Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (4 page)

Exhausted, I crashed, and then headed home the next day. When I arrived, an e-mail was waiting for me from Betsy. I e-mailed back, expecting she’d answer in a few days’ time, but she wrote back immediately, asking to speak to me on the phone. We wound up talking for two hours. I told ghost stories and Betsy avidly listened.

In May a two-man camera crew came to Penn State for a test shoot: producer Dave Miller, who later became coexecutive producer for the series, and his assistant. They planned to film us socializing at the school then follow us on an investigation for two days.

That first night, after trying to get into a crowded local bar, we went to a party. Dave filmed us playing pong, drinking beer, and flirting with girls. It was exciting, but weird. The partygoers were playing things up for the camera. I tried to act natural, but if you’re thinking about it, it’s not natural, right? Over time you wind up forgetting the cameras are there, but that time had yet to come.

The next day we went to Pittsburgh, the location of one of those two extreme demonic cases. As we stayed the night, things became intense. Our client began speaking incoherently, saying things that sounded like language, but weren’t. The fancy term is
glossolalia
, a condition where someone constantly, fluidly vocalizes in speechlike patterns that aren’t easily recognizable. It’s part of some religious practices, but also considered a symptom of demonic possession.

Adam, an early PRS member, tried hypnosis on her. He was older than the rest of the team, and working on his PhD in clinical psych. During the session, different personalities came through the client and we became convinced an exorcism was needed. Driven by the client’s husband, we ran out in the middle of the night to find a priest.

As we searched, it began to snow, which was very unusual, since it was May. Arriving at a large church, we tried to locate the rectory, the residence for clergy. A narrow alley held some metal steps to a door with a mail slot, so we figured that had to be it. I rang and knocked, with no response. I was about to give up when a light came on from a floor above us. Shortly, an older priest, wearing pajamas adorned with images of Kermit the Frog, opened the door and eyed us suspiciously.

There we were: a college kid, a balding psychologist, and a cameraman, asking for an exorcist. He looked as if he would’ve been happier to find three muggers standing at his door. I started to throw out a lot of information, so he asked me to slow down. I did, and having worked with the church before, I also dropped some names from the diocese as references.

He explained I didn’t need to convince him. He believed in the demonic, but he did not perform exorcisms. It wasn’t something he could do. Instead, he gave us some holy water
*
and a rosary.

I remember him saying, “I hope you know what you’re doing. You walk where angels fear to tread. I’ll pray for you.” Then he shut the door.

With the family under duress, Adam and I felt we had to do something to help them until we could get a priest. We planned to go back and try a house blessing.

Meanwhile, Dave, our visiting producer, was flipping out. “You actually believe this stuff?” he asked. “I’m in a desolate area of Pittsburgh in an alleyway begging a priest for an exorcism? What the fuck am I doing? This stuff is real?”

I hadn’t noticed Dave’s reaction, but he was shaken. As we drove back to the house, he called Betsy and said, “I feel like I took the red pill from
The Matrix
.” After a frantic conversation, Betsy told him if he wanted to, he could go.

I was surprised at Dave’s reaction. Our worlds were colliding. It struck me then how completely and utterly absurd my life must have looked. Adam and I started laughing. Once we reached the house, we shared the story with some of the PRS team. Eilfie Music, who’d been in PRS practically since I founded the club, and Serg, who was there as part of the team, were as surprised as I was.

And we went back to the case.

Dave and his assistant met us again the next day and shot a little more footage before they headed back to New York City. Dave, who’s a superfunny, laid-back person, later told me that when he got home, for the first time in a long while, he prayed. He also started sprinkling holy water around his room. Although we had an uneasy introduction to each other’s worlds, Dave came back. He was a coexecutive producer for the first thirteen episodes in season one and for all of season two.

At the time, when I didn’t hear anything, I figured the project was dead. But two days later, Betsy called, still very interested. Looking back, having a cameraman so freaked out he had to leave probably made her think she’d hit the jackpot with us.

For me, though, those two cases were profoundly different from wandering around an empty auditorium with a tape recorder and a camcorder hoping a chair would move by itself. I’d helped the families, yes, but I was also given a disturbing warning: The malevolent entities now knew me, and would one day return to attack me.

I was no longer an outside investigator looking in. I was not only knotted to the phenomena, I was left feeling as if these investigations nearly killed me. They certainly turned my life upside down. As a result of the fallout from these cases, which I discuss later in the book, I wound up dropping out of school in my senior year, and left at a very depressing crossroads.

I had to ask myself: If this was what it might mean, show or not, could I keep investigating? Was this
really
the direction I wanted to go in?

I
MPORTANT
D
ATES IN
PRS H
ISTORY

Paranormal Research Society founded     09.16.01

First case (Betsy Aardsma/Pattee Library)     09.30.01

First full investigation (Schwab Auditorium)     03.02

First big case (Cindy Song disappearance)     04.02

First UNIV-CON     10.24–27.02

Test video     04.29–05.01.05

Pilot (“Sixth Sense”)     03.31.06

Paranormal State
begins shooting season one     11.08.06

Paranormal State
season one premieres     12.10.07

S
EASON
O
NE
S
HOOTING
O
RDER AND
A
IRDATES

Shooting Order - “Sixth Sense”

Original Air Date - 12.10.07

Shooting Order - “The Name”

Original Air Date - 12.10.07

Shooting Order - “The Devil in Syracuse”

Original Air Date - 12.17.07

Shooting Order - “Dark Man”

Original Air Date - 12.17.07

Shooting Order - “Vegas”

Original Air Date - 12.31.07

Shooting Order - “The Cemetery”

Original Air Date - 01.07.08

Shooting Order - “Pet Cemetery”

Original Air Date - 01.07.08

Shooting Order - “Man of the House”

Original Air Date - 01.14.08

Shooting Order - “Beer, Wine & Spirits”

Original Air Date - 01.14.08

Shooting Order - “Paranormal Intervention”

Original Air Date - 01.21.08

Shooting Order - “Shape Shifter”

Original Air Date - 01.21.08

Shooting Order - “School House Haunting”

Original Air Date - 01.28.08

Shooting Order - “The Haunted Piano”

Original Air Date - 02.04.08

Shooting Order - “The Woman in the Window”

Original Air Date - 02.11.08

Shooting Order - “Requiem”

Original Air Date - 02.18.08

Shooting Order - “The Asylum”

Original Air Date - 02.25.08

Shooting Order - “Mothman”

Original Air Date - 03.03.08

Shooting Order - “Freshman Fear”

Original Air Date - 03.10.08

Shooting Order - “The Knickerbocker”

Original Air Date - 03.17.08

Shooting Order - “The Sensitive”

Original Air Date - 03.24.08

Chapter 2
Paranormal Pilot

Those black ones are the problem. Somehow I know they’re danger.

Once the decision was made to shoot a pilot, the next step was to find a case. Naturally, I wanted it to be exciting and interesting, but there’s no way to know for certain what will happen on an investigation until you get there.

It also wasn’t as easy to find a case back then. These days we get lots of leads. Whenever I’m in State College, I get recognized. Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a bar, someone says, “Oh my God, it’s that guy from
Paranormal State
!” and twenty thousand people notice me. PRS wasn’t unknown, but we weren’t flooded with clients.

In conjunction with our producers, we issued a press release asking any haunted families open to being filmed to contact us. The search made the local news, and I wound up doing a couple of televised interviews with some of the team. That gave us a pool of responses to take a look at.

Eventually, we received a call from Shelly Seighman
*
in Mount Pleasant, not too far from Penn State. Shelly was an administrative assistant, her husband Bryan a retail manager. Both were very concerned about their eight-year-old son, Matthew, who was regularly seeing mists and spirits. If that weren’t frightening enough, at times these mists told him to do horrible things like jump off the roof or stab his mother with scissors. One spirit seemed less malevolent, though, and Matthew knew him by name, Timmy.

The Seighmans had been to doctors and counselors and no one could figure out what was wrong. Of course they were extremely concerned.

When I spoke to them, they came across as unbelievably
believable
. To me, they felt like a normal family in despair, facing something they didn’t understand, about to fall apart because of it. There were also indications of a possible explanation for the haunting. Shelly thought Timmy might be the spirit of a former resident. It sounded like a perfect opportunity to offer help, and a perfect case for our pilot. It even had a hook: With Matthew regularly seeing “dead people,” it sounded like the film,
The Sixth Sense
.

While the case seemed perfect to me, for the first time, though, I had to consult people outside PRS. Our deal with Betsy and her company, Four Seasons Productions International and the production company, Go Go Luckey, was basically that while I had full control over what I knew best, the investigation, they had control over what they knew best, crafting the edited episodes. When we began, our investigatory process was new to them, while their concerns were new to us.

This would also be our pilot. We wouldn’t get a second shot at impressing the network, so we all wanted the best possible case. Here there were concerns about Matthew’s believability. He was a child, so how would we know what was an overactive imagination or not?