Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (13 page)

It didn’t seem to be a position he’d aspired to. He’d studied film at Penn State, but things didn’t work out. My sense was that now he felt stuck there.

The cemetery opened in 1881 and Matt’s family had been in charge ever since. His great-grandfather and his grandfather before that were caretakers. His father, Bill Franson, broke the tradition and became a successful banker and Matt’s siblings since found different careers. Matt may have felt like he slipped backward.

Meanwhile, Matt and Chandra, who was about ten years younger, had married after two months of seeing each other. It was a big change that happened very quickly.

As I’ve said, I’m not a psychologist, but I’d spent time working with Adam, who’d been trying to figure out how psychology fit in with the paranormal. He shared his sense with me that wherever there’s a trauma, dysfunction, or even ongoing unhappiness, the paranormal tends to parallel it, as if it finds a weak spot and fills it, or feeds off it.

Here there was potentially a lot going on emotionally.

To try to draw out Chandra, Katrina and another investigator sat down with her and went through their wedding photos. The few smiles she gave us turned out to be the biggest reaction we got from her.

As for their relationship, from what I saw, while Chandra had her say, she sometimes looked to Matt before answering my questions. It wasn’t as if she were afraid, more like she looked up to him.

Between the emotional dynamic, the mysterious urn, and the hallucinations, there was a lot to look at, but the most urgent problem was Chandra’s physical pain.

She told me she’d never experienced anything like it before moving in, but now it was constant. She’d been to a doctor, had blood tests and an MRI, but there were no conclusive results or even a theoretical explanation.

To try to figure out what was going on, I brought her for another exam, with Thad Diehl, a chiropractor at the university. He examined her thoroughly, and failed to find anything wrong. He did say that the types of pains she was having were more appropriate for an eighty-year-old.

Matt already had told me his own theory about what was happening. Feeling paralyzed and seeing a ghostly woman crawl out of his laundry basket made him think a female ghost had grown attached to him. Now she might be jealous of Chandra. He and Chandra both felt it was attached to the urn that had been buried on their property.

We also spoke with Matt’s father, Bill, who said he believed what Matt was experiencing and agreed the activity was tied to Chandra’s appearance. There was another family member, though, who came by while we were shooting, and seemed to have an affect on Matt.

Unwilling to appear on-camera, this relative made no bones about being unhappy about my presence. They were worried about the family’s reputation, but also blamed the activity on demons. They felt Matt had opened himself up to it because of his interest in horror movies and video games.

They asked to speak with me directly, which was a tricky situation. On the one hand, here was someone doing what they felt was right. But Matt and Chandra were my clients, and I’d been asked to do a job for them. In situations like that, I try only to be reassuring, not to express any opinion.

It’s difficult, though, especially in this case where I was being aggressively challenged. I was asked things like, “Do you even know what demons are?”

Inside I was thinking, “Man, if you only knew what I knew about demons.” Instead, I calmly explained about my background and mentioned I’d worked directly with the Church. That gave them some respect for me. It was apparent, though, that Matt was getting flak for allowing us there at all.

Part of the issue went back to that belief I discussed earlier, that there’s no such thing as earthbound ghosts, and therefore all preternatural activity
must
be demonic. It’s a pretty widespread belief. To this day, I get letters insisting that no matter the evidence or the situation, it’s always the devil deceiving us.

While I try to respect everyone’s beliefs, I’d be doing my clients a disservice if I didn’t trust in my own experiences. Here I just didn’t see any evidence for a demonic presence. That led to some interesting situations not only with Matt and his family, but also some interesting conversations with the producers.

Prior to this person’s visit, Matt rarely said the word “demon.” He described his experiences as hallucinations, but also considered the possibility of a jealous spirit. He seemed open to entertaining whatever theory fit the facts. After the visit, though, Matt’s demeanor changed. Suddenly, he was talking demon, demon, demon. And, while he’d originally agreed to bring in a psychic, now he refused.

It was a scenario I was familiar with. In my own life, growing up, I’d seen my mother’s behavior change whenever my grandfather and his wife visited. When they weren’t there, she’d take me to see the latest
Halloween
movie, for instance. When they were visiting, there were no movies for me beyond PG. From watching Matt, I couldn’t tell if he wanted his family’s approval or felt as if he had to have it to avoid punishment.

As the others set up for Dead Time, I had a talk with Matt in the barn. I didn’t think this was a demon case, but I spoke to him in those terms because I felt it’d be the most useful for him. There’s also always an interpretive part to paranormal phenomena. If your beliefs don’t allow for the existence of ghosts, you use other terms.

I pointed out that his identity as a “ferryman” put him in a good position to be attacked. Even so, he could take charge of the forces working on his life, no matter what he wanted to call them.

He seemed to open up a bit. He started talking about how he’d let his feelings stew, and then he would lash out. In a way, he reminded me of my father when he was younger, when he was feeling trapped in a job he hated. If my dad were in a bad mood back then, you’d stay out of his way.

Matt, though, described his pent-up feelings as a way for Satan to get through. I tried to convince him it was up to him to reclaim his home.

While our conversations before that were very matter-of-fact, now he said with some emotion, “I feel good. I’m ready to fight this son of a bitch.”

During Dead Time, Matt remained committed. He asked if a demon was there to torment them, and condemned it back to hell.

At the time I heard nothing in response, but our recorders captured a very faint, almost electronic whistle. In terms of evidence, it was pretty light, but it felt as if things were starting to shift psychologically.

In the episode, the buried urn isn’t brought up until about halfway through, but it was during our preliminary talk Matt first told me about it. From the beginning, the Fransons considered it a possible source for their problems.

Years before, an unidentified urn containing ashes had been found by a police officer on the nearby banks of the Susquehanna River. The police thought someone might have thrown it off a bridge near the spot. According to Matt, on October 11, 2001, the chief of police brought it to him, asking if he’d bury it someplace.

Matt, concerned he’d have to dig it up again if someone claimed it, let it sit on a shelf in his barn. Almost five years later, on July 27, 2006, he decided it was finally time to bury it. He put it in his own yard, leaving a bit of cement on top to mark the spot. The burial roughly coincided with their marriage and, hence, the beginning of the activity.

Going into this case, one of our biggest concerns was whether or not our short schedule gave us the time to fully investigate the urn. As it turned out, I was particularly proud of what we were able to accomplish, and very disappointed that practically none of that investigative work made it into the episode.

One of the first things we did when we arrived was exhume the urn. There’s a scene with Matt digging it up in the rain. It was a square metal box with a relief of praying hands, a Christian symbol, on one side. At first we didn’t even know if the ashes were human.

We started by interviewing the policewoman who’d found it. Our first surprise came when she told us that at the time she found it, this “unidentified urn” had a metal ID tag. Whenever someone’s cremated in Pennsylvania, the ashes are always given that sort of tag. Unfortunately, according to the police, before they took the urn to Matt, it was brought to a funeral parlor (this is not the same parlor shown in the episode). When it came back, the tag was missing.

It was incredibly frustrating. Not finding any lead at all is one thing, but in this case we were so close. There were only so many places in Pennsylvania that cremate remains. Based on the location, the ashes were likely from a crematorium very close to State College. With an ID tag, it would’ve been easy to find out who this was.

I called the parlor, but they denied there’d ever been any tag. In fact, they didn’t seem to want to talk to me at all. Perhaps if they’d admitted to losing the tag, there may have been a legal or a public relations issue for them, but I found the attitude strange.

Our best chance gone, I took the ashes to the Penn State forensics department, hoping they could identify the remains through DNA. A technician there explained that not only would the results take weeks, there was only a very small chance of finding any DNA to begin with. It was likely all destroyed during the cremation. Then, even if they did beat those odds, the deceased would’ve had to have their DNA pattern stored in a database in order to get a match.

I was stumped. Not knowing when the person died, we couldn’t just check hospital records. I figured someone must’ve thrown the urn into the river, but we didn’t know when, how long after the date of death, or even how long after that the urn was in the river—two months or twenty years.

But that brought up another question. Why would someone throw an entire urn off a bridge? Maybe the deceased wanted their ashes scattered over the river, and someone tried, but dropped the urn. We’ll never know.

The ashes did reveal a couple of things. I interviewed funeral director Bill William, and his examination of the ashes did make it into the episode. He poured them out on a plastic bag, and then sifted through them with his bare hands. I also put my fingers through the ashes. Unlike Mr. Williams, I wore latex gloves.

My career as an investigator sometimes involved sticking my head and hands into some very questionable places—including dead dogs, spirit vortices, and dusty attics. Here, I was actually touching what was once a human being. There’s a quick cut in the episode with a look on my face expressing my feelings at the time.

During a modern cremation, the corpse is heated to around seventeen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, completely incinerating it. Even at that temperature, though, some personal items survive. Mr. Williams uncovered a bracelet and some surgical staples. The feminine bracelet led him to conclude it was definitely human, and likely a woman. The staples indicated she’d gone through a major surgery. Since these staples were of a type that is usually removed after the incision heals, it was likely she’d passed away before recovering.

This created an intriguing possibility that made me think Matt and Chandra were right in pinpointing the urn as the source of the haunting. Rather than a demon or a jealous spirit, I wondered if it was someone who’d been sick when they died. If they couldn’t move on because they’d never been buried properly, they might be imposing their illness, their pains, on Chandra.

That fit, for the paranormal aspect, but I still felt that there were issues surrounding the emotional side of things. Chandra was experiencing the bulk of the phenomena, but Matt’s notion of a demon or a jealous female put him at the center of the problem. He pictured this entity as wanting to take away the people closest to him. It sounded as if it wasn’t so much about jealousy as punishment. I wondered if he might be using his theories to express feelings of guilt and being trapped.

At that early stage, I was very, very hesitant to bring a thought like that to a client’s attention. I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to tell people what I thought their personal problems were. But again and again those problems seem linked to the activity. These days, for better or worse, I try to be a lot more direct. If I believe it’s true, I’ll just say, for instance, “Hey, your menopause could be causing your poltergeist activity.”

Whatever the explanation, I felt the best thing we could do was give the urn a proper burial. That would create the possibility for all three of them—the spirit, Matt, and Chandra—to move on.

Since the urn had a Christian symbol on the side, we assumed the deceased had been of that faith. Matt picked a spot in the cemetery and we made preparations. Once the decision was made, they both reported already feeling better, lighter. With that sense of impending relief, Matt opened up some more, revealing a sense of guilt.

“I had let my guard down over the years,” he told me, “taken it for granted and let this demon come into my house and cause problems, but now this has been a rebirth for me, and I’m ready to fight.”

He choked up. It was a very emotional moment for him. At the same time, though, I had to tell him what I thought. The complete conversation isn’t in the episode, but I said, “I don’t think you did anything wrong. I don’t think you summoned a demon.”

But I don’t know if he ever believed me.

Because of the strength of his feelings at that moment, I wondered if there might be something he wasn’t telling me. He definitely seemed to feel he was getting a resolution to something. What that something was, I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand.