Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (37 page)

“I heard a huge wind,” she said. “Something jumped on the foot of my bed, and slowly crawled on top of my feet, along my body, until it was staring at me. I could feel it breathing hot, hot, hot,
awful
air right on my neck . . .”

The creature growled. Katie described the noise it made as being somewhere between a cat’s hiss and a rattlesnake. It wasn’t huge, maybe four feet tall, about the size of Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings
. Katie had seen it previously, but generally out of the corner of her eye.

It sounded as if it might be sleep paralysis. A lot of the signs were present. I asked Katie if she tended to see this thing when she was stressed or tired, but couldn’t find any correlation.

I also asked about any personal trauma they may have experienced. I never had the sense they were keeping secrets. To make sure, though, I also spoke to them privately. I was comfortable there wasn’t anything else major going on, beyond the fact that Georgia, of course, was concerned for her daughter.

As Georgia put it, “She’s my baby.”

Georgia was single and seemed very connected to her daughter. Katie’s recent move to college was big for both of them, and I do think that may have had a lot to do with aggravating the haunting. And there was one important thing that didn’t fit in with sleep paralysis. Katie’s childhood friend Chris had stayed over, and also saw the creature.

Speaking in a low, frightened voice, Chris managed to give me the fullest description: “It doesn’t have a human face. It’s got really thin lips that are red in color, like there’s a red strip. Its nose isn’t a full nose. It’s like a strip of red. It’s like the nose stopped growing. It had whitish skin and the teeth are narrow and pointy. It’s the scariest thing you’ll ever see.”

Unless it was hysteria, or Chris was imaginative, it sounded legitimate.

I also considered the possibility the activity was related to some surrounding cemeteries. The house was in an area with a lot of old graveyards that aren’t fenced off or cared for.

While staying at the hotel between shoots, I’d go for a run down a road between two woods and think about the case. Right on the side of the road, I’d see a cemetery. It started out as a couple of tombstones, and then there were maybe twenty, very old, possibly from colonial times.

At the same time, this sort of creature attack isn’t characteristic of a haunting. If something’s assaulting the client this way, it’s generally not a human spirit. Yet, given the descriptions, I didn’t consider it demonic. If anything, it seemed outside the family’s, or my own, cultural experience.

The possibility that this was some form of nature spirit was something the clients had already considered. They’d worked with a Native American spiritual leader, Brent Allaire, who’d tried a house cleansing that apparently didn’t work.

Research is always important, but learning anything about the history of this property was particularly difficult. Chapley wasn’t a sprawling city with historical societies or many neighbors to interview. It was a chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t even any official town where the documents were kept. We had to go to the next town over, about twenty minutes away, for any information.

There, though, Eilfie managed to find a deed for the land dated 1660. It stated that a John Henderson and John Scadlocke bought the property from a Native American named Segeweha. That name is common to a tribe called the Almouchiquois that once lived in the area. They paid for the land with very little money and some supplies. Back then there was plenty of land, so many Native Americans figured they’d just move to the next spot, until one day they had nowhere else to go.

Given this background, the Native American spirit theory began to make more sense. Still, there was no specific indigenous myth we knew of that matched the experiences Georgia and Katie described. There was the wendigo and the trickster, and we discussed both, but neither fit.

Hoping to learn more, I asked Brent, a member of the local Penobscot tribe, to return. Like the Almouchiquois, the Penobscot were related to the larger Algonquin tribe, sharing language and culture. I don’t think Brent had a title, per se, but he and his people were very open to spirits.

After arriving, he described his belief that something had been done on Georgia’s property a long time ago that angered the spirits. As he put it, “The ground is unhappy.”

He felt he’d already pinpointed the source of the problem as a pile of stones in the backyard about a hundred feet from the house. When we examined them, they seemed to me just a pile of rocks, not huge or in a special pattern. We’d just dug up a lot of rocks in “Pet Cemetery,” with interesting results, so I asked Brent what would happen if I disturbed them.

“It would be extremely dangerous,” he said. “You’ve got good and bad down there and you’ve got to know which one you’re dealing with. They will try to kill you.”

It was a pretty strong warning. Since Brent’s first effort hadn’t ended the activity, he planned to return the next day with a tribal elder. Though I didn’t know the details, I understood that together they would perform a more complete cleansing.

Meanwhile, Chip arrived for the psychic walk-through. I believe this is one of the first episodes where I “officially” ask if he knows anything about the case. That’s now a standard part of the show, like a little oath. If memory serves, it came up because we’d all been thinking more about our investigatory process. There are times when Chip has been so accurate that I worry he’d overheard something or read a local article. So I started giving him this one chance to come clean.

“You keep me very much in the dark, Ryan,” he said.

Here again, Chip’s pretty on the mark. He senses that Katie is “a or
the
target,” that the troubling spirit comes into the house from outside, and, disturbingly, that the entity is pleased by Katie’s fear. When we take him outside, Chip hits again, sensing something Native American involved. I asked him what it looked like.

“Half animal, half human.”

After the walk-through, we prepared for Dead Time. Chip and I remained in the house with Georgia and Katie, while Josh and Eilfie worked in the woods. Often, we get nothing, but this session was particularly interesting. Georgia heard a faint growl. Chip sensed the source and we followed it downstairs. There, he felt it’d ducked behind a door. At times I felt teasingly close to some kind of breakthrough. Whatever we were tracking inside moved around a lot.

The most fascinating thing happened outside, though. After hearing a slight rustle, Josh asked any entities that might be listening to make another noise indicating their presence. A series of weird, plaintive cries erupted from the woods.

Inside, we didn’t hear them at all. Outside, the sound came and went, but overall lasted a good twenty minutes. We hadn’t heard many other noises, maybe a dog barking once in a while, faintly, and this was clearly no dog. Josh and Eilfie wanted to try to get closer, but they didn’t know what direction to head in. It sounded far off, like a quarter or half mile.

This time, the sound was captured.

The next day I led an evidence review centered on that recording. One of the things that seldom makes it into the final episodes, for obvious time reasons, is our lengthy conversations about what evidence we do have, and what explanations there might be for it. But man, this sound was weird, like a whole pack of some sort of animal. It was nothing recognizable to any of us. Georgia and Katie had never heard anything like it either.

We searched the Internet for coyote and other animal sounds to compare, but nothing came close. It sounded sort of like hyenas, but there aren’t any living naturally in North America, let alone Maine. With the nearest neighbor at least a mile away, there wasn’t anyone else to ask about the cries.

Stumped by the recording, but more and more curious, I decided to take a look under those rocks in the yard. Some viewers felt I wasn’t respecting the beliefs of the Native Americans. This couldn’t be further from the truth. On a regular basis, however, religious tradition and the investigation process are at odds. For the sake of the clients, I needed answers. I explained my reasoning to Georgia. The Elders
assumed
there was a portal, but we wanted to be sure. If it was a significant source of paranormal energy, there could be markings or even a cursed object planted there. Knowing more would better help us understand how it was affecting the clients.

In the end, someone simply saying, “the problem is coming from over there by those rocks. But don’t open it or investigate it” isn’t a strong enough argument to stop the investigation process, whether the person is Catholic, Native American or Buddhist. If someone says there’s a portal to hell under some rocks, you bet your ass I’m going to move them.

Together with Eilfie, we removed the rocks to see if there were any occult or religious markings. Underneath, the only thing we found was a rotten tree trunk, a stump. At the time it felt like a dead end, certainly not the wound in the earth Brent described.

Brent and the tribal elder would be arriving later that morning. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the elder. I pictured the stereotype—some wizened man in robes with a gnarled wooden cane. Not knowing the specific tribe’s culture, I was also concerned we might accidentally offend him and wanted to make sure we were respectful. Eilfie knew enough about Native American tradition to tell us that when an elder visits, you’re supposed to offer a gift. She felt the safest thing was tobacco, so we bought some and Eilfie took the time to make pouches for it. As we’re reviewing the animal cries, you can see her sewing the pouches in the background.

The elder, Ron Strongheart, didn’t match my preconceived image at all. If anything, he looked a bit Italian. We gave him our gift and he accepted it. He didn’t seem surprised we’d offered it, so it felt like the right thing to do.

At first, I was pleased not to have offended him, but that didn’t last. Maybe I should have expected it, but he and Brent were both upset that I’d disturbed the rocks.

“I wish you didn’t move the rocks until I sealed it,” Brent said.

The hole and the tree stump didn’t feel evil to me, but Brent and Ron were convinced they were. Looking back, I think our moving the rocks was a positive thing. Once we told Brent and Ron what we had discovered, they felt it was proof that it was indeed a portal. According to them, the tree root was a connection to the underworld. They said again that someone or something had wounded the land, perhaps cutting down a sacred tree without the proper atonement. Maybe the stump I saw was what was left of that sacred tree? In either case, they felt this caused a portal to open to the spirit world, allowing evil to pass over.

“That hole in the ground is where the vortex is,” Brent said.

As they explained further, I understood that they felt there were two issues, separate but related: the vortex and the creature. Brent believed that when he first cleansed the house, he’d trapped the evil spirit in the hole. The trap wasn’t strong enough, though, so at times it was able to get out. He originally figured if he and Ron closed the vortex, they’d be done. Now that I’d moved the rock, he was concerned that I may have opened it completely again.

I wasn’t sure what I believed at that point. When I asked about the animal sounds, interestingly, they didn’t want to hear the recording, Brent saying that a spirit could take any shape or form, as if the specifics didn’t matter.

As a result, they wound up not only cleansing the land but also going back into the house and doing a second cleansing.

Importantly, what’s shown on the episode is not their complete ceremony. They felt that would take away from the tradition’s privacy. Many cultures share those feelings. Eilfie, for instance, was very reluctant to allow the pagan banishment ritual she performed in “Dark Man” filmed. And it’s next to impossible to find a Catholic priest willing to allow an exorcism to be filmed.

They did explain the “smudging” process for us on-camera, showing us the eagle feather and abalone shell they’d be using, and reciting some of their prayers. The word “smudging,” by the way, has been adopted into English from these original Native American rituals. It involves binding certain herbs and grass into smudge sticks. The sticks are lit, and the smoke is used as part of the cleansing.

“As the smoke rises, it will be sealed,” Ron explained.

In some ways, Ron and Brent came across as psychics, but there was an important difference. They didn’t walk in and start saying things based on what they sensed at the moment, the way Chip would. They felt their insight came from meditation and prayer, through rituals they’d performed on the reservation before they arrived. While the role is embedded in a cultural hierarchy and process, they also believe everyone has an intuitive spiritual ability.

Their understanding seemed to match a lot of what was going on here, and my take is that they were close to the truth. The Native American element seemed genuine, and it involved something that was, at best, unfriendly. But, having failed to remove the entity once, would they now succeed?

After the ceremony, Chip walked through the house again to see if there was any difference. Unfortunately, he soon tensed up and shook his head. Whatever it was, he felt it wasn’t gone. He felt part of it had been taken care of, but not the whole thing.