dead Time. Usually we don’t have minors at Dead Time, but Nate wanted to watch, and Jodi wanted him present, so we had him sit in with Serg in tech. The house wasn’t that big, tech HQ was downstairs, and we couldn’t really move around a lot.

Despite my hunches about Jodi, I still wasn’t expecting anything. But I swear, as we tried to contact the child spirits, I heard
very
clear footsteps down the hallway. Everyone heard them, even the cameramen. I looked down the hall, wondering what was making the noise, and saw nothing.

Since we’d been trying to contact the child when the footsteps started, I said, “Okay, let’s have the child move away and let this male figure come through.”

Jodi seemed to react. She said she was feeling a presence, then reported that she was being touched.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What is your name?”

B—, the name of the Syracuse demon, popped into my head.

Ryan,
I told myself,
you’re going overboard. That’s next week’s case. Stay focused.

But then Chip announced, “I’ve got a name. It’s a strange one.”

For some reason I couldn’t explain, I asked him not to say it, but to write it. As he wrote, my intuition was telling me,
It’s going to be the name. It’s going to be the name.
But, my mind said,
Nah, couldn’t be.

I opened the paper. There it was: B—.

My own emotions had been running a gamut that day. Now, I was floored. I felt like my breath had been stolen from me. The room started to spin. My heart started to race. I became hyperaware of every single noise in the house. I make no exaggeration about this incident. It was the biggest physical reaction I ever had on
Paranormal State.
I stared at it for about thirty seconds. Finally I looked up at Chip. “Why did you write this name down?”

“That’s what I got. Do you know that?”

“Yes, I do. It’s the same name that I’ve been . . .”

“Picking up? You knew that was what was going to be on the paper, didn’t you?”

“You’ve never come across this name before?” I asked, ignoring the question.