Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (21 page)

For further information on the nature and psychology of the demonic, I recommend what is probably the most definitive book on the subject written in the twentieth century,
Hostage to the Devil
by Malachi Martin. Martin, a former Catholic exorcist, tells the tales of five real exorcisms that took place here in America. He unravels the full complexity of each case, showing just how each individual opened up the doorway.

Chapter 10
Bored Until the Ghosts Show Up

I don’t want to sound weird, but I don’t think I want to do this interview.

To be completely honest, after “Paranormal Intervention” I didn’t want to do the next case at all. I didn’t know yet how things would turn out with Carol Anne, but the schedule was getting to me. After years of one investigation every month or so, the once-a-week pace was exhausting. I’d been sick. I was burnt out. On top of that, I just wasn’t wild about investigating a haunted bar in Long Island. It didn’t sound appealing, or different. It also sounded small, like there wouldn’t be enough room for the crew. At the time I also thought we wouldn’t even be able to spend the night.

Tired and turned off though I was, we had a show to shoot. The producers were sympathetic. They suggested I consider it a fun break, something small, with a cool location, and apparently the client, Brian Karppinen, was a great guy. With no other possibilities, there I was, not in the best of moods.

Katrina had bused in from Philly to join us for the briefing at a diner in Smithtown. Brian, I explained, was having a pretty rough time. He’d been a motorcycle mechanic and bartender with a head for business, and bought a place called Katie’s Bar—along with the debt from the previous owner—for a few hundred dollars. Interestingly, he never drank himself. As he later told our counselor, Jamie, his father had an alcohol-related death, and Brian never developed a liking for it. It might seem odd that he’d decide to open a bar, but he was a very social guy, so it made sense he’d want to do something with people around.

As he told the story, at first it was a dream fulfilled. He put his heart, soul, and life savings into the place, but things didn’t go as planned. To pay for the remodeling, he wound up selling his house and motorcycle. Then his wife left him for a customer. With nowhere else to go, he wound up living at Katie’s, which is when his experiences began.

His customers reported seeing apparitions. Not only that, wineglasses kept breaking. We would go in, gather evidence, and if possible, resolve the haunting.

Given my general glum outlook, and what seemed a simple scenario, I figured this would be a good opportunity to shake things up. I decided to hand the investigation over to our two trainees, Heather and Katrina. I’d done this sort of thing before the show, as part of the training process, and it had worked out well. I thought it would certainly make the episode different. Plus, the look on their faces was priceless.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t do this for TV entertainment. Taking over a case with next to no warning is part of the PRS training process. The nature of the paranormal is to remain unpredictable, random, and uncontrollable. The reactions of the clients are also unpredictable. The reason for throwing our trainees into a leadership scenario is to see how well they deal with that pressure and unpredictability. A good investigator must always be able to handle the unpredictable nature of the supernatural. He/she must also be able to work under direct pressure. Weirdos like me thrive under pressure and impossible scenarios.

As trainees, before each investigation, they’d study how things worked. At the time of our fourth episode, “The Woman in the Window,” they’d failed their first two quizzes. Now, after three months and six investigations, I planned to give them their own case. I also wanted to spring it on them, a surprise we could tape for the show. I gave our executive producer, Betsy Schechter, a heads-up, and told Eilfie, but everyone else was in the dark.

During the briefing, I thought I was giving it away. I pointedly asked, “So, do you think you know enough about how cases work?” I even said, “You guys are doing great. If you keep it up, maybe one day we’ll give
you
an investigation.” But they totally didn’t get it. They were still in the dark as we headed to Katie’s Bar for the walk-through.

The bar didn’t seem to be in a great location to attract foot traffic, but the work Brian had done was fantastic. I’m used to Penn State’s dive bars, but this place was gorgeous, with great lighting, woodwork, TVs, and karaoke. The main floor had a bar and stage area, booths and seating. Downstairs, there was a second bar. Impressive as it was, it was struggling. At the time, Brian rented the basement space to psychics for readings. The experiences Brian told us about predated the appearance of the psychics, so I didn’t consider them the cause.

During our initial interview, Brian described the activity in detail. His first encounter occurred during his renovation, as he stood on a staircase in the rear of the basement. Trying to remove a bar rail, he gave it a good slam, pulled, and all of a sudden, it came loose. It happened so quickly; he fell backward. He thought he’d fly down the steps, but something pushed against his shoulders and helped him regain his footing.

Whatever it was had saved him, so he said he was fine with it. But then he talked about some darker experiences. Wineglasses fell off the shelves and shattered. Patrons reported seeing ghostly images in a mirror. An oppressive feeling hung over the place.

In a sequence not in the show, Brian also spoke about something that happened while he was trying to sleep at the bar. He claimed to have seen one of his old dogs, from years ago. He was thrilled—he loved this dog—but suddenly felt that it wasn’t really his dog.

“If you’re my dog, you’ll know the trick I taught you,” he told it. When the dog didn’t know the trick, he said, “You’re not my dog.” And the dog disappeared.

Brian said he believed that whatever spirit was in the bar was mimicking his dog to get at him. I wasn’t so sure that was the case, and told him so.

I don’t think of spirits as copying animals, except in the case of nature spirits. He’d also said he felt like he was out of his body at the time, that he wanted to move, but couldn’t. Those are both symptoms of sleep paralysis. To explore that possibility, we brought in a sleep expert. Brian listened, but remained convinced what he’d seen was real. Which, of course, is the problem—when you’re having a waking dream, it feels
exactly
like reality.

Regardless, Brian felt the presence of a dark energy. He thought it was keeping business down and he wanted it gone. It was an interesting case, but nothing I felt our trainees couldn’t handle. Once the interview was over, I called for a group huddle.

“I’m going to turn it over to you,” I said to Heather and Katrina. “We’re going to leave.”

They looked shocked. Neither said anything. Heather just smiled. I thought it was overconfidence, but since learned that she smiles like that when she’s freaked. When it dawned on them, Katrina looked as if she was about to cry.

I took Eilfie and Serg with me, and left. As we walked out, Katrina still hadn’t said anything. I heard later on that they both freaked out a bit.

Almost immediately following that, very interesting things starting happening on the boring case I didn’t want to do. Serg, who never seemed to have any strange experiences no matter where we went, took me aside. “I felt something heavy on the chest area, definitely, the minute we walked into the basement,” he said. “I’ve never felt anything like this when we’ve walked into a client’s house before. It got progressively worse.”

Given Serg’s history, it was curious, but I hadn’t felt anything at all myself, so I decided to let Heather and Katrina proceed. I didn’t leave, though. For the first few hours, I hid and watched them through a portable monitor.

During their site tour on the first floor, they almost caught me, so before they came downstairs, I hid in a storage closet. I figured they’d never look in there, but they ended up walking in on me. After that I kept watch, but didn’t interfere. The investigation was still all theirs.

Following the tour, they both interviewed Brian, who talked about the breaking wineglasses. Apparently this happened a
lot.
There was a two-week period when they couldn’t keep a single wineglass intact. He said that one actually flew off the rack right in front of his workers.

“It went right past Jen’s face,” he said, “and landed between her and Debbie.”

The fact that it was only wineglasses struck him as odd. Martini glasses, for instance, are more top heavy and would be, if anything, more prone to fall, but he hadn’t lost any of those. Locals, and his customers, had also been telling him the place was cursed. “No one’s made a nickel here in twenty years,” he said.

Though their questions were good, Heather and Katrina had made their first mistake: They decided to talk to Brian together. It was understandable. Newcomers tend to think in terms of individual tasks. But with only a few days to cover all the bases, the work has to be split up or you fall behind fast. As they both interviewed Brian, tech wasn’t being set up. While they both set up tech, their second interviewee, the bar’s previous owner, Rich, was kept waiting.

When they got to him, their questions were again right on target. Rich said he’d owned Katie’s for a few years and, like Brian, had a hard time businesswise. He didn’t know any specifics about the building’s history, but he also heard customers talk about a dark spirit. Interestingly, he’d
also
had a problem, specifically, with wineglasses. They didn’t break. They just kept vanishing.

“I thought people were taking them,” he said.

With nothing particularly exciting going on, I hung back and kept watching as Heather and Katrina met with Janet, a psychic who’d previously done a reading on the bar. Brian had already told us what she’d said to him and her information didn’t change. Janet sensed a spirit named Charlie who wanted people to know he was still there, overseeing the place.

Katrina smartly asked if she had any sense of when Charlie lived.

“Nineteen thirty to nineteen forty,” Janet said. She also felt that the steps where Brian nearly fell were the spot where Charlie hung out.

Given my bad experiences with psychics, I thought it would be interesting as an experiment to invite a lot of local psychics into the bar. We could record each reading, then do a montage showing if they contradicted each other or agreed. Unfortunately we couldn’t schedule enough people.

At the end of the first day, I gave our trainees a little crit session. I was very happy with the way they handled Janet, but disappointed they hadn’t tape-recorded any of their interviews. Serg pointed out that they should have asked Brian about his divorce, which was pretty traumatic. What was the relationship between that and the start of his paranormal experiences? Overall, though, they were doing well.

Splitting the team wound up being a little odd socially. At dinner, Heather and Katrina felt they had to stay apart, so they sat on their own and kept quiet. They did have an idea for a great experiment.

With all the breaking wineglasses, they decided to put baby powder under two for the night. Any movement by the wineglasses would show in the powder. Most important, setting up the experiment gave me the opportunity to whack Serg in the face with a rag full of baby powder. I immediately apologized, of course, but only to lure him around a corner where Eilfie happily whacked him again. He has yet to get back at us for that.

Many paranormal researchers have noted that when you set up this sort of experiment, it’s as if the ghosts enjoy playing with you. Janet had also reported her sense that Charlie enjoyed messing with people. The next morning, the wineglasses were still in the same spot on the table where they’d started, but on one table there were streaks in the baby powder, as if the glass had moved one way, then moved back to its original spot.

Unfortunately, in another trainee oversight, there were no cameras pointed at that table. From the cameras we did have, I knew that no one entered or left, but any actual movement of the glasses was missed. To be fair to Heather and Katrina, placing our cameras has been a learning process. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate all the blind spots, and we’re always working for wider coverage. I think it’s interesting to note, however, just how odd it is that the only area not covered by cameras is the area where the wineglasses moved. Coincidence?

There were those streaks in the baby powder, though, which we tried to explain naturally. We bumped the tables, stomped by, and so on, but the glasses didn’t budge. There is a train station nearby, and some have theorized that the vibrations from a passing train caused the movement, but I’ve been at Katie’s Bar four times now, spent the night, heard trains pass, and never felt a single vibration. And if there were vibrations, even on a minimal scale, we’d have seen the cameras shake. The trail in the powder also indicated that the glass moved forward and back to the same spot. That’s an incredible coincidence if it were a natural force.

Given Janet’s intuitions about Charlie, Heather contacted the local historical society. The next day, she and Katrina met with town historians Brad and George, and Cathy, a librarian, to piece together some of the building’s history.