Paranormal nation : why America needs ghosts, UFOs, and bigfoot

434 Pages·2013·3.21 MB·English

by  Marc E. Fitch

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
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
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Praeger
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ABC-CLIO, LLC
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This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
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 Gallup 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