Doug related one last incident to me—one that never made the final MonsterQuest cut because they had all been too scared to leave the cabin, and his eldest son, who had been with them during filming, went into shock. Things such as full-sized logs were being thrown against the cabin with such force that they all figured something was going to come through the wall and kill them. “The reason that never made the show is that I was too afraid, and so was my crew, to get up and investigate because we thought we were going to be killed. That’s the simple truth.” Doug says that his son, Blaine, has had panic attacks since that night.
Part of the fun of MonsterQuest, according to Doug, is the fear of the unknown. But it is a good fear—a fear of childhood wonder, when the world was still an incomprehensibly large, alien place and monsters roamed the countryside. Hajicek only asks that his audience be as open-minded as he is. “I just ask that people look. When I interview a couple who were driving down the road in the middle of the day and saw something large and hairy walk across the road in front of them, and they’re too scared to go on camera because they run a day care out of their home, did they want to see it? No, that’s probably the last thing they wanted to see. But I guarantee you that from now on they’ll be watching the side of the road as they’re driving. Once your eyes are opened and your mind is opened to the possibility, you begin to look and realize that the world isn’t completely figured out. If you never look to the sky, you’ll never know what you missed.”
What if the Sasquatch were found? What if tomorrow a hunter showed up with an actual body? The scientific community would obviously be in an uproar; suddenly innumerable expeditions would be made into the habitat of the Sasquatch. The body would be dissected, analyzed, and mapped down to its very DNA. Suddenly the mystery would be gone, and the answers would seem perfectly simple and logical. Men and women would shake their heads and wonder how they had missed it, Animal Planet would carry nonstop coverage, and the endless, ongoing debate would cease to be. What good would it do for the world? Or what harm? What if that never happens? What if Bigfoot is never found and all we have are giant footprints tracing the outline of a lonely Arctic lake? Would it be so bad to watch those prints disappear into the forest and never know for certain what created them? Would it be so bad to keep that childhood wonder rather than having the adult answer? This is the crux of a moral dilemma that quietly plagues paranormal programs that seek the truth—not whether or not finding the truth is possible, but whether or not it is wise to do so. What would change and in what way? These are big-picture questions, cultural and moral and ethical questions that can be overlooked in the near-sightedness of eager scientists, filmmakers, and entertainment executives. Proving the paranormal would be a moral and ethical atom bomb, but was the world better off before or after the atom bomb?
DISCOVERY CHANNEL’S A HAUNTING: “WHERE EVIL LURKS”11
The Discovery Channel’s A Haunting was actually the inspiration for this book, as I found a regular source to quench my thirst for horror movies. The program is generally creepy and chilling—a mini horror film that is aired twice a day at 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. respectively, as Discovery regularly shows repeats to fill up daytime slots. Thanks to TIVO, I was able to quickly catch up on all four seasons. But as I watched the program I began to ask myself a few questions. I grew up with the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, stories of space explorations, and film footage of jungles, deserts, and cultures from around the world. It was a respectable, scientific, and informative source of programming. However, with the arrival of A Haunting, I began to wonder if we were all somehow being duped. All these people who seemed like perfectly normal, average, hard-working individuals were making claims of paranormal and supernatural events and experiences, and Discovery Channel felt these stories to be legitimate enough to air alongside their regular programming. Were all these witnesses lying? Were they all suffering from some mental disorder? Considering the reputable Discovery Channel was willing to air their stories, considering that I could find no benefit whatsoever to the witnesses in possibly putting themselves up for ridicule, and considering it seemed highly unlikely that all of them were engaged in some kind of hoax or mass hysteria, I decided to look into the matter for myself.
A Haunting began with two specials, A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia, both produced by New Dominion Pictures. However, based on the success of the specials, Discovery adopted the idea for a series, and thus began a four-season run of A Haunting that continues into the present (It was recently renewed for a fifth season on Discovery’s sister channel Destination America). “A Haunting in Connecticut” was based on an incident in Southington, Connecticut, involving demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, who tried to exorcise a house in the late 1970s that was formerly a funeral home. The owners eventually fled the house, and their experiences were turned into a book, cowritten by the family, that was released in the 1990s. The story has now reached Amityville Horror status with the release of the feature film The Haunting in Connecticut, released in 2009. Thus, Discovery’s adoption of A Haunting has proven successful on a large scale, both financially and culturally.
“Where Evil Lurks” is a particularly fascinating example of Discovery’s program for several reasons. Firstly, this was not Casper the Friendly Ghost—this was an entity that was frightening and destructive enough that the Shea family in Arkansas felt a serious need for help that could not be provided by any source other than the Spirit Seekers, a paranormal research group. Secondly, the way it was portrayed in the episode, the paranormal activity was witnessed by a number of different people; the incidents were not confined to one individual having an experience, but by a group of people simultaneously sharing a paranormal experience. Thirdly, the situation was never resolved. According to the program, the family fled the house in the middle of the night and never returned. This aspect of the haunting is particularly fascinating because it actually uprooted a family and caused them to flee a very large real estate investment. Anybody who has ever moved from a house knows that it is not something that is taken lightly. In the Amityville Horror case, the family also left all their possessions behind, not wanting to stay in the home another moment. There are several similarities to be found between the Amityville Horror and the Shea home in Arkansas, but whether or not these similarities are due to an ingrained idea in the minds of the Shea family due to the infamy of the Amityville house, or because they were both supposedly occupied by demonic entities, remains to be known.
When the Sheas were searching for a new home, they found evidence of satanic rituals in an upstairs bedroom of one of the houses they looked at. Thinking it was only teenagers that had been playing a prank in an abandoned house, they decided to purchase the house and continue with their move as planned; the room became their son’s room.
There are two additional influences to consider when discussing the experience of the Shea family: teens who dabble in the occult and the idea that certain regions tend to be haunted. The idea of teenagers experimenting with Satanism, which then leads to a haunting, is fairly common in stories of the supernatural, similar to the desecration of Native American burial grounds. Teenage experimentation with the occult is often a form of rebellion against traditional adult values, but according to paranormal investigators, such activities open portals through which evil entities can enter the earthly plane. Often, the teenagers get more than they bargained for with their occult “play.” But the idea of ritualistic Satanism having taken place in the Shea house offers an explanation as to the haunting that followed.
Also, inherent in the story is the land itself being susceptible to haunting. The introduction to each episode of A Haunting sets up any given regional area where a haunting has occurred as a place inanely haunted by otherworldly spirits. “The Ozark River Valley once stood as a gateway to the West, a last outpost of civilization before the wilderness beyond. But nestled amid this lush countryside lies a different kind of portal, a crossroads between life and death
where the mortal and the eternal collide.” This idea that certain regions of the United States are naturally haunted and pocked with portals to eternal realms is a staple of A Haunting and reveals the inherent opinion of the program that these stories are to be believed without the need of further evidence. It creates a sense of place and history that is associated with a sense of horror, similar to Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, for which the cause of the haunting was the desecration of gravesites. Thus, it appears that the United States is dotted with supernatural areas that cannot be explained, and “when doors are opened, nightmares become reality.” This point is reiterated when Mrs. Shea, while checking out books on the supernatural, talks with a local librarian and finds out that their new home has long been known as a “haunted house.”
The Shea family’s nightmare begins shortly after moving in. There are sounds of a baby crying when their baby was gone, voices in empty rooms, feelings of being touched by unseen hands, and the appearance of a frightful, reaper-like face in the darkened screen of the computer when Mrs. Shea sits down to type. The final straw comes when Mrs. Shea and her oldest daughter, Tory, are involved in a car accident, which almost claims Tory’s life. A Haunting implies that this accident was the work of whatever evil forces lurked in the house. The reaper entity had appeared the moment that Mrs. Shea veered off the road.
As Tory recovers at home following the accident, the Sheas finally reach the end of their rope and seek help. They contact the Spirit Seekers, a paranormal research group headed by Alan Lowe. A historical researcher and two clairvoyants, who can communicate with and sense the presence of spirits, join Alan. The group begins to monitor the house using video and audio equipment, and the clairvoyants walk throughout trying to find pockets of psychic activity. Their search comes to a head in the son’s bedroom where the satanic symbols had been found. Violet senses myriad different spirits and then, finally, one frightening demonic entity, which has likely been causing all the Sheas’ troubles. The Spirit Seekers then perform a séance ritual and use a Ouija board to communicate with the entity. The Ouija planchette moves without anyone touching it. It spells the name SETH and indicates that this being was never human, thus eternal and demonic. The planchette then begins to move rapidly across the board and then stops and points to a television monitor that is trained on the upstairs hallway. The group lets out a collective gasp as a dark figure is seen ambling down the hallway toward Bridger’s room.
This is essentially the epitome of a paranormal experience: a dark, frightening figure on camera witnessed by a variety of people. It is a shared experience rather than one individual’s story of feeling “like I was being watched” or seeing a figure from the corner of one’s eye. This should be the defining moment of paranormal research and programming. If this figure is on tape and can be seen by multiple people, then it would seem to constitute some of the best evidence ever gathered of ghostly and demonic entities. However, this is not the case.
A Haunting is based on witness testimony and only witness testimony. Unlike MonsterQuest or other documentary-style programs, A Haunting does not offer up evidence or proof of the stories they present. They offer only the story of the people involved as it was told to the producers. Thus, Discovery has already examined the stories and assigned to them a notion of belief. Larry Silverman is the executive producer of A Haunting and, while he declined a request for an interview for this book, he was previously interviewed by iamlegend, a blogger who regularly posts for The Haunted Report, a weekly report specializing in the haunted house/horror film market. Silverman states that A Haunting seeks “to figure out how to tell someone’s story and still structure it in a way that is like a traditional Hollywood horror film, but not do anything in which we are making anything up … We have to submit to Discovery an annotated script, which means everything in the script has to have a source. Whether or not these things actually happened to these people, we don’t know. We decided early on that we weren’t going to question, we were just going to tell the story as they said it happened.”12
A Haunting certainly imbues its stories with a horror film quality. Ghostly figures pop onto the screen, demonic entities manifest in dark rooms and in reflections in mirrors, people and things levitate, frightening sounds are heard, ghostly winds blow through closed rooms, and mysterious lights appear down hallways. Alan Lowe, head of the Spirit Seekers, who attempted to rid the Sheas’ home of its demons, feels that the special effects in the horror film that depicted the Sheas’ experience served a two-sided purpose. “The facts were accurately presented, although some parts were dramatized. This was necessary, in part, in order to impart to the audience the creepy feeling that the home had. I was hesitant about participating in the program in the beginning, for fear of how it would be handled. I was pleasantly surprised that the producers attempted to present events as accurately as possible, while still making the program entertaining to watch.”13 Thus, A Haunting, like all other television programs, must remain entertaining to ensure viewers; however, they must balance entertainment with accuracy. Scenes are dramatized using special effects but, as Silverman claims, the stories themselves remain true to the witness testimony. “We turn down a lot of stories,” Silverman said, “where people say something happened someplace but it’s just anecdotal.”
A Haunting, unlike documentary-style programs, is a show. There are sets, art directors, sound stages, special effects—in essence, it is a production. Silverman readily admits that he is a fan of the horror genre, and that the tried-and-true techniques used in creating horror and suspense in film have been recreated in A Haunting. However, at what point do the lines between truth and fiction become so blurred that one leaks into the other? Discovery Channel is known for producing the highest-quality nonfiction programming, and viewers essentially expect that something aired on Discovery will be factual and reality-based. While New Dominion Pictures tries to balance between witness testimony and entertainment, sometimes one can get lost in the other. As illustrated before, the culmination of “Where Evil Lurks” lies in the Ouija board scene in which the demon spells out its name and then manifests itself on camera. Alan Lowe was present during this séance and witnessed the events for himself, but they differ slightly from the witness statement given on A Haunting. “In the scene with the Ouija board, the planchette did move on its own and point toward an investigator holding a camera. The dark figure seen moving along the upstairs hallway was seen by Violet, who is psychic, and portrayed as she described it.” The subtle difference lies in the fact that Lowe seemingly asserts that Violet’s gift of being a psychic enabled her and only her to see the figure on the camera, but the Sheas state that they also saw the figure moving through the hallway during an on-air interview. While this is a fairly minor discrepancy, and could, in fact, just be a miscommunication between the different stories being told, it calls into question the most frightening and solidifying piece of the story—a shared paranormal experience between two distinct groups of people, the Sheas and the Spirit Seekers.
Despite this discrepancy between stories and the artistic license taken by the producers, A Haunting is still based upon individuals and families who are willing to go on national television and tell a story that may have social and economic consequences. As Doug Hajicek asserted about Sasquatch witnesses, these people don’t want to see anything, but they do; they see something they can’t explain and begin looking for answers. “Belief in the supernatural is not a matter of faith, but simply a result of being open to the truth. The Spirit Seekers have had some extremely skeptical investigators with no real religious faith; however, they were open-minded and curious. Once a person experiences a paranormal event, it then becomes necessary to understand it as much as possible. When all other explanations fail, people are often convinced that the supernatural is real,” said Lowe. Or as Silverman puts it, “If we were just a bunch of writers sitting back saying, ‘Okay, what do you want to do this week?’ it would be one thing, but we’re at the mercy of
the stories we find.”14 The question of the paranormal often boils down to the chicken and egg scenario; do programs such as A Haunting and groups such as the Spirit Seekers exist because people are having experiences they cannot explain, or are people seeing things that do not exist thanks to the effects these programs and groups have on their imaginations?
The Sheas’ story ends a little differently from many others. The family, unable to rid the home of its portal to hell, flees the house in the middle of the night, leaving their possessions behind. In a final scene, Mrs. Shea and Tory are confronted with the demon Seth as he approaches them down the hallway from the son’s bedroom. It is a spectacular and frightening finish. It leaves you with the conclusion that it must be real; why else would a family abandon their home? But we have only the witness testimony to go on. However, with regards to the blurring of reality and entertainment, let’s take a look at the similarities in this passage from Jay Anson’s book, The Amityville Horror, a nonfiction work that has been hotly contested as a hoax and was turned into a major motion picture. “On the top step stood a gigantic figure in white. George knew it was the hooded image that Kathy had first glimpsed in the fireplace. The being was pointing at him!” At this point the Lutzes fled the Amityville Horror house and left all their possessions behind.
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