Chasing Ghosts, page 16
“It’s absolutely mad,” Adams says of the entire crazy cast of characters. “It’s like a soap opera. Not even Eastenders would dream up something like this. It really is bizarre, but that’s why we love it.”
Perhaps Price got caught up in the excitement, or maybe the rectory was a bit of a golden goose for him. The investigations led to numerous books and articles, along with appearances on the radio and television. If there’s any truth to him being sneaky with a few pebbles and magic tricks to help keep the public’s interest alive, maybe it was worth it.
Why are we so fascinated with visiting old prisons, asylums, and other haunted locations? And why do we revel in standing in the very spot where horror took place? Sociologist and author Margee Kerr suggests it might have something to do with how we see ourselves in comparison.
“People like opportunities to feel a sense of righteousness in a way, that they’re on the right side—they’re the good guys,” she says. “They’re not like these evil people that did horrible things. They would never do that. You can feel good that you’re on the right track.”
That righteousness comes with the thrill of possibly experiencing the unknown and opening your imagination to what might be possible. Not to mention evoking a bit of teenage rebellion. “You feel a little edgy for trying to contact the supernatural or just being in places you’re not supposed to be,” Kerr adds.
For many who seek out such thrills, there’s also just a simple love of being scared. As the founder and owner of Boroughs of the Dead: Macabre New York City Walking Tours, Andrea Janes shares ghost stories with these folks for a living. “They want to experience fear because it’s a delicious feeling,” she says. “It’s a delightful little shiver when you get all that luscious exquisiteness of feeling horror in a setting that is completely safe and completely controlled and doesn’t actually threaten or imperil you in any way.”
Those feelings aren’t just a reaction to morbid curiosity; we’re actually wired to feel this way. Fear releases dopamine. This might sound strange given that dopamine is a chemical that plays a role in feeling pleasure. In the case of fear, its release might be the brain’s way of letting us know we’re surviving a fright. That makes us feel good, so dopamine is just doing its job. Combine that with a dose of adrenaline, and wandering through a haunted house that probably isn’t haunted gives us a good rush.
Sometimes, though, the scariest phenomena don’t revolve around places. They revolve around people. Not understanding how or why the paranormal is happening leads to real feelings of danger. For these victims, the frights are not fun at all.
THE REAL HORROR OF AMITYVILLE
In the wee hours of the morning on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo picked up his high-powered rifle, marched through his two-story home, and brutally slaughtered his parents and four siblings as they slept in their beds. During his trial he claimed voices told him to do it, but the jury didn’t buy his insanity plea and sentenced the troubled twenty-four-year-old to six life sentences. DeFeo’s life, for all intents and purposes, was over. But the horror in Amityville was just beginning.
Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved their family into the Dutch Colonial house in the quiet village situated on the south shore of New York’s Long Island. Their dream home quickly became anything but. Strange noises, disconnected telephones, mysterious flocks of flies, a phantom flying pig with glowing red eyes, drops of green slime, and other spooky phenomena were enough to send the family fleeing after twenty-eight days.
The Amityville Horror house is one of the most recognizable haunted houses in pop culture. Its legend was stoked by former owners George and Kathy Lutz and famed demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The Lutzes shared their story with the press and attracted paranormal investigators, most notably Ed and Lorraine Warren. As self-proclaimed “demonologists,” the Warrens inspected the house and found something unsettling.
“In our judgment, there was a spirit that had plagued the Lutzes in the house,” Ed said. “But, no ghost was present. The ‘spirit’ was in human.” By in human he meant a spirit that “has never walked the earth in human form” had caused all the commotion.
Another paranormal investigator, Hans Holzer, visited the home in 1977 accompanied by a trance medium. The psychic claimed an angry Native American chief was responsible for the trouble, allegedly because the home had been built on a sacred burial site. Holzer believed in his medium and worked with the local historical society and librarian to find evidence of a chieftain in the area. Local Native Americans, however, disagreed with the suggestion and said there were no records of burial grounds in Amityville.
These explorations fueled hype building up to The Amityville Horror’s book release and subsequent movie adaptation. Suddenly, Amityville became America’s scariest place. Especially for the neighbors. Curiosity seekers made the pilgrimage to Long Island from all over the country. One group came dressed in hooded black robes carrying crosses and candles, totally prepared to face evil, and then marched around the wrong house. A do-gooder brought a goat on a leash to eat the house’s nefarious spirits. And then there was just about everyone else: executives, teachers, cops, doctors, you name it. They came day and night, roaming the street in their cars, asking for directions, clogging traffic, taking photographs, and building up the blood pressure and anger of residents trying to just live peaceful lives. The horror in Amityville was real.
One woman responded to a stranger’s plea for help finding the house by calmly telling him, “You’re a stupid, gullible, ignorant, pea-brained boob!”
Another remarked that “the only true thing in that book is the address.”
The Lutzes’ lawyer would’ve agreed. He claimed the whole affair was nothing more than a commercial venture. “We created this horror story over many bottles of wine that George was drinking,” he told the Associated Press in 1979. “We were creating something the public would want to hear about.”
Barbara and James Cromarty, who bought the home just months after the Lutzes skedaddled, were especially disgusted by all the hoopla. When they heard the book was coming out they knew the invasion of morbid tourists would only get worse.
“We begged them not to print it,” Barbara said after the publisher sent them galley proofs, “and they told us, in legal terminology, to go to hell.”
As far as the Cromartys and the rest of the neighbors were concerned, they were already there.
The Telekinetic Temper Tantrums of Living Poltergeists
In the fall of 2013, a family in rural North Carolina sought medical help for their eleven-year-old boy. He didn’t seem ill; he just happened to make electronic devices go haywire whenever he was near. The doctor didn’t have a prescription for that, so he reached out to parapsychologists at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, for help.
By the following January, John Kruth, executive director of the Rhine, assembled an investigative team and visited the boy to witness the claims for themselves. The phenomena proved just as odd and wondrous as described.
“The electronics in his house would go wild whenever he went near them,” Kruth says, certain that trickery could not explain all the observable disturbances. “The phone would ring when he walked by it, over and over again. He couldn’t touch cell phones. Smoke alarms would go off when he walked by them. The TV remote would do strange things whenever he was holding it.”
The boy’s peculiar relationship with electronics followed him wherever he went. At school he’d walk by a printer and it would spit paper out all over the floor. Tests administered on computers would malfunction, forcing teachers to make him take exams only after his classmates finished. Those same teachers thought he was a prankster determined to sabotage the school’s computer system.
Kruth considered the case to be a poltergeist. The term is German for “noisy ghost” and dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. These strange happenings are often thought to be provoked by some sort of mischievous spirit, as experienced at Borley Rectory. But parapsychologists distinguish these types of cases from others. Instead of being caused by the dead, the occurrences are believed to be induced by the living. To be more specific, where there’s a poltergeist, there’s typically someone going through some form of emotional, psychological stress. That stress is rooted in the subconscious mind and gets manifested through psychokinetic abilities. Since it happens repeatedly during these stressful periods, it’s been termed recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK). In Loyd Auerbach’s words, “You can think of a poltergeist scenario as a telekinetic temper tantrum.”
As the North Carolina boy’s experiences continued, he became sensitive to how they affected people around him and the resulting comments directed toward him. He developed anxiety, and the whole situation caused the family distress. Plus the bills were piling up from all the damaged electronic devices. They didn’t care why or how it was happening, they just wanted it to stop.
So Kruth sought to ease the anxiety. “I taught him some relaxation techniques, some breathing exercises, some mindfulness, and within a week things subsided.”
“The strange thing about PK is you can feel it happening. You can feel the pressure. It builds and it builds and it’s almost like your ears are popping. And then it builds to a point where it has to build so far, something has to give in the atmosphere. I felt that and a light bulb popped above my head.”
—Robyn Wilson, a paranormal investigator with psychic abilities, describing an example of a psychokinesis experience in 2020
The family was relieved, and Kruth considered the treatment a success from a psychological point of view, though from a scientific parapsychological point of view he would’ve liked to study the activity in a lab, run some tests, and understand more about how it worked. “But that wasn’t my purpose here,” he notes, “my purpose was to try to help the family.”
The idea of poltergeists typically conjures visions of moving chairs and randomly thrown objects, not malfunctioning printers. That’s with good reason. After all, those types of cases have been recorded for nearly two thousand years. In his 1951 book, Haunted People, Hereward Carrington documents more than 360 of them, dating back to a German case in 355 AD. And that’s just in one chapter. Charles Fort, author of the 1919 Book of the Damned and several other books compiling tales of anomalous phenomena, reported his fair share of poltergeists as well. One example from 1921 involved a family in London with an unfortunate situation involving exploding coal. When police were called to investigate, Fort reported that the volatile coal also “hopped out of grates and sauntered along floors” and “fell in showers in other rooms, having passed through walls, without leaving signs of this passage.”
Though “telekinetic temper tantrums” can be thrown by all types of people, frequently they’re linked to mental stress and the physical changes of puberty. Yes, teenagers are often at the center of poltergeist cases, just like Stephen King’s Carrie—only these cases aren’t works of fiction. Well, depending on what you choose to believe, that is. Some of these kids might just be clever mischief-makers.
Dr. Nandor Fodor, a psychoanalyst and psychical researcher, studied many poltergeist cases in the early- to mid-twentieth century, often involving teens, and could not chalk it all up to hoaxes. In 1960 he proclaimed, “Psychic phenomena do exist. Biology will have to revise some of its concepts. It will have to admit to a force in the human body that can move objects at a distance without muscular contact.”
It all sounds fantastic, but Fodor saw what he saw and saw no other explanation. In 1958, for example, he investigated the Herrmann family on Long Island, New York, where the strange happenings included an assortment of flying objects: sugar bowls; a seventy-five-pound bookcase (full of books); a dresser; a record player; and, much to the family’s chagrin, their collection of eighteenth-century ceramic figurines. The Herrmanns had not one, but two teenagers in the house—a situation that’s usually stressful enough without inanimate stuff randomly springing to life.
Fodor didn’t have a scientific explanation of how exactly this psychic force worked, but he believed that within adolescents, “a side-tracking of the sexual energies in a maturing body may be responsible for the explosive manifestation” and added that such episodes could include a “schizophrenic character.” In other words, teenagers exhibiting RSPK might have a part of their minds or personalities dissociating during their poltergeist moments, all stemming from repressed frustrations or desires.
The family dealing with the exploding coal conundrum included three children, and though Fort didn’t research explanations for his cases, he certainly unearthed many accounts of poltergeists involving adolescents. He topped his burning coal story with that of a twelve-year-old California boy who, in 1886, caused a stir by setting things on fire “by his glance.” His antics, whether through RSPK or sneaky mean-spiritedness, led to a swift expulsion from school. Fort noted a similarly infernal story that occurred a year later in a town in New Brunswick, Canada, concerning a family with four children, two nieces, and forty fires blazing within a few hours. “The fires can be traced to no human agency, and even the most skeptical are staggered,” one newspaper reported.
Extraordinary as these poltergeists seem, a few cases over the past two centuries have levitated to the top of the list in the world of paranormal phenomena. We’ll start in the early 1800s, with the one Nandor Fodor called “the greatest American ghost story”: the Bell Witch of Robertson County, Tennessee. Like many poltergeists, it began with knockings, scratchings, and other strange noises. But unlike other such cases, this one ended in murder.
The Bell Witch of Tennessee
John Bell was “an honest, God-fearing” Christian farmer who tended hundreds of acres of land as he and his wife, Lucy, raised their five sons and two daughters. All was well until 1817, when their family was joined by a mysterious presence. The manifestation quickly progressed from creepy sounds to creepier physical contact to the ability to speak in a whispery voice. Though the Bell family had initially kept the disturbances private, the town eventually heard about the phenomena and visitors came to experience things for themselves. Whatever it was, it became known as the Bell Witch.
The Democratic Herald chronicles the legend of the Bell Witch, a poltergeist-like entity that initially haunted the Bell family in early-nineteenth-century Tennessee. She would later inspire The Blair Witch Project.
Much of the entity’s malicious activity began to focus on the Bell’s youngest daughter, Betsy, who was fourteen at the time. She was described as “fit and proper for a tall, pretty girl with eyes blue as the sky, skin like cream and rose leaves, and the finest yellow hair.” Everyone liked Betsy, except, of course, the Bell Witch. It didn’t approve of her relationship with a neighborhood boy and showed its disdain by pulling her hair, pinching her, and slapping her face with enough force to leave fingerprints on her cheeks—all while shouting “I tell you, don’t marry Joshua Gardner!” The witch, it seemed, had an affinity for getting involved in people’s personal business. Not only did it shame Betsy in front of her parents, but it dished out secrets about all the local townsfolk. Accusations of ventriloquism were lobbed at Betsy, but a witness placed his hand over her mouth as the voice spoke and had no effect.
The witch continued to plague the young girl by sticking her with invisible pins until she shrieked and throwing her into spasmodic trances that lasted up to an hour. Physicians who examined her said she was perfectly healthy.
As the months passed, the entity only got louder and behaved in increasingly bizarre ways. According to early published reports on the case, the witch could “quote scripture in a way to astound the most learned minister” and it “became profane and ribald, howled, sang and swore, and, worse still, became a fearful toper, filling the room with her tipsy breath.”
This illustration of the Bell Witch appeared in a 1935 edition of the Des Moines Register.
All the commotion caught the attention of General Andrew Jackson, under whom one of Bells’ sons fought in the Battle of New Orleans. The future president arrived with his entourage and joined the family for a lovely dinner and delightful small talk, but he grew impatient when the Bell Witch failed to show up. One of his men took responsibility for the peace and quiet. Armed with a silver bullet in his pistol, the man considered himself a “witch tamer” and thought the entity wouldn’t dare make an appearance in his presence. The seemingly omnipresent Bell Witch heard his braggadocio and swiftly let him know it didn’t care for it. The man suddenly jumped from his chair, grabbing his behind, and shouted, “Boys, I am being stuck by a thousand pins!”
“I am in front of you—shoot!” the voice said. The witch tamer tried but his pistol wouldn’t fire. The Bell Witch, it was said, slapped his face repeatedly as it shouted, “It’s my night for fun!” Crying in pain, the man made a run for it and escaped the house. General Jackson loved it. He told John he’d never encountered something so amusing and mysterious and asked if he could stay another week. The Bell Witch told him to go to bed and promised to attack another of Jackson’s men the next evening.
Over time the witch introduced itself as several different entities, ranging from the spirit of an evil stepmother to a Native American spirit whose bones had been disturbed to an early settler who’d buried gold and silver on the Bell property and wanted to give it to Betsy. Eventually a minister got the entity to admit to, or settle on, being the spirit of an eccentric neighbor whom John had once quarreled with, known as Old Kate Batts. And it intended to torment John to death.
Betsy’s father was already mentally agonized by the Bell Witch’s mischievous antics, but its wrath soon affected him physically with a series of odd ailments beyond what others had experienced. It began with a strange swelling of his tongue that rendered speech and swallowing nearly impossible, which was exacerbated by twitchings throughout his whole body. This went on for about a year—and then things took a sharp turn for the worse. One fall morning John stepped out of the house and had his shoes suddenly snatched from his feet. According to a newspaper retelling, “he was beaten and twisted until there came upon him a seizure so violent that when at last he got home he had to take to his bed.”
