The Believer, page 2
2
Paranormal
Vlad
One of the problems with ghost research, Dr. Vladimir Dubaj once explained to me, is that “things happen outside of your attention.” You can set up cameras and sit there with an intense focus, and nothing will happen. “It’s when you’re taking a coffee break that something comes up.” Once Vlad was standing around with his colleagues on an investigation, having such a coffee, when they all heard a whistle pass through the room. Frustratingly, no one was recording. “It waits till you’re not ready,” he said.
Vlad is the current president of the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, “a non-profit scientific and community society founded in 1977.” Help is Available, promises the institute’s website. It goes on to explain that it has a history of providing support in relation to alleged or actual experiences of a paranormal nature that may require relief of suffering, distress or helplessness. Though paranormal investigation is not Vlad’s professional work—his doctorate is in biomedical imaging and he lectures in physiology at a university—one might say that it is his life’s work, given the financial, intellectual and emotional resources he has invested in it.
Vlad is hungry for data. While he will unhesitatingly ask those who purport to be psychic what they feel, see or sense, he knows his best chance of establishing proof lies in the physical realm: things that can be quantified and replicated.
“Around thirty percent of people will experience ghost or haunting activity at some stage of their lives,” he has stated. “Such a high percentage suggests that science really needs to consider these phenomena seriously.”
3
In the Beginning
The Ark
It is as advertised: a full-size Noah’s ark, built according to the dimensions in the Bible, resting on an endless expanse of grass in the middle of nowhere. The “largest timber frame structure in the world,” the ark is as long as a football field. All honeyed timber and strangely pristine, it reaches more than four stories up into the gray Kentucky sky, eloquent in its absurdity, just waiting for the storm.
It’s freezing outside in the late autumn wind but warm in the belly of the ark, where a looping soundtrack of snarling and clucking laps against triumphal flutes and drums. Walking across the ark’s three long decks, I pass exhibits on Why the Bible Is True and animatronic replicas of Noah’s family and his animals—his hippos and horses and stegosauruses all snug in their cages.
Like its “sister attraction,” the Creation Museum nearby, the Ark Encounter is the fully realized brainchild of Ken Ham, a former high school science teacher from Queensland and the founder, president and CEO of Answers in Genesis, a nondenominational Christian fundamentalist evangelical ministry. Both the attractions speak to the ministry’s mission—the suspension of disbelief, less as a matter of faith and more as a matter of scientific fact, as cold and hard as the planks of the ark now holding me in midair.
Though it feels right, it’s wrong to call this the middle of nowhere. The attractions are a short drive from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport: a “strategic location,” explains Answers in Genesis, “because it is within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population.” So here, down the road from an Amazon “Fulfillment Center” and the town of Rabbit Hash (which has elected a dog as its mayor for the past twenty years) and Big Bone Lick National Park (the birthplace of American palaeontology)—is exactly where the attractions belong. It is the middle of the national Everywhere in a country that values the ostentation of size over the grace of proportion and where its dreams are consequently locked perpetually in the distance. Just out of reach through no fault, it would seem, of one’s own.
To get to the museum from the ark, you drive forty-five minutes along a stretch of Interstate 75, the highway that bisects America from the northern tip of Michigan all the way down the finger of southern Florida. You drive past fields and barns and fast food signs on improbably tall poles. You drive past churches that look like houses or warehouses or motels. Past billboards erected at some expense by the “anti-theocracy” Tri-State Freethinkers. You drive through country where “atheist” occupies the same linguistic terrain previously inhabited by “communist.” You drive next to people who don’t go to church on Sunday but who will performatively profess guilt about that, putting religion on like pants when they leave the house. People who swap concealed carry gun permits with loved ones for Christmas. People who do not like Donald Trump but feel a little sorry for him on account of his flailing, people who are fine with creationism and evolution being taught together at school, to keep an open mind.
Here, it is easy not to hear how Trump just mixed up his school shootings and instead tune inadvertently into Christian radio stations and get: “It’s not the size of your faith that matters, it’s the size of your god.” You drive past new-built houses and rusting farm machinery, until you turn off into the Creation Museum. Prepare to Believe, its motto urges.
4
The Death Doula
Annie
When Annie was seventeen, her husband took the boxes of her childhood books, which she had just moved from her mother’s house, downstairs to the furnace, popped them into the chute and burned them.
She learns this while they are unpacking, setting up their new home. She turns to him, saying, I can’t find the books. I’ve gotta go to my mom’s and get them.
No, you don’t, he replies. I burned them.
The Wizard of Oz, the poems, the books that Nana and Grandpa gave her, all those beautiful books, those building blocks and life rafts—gone. Annie understands this not in punitive terms, but rather because he isn’t a reader and cannot conceive of the books’ significance to her. They’d just take up room, he says, you’ve already read them.
I’ve just married this man, she thinks, standing there, pregnant. And though she is a child still, she sees it with absolute clarity. Fuck. This is gonna be my life.
“From there,” she explains to me, “it just went down the sewer.”
Annie’s schooling was truncated at fourteen. She has been, among other things, a dressmaker, a funeral celebrant and a truck driver, steering a four-ton Ford tray on the roads for eighteen months. She’s completed courses in neuroplasticity and pastoral care and grief counseling and mindful self-compassion. She’s taught yoga and breath control and meditation. She’s written, self-published and sold ten thousand and eleven thousand copies, respectively, of her Pocket Guide to Positive Symbolism and Eastern Gods and Animal Spirits. She’s completed an accelerated freefall, skydiving out of a Cessna 182 from an altitude of fourteen thousand feet. She’s had seven surnames, returning last to her first. Her grandfather died in her arms, her baby nephew died in her arms. She’s been married six times and tried to kill herself twice. She’s had six miscarriages and two live births. And she’s died once.
5
Paranormal
Vlad
“Has anyone here had a paranormal experience?” the conference organizer asks the group that has gathered on a Friday night for the first session of this weekend’s Real Ghostbusters of Australia Conference.
“Kind of comes with the territory,” says one of the participants, a professional psychic, with a wry laugh.
We are upstairs at Milano’s Tavern in Brighton for a “night of haunted place sensing and ghostbusting demonstration.” The building has been reincarnated many times since its first iteration in the 1840s as the Royal Terminus Hotel. It was a pub at the end of the line frequented by outlaws, perhaps a brothel too, then a seaside sanatorium for the wealthy unwell.
Despite its age and the dark of the night, my first impression of the building was the diametric opposite of fear on account of the pinging of slot machines and the posters advertising the upcoming performance of an Abba cover band. Online reviews were divided on the freshness or failures of the bistro’s calamari. None, however, mentioned Tilly, the ghost of a woman said to have been murdered on the premises in the 1840s, who has been encountered by various people over the years and by the staff as recently as last Wednesday, when two waitresses on the second floor, where we are now gathered, reported hearing a disembodied voice and went running downstairs.
The Bayview Room just hosted a wake for a twenty-six-year-old. Still-full wine glasses on soiled white tablecloths and a strong scent of perfume and cigarettes brought to mind a suddenly abandoned cruise ship as we threaded into the room and congregated around a table at the back. A pubful of ghost hunters.
In addition to the five parapsychological professionals who will be presenting at the conference this weekend, there are ten participants who’ve come along not so much for a bit of fun as from a solemn curiosity and the organizer, who does not turn on the lights.
The young woman who just spoke goes by the alternative names of Misha/Amber. She does readings and house clearings, she explains, and releases spirit attachments. The conference presenters joining us tonight are Vlad (interested in investigating haunting and poltergeist activity) and Rob Tilley from Sydney (decades of experience “clearing” homes and people of psychic distress). Also, Johann and Karen, a ghostbusting couple from Perth, and Brett, a clinical hypnotherapist and spirit-release therapist, who specializes in “taking entities out of people who are possessed.”
Earlier, Vlad learned that Brett’s introduction to the paranormal stood in stark counterpoint to his own inasmuch as it involved Brett walking into a room where the ghost of an elderly woman jumped on him in fright. “I don’t know how that works but that’s his introduction,” Vlad told me, as he pondered it gravely. “He can see these things, he can interact with these things. I have no intuitive element whatsoever.”
Technically, Vlad’s main interests—out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, ghosts, poltergeists—are adjacent to “true parapsychology,” which encompasses phenomena of the mind like ESP, telekinesis and clairvoyance. “Survival of consciousness is a little bit on the borders,” he explained to me the first time we met, in a café at Monash University, where we both earned our doctorates. He spoke in a soft voice and his face was open and earnest beneath a pale, broad forehead.
Empirical evaluation of spontaneous out-of-body experiences is tricky. For one thing, it is challenging to find someone who can have them on demand. Most of the research these days, Vlad said with some frustration, is qualitative. Sending questionnaires out to a thousand people and asking how many have had an out-of-body experience, how they would describe it, things of that nature. Vlad, on the other hand, was initially interested in hands-on research of the style that had been funded in academic eras long gone: getting people into the lab to measure their brain activity or test whether they could see an object around the corner and so on.
Faced with the improbability of obtaining funding for such experiments, he asked himself what would be the next best thing. The answer was: ghosts. “It’s very easy to find a location and you don’t need ethics approval.”
You don’t generally talk seriously about ghosts in academic circles. “Interesting thing, though,” he said, “when you do, no one says much until after they’ve got you alone and then it’s ‘Guess what? Such and such happened to me . . . .’”
Vlad started a research group with a colleague about ten years ago and, once the website was up, calls started coming in. “I would like to think that the only difference between my research and mainstream science, or a skeptical researcher, is that I don’t dismiss all of the activity as being made up or fake,” he said. “I go in there with the idea that something’s happened that we can’t explain, and I try to filter out all the noise to get to the signal.”
From Vlad’s experience, ninety to ninety-five percent of claims can be dismissed by a mundane explanation, and the majority of mundane explanations are psychological. But he has found that other claims cannot be so easily dismissed.
Streetlamps soften the darkness in the Bayview Room as Lee, a young man with his own paranormal investigation group, takes out a device I believe at first to be a buzzer for an order of food downstairs at the bistro. It turns out to be a K-II electromagnetic frequency meter. He places it on the tablecloth in front of him and peers into it with a satisfied smile as its lights go off.
Vlad extracts a yellow rubber ducky from his bag and places it next to his own EMF meter. The duck of Dr. Dubaj contains a mechanism that, when thwacked with some force, causes a light to go off inside its sunny abdomen. Vlad uses it as a trigger object. The parlance of paranormal investigation can be opaque to the laywoman, so he explains that a trigger object is any tool that can clearly signal changes in the environment while ghost hunting. You can choose “whatever you think might interest the entities.” Unlike pricier, purpose-built products like BooBuddy—marketed as an attractive, talking bear trigger object that responds to changes in temperature and EMF energy with a friendly voice—the duck was purchased from a two-dollar shop. Its lights have gone off, unthwacked, only once in the course of Vlad’s paranormal investigations and they will not go off tonight. But the duck is there for the purposes of preparedness. As Vlad has said, “The scientific community devotes little attention to ghost and haunting phenomena due to its unpredictable and spontaneous nature.” He is nothing if not prepared.
“Allow the spiritual eye to start observing . . .” Brett says, starting off the night with an opening meditation. We breathe deeply. He cautions us not to question ourselves if we see something in this altered state of consciousness by thinking that it can’t be true, because it’s precisely the suspension of the analytical mind that allows the spiritual vision to arise. Also, not to worry if anyone feels they’ve got something attached to them at the end of the night; there’s plenty of people here who can sort that out.
I close my eyes, I go along with it. I feel the cold air coming down from the vents above my left shoulder. A tingling down the right side of my face. A heaviness on the back of my head as though it is being subtly pushed forward. A thump sounds, like the emergency exit door in the room’s bar area has opened and closed.
At the conclusion of the exercise, Misha/Amber shares with the group that she is sensing the presence of a man who died as violently as he lived. Sees him hogtied, wriggling as he is killed by his fellow criminals.
“Haunted people, haunted places, it’s the same problem,” says Rob Tilley, a tall man of seventy in a leather jacket, with the wild white hair, rosy cheeks and jovial laugh of a muscular Santa. “You ask the good spooks to come in and take care of it. You don’t take an interest in them ’cause that’s what they want! You just cut ’em off and say, ‘You’re a bloody nuisance, go to the light,’” he explains, waving one large hand as though shooing off an invasive seagull.
“Do you ever find,” Vlad asks Rob, “that some people just don’t want to let go? Like the occupants of the house subconsciously actually want the attention?”
“Yeah, those are the ones you can’t help,” Rob replies, before regaling the group with the story of a case he had in Brisbane. A woman who was fascinated and frightened in equal measure by the poltergeist haunting her home. With frustration, he explains how he told her to just leave it alone but that she kept pulling it back in, undoing his work. “That’s a psychological problem,” he says, shaking his head.
Brett chimes in with a similar case—a house clearing he did for a man “of Chinese origin” necessitating the incidental removal of a dragon from the kitchen. The man later requested its return, explaining that it had been benevolent. Brett explains that in his effort to accommodate the request, he summoned a dragon while in a trance state that was larger than the original one and would not fit in the kitchen. So he left it curled around the house, protecting the property and those inside: an outcome that happily exceeded his own expectations.
Vlad’s EMF meter emits the type of theremin sound you hear in old horror movies. “It’s showing lots of background activity,” he notes briskly. “Looks like the wiring isn’t shielded properly.”
Before we adjourn to explore the rest of the floor, Brett mentions that he senses “an energy” nearby, watching over what we are doing from a corner up against the ceiling. It’s not a deceased person, he explains, rather it’s a form of energy that has never been human, probably an ancient energy, attached to this location before they built the pub around it.
A woman inquires whether we might be on an Aboriginal sacred site.
“Could be,” he replies. It’s here in the room now, and he believes this is where it will permanently stay. Having communicated with it, he found it to be a frightened entity, asking that it not be made to leave. He warns that “if we rush over there in a group we’ll scare the hell out of it.”
“As I was walking around in here earlier on, it was so packed with dead people, I could feel them passing through my body,” Rob says brightly, pushing his chair back to stand. “So you can try that when we get up and move around. See if you can sense that.”
“I feel nothing whatsoever,” Vlad notes, still seated, chewing his gum with his arms crossed over his chest and the light from outside clouding his glasses.
As a younger man, Vlad would watch American ghost-hunting shows where something astonishing, or at least weird, happened in every episode. It gave him a false impression of the field. “It’s a lot of waiting around not really experiencing anything at all,” he told me earlier. “My personal experiences aren’t particularly remarkable. Certainly, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve started their own research groups and every one of them has had a very dramatic experience which really triggered them to research it. They’ve seen full-blown apparitions in front of them and started questioning reality. I, on the other hand, have not had that experience but probably the most interesting one—because I haven’t been able to explain it—has been seeing the orb.”
