Of course, the next morning I got in big trouble. Someone (I’ve always wondered if it was Ken but I never asked him) must’ve told Dad about my nighttime wanderings as soon as he got up because he lit into me at breakfast, in the middle of my bowl of chocolate Cheerios, full-on yelling at me for the first time in front of the cameras. It was a serious scolding; he stood so that he towered above the sitting me, his face all red and eyes jumping out of his head. He repeatedly asked if I thought this was some sort of game, if I thought they were all fooling around? I cried and apologized, told him I was worried and only checking to see if Marjorie was okay. Mom didn’t say anything and went outside for a smoke while Marjorie’s bagel was toasting. He asked why I thought they had made the new bedtime rules. He said that I wasn’t dumb and that I was smart enough to figure it out, but in a way that made me feel dumb.
Just in case it wasn’t clear, I was forbidden to go to her room or to be with Marjorie if I was by myself until further notice. If I did it again, I wouldn’t be able to watch my Bigfoot and River Monsters shows.
CHAPTER 20
OF COURSE THE show used material from that night in Marjorie’s room to fill the third and fourth episodes.
They showed the actual interview with Dr. Navidson in the room from two different angles. They slowed down the film to focus on Marjorie’s facial expressions and hand gestures, and at the 12:37 time stamp of the interview, when she first referred to herself as “we,” there’s a frame (caught from both camera angles) where her irises appeared to be red, as though someone had taken her photo with a flash. The show interviewed two photography experts who analyzed films and arrived at no conclusion as to the source of the red in her eyes. They also slowed down the interview film to point out some odd shadow play that occurred on the wall behind Marjorie, offset to her right, and for the viewers, their left. At three different times, there appeared to be long, tubular-shaped shadows, waving and writhing in the background. Again, the photography experts were consulted, and again, they came to no conclusion although, without giving their evidence, they immediately dismissed Photoshop, editing tricks, and other ways of physically doctoring the film as a possible cause.
Sound and voice experts examined Marjorie’s audio. They dissected the parts where her voice changed, and examined the speech patterns and frequency waves, and made readings of her emotional state using Layered Voice Analysis. One expert claimed that the other voices she spoke in had totally different voice biometrics (which reflect both the anatomy of the speaker—the size and shape of the mouth and throat—and the behavioral/regional speech patterns/style of the speaker) and could not have come from the same person.
They fact-checked everything Marjorie had said, verifying the sources she quoted, and they briefly investigated and examined her claims about the Pope performing an exorcism in St. Peter’s Square. They showed a clip of Pope Francis laying hands on a man in a wheelchair who convulsed and slumped as the Pope prayed. They showed the Vatican’s written statement; a nondenial denial that he’d performed an exorcism in public. They quoted a book Pope Francis had written when he was an Archbishop titled On Heaven and Earth, highlighting the second chapter (titled “On the Devil”) and its ominous snippets relating to Satan and his terrible influence. They ran a brief third-party interview with the Bishop of Madrid who had indeed petitioned the Vatican to train more of his priests as exorcists.
They outlined a brief biography of the writer H. P. Lovecraft. They detailed an extensive bibliography and the recent renaissance of his ideas and influence on current popular and literary culture, noting the new volume of his work published by the Library of America. They explained his Elder Gods/Cthulhu mythos and where the demon Yidhra fit into it, and attempted to place Yidhra within a wider context in the history of demons/spirits within folklore and religion.
Between the many segments of their dissection of Marjorie’s interview, they ran reaction interviews from everyone involved. There were multiple clips of Mom and Dad giving their thoughts and opinions. Dad was always shot in bright light, usually on the back porch, his chest puffed, standing tall, resolute, like he was ready to do whatever it was he was supposed to do. It didn’t really look like him, not the him that I remember. His eyes were solar flares, and he smiled too widely, all teeth. And he didn’t sound like I remember him sounding. He didn’t talk to the camera. He orated. He gave pep talks about how our family would overcome. He proselytized, working in Bible references and “May God bless our family” whenever he could.
The interviews they ran with Mom were shot with her sitting in the kitchen, in dim lighting, almost sepia toned, and with a cigarette trailing smoke in an ashtray more times than not. They painted her as the Doubting Thomas of the family, which she was. But they also made her seem like she was on the verge of an emotional breakdown, which she was, but so was Dad. I’m convinced they employed more than a little creative editing to her interviews. On the show she became the character who was inarticulately denying reality; the reality of our reality show. The off-screen interviewer would ask her to explain the shadows on the film or Marjorie’s red eyes (something they didn’t do with Dad, or if they did ask him to do so, they didn’t run those interviews) or some of the things Marjorie had said and they’d cut to Mom shrugging, stammering, shrinking into her chair, and mumbling, “I don’t know” or “not sure.”
Dr. Navidson was filmed speaking somewhere in the house, and even I can’t tell exactly where he was when he was interviewed since he stood right up against a white wall (Kitchen? Living room? One of the hallways? Stairwell landing? Guest room?) and his head took up the whole screen. He fumbled around and appeared very uncomfortable one-on-one with the camera. He declined to comment on specific details of this case, noting patient-client confidentiality, but admitted that he did recommend to the bishop that Marjorie’s was an extraordinary case, one that was beyond science.
They ran a get-to-know-me interview with Father Wanderly, with him sitting in a pew inside his church. He detailed his experience as a Jesuit, his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the College of the Holy Cross, spoke lovingly about his dog, Milo, a cocker spaniel mix that had lived with him at the rectory for sixteen years. The off-screen interviewer asked him if he knew any jokes. Father Wanderly seemed genuinely embarrassed, said that he didn’t know many, but did tell one: “Did you hear how the devil is having a terrible time of it with our current economy? The wages of sin have gone up ten percent.”
In one of Father Wanderly’s reaction interviews (conducted in the foyer, with him standing in front of the stairs, natural light pouring in from one of the windows behind him and to his right) he was much more forthcoming than Dr. Navidson had been in outlining the reasons why he was confident Marjorie was indeed possessed by an evil spirit.
They even ran an interview with one of the protesters out in front of our house, which, shockingly, turned out to be a huge mistake. I’m guessing Barry et al, knew that running the interview with the sign-carrying kook would encourage more protesters, and more protesters would mean more (free!) media coverage. But as sniveling and weasely and so obviously uncaring to our family’s well-being as he was, I don’t think that he would’ve purposefully dropped the busload of infamous Baptist hate-group loonies on our doorstep, which is, of course, what happened.
They ran a single reaction interview with me. It was very brief. Ken was off-camera. He asked me questions while I sat on my bed. During taping, which happened after I’d returned home from an especially crappy day at school, we talked for close to an hour. Most of it was about the previous night in Marjorie’s room. Some of it was about what it was like living with the cameras, and what it was like just being me in general. They aired only three questions and answers, a snippet used as the closing segment to the fourth episode:
Ken: “Do you love your sister?”
Me: “Oh yes. Very much. She’s my best friend. I want to be just like her and I’d do anything for her.”
Ken: “When
Father Wanderly and Dr. Navidson were asking her questions last night, were you scared?”
Me (after a long pause during which I changed sitting positions on my bed, from legs unfolded to legs crossed, or crisscross applesauce): “Yeah, a little. But I wasn’t scared of Marjorie. I was scared of what Father Wanderly says is happening to her.”
Ken: “What was the scariest part?”
Me: “Well . . . seeing the scratches all over her. I didn’t think she’d do that to herself.”
THEY FILLED TWO EPISODES WITH material from and relating to that night because they could. But also because they had to.
Two days after the night in Marjorie’s room, Father Wanderly informed us that the bishop heading the northern pastoral region of the Archdiocese of Boston (which was composed of sixty-four parishes in southern Essex County) had given his permission and blessing to perform an exorcism on Marjorie. Father Wanderly, after briefly consulting with Barry, also told us that he would need eight days to be fully prepared. No one questioned this.
For those eight days the world outside our house grew increasingly chaotic. School became intolerable. Kids picked on me more often and more openly. Given the recent bullying laws passed in Massachusetts, which placed considerable legal culpability upon the school if bullying incidents went unreported, faculty and administration were in a tizzy, and Mom was called in routinely for meetings. The adults didn’t seem to know what to do but Mom wasn’t about to keep me home from school. All I knew was that the kid who called me “Sister Satan” and pinched my arms hard enough to leave bruises three days in a row was suddenly not at school for the next two, and when he returned, he wasn’t allowed to go near me.
Marjorie had already stopped going to school altogether but a group of her former classmates set up an Instagram account under her name and posted screencaps from the show—both of her and of the actor playing her. Years later I found out that the screencaps had violent or brutally sexualized captions. There was one picture of Actor-Marjorie masturbating in the hallway with the caption: “Twerk for Satan! Fuck me in the ass, Jesus!” The page’s creator and five other students were suspended for a week.
Despite the cold of mid-November, the number of protesters in front of our house swelled so that the road was almost impassable to traffic. Two policemen were assigned detail to keep the protesters from encroaching on the property and from making contact with us or the crew. The police had to replace yellow tape daily and often had to clear people away from the mouth of our driveway whenever a car left or entered.
Mom took a leave of absence from the bank. She didn’t tell me, but I overheard her telling Dad that it was the bank’s idea. She went grocery shopping in towns that were thirty minutes or more away. She spent her evenings on the phone with her parents (my only living grandparents) who lived in California. They didn’t understand what it was we were doing on the show. Mom told me that after everything was done, maybe we’d go for a visit. I said, “Yay! For how long?” She said, “I—I don’t know. Maybe for a really long time.”
Dad spent most of his mornings at Father Wanderly’s parish, attending the two morning masses, and apparently even served as a Eucharistic Minister. He told me it was the best way to start the day. I remember him telling me that “going there fills me with hope, and all the prayers and support from my fellow parishioners are sustaining, like sunshine for a beautiful sunflower.” I wanted to tell him that this, all of this, wasn’t about him, but I chickened out. He spent most of his afternoons arguing with and attempting to intimidate protesters. He grew scarier by the day.
So while our place or status within the community continued to deteriorate, the goings-on inside our house turned relatively calm. Now that we had a hard date upon which an exorcism would be attempted, Marjorie’s bizarre behavior went into a kind of remission. She wouldn’t talk much and she still wore her earphones most of the time, and I’d catch her talking to herself and giggling at nothing, but she willingly left her room and came downstairs to eat dinner with us in the kitchen.
For seven days there wasn’t anything that happened inside the house that was dramatic or show-worthy. I know this because Barry spent most of that week stomping around, going room to room as though he expected that he himself would find demons defecating in dark corners or the walls bleeding or something equally entertaining. No such luck. He snapped at crew members, especially at Ken, once telling him, “You have to figure out something. We need something to shoot.”
The “something to shoot” turned out to be a post-dinner family scene. It was the night before the exorcism was to be performed, and we were all in the living room watching TV. Dad had put on a show where a survivalist is dumped in the middle of the wilderness and eats tree sap, bugs, and rodents for ten days. In this episode, the guy was somewhere deep in the Boreal forest. I was watching, but not really watching. I did cartwheels across the room and front rolls into the couch, asking Dad to rate them by giving me a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Mom only halfheartedly asked me to stop, so I didn’t. She wasn’t paying much attention anyway, and had her nose buried in her smartphone.
Marjorie came downstairs and said, “Hi. Is it okay if I watch TV too?”
We all stuttered and stumbled over one another saying “yes” and “sure” and “come on in.” Marjorie plopped herself down on the floor in front of the TV, lying on her stomach, head propped up in her hands. We all watched her watching TV. There was an odd feeling in the room. We were nervous that something would happen, but at the same time, we were glad she was there.
Barry and Ken suddenly appeared in the front foyer. Two cameras, one at each end of the room, were focused on us. Barry announced that he wanted to tape a scene of us together trying to maintain our normal family life. He actually said “normal family life” to us. He whisper-consulted with Ken, read some of Ken’s notes, and then gave us some direction.
He said, “Okay, why don’t we start with you guys talking a little about what you’re watching?”
We all looked around, at a loss as what to say. Mom said, “This is silly.”
Dad flashed angry, and was quick to chide her. “Come on. We can do this. Is acting like a family so hard to do?”
Mom was more than ready to respond in kind. “Right. Kids, gather ’round Daddy so we can all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
I quickly back-rolled off the arm of the couch, slapping my feet hard as I landed. I shouted, “Dad! Dad! Rating! You said you’d rate my landings.” I hoped I’d been loud enough to drown out the start of another fight.
Dad gave me a thumbs-up and said, “Woo,” but his enthusiasm for my performance was lacking.
Before they could start back in on each other, I pointed at the TV and said, “Maybe they’ll finally find Bigfoot this time.”
Marjorie said, “This isn’t the Bigfoot show, monkey.”
We were pleased and shocked that Marjorie was casually interacting with us. Barry made that camera-rolling motion with his hands, desperately wanting one of us to respond, to goose the conversation forward.
Dad said, “Right. It’s . . . um . . . called Survivorman.”
I said, “Yeah, I know. But he’s way deep in the woods all by himself. That’s where Bigfoot lives, so maybe he’ll see one.”
“Pfft. I don’t think so, sweetie.” Dad was badly overacting. He had that fake smile on his face, the one that looked painful to wear.
I said, “I bet he heard one but didn’t know it was a Bigfoot making that noise because he’s not an expert.” I punctuated with a one-handed cartwheel.
Dad said, “Of course he’s an expert.”
“No, he’s not a Bigfoot expert.” I looked to Barry and then Ken, looking for some sign of approval; that we were doing and talking about the right things in the right ways.
There was a lull, and Barry said, “What do you think, Sarah? Is this guy a Bigfoot expert?”
Mom said, “What? Oh, sorry,” then put her phone down on the end table and crossed h
er arms. “He’s not a Bigfoot expert. He’s just, um, what, survivorman?”
I said, “Sounds like a superhero name. He needs a cape.”
Mom gave me a sad smile, like she’d just remembered that I was there and had been there for a long time. She said, “No capes!” like the character from one of my favorite movies, The Incredibles.
At the same time, Marjorie said, “A cape he made out of moss and twigs,” but she mumbled. It wasn’t a weird, creepy, she’s-possessed mumble, but her previously normal, I’m-barely-interested-in-what-you’re-talking-about mumble. I heard her and understood her. Mom did too because she laughed.
Marjorie added, “And tight superhero underwear made from squirrel pelts.”
Mom said, “It’s where he puts his nuts.”
I screamed, “Mom!” and everyone but Dad laughed.
The room went quiet again. Barry and Ken whispered to each other some more and consulted the notes again. I leaned on the arm of the couch like it was a pommel horse, and went up and down on my tiptoes. We watched survivorman build a shelter and set deadfall traps for small animals.
I said, “Ew, is he really going to squish animal heads with those rocks? I don’t want to see that. Change it.”
Marjorie turned, closed one eye, and peered at me through her pinching fingers. “I can squish your head.” She pinched her thumb and pointer together and said, “Squish, squish, squish . . .”
I screamed a fake-death moan and fell backward onto the couch, kicking my feet until I rolled over and landed face-up in Dad’s lap.
He said, “Come on!” and pushed me off his lap, onto the couch. “You just hit me in the—” He looked at the cameras and didn’t finish his sentence.
Marjorie said, “You hit him in the squirrel pelt.” She giggled, and so did I. And so did Mom.
A Head Full of Ghosts Page 17
