Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown (40 page)

A coincidence? We didn’t plan it, but as Chip later said, “Maybe it planned you.” It certainly was something I should’ve noticed sooner. Once we started compiling articles about Jim, the death date was right there in my face. That sort of thing reminds me how much more I, and everyone else on the team, can do to pay attention. The small details we tend to miss are sometimes the most important.

Since Jim Barnes had Alzheimer’s, it raised the question of whether his spirit might believe and act as if it had the disease as well. To explore the issue, I interviewed a neuroscientist specializing in the subject and asked about the psychological and emotional makeup of someone who has Alzheimer’s. I wondered if it was possible a spirit might somehow still have the disease, or at least behave as if it did. The neuroscientist felt that once you accept the possibility there are spirits—then, yes, it was possible.

Some theorize that spirits, especially those that die suddenly, continue to assume things are as they were when they were alive. So, Jim’s concern about his disease may have been part of what was keeping him there.

Since this seemed to be a multiple haunting, I also want to point out that there’s evidence and testimony from many cases suggesting it’s possible for spirits to be aware of one another, even if they’re from different eras. During psychic or EVP sessions, sometimes one spirit names the others. On the flip side, it seems that in some cases one spirit has no idea the others exist. I think that’s fascinating.

That night, when we went into a second Dead Time, I was determined to try to make contact with both spirits. As I spoke, I tried to tell Jim, if he were present, that Alzheimer’s wasn’t something he had to worry about anymore.

Despite the quiet first night, our second session was much more active. Chip sensed Walter edging up to us, in the hall. I try to coax him in, but Chip said he was keeping his distance. Whenever Chip tried to approach, he sensed Walter move away. Serg reports that the door to our headquarters suddenly opened by itself, but on later inspection we were confident it was due to the wind.

Another interesting thing was the fact that Chip had been traveling with a friend, Patti Star, a ghost hunter. They’d been together on a college speaking tour, so she came along with him to the case. Patti claimed to have psychic intuition but didn’t consider herself a full-blown psychic.

During our second Dead Time, a thunderstorm rolled in. Patti was in a truck out in the back when she opened her eyes and saw a tree shaking from the wind. She said she saw a man standing there, holding on to the trunk, and later she pretty accurately described what Jim looked like.

She said he was swaying, rocking, and in her mind she heard him saying, “I did a bad thing. I did a bad thing.”

It’s possible Patti was exposed to some details of the case, but here was something to suggest that Jim’s spirit was remorseful over his suicide. When I heard about this, I wanted to ask Patti back for an interview, but she and Chip left pretty early the next morning.

The most exciting event during that Dead Time occurred when Chip announced that Jim Barnes Jr. would show himself in the barn. “Just watch, that’s what he says, just watch.”

Then . . . bam, bam, bam, bam—four cameras malfunctioned, one after the other. First it was Kristy’s bedroom, then the kitchen area where Walter died, a second camera in Kristy’s bedroom, then the barn. These were all areas directly related to the activity.

The cameras didn’t simply go black. Each image dimmed, as if the camera were losing power. Everything got darker until the screen was suddenly tinted a bloody red. Then, it blacked out for half a second. Three to five seconds later the cameras all returned to normal.

There was no easy explanation. All our cameras pulled power from the same source, a cord that ran to the tech HQ computer. If the electricity had stopped or been interrupted,
all
the cameras should’ve been affected, but it was only four. It was something that’d never happened before, and to this day we have no idea what caused it.

Having done all we could, by about 4:00 A.M. we brought the family back to the property, to share what we’d learned about Walter and Jim. Chip explained his sense that Walter was simply mischievous, that his actions were more playful than harmful. He told Kristy that it didn’t seem to him as though there was anything in the house out to get her.

As for Jim Barnes, I considered exhuming the piece of skull and burying it with the rest of his remains, but it would have been too complicated. Not only did we not know exactly where it was, but the Warrens had expanded the width of the driveway, so the asphalt would have to be ripped up to get to it. With our limited time it seemed futile to even try.

But I did want to honor Jim’s remains in some way, and possibly release him. So, I asked to have a memorial guard perform a military service for him on the property. I believe that service, coupled with our efforts to tell Jim he no longer had to worry about his disease helped set him at rest. Afterward, the activity in the barn stopped.

As for Walter, I didn’t have a priest formally come in, but I gathered everyone for a small prayer where we asked him to move on. I also laid some blessed medallions around.

A few weeks later, Kristy contacted me through Facebook to report she felt much better. A lot of her concern was that the spirit was angry, and Chip’s description of Walter set her mind at rest. The last I heard, Kristy still feels Walter around sometimes, but she is no longer afraid.

S
YNCHRONICITY

Synchronicity
is defined as two or more events that don’t seem to have any physical connection, but occur in a manner that seems meaningful. You think of a friend, the phone rings, and it’s them.

Throughout the series, we’ve encountered a shocking number of synchronicities, such as in this episode, where we happen to arrive on the anniversary of a suicide. I think it’s happened at least half a dozen times in the first season alone.

I don’t have an explanation, just some vague thoughts. We relive anniversaries all the time. There’s an energy and concentration around dates that are important to us. People tend to die near their birthdays, for instance. A 1992 study of nearly three million people showed that women are more likely to die in the week following their birthdays than in any other week of the year, while male deaths peak shortly before their birthdays. So, it’d make sense for a spirit to become more active near such a date.

If the case has already been given to me, if PRS is aware of it, the increased activity would draw our attention to it. Of course, I’d want to investigate while the spirit was active.

In that sense, it might be like the butterfly effect, the theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause a tornado a thousand miles away. But it’s always surprising and often mysterious the way things wind up being interconnected.

Chapter 21
I Don’t Believe

If a priest was standing here and it did that,
he’d
take it as a sign. I’m sure.

As with some of our other cases, Peg Knickerbocker got in touch with us through the publicity and articles we’d circulated back around Halloween. She and her husband, Myrle, owned a 131-year-old building in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and ever since they’d bought the place they’d been experiencing activity.

I knew from the start that Peg welcomed psychics and paranormal investigators to her hotel. The spirits were part of the draw for customers. Since it was evident that Peg was okay with publicity, I did worry about the legitimacy of the haunting, that it might be a stunt. In general, though, PRS doesn’t mind doing a case just because a client wants publicity. We do want to be sure that (1) the client genuinely believes in the phenomena and, (2) that there’s some sort of scientific or ethical merit to doing the case.

We always have an eye to our overarching goals of furthering the understanding of paranormal phenomena and helping clients, but sometimes an investigation can be more of a fun exercise for the group, like “Mothman.” If, in the process, we can document evidence or improve our technique, then I feel there’s merit in it. Here, the Knickerbocker Hotel seemed like a cool, creepy location. I explored further, wanting to know how active the haunting was and so on.

Through our preinvestigation and research, I became more dubious about the claims. Aside from all the psychics and investigators who had visited, I also saw a very hokey brochure advertising the spirits in a way that fed my doubts. I didn’t think the client was lying, but rather that, wrapped up in the atmosphere and her own beliefs, she might be misinterpreting natural events.

When Peg spoke over the phone, even in initially talking to the producers, she seemed very careful about what she said, and kind of passive. I knew, for instance, that there’d been some deaths and injuries involving people close to Peg who’d been at the hotel, but she didn’t want to talk about that directly. She did report that there was a particular bedroom where she wouldn’t stay because she’d wake up feeling choked. Apparently more than one person had seen apparitions and they had mediums over regularly to perform séances.

I try to start out open-minded, but sometimes I get warning signs that I don’t want to ignore either. As I started theorizing with the others about possible natural explanations, I began to worry that the case could be a disaster—a situation where the client was so set on believing in the ghosts, that there’d be no reasoning with her.

When we headed to Linesville, and held our briefing on the first floor of a local historical building, I was already taking a slightly more skeptical approach than usual.

“I definitely do want to pursue debunking some of this stuff,” I said. “As well as trying to give the clients the benefit of the doubt that maybe what they’re experiencing is real.”

To me, if we’re thinking it
isn’t
paranormal, that’s a legitimate part of the process, too.

The Knickerbocker Hotel is a three-story building on the corner of a busy street. The current business was established by Peg and Myrle in 2005. During our tour, she told us it was built in 1882 by Milo Arnold, and originally called the Arnold House.

Though it was called a hotel, it was set up more as an event space for reunions, meetings, paranormal groups that would come to investigate, and that sort of thing. The rooms are mostly decorative. Peg said she wanted it to be a place where people could come and have their picture taken on the stairwell.

“But who’s going to have their picture taken on the stairwell if someone is going to try to push you down it?” she asked. According to Peg, many people had felt something come from behind them while they were on the stairs and try to push them down. “That’s happened to my husband, my son-in-law, my daughter-in-law . . .”

She also showed us the “choking room” where she’d woken up and felt unable to breathe.

As I sat down to interview her, I kept in mind that she was, in a way, an entertainer, as a hostess for the hotel. I had the sense she felt as if she had to be engaging and entertaining for the camera.

It was clear she loved the place, and they’d put a lot into preserving it. It didn’t seem as important for their income as much as it was a labor of love. They may have lived there at some point, but at the time of our investigation they were living nearby.

Peg told me there’d only been two séances at the hotel. The number seemed small, so I was concerned she might be misleading us. In the end I don’t think that was the case. Others interviewed for the case told us about séances there that Peg hadn’t been part of. There’d been so many groups and paranormal teams at the hotel, I don’t think she kept count or even registered it. My sense was that she was much too casual about it to keep track.

Prior to our arrival, Peg specifically asked that we not bring up the deaths and injuries in her family. If the activity was real, though, that would likely be an important part of any emotional factor here, so I brought it up anyway.

Peg, to her credit, responded. She told us there was a particular party they’d held in the hotel. “It was an anniversary party for my in-laws,” she explained. “We had a wonderful party. I looked and saw an image go through my kitchen. It was like a dark image. It was a frightening thing to me. I didn’t know what it was.”