Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (18 page)

It was incredibly frustrating. The phone rang about five times, so if I’d realized at the time, it could’ve been tracked down. Everyone was disappointed that we’d missed a prime opportunity, so, between this case and the next, “Man of the House,” we took a good hard look at how to be more careful during Dead Time.

We did come away with some evidence. The ring was captured on audio, so we compared it to the rings of all the other phones in the house. There was no match. I also asked the clients if they’d heard anything like it, but they hadn’t.

It was a weird event in any case. Jacob and Jane Witzel were from the middle of the nineteenth century, and there were no phones at the time. It did raise the possibility that there were more spirits about. We had some indications of that. One night, for instance, Ally told us that she’d woken up in bed and saw not the older woman but a younger man looking at her. Since it didn’t bear on the main story, it was left out of the episode.

During Dead Time, CJ also offered to carry any messages the spirits had to the family. She told us that they wanted to stay and coexist. As it turned out, the Sokolowskis felt the same way. When people watch this episode, some ask why we didn’t perform a house blessing or ceremony to get rid of the spirit. My answer is this: If the spirit gives us any indication that it feels trapped or wants to move on, then we’d feel a personal obligation to do so. On the other hand, we also accept the possibility that some spiritual presences in a home are there by choice, for whatever reason. In that case, it’s up to the homeowners, since it is now their space. If the spirit wishes to remain, we ask the homeowners if they have any objection. If they don’t, then the spirit remains. If the clients do, then we have to have an intervention.

On the other hand, if the spirits give us an indication that they want to leave, but the clients don’t want them to, then we will consider trying to remove the spirits even if it’s against the clients’ will. (Believe me, there are many instances of this happening. There are several ghost tourist locations that try to capitalize on the pain and suffering of the deceased, not even willing to entertain the possibility that they are there against their will. These owners will not allow anyone to go in there to remove the spirits because it would be bad for business.)

In this case, I talked it over with Eilfie, Sergey, and Josh, and we felt comfortable that we were dealing with a completely benevolent haunting, and therefore agreed to not interfere with the family’s—and spirits’—wishes.

This brought us to an unusual resolution. It was sort of like the end of Tim Burton’s film
Beetlejuice
, with dead and living getting along in harmony. Normally I’d be suspicious of that, but given everything else going on in the family, acceptance seemed the right way to go.

The next day, in a very moving moment for Larry, CJ conveyed that he did have Jane’s approval. After that, we even managed to open up a dialogue between Larry and Ally’s parents. For the first time, they talked things out. Larry had the opportunity to tell them how uncomfortable he was, not just from the spirits, but with them as well. By the end of it, they were laughing together.

Sometimes, whether it’s paranormal or not, if we help remove the spirits or not, the shared experience is what matters the most. As Linkin Park put it in a song, “The journey is more important than the end or the start.” In having shared this experience together, Larry and the Sokolowski family had something in common. This made the case feel, to me at least, very complete.

Very often in these investigations, threads are left hanging, mysteries unsolved, clients’ problems unresolved. But this investigation was satisfying on many levels. On the one hand, I felt it was a genuine haunting. On the other, the emotional aspect had a satisfying conclusion. The ghost actually seemed to help unite the family.

Ally said she had less trouble sleeping in the house now that she felt she knew who the ghost was. Larry claimed he wasn’t having any more problems. A couple of years later, we contacted the family to see how they were doing. They assured us that they were fine, that they still had some minor, harmless paranormal activity but it wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle. All around, aside from kicking myself over the ringing phone, for me this was energizing, one of the success stories.

P
SYCHICS AND
S
UCH

Psychic
is an umbrella term for someone with the ability to discover hidden information and/or influence the world through their minds alone. There are many subcategories, but the definitions tend to overlap and vary depending on the source and history. Here’s a rough guide.

Mediums
are people who communicate with the dead. The word gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, during the rise of modern spiritualism in the United States and Britain.
Mental mediums
sense spirits and communicate for them.
Physical mediums
act as conduits for spirit energies, allowing them to act physically on the world, either by speaking directly through the medium, causing objects to move or materialize, and even
transfiguring,
where the face of the spirit appears on the face of the medium.

Seers
are able to see future events, through their own intuition or in combination with rituals or tools, such as crystal balls, tarot cards, runes, or the
I Ching
. This subcategory includes
prophets,
and span all the way from the ancient Greek Oracle of Delphi to the sixteenth-century Frenchman Nostradamus to today’s tarot readers and astrologists.

Clairvoyance
(meaning “clear vision” in French) is a general term that refers to the ability to gain information through means beyond the normal six senses. The subcategory
remote viewing
is more specifically the ability to visualize an unseen person or object and its location. Through the Stargate Project beginning in the 1970s, the United States military attempted to use so-called remotes to locate objects and other targets. The program was successful enough to continue operation through the 1990s.

Other types of psychics include the
telepath
, who has the ability to read minds, and the
telekinetic
, who has the ability to move objects.

True psychics are hard to come by. Amateurs, frauds, and the self-deluded abound. Because people under emotional duress tend to be vulnerable, it’s crucial to proceed with extreme caution before placing faith in a psychic. Many of the effects are easy to fake through such things as
cold reading
, discussed elsewhere.

K
ATRINA
W
EIDMAN

Why the fascination with the paranormal?

The fact that my parents kept buying and moving into haunted houses probably had something to do with it. I was always the girl at sleepovers who brought the Ouija board. My friends, tears in their eyes, would call their parents to take them home.

I don’t know what was worse for my parents, to have their daughter say, “I want to be an actor” or “I want to be a paranormal investigator.” In my case, neither took them by surprise. As I worked on my degrees in theater and integrative arts I also spent hours studying to be an investigator with PRS.

What was your most unusual interview?

During “Pet Cemetery,” talking to Coley, a little girl. She was very hard to understand. All I could make out was her little voice saying, “I want to die; I don’t want to die; I want to die.” If you watch my face it pretty much sums up my feelings. Ryan does a lovely impersonation of my reaction.

What was it like handling your own case?

Loved it. I’ll never forget the moment during “Beer, Wine & Spirits” when Ryan told Heather and me, “This is your investigation, girls.” We just kind of stood there with blank expressions. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. The night before, Eilfie kept asking if I’d read my PRS handbook. “Did you bring it with you?” It was an odd question to ask at one A.M.

I made a lot of rookie mistakes, but in the end I felt like Heather and I stepped up. It was the first time I really felt like I was part of the team.

What was your most difficult interview?

Brian, the client from “Beer,” just because it was my first time sitting down with a client without Ryan. I wound up forgetting a lot of key points and I don’t think I did a very good job making Brian feel comfortable.

What’s the one thing you’d like people to know about PRS?

What people see on TV is only a snapshot of what we do, and a fragment of who we are as people. We actually have personalities and know how to smile. People are always surprised to learn that when they meet us.

We also don’t head home to sip martinis from diamond encrusted glasses poolside. That’s what TV life’s supposed to be like, right? We work extremely hard. We search for cases, do tons of interviews, plan new experiments, and do exhaustive historical research, all before we step foot on the property. Afterward, we spend hours reviewing the evidence and compiling a report.

How has working with PRS changed your views of the paranormal?

I used to be afraid of death. Now, I believe it’s just the next stage. I used to think a ghost was someone who’d died and couldn’t move on, but the word doesn’t do justice to the possibilities. It could be from another dimension, an intelligence that attaches itself to human life, or echoes of moments of time. Maybe
we’re
ghosts to the transparent figures we scream at and run from. That’s what I find exciting about this field, the possibilities.

Sometimes I look back at the work I’ve done with my friends, who’ve become like brothers and sisters, and wonder what I’d be doing if my parents never bought that first haunted house. I didn’t know it, but it was one of the best purchases they ever made.

Chapter 9
The Client That Haunted the Ghosts

I asked how often she did the EVP recording. “Every day.”

After “The Woman in the Window,” we filmed “Man in the House,” right up until a few days before Christmas. With that behind us, it was time for Penn State’s winter break, giving us three weeks off from school. I’d always planned to take the show outside Pennsylvania, and without classes to worry about, this was the time to do it. Our producers were based in New York City, so they put out some press there and uncovered a few cases. We wound up shooting two in New York, which would become “Paranormal Intervention” and “Beer, Wine & Spirits,” and a third in Massachusetts, “School House Haunting.”

I spent the holiday back home in South Carolina, and then drove up to New York on January 2, 2007. Serg was from Queens, so it was a short drive for him. Eilfie took a bus from State College, Heather from Altoona. Katrina didn’t make the first case, but later trained in from Philly.