"I could sleep
I could sleep
I could sleep
When I lived alone
Is there a ghost in my house?"
~Band of Horses, 2007~
So there's this new flick out, Paranormal Activity, reportedly another faux-documentary, jerky-camera horror film, this time about a young couple's troubles with a hoofed demon that gallops and gallivants about their house while they're asleep.I'll wait for cable. But given my, shall we say ... "colorful" ... background, you can perhaps indulge me for a strange-but-true paranormal tale of a former substance abuser and eccentric trouble magnet who looks back neither proud, nor ashamed. Just glad I'm here, I suppose. (The Great Platypus has again directed me to delve into my personal experiences as an entrée to the terrestrial trappings of his unearthly filter. Annoyed, yes. But duty bound, am I.)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered the ugly prospect of being enrolled down south at Con College and wearily practiced my patented technique of kicking ass at a corporate stress factory job, I lived alone in a house.A good many of my sleepless nights were spent in the company of a quasi girlfriend who, while seemingly grounded in other ways, believed in ghosts, demons, psychic intuitions and tarot cards. As did her wacky mother. And the mother before her, and the mother before her -- and so on, all the way back to the dark ancestral woods of their credulous family tree, in all likelihood.
At night, we hung out at my place. By day, I auto-piloted my zombie self into an office tower parking garage, and she went to a career college to become one of those ridiculously unrealistic CSI investigators on television.
It was one of those bizarre times that failed to normalize. I was on the edge. The cards had forecast a fateful turning point, hinging upon the uncertain outcome of justice against the The Hanged Man, and The Knight of Wands against the gathering storm.For months, my witchy girlfriend had been saying she sensed a "presence" in my house, a shadowy entity that allegedly hovered in the back corners of the master bedroom. She had consulted with her mother about the situation, as well, and they agreed there was some sort of Beelzebub in my crib.
My amused and dismissive response, of course, was always the same: preposterous superstitious nonsense. But I humored her, focused on keeping the "feel good" alive. Besides, in my manic moments, it was kicks for me to entertain these things.
Until something happened.
After one chemically indulgent evening, she went home where she lived with her mother and young daughter. After she left, I lay on my side in bed, staring out the bedroom door into the hallway, which shot out about eight feet or so before turning left into the living room. The master bathroom light was still on, the door slightly ajar and providing only a dimly lit view, when a very short female figure -- 5 feet tall, at the most -- appeared suddenly in the hallway.Draped head to toe in some kind of heavy gray shawl, the opening to her face was completely obscured. She scampered straight toward me into the bedroom, stopping at the edge of the bed, then leaned over me and whispered in my ear, "You have 30 minutes to live." It was the thin, tinny voice of an elderly woman, yet unmistakably taunting in tone. As the words were uttered, there was the uncannily vivid sensation of her breath on my face. She then did an about-face, and tip-toed hurriedly back down the hallway, turning left into the unseen living room.
I was startled. OK, sure. But more than that, I was absolutely bewildered. Had I been asleep and dreamed this photographically realistic event, or had I been ... awake? Did I have a dream, or did the dream have me? There were eerie thoughts that perhaps my unwanted guest was still in the house, flitting about in the darkened cavern of the living room. Should I get up and investigate? My ears began noticing noises -- muffled bumps and creaks and shuffling sounds.
Spooked as I was, I am a born skeptic (and cynic), so I decided to try to forget about it and get some sleep. What followed, however, was a terrible bout of sleep paralysis, in which a freakishly tall, shadowy and implicitly evil figure approached the bed from the far end of the room, getting closer and closer, growing larger and larger ... Realizing that I was, in fact, not awake but dreaming, I struggled to move and shake myself awake before I was overtaken, finally breaking through the paralysis and sitting up in bed.Upon awakening, I immediately recalled the tangibly lifelike experience with the shawled, dwarfish hag and her message of unkindness. I picked up the phone on the nightstand called my girlfriend, the pseudo paranormal expert, who was still awake at her mom's house. I told her exactly what had happened, thinking that perhaps I could snap myself back into the World of Science by talking it through with her. But before I could begin intellectualizing and constructing plausible explanations, she said she would be right over and hung up.
Feeling at once foolish and relieved, I next found myself following her about the house as she sprinkled frickin' olive oil (from a bottle fished out of my pantry) between every doorway and entrance in my house. (To my later irritation, this made permanent stains on some of the freshly starched dress shirts hanging in my closet.) Upon each finger sprinkle, she would utter some kind of obligatory "Satan, begone" pronouncement, of course.After this comical yet somehow essential exorcism of my house, we smoked a joint and agreed that things, well ... things were somehow still not right. There remained a palpably paranoid pall of danger in the place. (Go figure, eh?)
And then, as if struck by a bolt of unholy revelation, my amateur exorcist/occultist/medium girlfriend proclaimed she knew what the problem was. The tarot cards she had brought over months earlier were still in my nightstand drawer. I had to get rid of them, you see, because they were acting as a numinous, neon-lit welcome sign for evil spirits. So I grabbed the dang things, walked outside into the predawn darkness and threw 'em fluttering down a street gutter. And then things felt better.Problem solved? Momentarily, perhaps. But perception is reality only for as long as it takes to cede to truth. And the truth was that I was a mess, embarking on a lengthy run that would culminate in a particularly nasty dance with the yayo. Demons? They were between my ears, and I was feeding them by entertaining my girlfriend's superstitious hocus pocus. We had even become diehard watchers of the momentous first season of Ghost Hunters on the SyFy Channel. (Which we'll soon be addressing.)
Consider also that I had been a lifelong aficionado of horror literature and supernatural films. As a kid, I voraciously consumed the novels and short stories of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Matheson, the early works of Stephen King, and other great spookmasters. As a sixth-grader, I read the so-called "true story" of Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror and was scared for weeks to look at my bedroom window at night, lest the glowing red eyes of Jody the Pig be pressed up against the glass, peering inside at me.Sleep paralysis? A recurring phenomenon of my dreams since my earliest living memories. The Shadow People have visited my nightmares since I was a toddler. In case you didn't know, the word "mare" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "merran," which is literally defined as "to crush." Hence, the term "nightmare" means "the crusher who comes in the night."
As depicted in his 1781 work, The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli might have considered it a case of "the devil sitting on your chest." Or, in my case, it seems I had more than a little touch of "Old Hag Syndrome," given my Little Old Lady of Doom's cheery pronouncement, "You have 30 minutes to live."But this is also easily explained. Only a few weeks or so before the incident, the girlfriend and I had rented and watched the movie, The Ring. I trust you remember the scenes with the ringing phone, then the creepy girl's voice saying, "You have one week to live."
(Another thought: The apparition was actually Paranormal State's Chip Coffey in drag, channeling the ghost of an ancient gypsy woman.)The bottom line: My brain was influenced by drugs, stress, a longstanding fascination with the supernatural, a superstitious girlfriend, and a knack for screening vividly realistic sleep-paralysis dreams. Thus, it's really not a big stretch that I could have imagined seeing some weird things. Part of me also wanted to believe in my girlfriend's supernatural beliefs and divinations, or at least play along with them. They were sort of a fun deviation, another trippy element I could add to the overall environment of escapism I was cultivating.
Hey, the mind is a funny thing. (Especially mine.)
Right?
As previously mentioned, we watched the entire first season of Ghost Hunters in that time of zaniness. Little did I know that five years later the sprawling shitscape of network programming would be haunted with hordes of paranormal "reality" shows.The Web also has swelled with paranormal fansites, blogs and scads of skeptical debunkers who dissect and debate the ever-multiplying ectoplasm of noises, blurry images, EVPs and physical encounters recorded by TV ghost posses and their high-tech paranormal gizmos. (We just gotta take their word for it that the "evidence" is genuine, don't we? I suspect the best nuggets are often concocted and staged before the actual onsite investigations even begin.)
Regardless, you gotta hand it to Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of Ghost Hunters. These two former Roto-Rooter plumbers are the pioneering fathers of today's explosion of paranormal programming, and, by all accounts, they were initially motivated by genuine fascination with the supernatural. They founded The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) on a shoe-string budget, long before it shroomed into their mad-cash reality TV show. (They both claim to have been inspired by personal paranormal encounters, but say they don't want to talk about them.)
Admittedly, I still occasionally tune into Ghost Hunters and find myself actually roto-rooting for these guys. I struggle to see them as kindred skeptics, instead of money-grubbing con artists, who are earnestly exploring a curious realm of otherworldly possibilities.
With Ghost Hunters, skepticism is boldly advertised as an integral aspect of the team's investigative methodology, approaching each site with the intent of trying to disprove it is haunted.
Or, as I suspect, is this professed allegiance to skepticism just a pretentious part of their shtick? ("Hey, these guys are skeptics -- so it's gotta be real!")
The truth, of course, is that Ghost Hunters and other copycat paranormal shows are first and foremost about money, ratings and entertainment value. No paranormal reality show can survive without scary stuff happening in every episode, enhanced with the electronic dread tones of horror movie music and bouncy, Blair Witch-style camera work.After all, what entertainment value could possibly exist in these shows without mysterious occurrences, startling dramatics and ominous music? How could we be entertained without the perfectly timed footsteps, odd noises and mumbling EVPs that are always right on-cue when the cast members ask the ghosts to announce their presence? Absent all this, we'd have nothing but excruciatingly boring footage of folks squinting in the darkness and tripping over each other with their flat-lined recording gadgets, with no break in the monotony except for an occasional fart from the key-grip guy.
If you really want to goose things up, however, why not do so hilariously like helium-biceped, douchebag wunderkind Zak Bagans of the Travel Channel's Ghost Adventures?My favorite episode is the madcap Goldfield Hotel investigation and its priceless Flying Ghost Brick of Cowardice scene. Ever the drama queen, Mr. Bagans at first struts about the historic old place telling the ghosts that he's not scared of them. But when a brick seemingly comes off the floor by itself, Mr. Bagans flees while channeling the spirits of Fay Wray and the The Great Wilhelm, as you can see below.
Getting back to Ghost Hunters, however, I must say I was disappointed (if not completely surprised) by the controversy surrounding last year's live Halloween special at the Fort Delaware Civil War prison. It appears that Mr. Hawes and Mr. Wilson got royally busted on that deal, perhaps not anticipating that the dynamics of live television are far less amenable to fakery than taping the shows in advance.
Mr. Wilson, of course, has denied any trickery. But it's interesting, me thinks, that he and Mr. Hawes have apparently pulled out of Saturday's Halloween 2009 Ghost Hunters Live special, instead leaving it to the rookies of Ghost Hunters Academy to run amok through New Jersey's Essex County Hospital, the old insane asylum where many patients froze to death 1917, according to this archived New York Times article.
But hey, I just might tune in, anyway. With Ghost Hunters, I still inexplicably find myself wanting to believe there is an authentic core of serious inquisition, in spite of the alleged special effects.Dear Jason and Grant: It's not all about the money, is it? Because if it's not all about ratings and your celebrity bank accounts, then perhaps there's a chance that some of the so-called evidence you've collected truly is unexplainable. Right?
Because, to me, if just one or two of these things can't be scientifically explained, well ... now, that's what I would call real entertainment.
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"We sometimes catch a windowA glimpse of what's beyond
Was it just imagination
Stringing us along?
More things than are dreamed about
Unseen and unexplained
We suspend our disbelief
And we are entertained."
~Neil Peart/Rush, 1985~
