Paranormal Nation
Why America Needs Ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot
MARC E. FITCH
Copyright 2013 by Marc E. Fitch
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fitch, Marc E.
Paranormal nation : why America needs ghosts, UFOs, and bigfoot / Marc E. Fitch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–313–38206–2 (hardback) — ISBN 978–0–313–38207–9 (ebook) 1. Parapsychology—United States—History. 2. United States—Social life and customs. I. Title.
BF1028.5.U6F58 2013
130.973—dc23 2012040011
ISBN: 978–0–313–38206–2
EISBN: 978–0–313–38207–9
17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
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Dedicated to my wife, Erin. For all your love and support.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 A Brief History of the Paranormal in America
Chapter 3 Paranormal Hoaxes
Chapter 4 The Native Paranormal
Chapter 5 The JFK Assassination and the Paranormal
Chapter 6 Social Change and the Paranormal
Chapter 7 The Rise of Paranormal Television
Chapter 8 The Paranormal Reality
Chapter 9 The Paranormal Economy
Chapter 10 Based on a True Story…
Chapter 11 A Lack of Faith
Chapter 12 Is Satanism Real?
Chapter 13 The American Gothic
Chapter 14 The Ghost Hunter Age: Today’s Paranormal Movement
Chapter 15 Shirley Jackson’s America
Chapter 16 Why Does the United States Need Ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot?
Chapter 17 Cry of the Banshee
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my mother, Paulette, for her time, encouragement, and editorial skills. Thanks to Praeger/ABC-CLIO for giving a new author a chance. Thank you to Tom and Rita McCullough for letting my family live in your home while I finished this manuscript and, of course, thank you to all those who helped and contributed their stories to this work.
(If you don’t believe in miracles, I wrote this book while working two jobs and living in a one-bedroom apartment with our two children under 3 years old.)
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
A frightened family and a paranormal research group known as the Spirit Seekers out of Montgomery, Alabama, sit around a wooden table in a dark recess of the Shea family’s new home. Ben and Jamie Shea and their three young children, Jackson (3 months), Bridger (5), and Tory (11) have been experiencing a living nightmare since purchasing and moving into the previously empty house. Demonic phantoms appear to them; ghosts of children and the elderly walk up and down their stairs at night; their young son cannot sleep because of the voices that keep sounding in his room and, worst of all, the Shea’s oldest child is involved in a near-fatal car accident. After enduring these apparitions, frightening sounds, near misses, and paranoia, the Sheas finally called the Spirit Seekers. Alan Lowe and his wife, Angela, run the Spirit Seekers. Together they investigate paranormal phenomena such as hauntings. Joining them is their daughter Violet, a medium who can converse with the dead, and Karen Shillings, a historical researcher who tries to discover a historical source of the haunting. They have come to help the Sheas rid their home of its unwelcome guests.
The Spirit Seekers set up shop quickly. The focus of the terror appears to be a little boy’s room at the end of a hallway. It was in this room that the Sheas found evidence of a satanic ritual when they first bought the abandoned house. Not believing that there was anything to worry about, they purchased the home anyway and turned the bedroom into their son’s room. The Spirit Seekers have placed a video camera in the hallway to monitor activity. In fact, they have placed several video cameras throughout the house with viewing monitors, recording devices, and infrared cameras to capture any negative heat signatures left by an entity. The house is rigged, and the investigators are ready to confront whatever evil lies in wait.
Violet, the medium, senses an evil presence in the house—something inhuman. She believes that whoever performed the satanic ritual in the house may have opened a door to an evil world. After some discussion the investigators decide to try to communicate with the spirits through use of a Ouija board. The Spirit Seekers and the Sheas gather around a table in the living room and place all their hands lightly on the planchette. Victoria calls out to the spirit and asks its name. Slowly the planchette begins to move across the board to form the word S-E-T-H. Then Victoria asks when Seth was alive. Again the planchette moves and spells out N-E-V-E-R. The Sheas are now terrified, and the investigators realize that they may be dealing with a demonic entity—something that is not the ghost of a former resident but something straight from hell. They all take their hands away from the planchette and begin to discuss what should be done to rid the house of a possible demon. Suddenly the group watches in horror as the planchette, now without anyone’s hand on it, begins to move wildly across the board forming words faster than the investigators can write them down. Alan asks if the presence will reveal itself. The planchette turns, points toward one of the video monitors and stops dead still. The lights in the house suddenly turn off, and on the screen they see a tall, black-robed figure ambling down the upstairs hallway and disappearing into the young boy’s bedroom.
The Spirit Seekers attempt to cleanse the house of its demons; however, two months later, the Sheas flee the house in terror as this same black entity descends upon them in the hallway. They leave all their possessions behind.
This was a scene from the Discovery Channel’s program A Haunting. The premise of the program, which as of this writing is in its fourth season, is to tell the true story of a haunting.1 Discovery reenacts haunted experiences using actors, scripts, and some fairly spooky special effects based on witnesses’ testimonies. The witnesses tell their story through interviews during the program, and the actors act it out with the help of a network studio. A Haunting has enjoyed favorable ratings since its release in 2004 and is slotted for another season.
It is just one of many new television shows that have appeared since 2000. Prompted by the success of the British program Most Haunted, networks such as Discovery, History, Syfy, A&E, Travel, Biography, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV) have hopped on the bandwagon of paranormal television and have been enjoying the rating benefits ever since. Indeed, some of these programs have even served to put these networks “on the map.” Television programs such as MonsterQuest and UFO Files featured on the History Channel, Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International on Syfy, Paranormal State on A&E, and Ghostly Encounters on Biography have captured the imagination and rating share of the nation. These shows have garnered considerable ratings for otherwise small cable networks and reinvigorated some channels like Discovery, History, and Travel.
According to the Gal
lup News Service, approximately “…three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief…,”2 the most popular being extrasensory perception followed closely by a belief in haunted houses. Interestingly enough, this is nearly identical to the percentage of Americans that believe in God. Obviously, television network executives have tapped into a widespread and profitable consumer base. But what does this say about U.S. culture? Oftentimes we can tell more about the state of the United States through the study of pop culture than we can through polls and demographic studies. Popular culture can be viewed in historical context to reveal anxieties, concerns, and belief systems of a culture, particularly when dealing with the supernatural or paranormal. Is it just coincidence that belief in sightings of UFOs skyrocketed in the late forties and fifties after the development of nuclear arms and the Cold War? Is it coincidence that spiritualism and communication with spirits became a popular social movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s following Darwin’s release of On the Origin of Species? The United States has undergone many social changes over the past century, which can often be reflected through popular media outlets such as television and movies. Each generation either embraces or rejects the values of the previous one and finds its own way through our ongoing history. So what is it about this time in U.S. history, a time of unprecedented scientific and technological progress, that has made the public so interested in ghosts?
The paranormal is defined as that which cannot be explained by any known scientific explanation and is outside the realm of normal experience. As we begin to comprehend the extent of our knowledge, we may find that it is infinitely smaller than we suppose. The public generally accepts things they cannot see or explain as fact and the basis for their reality. Take, for instance, gravity; the force that keeps our feet on the ground and causes the rotation of the planet in the solar system and the passage of time—day to night, month to month, year to year, and eon to eon. How exactly does gravity function and what causes it? Truth be told, there is much about gravity that we do not understand, particularly in lieu of new advances in quantum physics; and while we have given it definition, we have not yet been able to assign a comprehensive and definitive theory by which the force operates.3 And even if we did (or “could”), it would still be a “theory,” albeit one that is provable every time we get up in the morning and put our feet on the ground. The point is that our knowledge has limits. We accept gravity without understanding it; we assume that someone out there does, and that he or she is really smart and has it all quantified into an absolutely provable science. But, in reality, that is not the case. We live our lives with an assumed understanding of our reality, but there are limits to our understanding.
Like gravity and any number of other functions of physics and science that guide our everyday lives, there are certain experiences that defy our understanding of the known universe. These mysterious, anomalous events are called paranormal because they are outside our normal experience and outside our normal understanding of the universe. In fact, it is this very idea of being “outside” that defines the paranormal. It exists in the periphery of our society, whispered in secret or not at all, only to those who one believes will not ridicule. And these experiences are not isolated to one particular group or society; rather, they have formed the basis of human interaction and progress since the dawn of time. Since the first lightning bolt struck the earth and caused primitive man to fear a god and try to appeal to his mercy, the paranormal—that which is outside our understanding or normal lives—has been with us; it has shaped the progress of science, religion, and social changes. For when the paranormal is no longer paranormal, it becomes science.
But there are limits, and at this point in the progress of science, technology, and humanity, one could argue that society is bumping up against those limits of understanding. Perhaps the most definitive examination of the paranormal came from George P. Hansen’s work, The Trickster and the Paranormal, in which he defines the paranormal as something that defies boundaries, limits, and institutionalization. “The supernatural is irrational, but it is also real. It holds enormous power. We ignore it at our peril. It operates not only on the individual psyche, but at a collective level, influencing entire cultures. The witchcraft persecutions and the demagoguery of charismatic leaders are only two of many dangers. If we fail to recognize the limits of our ‘rational’ way of thinking we can become victims of it.”4 It is because of our culture’s focus on the rational and scientific that the paranormal is relegated to the outside of the cultural norm. In previous civilizations the inverse may have been the norm; the supernatural was accepted as fact while science was derided as “witchcraft.” Hansen warns that we ignore the irrational and paranormal at our own risk, but history has shown that we ignore science and rationality at our own risk as well.
However, today’s society is the inverse of the Middle Ages; we have accelerated beyond the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and have now entered the Information Age, fueled by the technology of the Internet. During this age, however, popular culture has become fascinated once again with the paranormal, that which defies science and technology and institutionalization. Humanity has, in fact, never forgotten its ghosts and demons and monsters; the stories and traditions have been passed down from generation to generation and country to country. But there have been “ages” of paranormal fascination and upheaval similar to those times of social upheaval and changes, and, oftentimes, coinciding with them. This begs the cultural question: why now?
Paranormal Nation is a work that will seek to answer the question of why the paranormal has experienced such a revival in the past 12 years and why humanity seeks out and, in fact, needs the paranormal. It will look at the history of the paranormal, its relationship to social changes, and the implications therein and will then look at the current state of the paranormal in the United States and explore our need for the mysterious in our lives. Ultimately, we will ask the question, “What is more frightening: the idea that we do not completely understand the workings of the world or the idea that we do?”
But there are people who make the exploration of the dark and unknown their life’s work. People such as ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, cryptozoologists, scientists, ufologists, mediums, and amateur interested sleuths define their worldview and, thus, their lives through the pursuit and exploration of the unknown. And there are those who, while not in pursuit of these paranormal experiences, have experienced them nonetheless and have remained forever changed because of it. But what would drive someone to seek the unknown? What would make someone spend their lives in pursuit of the paranormal, or allow themselves to be shaped and changed by it? Of course, many people live their lives steeped in religion, but church attendance numbers have been dwindling in recent years—43 percent according to ReligiousTolerance.org—while belief in a God or gods has remained fairly steady at approximately 80 percent.5 This leaves a large discrepancy of people who believe in the spirit world and believe in a God or gods, but who do not regularly attend services. Could this most recent incarnation of paranormal beliefs actually be a result of diminished religious affiliation? How do today’s religions view the paranormal? These are some of the questions that will be explored in Paranormal Nation.
Even more importantly, we will explore why it appears that the United States needs its ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot. Do these paranormal phenomena merely symbolize the darkness of human imagination, or do they represent something more essential to humanity?
In the ancient world, stories were developed and passed from generation to generation that told of how the world and everything in it was created. They became the blueprints of how to live one’s life in relation to this world. Almost everyone is familiar with the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, and with the story of the Garden of Eden, which shows how the world was created by God and how the natural world came into being. It is these stories of origins that became the myths that guided the ancient world. Today many of
those myths have been discarded in favor of science and a naturalistic view of the universe. However, the abandonment of myth has left a void in society, and it is one that those who seek the paranormal try to fill. To seek out the mysterious is to seek a fundamental change in one’s own life. Those who try to bring that change to society as a whole engage in a noble, if not impossible, task. But it is this very task that makes them, in some sense, heroic. If those who seek to verify and prove the paranormal were to ever succeed in their quest, it would fundamentally change our understanding of what it means to be human and what our role is in the universe. Thus, those who seek out the paranormal are seeking to change our society and, in their view, it is for the better.
What does it mean to believe in ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot? That is the fundamental underlying question that will be examined in this work. It is obvious through the persistence of paranormal beliefs throughout history that there exists a need to believe, and clearly people do. So what does it mean for both the individual and society as a whole?
There are those people who pursue this primal fear and belief as a noble cause, and they are the individuals who shape and influence paranormal belief in today’s society. Paranormal Nation examines the paranormal as it exists today in its modern incarnation and also explores the motivations behind those who have been shaped and influenced by their belief in ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot. These individuals can be found in nearly every town and city across the country. Their work has sometimes been memorialized and sometimes scorned and discredited, but their motivations stem from a common goal: to seek a new definition for life through exploration of the unknown reaches of both our psyche and our reality. Those interviewed in this work are neither “kooks” nor liars and to call them so is to do a disservice to the spirit of humanity and civility. Paranormal Nation seeks to portray the paranormal not as a supernatural experience, but rather, a very human experience.
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