Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown Read online

  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?

  IMPORTANT DATES IN PRS HISTORY

  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

  SEASON ONE SHOOTING ORDER AND AIRDATES

  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?

  At the same time we’ve never gone into an investigation knowing there was true paranormal activity. Often we leave still not knowing. The only way to find out what’s true is to do the investigation.

  While I suspected something paranormal was going on, I knew deep down that this family needed the kind of help we could provide. Whether that meant uncovering an actual entity, finding ways to empower them emotionally so they could better deal with the situation, or empowering them just by providing explanations, would be something we’d have to find out along the way. At some point we had to roll the dice.

  The family dynamic also seemed complicated for a twenty-two minute show. As Shelly indicates in the episode, the Seighmans’ marriage was troubled. They also had an older child, Rachel, who was wheelchair-bound. She was suffering from a debilitating terminal illness that left her in an infant state. We agreed that since she didn’t seem central to the haunting, there was no need for Rachel to appear on-camera.

  In the end, we went ahead with the case.

  New as I was to the whole process of discussing a case in terms of what made a good show, I soon learned that what might be considered risky one day, like shooting with children, could become standard the next. Once we had the experience of working with Matthew, it was easier to consider working with children, resulting in some of our best cases.

  The only word to describe March 31, 2006—the first day of shooting—is surreal. One day life was relatively normal. The next, several vans full of technicians, camera people, directors, assistants, and equipment showed up at club headquarters.

  Since this was the pilot, all the producers involved also showed up. In addition to my team, there were twelve or thirteen production people. Usually on a case, there’d be five
or so of us, and whatever equipment we carried. Now we were quite a crowd. It was energizing, exciting, but also completely strange.

  As everyone unpacked, I walked down the road with Eilfie. We were all excited about the show, but most of us had no long-standing desire to be on TV.

  “Can you believe this is actually happening?” I asked.

  “I just hope we don’t get caught up in it,” she said. “I hope they do a good job of documenting it.”

  Exploitation was certainly a fear I had. Television meant money and fame to a lot of people. Were we going to exploit the clients? Were they going to try to exploit us?

  The producers, I assume, had their own worries. They were spending a lot of time and money on an expensive pilot. I could easily see them wondering, what if these college kids ruined it? What if the clients were lying? What if we didn’t get any footage we could use?

  The fact that our producers and the crew were extremely professional, hands-on, and communicative helped tremendously. Before anything was shot, we had a circle powwow with everyone to talk about the day.

  I’d created an outline of how I felt things should go, starting with the briefing we always had before going out on an investigation. In a way, our briefing scenes are a real-life homage to The X Files, one of my favorite shows. They often have a scene with Mulder doing a slide show for Scully to explain their case. I think every paranormal investigator relates to Fox Mulder, but, to be a little cocky, I believe I have a stronger connection than most. As a child, Mulder experienced a sudden shift that changed his life. That was similar to what I went through.

  When it came time to shoot, with all those cameras aimed at me, I was nervous. What was I supposed to talk about? How could I keep it interesting enough for a TV audience? In the end, I just went into the details about the case, like I had for years, and things worked out. “We were contacted back in February . . .”

  That first briefing is particularly interesting to go back and watch. Aside from being our first shoot, there are people who have since left PRS and don’t appear again. Except for the faithful few, the membership changed over time. People graduated, grew in different directions, and many months passed between shooting the pilot and shooting the series.

  Adam was a special case. Though he wasn’t technically our instructor, he’d been staff adviser for PRS. He came back for the pilot, but had already left the group. He’d told me that partly as a result of what we’d witnessed during those extreme demonic cases, he now had a more rigid view of doctrinal Catholic Church belief: Since every human spirit is sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory at death there can be no earthbound human spirits, no ghosts. Therefore any paranormal activity must be demonic.

  It’s funny, but because of the demonic cases we’ve done on the show some viewers conclude that I think everything’s demonic, but, based on my experience, I just don’t believe that.

  After the briefing, all twenty-three of us were on our way to Mount Pleasant. I called Shelly from the road, and, unfortunately, things were getting worse. Matthew’s experiences were even more frequent now. The night before he’d felt something tighten around his neck.

  As per the procedure we’d established over the years, when we arrived, Serg and the others set up our equipment while I sat down to talk with Shelly. Usually, though, I’d be alone with the client. Now I was surrounded by a film crew.

  Beyond the short outline I’d written there was no sense of a formula, no plan. As it turned out, this worked very well. The producers and crew hung back and let us do our thing, a process that we’ve found leads to our best work and most exciting episodes.

  It was easy to see that Shelly was upset. She told me how Matthew’s experiences made him miserable and disruptive in school. He was even seeing the spirits manifest in class. They appeared more strongly at night, though, and Matthew was having a lot of trouble sleeping, despite medication.

  One crucial thing I’ve learned is that there’s nearly always an emotional aspect to hauntings. On the one hand, stress can make people see or hear things that aren’t there. On the other, many believe that spirits don’t have their own energy and have to borrow it. Stress can generate an excess emotional energy that attracts activity. Then again, encountering the paranormal creates stress, so it’s hard to know how to unravel things.

  I’d also learned, partly from Adam and his psychology training, to always proceed cautiously, with sympathy and concern. I try not to play pop psychologist. I leave the big issues to the professionals, which is why a counselor, like Adam, is an important part of the team. If the situation is clear to me, though, I do try to empower my clients to help themselves.

  Here I felt a lot of sadness the moment I walked through the door. Caring for a daughter with a terminal illness had already put the marriage under pressure. Their new worries for Matthew, coupled with his refusal to sleep in his own bed, put an even greater strain on things. There was clearly a lot going on emotionally.

  While I spoke with Shelly, Adam spent time with Matthew, trying to establish a relaxed, friendly atmosphere in which it would be easier for him to open up. You can see right away in the episode that Matthew wasn’t a typical kid. He was often quiet and withdrawn.

  As I mentioned, it’s important to look at nonparanormal explanations first. Here, while it doesn’t appear in the episode, a number of psychological checks were performed on Matthew. Though he had some speech problems, his doctors did not feel he was autistic or developmentally challenged. We were also comfortable there wasn’t any question of physical or verbal abuse.

  At the same time he seemed very shut down. I don’t believe his parents directly told him his sister was dying or about their marital problems, but kids can sense what’s going on in a household, and those factors may have contributed to his seeming withdrawal. It’s sad to see that in any kid, but particularly with Matthew. My own childhood experiences also made me feel close to him. He had a very active mind, but it was occupied by dark concerns.

  When he talked about the spirits, he said, “Those black ones are the problem. Somehow I know they’re danger.”

  He described them as smoky shapes without full human form. “Mists” was the best he could come up with. He didn’t know why they were around, but definitely thought they were after him, telling him, as I mentioned, to “stab Mommy” or “jump off the roof.”

  That kind of malevolence is sometimes demonic, but not all of his experiences were threatening. One spirit he saw, Timmy, not only had a human shape, but Matthew wasn’t particularly afraid of him. Their conversations were, I guess, what you’d call a little more “normal.”

  One of the things that drew me to the case was the possibility of explaining the haunting historically. Shelly suggested to us that Timmy might be the spirit of Timothy Shirey, a former resident of the house. Research, both about the location of the activity and its past occupants, is always important. Here we were able to piece together Timothy’s story in a way that strikingly fit in with Matthew’s experiences.

  A local newspaper article described Timothy Shirey as schizophrenic. Unable to live independently, he was cared for by adoptive parents. Shelly believed some of his friends were still in the area, and we were able to track a few down, including Mike and Lori Dopik.

  The Dopiks described Timothy as withdrawn and childlike, making him, in a way, like Matthew. Another friend described how Timothy would come over to hang out, but would often just get up and leave without saying good-bye. He disappeared for days or even weeks at a time.

  In his midthirties, Timothy’s life changed drastically. One of his adoptive parents passed away and the surviving parent was moved to an assisted-care facility. The Shireys’ eldest biological son decided to sell the house. Faced with fending for himself for the first time in his life, Timothy disappeared. According to a neighbor interviewed in the episode, when Timothy left, the only thing he took with him was a .22 caliber rifle.

  Two months later, when Bryan and Shelly bought the hou
se, Timothy hadn’t been found. They remodeled so that Rachel could get around more easily in her wheelchair, and moved in, not knowing about Timothy. Matthew began seeing spirits a few months after moving in, and may have seen Timmy while he was still considered missing.

  There was a big patch of overgrown land in the neighborhood. Six months later, workers began clearing it. People started walking their dogs and wandering around there. That’s when a neighbor found Timothy’s body, dead from a .22 caliber bullet wound.

  Some of the locals we spoke with felt Timothy was murdered, but I tend to discount those stories. In many of the cases I’ve investigated, whenever suicide is the official explanation, some people just don’t accept it. Given his situation and the fact he’d brought his rifle, suicide seems likely to me. Matthew was five at the time the body was found and his parents kept the news from him.

  This history provided a direct explanation and an identity for one of the spirits. Spirits tend to be connected to location. Timothy would naturally feel attached to his former home, and possibly be as afraid to leave it in death as he had been in life. Spirits are also often disturbed when their environment is changed. The house renovations, the clearing of the field, and the discovery of the body may have contributed to the activity.

  While interviewing Matthew, Adam asked if there was any specific place that the spirits appeared. Matthew led him down into the basement, pointed to a corner near the furnace and immediately started walking away.

  “Over there?” Adam asked. “By the furnace? Right now or some other time?”

  Matthew paused long enough to say “now,” and then kept walking.

  Did Matthew’s reaction mean Timmy was actually there? Maybe.

  Unless someone manages to videotape a full-body apparition, or something levitating in laboratory conditions, hard evidence of the paranormal is, to put it mildly, tough. In my own experience, even when something amazing seems to happen right in front of me, one of the hard lessons is that it’s still very possible there’s a natural explanation.