Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (11 page)

I asked her the big question. “Justin wants to know if the Dark Man had anything to do with Chris’s death.”

“Chris is telling me, yes,” CJ said. “He’s telling me he was pushed, to the limit. Whatever was going on, it happened again and again, time after time. His will was worn down. I feel like he just, he wanted it to be over . . . to be done.”

It seemed like the stone walls “Tough” Justin and Helen had put up crumbled. Justin’s eyes filled with tears. Helen cried quietly.

I continued asking questions, but they’d stopped listening. Helen was staring off into space. I was worried, wondering what she was thinking.

After I ended the conversation with CJ, I tried to talk to Helen, to find out where her head was. Her responses didn’t strike me as particularly coherent. She was upset, she needed time to think, so we all took a break.

I’d planned to invite her and Justin to the second Dead Time that night, but now thought it was a bad idea. They seemed too vulnerable. Helen wouldn’t have it any other way, though. She insisted she be allowed to participate.

I’d have to proceed carefully. There was a balance to be struck. On the one hand, I wanted to be more aggressive in provoking the spirits. On the other hand, I was concerned about Helen.

I put her by my side during Dead Time, along with Eilfie and Katrina, in case I needed their support in tending to Helen. Serg would manage tech alone in the kitchen, while Justin would be with the others in the basement.

The harsh lights were gone, but we weren’t a well-oiled machine yet. With us in Chris’s room was the director, Brad, a cameraman, and a soundman. The basement was more crowded: Three producers, two cameramen, an audio guy, and a production assistant all sat against the wall, observing my team as they tried to communicate with a discarnate spirit.

As for Helen, for the first half of Dead Time she sat in silence. With all the feelings bubbling inside her, I felt it was only a matter of time.

Trying to goad whatever might be present, I told the spirit I didn’t believe it was there. Helen played along, shaking her head in disappointment.

The minutes rolled by. Half an hour, three quarters of an hour passed and still nothing.

Then Helen found her voice. “He just wants the attention,” she said derisively. “He wants to wait and then show off the moment the cameras are turned off. We’re looking for something that’s supposed to be so big and bad when there’s just nothing.”

She addressed the spirit directly, challenging it, as Chris—through CJ—suggested. “I’m going to give you a chance. Show me. If you are here, give me a sign that you’re here. Do something!”

No response.

“Do you want me to walk into another room by myself?” Helen asked me.

My feeling was no, I didn’t. But it seemed to me it would be important for her to gain some sense of control, so I also didn’t want to stop her. Instead, I asked what room she wanted to walk into. Suddenly, she stood up. It dawned on me she probably hadn’t been asking at all. Just as she had about inviting the psychic, she’d already made up her mind.

As she walked out, I asked if she at least wanted to take a flashlight.

“No!” she said defiantly. Then she exited the room. She was gone, out of sight.

My first thought was to go after her, but I also felt she wanted to be alone with it, as if she had to face it, to tell it something. There’d been no severe activity, or much activity to speak of, so I decided to wait and see what happened.

From down the pitch-black hallway, I heard her. “Okay, I’m by myself. This is where you scared my son the first time. This is where you made him afraid of you. And I have had it.”

Hearing that, I looked at Eilfie and she nodded at me. We’d seen similar things on other cases where there was long-standing torment. The dam was about to break. The victim was about to stand up and take charge.

“If you had anything to do with my son’s death, I want to know and I want to know now!” Helen said.

There was a reaction, sudden and strange. All at once, sounds came from different locations. It was as if one ball was bouncing down the stairs while another was thrown against a wall.

Helen called, “This light just went on.”

The motion detector had gone off.

“You didn’t stand in front of it or go into the room?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I stayed out here in the hallway the entire time.”

“It’s running away from you,” I told her.

I examined the area. There was no evidence of anything being thrown.

Helen wasn’t finished. She had a few more choice words to say. There was more banging. With the activity ramping up again, I asked her to return. I was a little surprised that she agreed so easily; she came back and sat down with us. But her anger, and her challenges to the dark, continued.

“How dare you come into my house and affect my children. I want you out. I want you out of my house and I want you out now!”

There was no further huge response, but we kept trying.

A few minutes later, I heard loud sounds and movement, but they weren’t unearthly.

I radioed Serg. “Is there someone talking down there?”

The talking grew louder. I knew the voices. It was my team. Now I was annoyed.
They
knew how important it was to keep quiet during Dead Time. Why on earth were they making so much noise? And what took so long for Serg to respond?

“I think you should come down here,” he finally said.

Helen looked at me, worried. I smiled. “My team is being a little rowdy and I need to tell them to be quiet. I’ll be right back.”

I signaled to Eilfie that she was in charge. She may be quiet and a little shy, but when necessary, if someone became hysterical for instance, I’ve seen her break into scolds that froze people on the spot.

Meanwhile, not knowing what was going on, I flew down the steps and met Serg in the kitchen. “Why the
hell
are they being so loud down there?”

“They said something happened.”

Thinking Satan himself had better have appeared, I marched to the basement. There, the entire team was arguing with Joyce and production as they searched the basement.

Joyce spoke loudly and sternly. “We should get a camera to document every part of the basement. And
they
shouldn’t have been down here. This should be a controlled environment.”

By “they” she meant all the producers, assistants, and staff.

Still fuming myself, I looked at my team. “What happened?”

Josh explained that at first Dead Time had been completely quiet. He’d asked the spirit to make a sound and gotten nothing. As he explained, though, the activity occurred after Ryan Heiser spoke some Latin. Due to his religious training, he knew enough Latin to ask, “
Es vos mortuus
?” or “Are you dead?”

As if in answer, there was a
very
loud bang. They described the sound as if something had exploded, then slammed up against something else.

“And you don’t know what it was?” I asked.

“No,” said Josh, continuing his search. “Not yet.”

“How can we?” Joyce complained. “There are so many people here, we can’t be sure it wasn’t one of them.”

“Excuse me,” one of the producers said. “I haven’t moved from this wall. None of us have.”

It was a tense scene. I looked over at Justin, who sat there nervously, not knowing what to do.

“Everything’s cool, man,” one of my team said. “If it was supernatural, it was just making itself known.”

I knew that wouldn’t necessarily comfort him. This wasn’t a harmless spirit to him. He believed that whatever it was had killed his brother.

With everyone hell-bent on investigating the sound, I stopped Dead Time. While the others continued, I grabbed Eilfie for a walk to the pond. It was cold, but I needed to talk to her. The activity left me convinced the haunting was real. I had an idea, and I knew she wouldn’t like it.

“Elf, the family is suffering. Helen and Justin are frightened and angry. If there is something here, we have to try to do something about it.”

She gave me a weary look. “What are you suggesting?”

“Can you do the banishment ritual thing?”

“Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram,” she corrected. “And no, I won’t.”

I bit my lip. She’d made it clear previously that she was uncomfortable performing rituals on-camera. I hoped that after a few investigations with a camera crew, she’d ease into the idea, but I hadn’t planned on asking so soon.

“Can’t you do a Catholic prayer?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t have anything powerful enough memorized, and I didn’t bring anything with us.”

She eyed me. “So, you’re asking a pagan to cover for a Catholic, is that right?”

Recognizing the trouble the clients were in, she reluctantly agreed. My next step was to ask if Helen was willing. She’d seemed to gravitate to Eilfie when they met and now gave a quick yes.

With the body having been found in the pond, we took an old boat and put it into the water. As we did, rain mixed with snow began to fall. It was already freezing. Now we were getting soaked. I wouldn’t argue that the rain was paranormal, but there weren’t clouds in the sky earlier.

Eilfie and I got into the boat. I would row while she did the ritual. It was a tiny boat, and every time we made the slightest movement it rocked as if a tidal wave slammed into it. So there we were, pagan and Catholic, rowing to the center of the pond.

I was concentrating on making sure the boat didn’t tip over, but I could still see the crew running frantically from one side of the pond to the other as Eilfie chanted. I later learned they were barely able to get any sound. Until then, the film crew had no audio trouble to speak of. The
moment
Eilfie began chanting, they had major problems. The same equipment never had further problems, and to this day, they can’t explain what happened.

Fortunately, Eilfie repeated the same chant to each of the four corners, the cardinal points on the compass—north, east, south, west—so they were able to record enough for the show. Unfortunately, that also meant I had to turn the boat in the proper direction and keep it steady while she chanted.

The resulting scene is so powerful, the way it’s shot is so cinematic, when I watch it, it’s hard for me to remember that this is a documentary-based show.

Though the entire ritual is not Judeo-Christian, it does quote in part from a Talmudic prayer called Kriat Shema, which is recited before going to sleep, and mentions the archangels.

Before me stands Raphael

Behind me stands Gabriel

To my right, Michael,

To my left, Uriel . . .

Years and several seasons later, when people ask what my favorite episode of
Paranormal State
is, “Dark Man” is always near the top of the list. One of the reasons is I just love watching the banishment ritual scene. Another is what happened on the final day.

Once we ended Dead Time and moved on to the ritual, Helen went to bed. I didn’t hear from her at all until the next day, when she appeared, in contrast to her former somber look, a bit sunnier. Despite my fears for Helen’s emotional stability, she seemed fine. I think she was just angry, understandably so, and needed to say her piece.

Early that morning Heiser and Lance decided to go to a local church. I tagged along to say a prayer for Helen. As we walked out, the priest, as was the custom, greeted his parishioners. When we passed, he grabbed my hand.

“Wait,” he said. “Who are you three?”

I was startled, but quickly figured it was easy for him to spot newcomers.

“Oh, we’re just travelers.”

“Traveling? For what?”

“Um, just trying to help a family here in town.”

“Help a family? Is it charity work?”

“Well, Father, I’m not sure what you call it. We’re just trying to help them overcome some grief and set things right.”

“Then it
is
charity work. God bless you.”

I tried to downplay what he said, reminding myself that while we were helping people, we were doing a TV show. That took the charity out of it, didn’t it? As we walked to the car, I turned to see that he was still watching. Then again, I asked myself, who says TV has to be selfish?

Later that morning, CJ called Helen. “I have Chris with me. He says he’s crossed over, that he’s with his grandmother and he’s happy. Never stop talking to him, never stop remembering him, but know that he’s happy where he is,” she said.

It was what Helen had been waiting so long to hear. But complex emotions, especially grief mixed with all that guilt and anger, don’t vanish overnight. I knew we needed to bring in a therapist. Counseling is often a much-needed and powerful component of our work. Though the client may have only one session, we hope they’ll consider continuing. In this case, production helped find Diane, a grief counselor, and while most of these sessions with clients are not recorded, this one was.