And by demons, I mean demons.

According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, Patel murdered her two daughters — four-year-old Piya and seven-year-old Jiya — with a hatchet. When her husband returned from work, he found his daughters hacked to death and his wife severely injured; she attempted to take her own life by repeatedly hitting herself in the head with the murder weapon. According to Patel, a “ghost” was responsible for the slayings.

Clearly, Mrs. Patel suffered from problems far more serious than a murderous spirit, if ever such a thing existed. Her situation doesn’t necessarily say much about the paranormal craze of recent years, but it might tell us something about the pharmaceutical treatment of mental illness. In Patel’s case, such treatment is likely justified. But what about those who aren’t as disturbed?

Let me state that I do not know Mrs. Patel, nor am I familiar with her condition prior to this grisly incident. However, I’m not just a paranormal nerd, I’m also a high school teacher, a job that gives me a certain insight into how medication affects people — I’ve seen the before and I’ve seen the during and I’ve seen the after. Often, one is no more or less scary than the other.

I’ve seen bright and intelligent students with some fairly obvious personality quirks walk into my classroom one day tense and easily agitated, then dull and near-unresponsive zombie within 24 hours. I’ve seen highly violent students quick to do harm to themselves and others be transformed into apathetic beings with emotionless eyes. I’ve see kids who dart around the classroom with the energy of a chihuahua but the grace of a dancer become immobile and stationary, a shadow of their former selves.

I’ve seen kids with intensified, but typical teenage problems become twisted entities of their former selves, and seen those same kids, when taken off the pills, self-medicate through drugs, self-induced violence, or worse.

I’ve also seen students personifying heartache — kids who can take these feelings and turn them into beautiful expressions — become cheerful and engaging people at some sacrifice to their creativity.

I don’t know what “normal” is. I don’t know how to feel it and I don’t know what it feels like. It does seem to me that our society has chosen to excise portions of personalities deemed irregular by capturing them in pill bottles with the hope that it produces this elusive state of being.

And like I said, I don’t know Mrs. Patel, or her situation. She is confused to a degree well beyond anything I can imagine. She may indeed require pharmacological intervention to deal with her inner demons. In the days of yore she would be considered possessed and put to the stake, today she remains medicated.  I simply have to wonder if this is the case for all of the kids I’ve encountered whose energies may not be so sinister, simply misdirected.

Yet big adjustments were on the way. One driver of change, often overlooked, was the vital role that the paranormal — specifically spiritualism — played in the Feminist Awakening and Women’s Suffrage.

Spiritualist practitioners traveled from place to place and, for a small fee, would use their “spirit guide” — an otherwordly advisor of all affairs — to deliver messages from Beyond. The spiritual medium could contact dead relatives, conjure spirits, cause rooms to fill with mysterious tapping sounds, or make the writings of a ghostly hand appear on chalkboards. Spiritualists of the Victorian Era were highly sought out for comfort, advice and to rekindle memories of long-lost friends and family members.

Primarily, most spiritualists were women. Their role as medium offered an escape from the persistent indignities of domestic life. Spiritualism gave women a platform, one that came with certain degrees of power, freedom and equality absent in contemporary society. The practice also cultivated an air of mystery around the medium, which in turn drew the attention of both men and other women in ways seemingly impossible in other professions. It conferred wealth and fame. In looking at the early years of the feminist movement, you could justifiably point to the séance table as a symbol of equality.

The names of female Victorian-era spiritualists remain synonymous with the profession: Emma Hardinge Britten, Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for President, with Fredrick Douglass on the ticket, no less!), Leah Fox Fish and Cora L. V. Richmond — a woman whose exquisite features personified the Victorian male definition of virginal beauty.

All of these women would test the boundaries of feminism before women’s suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Lucy Stone came along. In fact, many female spiritualists would ultimately abandon the profession to directly empower the feminist movement without the obfuscation of the paranormal.

The women of spiritualism used the field as a means to empower themselves and counter the hegemonic rule of men. At a time when divorce and adultery were considered in league with prostitution, women could explore aspects of their sexuality at the séance table through the aforementioned “spirit guide” — a connection to another party that transcended typical matrimonial relations. These spirit guides often “took over the body” of the female medium and the actions — often physical — were not deemed harlotry on the part of the female.

Still, the uptight and conservative society of the day was reluctant to change. Despite its popularity, spiritualism was regularly condemned as a danger to the family and the sanctity of marriage. Writer Henry James despised the burgeoning sexuality and power among women of his era. Inspired by the beautiful Cora Richmond, he created (and condemned) the character Verena Terrant in his novel The Bostonians. Regardless of its editorializing, the novel forever pegs spiritualism to the rising feminist movement of the 19th century.

Over time, the original spiritualists were mostly deemed frauds and con-artists, and today, séance tables are few and far between. Gone are the papier mache “ghosts” materializing out of curtained corners, ecto-plasm and mysterious tappings on tabletops. Yet the role of the spiritual psychic advisor, tarot reader, etc., is to this day often filled by a woman.

The world finally caught up with the those women who, nearly two hundred years ago, sought a better life of equality and justice through the world of the paranormal. Yet even now, many see the empowerment of the marginalized as a threat to a certain way of life and attempt to thwart progress and social change.

Maybe it’s time to fire up those séance tables.

Well, he’s back and I’ve got nothing. Not because I’m lazy or devoid of ideas, but because during his time abroad I started the Masters of Education program at Georgia State University. It’s not that the work is difficult, but it’s certainly time-consuming. Currently my penis-envy sized desk is buried in mountains of books, articles and other texts, framed by a “due date” list that requires an extension to my new dry-erase board.

So, dear readers, I give you one of my first response critiques for my graduate’s degree — specifically my EPSF 7110  course. It’s for my Multicultural Education and Society class and asks for me to evaluate and interpret a song that reflects the feelings of modern teenage students. I chose “I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats and was shocked to learn that the story of the song’s origin come from my own university’s radio station!

Oh, and keep those Contrarian paychecks coming, please. They help cover my weekly whiskey bills.

——

Christopher S. Parizo

Song Lyrics and Society

EPSF 7110

June 25, 2011

“The computer chip inside her head gets switched to overload / and nobody’s going to go to school today, she’s going to make them stay at home.” With these opening lyrics, Sir Bob Geldoff of 1980s New Wave stalwarts the Boomtown Rats, begins the tale of a teenage female murderer.

Geldoff wrote the song while sitting in the radio station at Georgia State University in 1979. A telex machine printed the story of a 16-year-old student in San Diego named Brenda Ann Spencer, who openly fired a handgun at an elementary school, killing two children and wounding nine. The event marked one of the first school shootings in American history. But it wasn’t the tragic events that sparked Geldoff’s imagination, but rather the apathetic response Spencer gave to police and reporters when asked why she committed such a heinous crime: “Tell me why! / I don’t like Mondays.” This exchange is repeated throughout the song’s chorus.

Although the Boomtown Rats had a good deal of success overseas, “I Don’t Like Mondays” was the sole American hit for Geldoff and the band, only reaching #73 on the Billboard charts. Despite the song’s relative lack of U.S. impact, it has regularly featured in American media, such as in episodes of “The West Wing,” “House MD” and the movie The Breakfast Club.

The song’s speaker blames a technological flaw within the shooter herself (she happens to have a computer in her head instead of a brain). Beyond this device, the song’s lyrics describe a shift towards apathy that critics of American youth have trumpeted for generations. This is based on a common observation that the more society moves away from organic, human connections and towards technology, the greater distanced we are from human emotion. Geldoff himself comments on the irony of this in the song’s second verse by stating how the news came to him: “The telex machine is kept so clean as it types to a waiting world / And mother feels so shocked, father’s world is rocked and their thoughts turn to their own little girl.” Here, Geldoff imagines the response of the shooter’s parents, having heard the same news via the same cold telex message.

Geldoff continues his search for meaning in apathy with the third verse, which describes the schoolyard following the shooting. Geldoff writes, “All the playing’s stopped in the playground now / She wants to play with her toys a while / And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning and the lesson today is how to die.” Geldoff tells us here that there is no ultimate truth to be drawn, no moral compass to be re-calibrated — the violence is merely random. This is reinforced in the song’s close, which concerns the thoughts of the police captain who takes the shooter away: “… the problems [with] the how’s and why’s / And he can see no reasons because there are no reasons. What reason do you need to die?”

Ultimately, “I Don’t Like Mondays” concludes “there is no reason to be shown.” Geldoff follows this logic by not explicitly stating the cause of teenage apathy; the listener needs to draw their own conclusions. Nor do the lyrics depict the actual school shooting. We do not get a retelling of the events of the tragedy, only the emotional reactions (and lack thereof) to the events. Still, Geldoff does hint at the cause in his references to our modern world. We live in a technologically-oriented culture of computer chips and telex machines — or websites and text messages — and each expression that employs these technologies becomes severed from its emotional tether. When the “human” aspects of human communication are replaced or superseded, it engenders apathy, which makes violence easier. Deeper meaning is eclipsed by the mode of transmission; the ultimate reasons behind violence are forever obscured by easy catchphrases and purely mechanical interactions.

Titor claimed that in the year 2038, a computer-based mainframe error called the UNIX 2038 problem would wreak havoc upon the world and only an original 1975 IBM 5100 computer could solve the problem. Titor claimed that the 5100’s BASIC and APL programming languages held the key to future salvation and he was a soldier sent back in time to retrieve one in working condition.

Think of it as an uber-geeky Terminator, with Titor as the Michael Biehn character.

When asked about his year-2000 pit stop, Titor said that he dropped in to pick up some family photos lost during the “second Civil War” and to warn us of a cattle-based disease outbreak that would kill millions of people.  He also hinted at future historic events, scientific laws yet to be discovered and breakthroughs that would change human life as we know it — including time travel technology (his machine was nestled in the trunk of a 1975 Chevette). Like some Nostradamus firing off prophecies from a local Starbucks, Titor lit up scientific message boards for months with vague announcements hinting at the world to come.

Titor offered to answer any direct questions asked of him but refused to repeat himself. He confirmed the Everett-Wheeler Model of Quantum Physics and claimed that this discredited the Grandfather Paradox. The enigmatic man from the future kindly responded to most queries with a keen sense of duty and patience, but occasionally got peeved at naysayers. Eventually, the fatigue from being called crazy and the repeated denial of his warnings made Titor bow out of the message boards in March of 2001 — leaving us to the mercy of fate (or destiny).

Since his disappearance, John Titor’s predictions toppled one at a time — each failing to come true even as his legend continues to grow. His forecast of the 2004 Civil War never materialized; its escalation to near-apocalypse status in 2008 also proved false. Although some suggest Titor did hint at such events as September 11 and Hurricane Katrina, his failures overshadow any authentic augury. And now we wait for the 2015 Russian nuclear attack that destroys all major US cities, leaving Omaha, Nebraska as our nation’s capital. Why should we believe this prediction? Well, Titor’s followers — and he does have them — claim that his arrival in our time changed the path of history and steered us away from these horrific events.

Like another enigmatic modern-day folk hero, DB Cooper, who became a symbol of his time, John Titor holds a place in our own culture. Titor reflects our desire for online anonymity coupled with an urge to berate and harass from behind the impersonal architecture of message boards. When Titor reached out to our imperiled society with a desire to help — or maybe just to get some attention — we, in typical fashion, mocked and drove away.

According to his own posts, in 2011, the 13-year-old John Titor lives in Florida and is training with the “Fighting Diamondbacks” in preparation for the upcoming Russian conflict. Perhaps we should track him down and apologize before we run out of time…

The show was called “Small Town Gothic,” and it paid tribute to the back story of hauntings — those peculiar and offbeat little tales that give towns their character — rather than the paranormal investigation itself. Within each story, one investigator would play the “believer” while another would act as a skeptical historian. The two would dig deep into community lore, gathering tales of ghosts, monsters and general weirdness that accumulate through a town’s unique history. Using local archives, the tall tales would be separated from facts via historical record and personal remembrances.

We pimped this thing like a ho at 2AM. We made phone calls, got some feedback, had a lot of doors slammed in our faces and received several “thanks-but-no-thanks.” The commercial television market is a tough nut to crack, much more so than the music world (where I lived for many years). Whereas record labels seem interested in hearing what bubbles up from actual scenes (at least superficially), TV is much more self-involved and nepotistic. Production companies would rather rely on insider consultants than consider outside ideas, regardless of how interesting — or marketable — those ideas might be.

While pitching the show to production companies, I was shocked at a clause they all required us to sign which basically stated that they could legally produce the exact show we were pitching because they had the same idea before they met us. Meaning, each time we pitched a show, they could say, “Yeah, we already thought of that. Thanks. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.” And then put it into production.

The best feedback we received was “you’ve got something here, but I don’t think that it’s fully developed. Come back to us when you have a polished concept and we can talk.” I took this to mean, “I conceive better television shows on the toilet.”

So we gave up. Why bother? A colossal effort with little to no reward. Yet despite all this, I’ve spent the last year mulling the show over in my head, removing certain parts and altering others. I’ve spent countless hours in the shower (where amazing songs, lyrics and television shows are formulated and ultimately dried off with your towel) re-conceptualizing the show, and I came to a simple conclusion regarding pitching paranormal TV programs:

Fuck it. Fuck it all to Hell.

So anyway, here I am. With a television show I’m all set to pitch, but with no inclination to run around town, call around the country, sign ridiculous documents and all the other crap. Instead, I’m pitching it here, and tagging production companies. This is my show. Starring me and my friends. Production companies: you want it? Email me. You don’t? Go make a show about auctioning storage spaces — there’s four of those on right now, and surely the world needs another.

My show is called “Ghost Skeptic,” and it stars a dashingly handsome, likable and cocky teacher by day who spends his nights investigating supposed haunted locations around the country (world?). It begins with the following monologue:

My name is Chris Parizo. I spent my life studying the tales of ghosts, specters, and haunts. For years, I investigated the paranormal, searching for the unknown and unexplained. I spent hours with the latest equipment in hundreds of haunted locations and have come to one conclusion: ghosts don’t exist. But I want to believe! That’s why I’m offering this challenge. Send me to the most terrifying locations in the world, places where people dare not tread, and let me enter alone. Armed with a “panic button” as my only protection, and with my associate Darrell Hazelrig guarding the perimeter, I will venture into the world’s most dangerous and frightening haunted locales. And I will do it alone. This is “Ghost Skeptic.”

The gist of it should be clear from the opening. Basically, it’s “Small Town Gothic,” but we’ve succumbed to the paranormal investigation stuff. Act I will establish the location’s backstory: its history and the people who nurture the legend. Act II will focus on the archives and records, separating fact from folktale. Act III will be me scared shitless in the dark, doing my best not to press the panic button and alerting Darrell to switch on emergency lights, thereby ending the investigation. All of this will conclude with a wrap-up where I channel my inner Anthony Bourdain with my self-reflective and self-righteous philosophies of the paranormal. There’s another element that I will answer for anyone interested, but right now I’m too busy making fart noises with my mouth to get into it.

You’re frothing already, aren’t you!?!? This is just the greatest television pitch in history, right!?!?! You’ve got a great big boner and it has “Ghost Skeptic” written all over it, don’t you!?!?!?

Meh.

So that’s about it. I think it’s a good idea and it’s definitely something that I would watch. Hell, I’d even buy a t-shirt. Consider this an open call to all production companies: I’m tired of calling and emailing you; now it’s your turn.

And if you’ve already come up with this idea, kiss my ass. Give me executive producer credit and $20,000 so Darrell can get some new editing equipment and we’ll call it even.

Santana spent the last 50 years of his life on the island, every so often wandering into nearby port cities for supplies and other goods. He never divorced, but rarely saw his children or invited friends out to visit. People respected the privacy of an aging man who renounced modern society.

Time passed, and mainland dwellers became unnerved by the odd acquisitions Santana made with each visit, namely, old unwanted dolls. He would gather them from local garbage dumps, trashcans or the side of the road. Sometimes he traded fresh fruit grown on his island for a frayed and forgotten artifact from some stranger’s childhood. Ironically, Santana appeared to be swapping his own memories for those discarded by others.

Eventually, someone asked Santana what he did with the dolls. His chilling response spread quickly through the area.

It seems that Santana’s island was haunted by a wicked little girl who drowned in the island’s canal. She stalked Santana and menacingly occupied every facet of his life — blaming him for her watery death. He took the dolls back to the island where he spread them out, tying them to trees, to his house and to other objects in an attempt to distract and appease the child’s spirit. In 2001, Don Julian Santana stopped coming into the town. Some time after, the locals summoned the courage to go to his island, where they discovered his body drowned in the same canal that had claimed his ghostly tormentor.

It seems fitting that Santana, a man who rejected the life that was given to him, was haunted by a manifestation that desired the life that was taken away from her.

Santana’s legacy has resulted in one of the creepiest locales in the world. The small island is creatively littered with plastic corpses representing discarded childhood memories. For reasons unknown, some dolls were left intact while others were dismembered or seemingly tortured by the Mexican recluse. Although Santana claimed he gathered the playthings to appease a menacing spirit, it is perhaps more likely that the Island of the Dolls was the physical manifestation of a deeply troubled mind. Or maybe, Santana established his own silent society to ward off those who would interrupt his idyll.

The Island of the Dolls exists today as one of the most peculiar man-made sites in our world, not for the supposed haunting, but because it offers a window into one individual’s unconventional relationship to place and memory. It is a reminder of our own desires to break free from unwritten societal rules and establish our own safe haven where we can live — and die — as we choose.

It was only when he decided to let me go that I would be able to walk away.

My grandfather was an ex-priest who continued to hold confessions at his dining room table while we feasted on pizza and Sprite, singing Muppets songs together. There, over hundreds of games of Uno, Parcheesi, and Backgammon and over nearly thirty years, we would talk about life, of friends and family, or any problem I was dealing with at the time. You could chart every event of my life on the conversations at that table. He listened without judgment. Always there with a sympathetic ear, he would rarely give me answers, but rather asked questions that led me to my own conclusions — which always resulted in the best outcomes.  The last day we sat at that table together with familiar pizza and Sprites, I showed him pictures of the immigrant ship and the Ellis Island records of his grandfather’s arrival to America. He thanked me and told me it was an honor to have a grandson like me.

My grandfather was a fan of movies and took me to them as often as he could. To him, no movie was above my understanding. He never balked at seeing flicks like The Mission or The Last Emperor with his elementary school grandson. Sometimes the movies were just beyond my comprehension, but he found a way to explain them to me. These were films that opened my world to new ideas and possibilities. Our movie, the one I will forever connect to him, was Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, which he took me to see when I was eleven years old. After each movie, we would go to the Kuala Mauna where we would discuss universal themes, character development and symbolism.

We saw every Star Wars film during their initial run in the theaters (well, he swore he took me to see Episode IV when I was one year old, but I highly doubt it — I think he just wanted the experience to feel complete). He would read the opening scroll to me, leaning across the armrest to whisper the words into my ears. Much later, when the new trilogy came out, he did the same. I didn’t stop him, despite being 22 years old at the time. We just laughed.

My favorite movie memory with my grandfather was the time we saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This was 1982; I was six years old. About 20 minutes in, the filmstrip broke and the screen went to white — exactly when Khan put that space bug into Chekov’s ear. Picture a theater full of Trekkies reacting to the theater manager telling us to be patient while they repaired the film.

We ended up waiting an hour. As people gave up and left the theater, my grandfather took the downtime to discuss how the movie was actually a retelling of Moby-Dick — how the characters represented good and evil — and how Kahn’s relentless quest to destroy Capt. Kirk was the same as Ahab’s monomaniacal hunt for the whale. He spoke of themes related to the Holy Grail, the things we strive for that remain out of our reach, how anger can engulf the soul and how the film’s core message fits within the theme of Anti-Transcendentalism. We talked of Jungian archetypes and symbols. An hour later they fixed the film and we, now alone, sat and watched the movie — a far more enriching experience than if had it not been interrupted.

Yes, my grandfather taught me about Anti-Transcendentalism and Jungian archetypes when I was six years old. So stop asking me why I became a literary teacher.

Our very last day together was spent watching The Wrath of Khan. Cancer had riddled my grandfather’s body, while late-stage Alzheimer’s wasted away his mind. At times he thought I was my uncle Mike. But when that bug was put into Chekov’s ear, a memory was sparked deep within. “And this was where the film broke!” he said, smiling. “Ah, yes. Right here.”

One day my grandfather came to pick me up for one of our many weekends together. This was after the innocence of childhood and the onset of teenage pessimism and angst. He drove up with a brand new bumper sticker on his car, which read “Magic Happens.”

“Grandpa!” I asked, “What does that mean?”

“Magic Happens,” he replied. He told me he believed that magic was everywhere and magic was everything. All you had to do to see it was look around. The world was made of magical things. “Magic Happens,” he said.

I told him that I thought that that was stupid. His reply was simple and to the point and stuck with me. He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, I hope someday you change your mind. And you can explain it to me.”

Twenty-three years ago, my grandfather, Joseph Smyrski, wished that I would find magic and be able to explain it. Like his usual manner at the dining room table, he didn’t offer the answer directly, but rather created the path towards my own resolution.

Magic is a movie theater with my grandfather, where across the screen flicker images of heroes and villains, playing out stories of human struggle and triumph. Of far-off galaxies with closer-to-home life lessons. Magic is a broken filmstrip, an empty movie theater and the hero who now occupies the seat next to you. Magic is the conversation after, over Polynesian ribs and noodles.

Magic is a dining room table and an ever-evolving conversation. Where school problems become work problems that become career problems. Where conversations about girls become conversations about girlfriends to conversations of fiancées to conversations about marriage. Where the problems of being a son to your own father come full circle to conversations of becoming a father, and finally, a grandfather.

How do you find magic? You embrace these moments in life, the seemingly insignificant ones that somehow become embedded into your own soul. You grab them and hang onto them with every ounce of your strength, you pull them close to your heart hoping to not let one slip from your grasp and out of your memory. You squeeze them as tight as you can… just like…

The Claw.

Magic is my grandfather’s unbreakable grip. One that he placed on my head the day we first met and which tightened with every movie we saw, every Muppets song we sang, every conversation we had. A grip that to this day is wrapped around not just my skull, but my entire soul. And it’s not loosening. Magic is that my grandfather, Joseph Smyrski, is no longer here, but he has yet to let go of me, and will only let go when he is ready to let go. A day that magically will never come.

Magic Happens.  Magic is my grandfather, Joseph Smyrski.

Regardless, it’s going to haunt your dreams.

What? You want my two cents? Well then, if I must: lay off the meth, Louisianans — it ruins your teeth and makes you run around the bayou buck-ass naked.

My head would hang over these books for hours, taking in fantastic tales of the macabre. I studied intently grainy black and white photos of odd buildings, castles and churches in far off lands, each marked by supernatural phenomenon that chilled my youthful bones.

For the most part, these tales were well scrubbed of actual terror, designed to spark interest in reading rather than drive 6-year old Chris to scream for his mother with every headlight that bounced into his nighttime bedroom.

But there is one story I remember that was truly scary. So much so that I wonder how it was ever deemed suitable for a kid’s book. Maybe it was the fault of some bitter editor who saw himself writing the Great American Novel instead of proofreading “The Ghostly Hand of Fartmiser Castle!” for a second-rate publishing company. Because “The Terror of 50 Berkeley Square, London” could soil the britches of children well past their diaper years. Just thinking about it still sends shivers down my spine to this day.

The house on Berkeley Square is a residence built in the Georgian style popular in the 1700s — a time when London was divided by class lines too broad to bridge. The building stood as a testament to the privileged, while only a few blocks away, London’s poor dwelt in filth, crime and starvation. Occupying one of the city’s chic districts, it has been home to Prime Ministers, socialites and high-ranking military officials. Yet for many decades, the house remained abandoned.

The Berkeley Square story transcends your typical ghost yarn — no white phantoms stalk the hallways, nothing goes bump in the night. Instead, the building houses a terrifying, Lovecraftian presence bent on corrupting all those who live there, dubbed “the Beast.” In the 1800s, a young man dared to spend the night in a bedroom the entity was said to occupy, a challenge he laughed off with blustery confidence. Late in the evening, his associates heard him screaming. Rushing into the bedroom, they found him standing upright, eyes bulging from his head and sweating in panic. The man went into a delirious shock and died shortly thereafter.

Following this incident the house went unoccupied for decades. Empty, maybe, but hardly quiet: some wandering passersby reported screams of lunacy emanating through the thick walls of the vacant estate.

There is a subsequent tale of two sailors taking advantage of England’s “squatter’s law, through which an unoccupied building can be temporarily used as housing by anyone who gained entrance. Shrugging off the paranormal “nonsense” of 50 Berkeley Square, the seamen broke in to spend a night on shore-leave.  That same night, one of them was found cowering in a nearby alleyway. He spoke, almost incoherently, of an “oozing” creature that entered the room through a closet door. His last recollection was of the entity “filling the room” as his colleague stood frozen in terror. When the sailor and a  local constable returned to the home, they found the other man forcibly impaled on the iron gates below a broken window.

Theories have emerged to debunk this supernatural history: tales of “afflicted” relatives, banished from status-conscious London, returning in confusion to the place of their original confinement. Shunned family members haunt Berkeley Square as much as ghosts: symbols of genetic imperfections in a high society that refused to tolerate any flaws, whether organic or social.

There are other stories of those whose sanity imploded when met with the Berkeley Square Beast — the formless monster that enters unseen and pulls you out of your world and into something much darker and more sinister. Perhaps these tales were invented to keep the vagabonds and Cockneys, and squatters out of Berkeley Square’s general vicinity. Perhaps the Beast of Berkeley Square is the manifestation of the fears of the upper echelon: that the undesirables living mere blocks away could invade their pampered lives and force them to contemplate a truly terrifying world of pain, disease and death.

Those who currently occupy the building (now as an office complex) still speak of strange occurrences: smells, screams and strange mists that fill rooms. Whatever haunts the halls, rooms and minds of 50 Berkeley Square remains a tale of madness and mystery for all ages.

The film is shot in the same style as The Blair Witch Project — a movie assembled from handheld footage supposedly captured by the characters themselves. In this case, it’s a camera purchased for the sole purpose of documenting a purported haunting.

The story follows a young couple, Katie and Micah, who have that “star-crossed lovers” aura of a newfound romance destined for trouble. Katie moves into Micah’s house and almost immediately her secret rears its ugly head. For her entire life, Katie has been followed by what she assumes is a ghost. This revelation sparks Micah’s curiosity, he buys the camera and smuggles in a Ouija Board to attempt communication. A psychic enters the story and tells the couple that this is not a typical ghost, but rather a horrific haunting in the form of a negative entity: a beast that never existed in human form upon the Earth (i.e.: a demon). He begs Micah to stop filming and not to use the Ouija Board.

As the film progresses, Katie begs Micah to stop taunting the entity with the camera and Ouija Board. Micah offers an empty promise and continues on with business as usual. The  “activity” in Paranormal Activity subsequently intensifies due to Micah’s negligence and inability to heed the psychic’s advice. He turns blame on Katie who didn’t tell him what he was getting into when he asked her to move in. She in turn blames Micah for making the situation worse through his stubborn male posturing.

The metaphor is obvious. “Paranormal Activity” is the story of a decaying romance — some unavoidable thing that cripples relationships, the unspoken or hidden aspects of our pasts that we carry with us. It’s the story that we have all lived in one way or another. Romance cannot last forever and sometimes forces beyond our control impact our relationships in ways we could never foresee or forestall.

To me that’s what it is anyway.

Although I found the film to be rather disappointing, it made me reflect on my years as a paranormal investigator. I learned a lot about people during those years, about how we think, the attention we crave, and how we deal with the realities of life.

During one event with the TAPS team, I met a woman from Upstate New York who felt that her home was haunted. She told me of things moving on their own, shadows seen around the home and footsteps. I asked her if she was scared and she replied no. The woman believed that it was her grandfather, who had recently passed, that was haunting her home. Throughout her tale, she began to cry hysterically — fearing that her grandfather was not “crossing over to the other side” and “couldn’t let go of his living world.”

This woman was clearly grieving. She feared the safety of her grandfather; her own spiritual/paranormal belief system caused her to think he would spend eternity in the secular world, looking over his family. She wanted him to cross over. But I questioned who in this situation was having a difficult time gaining closure.

I told her there was a simple solution: when she is comfortable, alone in the home and begins to feel the presence of her grandfather, to have a conversation with him as if he was alive. Sit down with him and inform him that she will be OK, that she appreciates all he has done for her and all that he continues to do for her, but it is time to move on to the next stage. I told her to tell him that her life would continue on, and similarly his would do the same. Tell him he needs to let go and that she will see him again. It was time for both of them to move on.

Three weeks later I called her and asked her how things were going. She replied that she took my advice, sat down and told her grandfather exactly what I said, and the activity has stopped.

Now, almost two years later, there has been no activity within the home.  It is quiet and secure.

Whenever someone talks to me of possible paranormal activity, I usually respond with “Who do you think is haunting your home?” The response is typically a family member. Some of us hang on to those who have left this realm for too long, and we create the paranormal as an expression of our loss — it is a need to keep those we love around just a little while longer. The human grieving process is in many ways as mysterious as the paranormal, and the power of the human brain to house or heal emotional pain cannot effectively be quantified.

And if my good friend and former client in New York sat down at the kitchen table and talked to nobody, does it really matter? Perhaps she needed to hear herself say those words more than the deceased.