The Believer, page 9
Nick heads off with a wave and the paranormal researchers start setting up their equipment, a process that resembles a band loading in for a gig. Their many cases contain power boards, computers, recording devices and, at various points in the process, it appears as though everyone has at least one tripod. Vlad, returning from his car, hovers over his gear: four metal briefcases, two cloth bags and a plastic crate from which yellow and orange wires explode like viscera. He’s unenthusiastic about setting up cameras tonight. “I’m getting more and more of an impression that cameras deter the activity,” he explains.
“Well, there’s that poltergeist in Humpty Doo . . .” Paul, the psychologist, says. “Similar to the Enfield one, and it didn’t want to be recorded. It evaded the cameras just slightly or would do something just out of shot.”
“And the same has happened with us,” Vlad nods. “In one of the places we went to—the cinema—nothing ever happened in front of the cameras, it always happened when we were on a tea break. You would hear a voice just go through the group—like a whistling noise or exhales and things—and it also somehow damaged the PC recorder twice. Every time I’ve been there I’ve had to reformat the disk.”
“That’s why you bring a lot of batteries, they get wiped out,” says Evelyn, holding a headlamp as she surveys the walls for a power point to charge her two sound recorders.
Evelyn specializes in EVP: electronic voice phenomena. She explains that, though she had always been “a sensitive” she knew nothing about EVP until she started hearing voices and became interested in parapsychology later in life. EVP refers to sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted to be spirit voices recorded unintentionally or on request. The idea was popularised in the 1970s by the Latvian parapsychologist Konstantins Raudive, who described such sounds as typically brief—usually one word or a short phrase. Besides communication with the dead, other explanations advanced for these sounds have included nature energies, beings from other planets or dimensions, and living humans imprinting thoughts on an electronic medium through psychokinesis.
Two more AIPR members walk into the lodge room—Luke, a young man in a baseball cap who works in IT, and Bridget, an artist. They are a couple and this is their second night out in the two years since their child was born.
“And you chose to spend it here,” laughs Marina, the forensic scientist. “I can’t remember the last time we all did one together.”
The lodge room is a ritual space and its symbols are not readily intelligible to noninitiates. There is a pentagram at the center of a checkerboard pattern on the carpet, a golden G dangling from the ceiling. Ornate chairs of dark wood and navy leather are positioned in front of an open Bible on a stage at one end of the room. To one side, an exhausted Australian flag sags above a desk that looks like it was frozen in time at an accountant’s office in 1975. An organ sits at the back of the room beneath two portraits of abundantly white-haired men in suits which Paul is currently wanding with an EMF meter. Marking the baseline readings in a notebook, he methodically raises the device towards the ceiling before lowering it towards the floor as he makes his way around the room.
Setting his laptop on the stage floor, Vlad connects it to a magnetic field spectrum analyzer anchored on a nearby tripod. Then he heads to the grocery store around the corner to stock up on supplies because, like any long game, snacks are an important part of ghost hunting and the night is young.
“Do you ever work off intuition?” I ask Vlad when he returns and we stand for a moment in the large hall, which is freezing. A tiny portrait of the young Queen hangs too high and at a slant on an expanse of cracked wall. The only other decoration is three dingy squares of cardboard decorated like playing cards propped up at various points along the moldings. It looks like something out of a David Lynch film but far less sleek, all the conditions conspiring towards creepiness.
“I have no intuition,” Vlad replies in a sheepish whisper. “I’m trying to develop some. But I do try to eliminate other influences.” He notes how the floorboards in here slope almost imperceptibly down towards the center of the room.
Back in the lodge room, he produces his trigger objects. No rubber duck this time: instead he’s brought two soft plastic spiky balls that do the same thing. Each contains a mechanism that, when given a good whack, causes a light to go off at its center. One is neon green, the other is neon pink and shaped like an Angry Bird. He rolls both onto the carpet towards the center of the room before crouching over his computer, where the screen springs to life, displaying a multicolored bar he will use to monitor changes in the magnetic field during the hours that follow. “I generally lean towards lower frequencies—under a hundred hertz,” he explains, “but there’s no hard and fast rule.”
Marina sits down at the organ. She plays a few sustained notes that sound like something from a Hitchcock film and add a certain gravitas to Vlad’s explanation.
“Some people think that the Shuman Resonance—7.8 hertz, which is the overall frequency of all the lightning that’s occurring around the world—causes this kind of echoing at seven or eight hertz. So some people think that’s ghostly or paranormal in some way,” he continues.
“There’s quite a few papers now out saying that fluctuations of the earth’s magnetic field correlate with activity—not just ghosts but extrasensory perception, other things. If that’s the case . . .” He sighs. “It’d be very low frequencies. ELF—extremely low frequencies, VLF—very low frequencies. Under two cycles per second. Quite slow.”
At the back of the room, Jessica sits with perfect posture, hands neatly folded on the notebook in her lap, long blond hair cascading down her back. She is absolutely still and staring into the middle distance.
“What’s the time now?” Luke asks Bridget, peering up from the floor where he is pressing buttons on an audio recorder.
“8:05,” Bridget replies.
“Testing,” he says into the mic.
“Anybody have the time?” Evelyn asks, holding her own recorder.
“8:06 now,” Bridget replies.
“Recording one, Yarraville, September 28,” Vlad says into his audio recorder before going to make a cup of coffee. First, refreshments. Then we’ll make a start.
Just before 9:00 PM, the AIPR members in their AIPR windbreakers stand in the cold tea room finishing hot beverages or crinkling empty chip packets as Jessica recounts what she’s picked up.
“There was a man,” she begins.
“Did you get a sense of what he looked like?” Vlad asks. “Caucasian, Aboriginal . . .”
Not really, she says. But he has an adult daughter who is upset by what she believes to be a misunderstanding about the manner of his death. The man wants his daughter to know: it was an accident.
“And how did he communicate this information? Was it just subjective?” Vlad asks.
Jessica replies that it just comes to her. He nods. We return to the lodge room, turning the lights off as we go.
Everyone settles into position, sitting on the carpet for the vigil. Suddenly, Vlad receives a phone alert. “There’s a geomagnetic storm happening as we speak,” he reports. “It’s been active all night.” Not a physical storm, he explains, rather an increase in fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field.
When Vlad had first described for me his academic background in neurophysiology, he had mentioned transcranial magnetic stimulation: the use of a magnetic field to impact brain neurons. This is one of his favorite areas. “It’s used a lot for treating depression,” he said. “The other beautiful thing it’s used for is to interrupt sensory processing.”
He told me about Michael Persinger’s God Helmet. Persinger, a Canadian psychology professor, used very weak magnetic fields—in the order of the earth’s magnetic field or slightly stronger—to stimulate certain parts of the brain. He found that by stimulating a specific location he could induce a sense of presence, that feeling of not being alone in a room. And that slight adjustments could evoke a positive or negative emotional state associated with this feeling.
“If you can explain all paranormal experience as brain activity modified by magnetic fields,” Vlad had said, “then you don’t need to have all the other explanations like consciousness outside the body—it’s all explained by misperception. Problem is, not all of these experiences are purely psychological. Some of them are physical. Things moving, cameras stop, doors slam . . .”
It also cannot account for instances where multiple people report seeing the same thing, he said. “It’s very unlikely that a magnetic field will affect everyone in exactly the same way because in theory everyone’s brain activity will be different, so they shouldn’t really see the same thing.
“There’s a more exotic interpretation of this magnetic field thing,” he continued, explaining that files had recently been obtained from the early penal settlement of Port Arthur—years of “haunt-type experiences” reported by the public. “We found that there are certain buildings that seem to have a similar type of activity reported by people over the years. You have a hundred people walking through that building and they will report the same type of activity. They don’t know that it’s been reported by other people.
“There’s one building where they’ll say, ‘I saw a light coming from under the door,’ but all the electricity is turned off in the building. Or they’ll say, ‘I saw a little girl in a dress in the yard.’ But that wasn’t publicized.
“That kind of data, to me, suggests another possible interpretation for this electromagnetic theory—and it’s a more exotic one: that the electromagnetic activity somehow modifies the environment itself. And the people are just there at the right time to experience something. But that’s a little bit harder to justify.”
Vlad squints into his phone, reading about the current electromagnetic storm.
“Who’s got the time?” Evelyn asks.
“The time is 9:27,” Vlad replies.
The forensic scientist snaps the lights off.
16
The Death Doula
Annie & Katrina
“It feels, Annie, like you’re going to be an important person on this journey,” says Carol on the couch, her hand resting on Katrina’s outstretched legs as Peter hands his wife a barley sugar.
Though she is enormously unwell, Katrina doesn’t look it. Her hair is full and sleek, her skin is vibrant, her lips are a deep natural pink. I don’t yet know how tall Katrina is because I haven’t seen her vertical; it will turn out that she is not so tall. But I am already acutely aware that her intense energy has little to do with physical factors, because even in her diminished state she is radiant, strong. Which is to say that although she is being assaulted by a wave of nausea at this moment and needs to close her eyes and concentrate on breathing, she is still very much the woman who “always power-dressed” for work in red lipstick and stilettos that she wielded like a ceremonial knife. Still the same woman who balanced four school schedules with work and friends and family. Still the same woman who ate right and meditated and read Psychotherapy Magazine and took the spin classes that gave her the deep satisfaction of observing how, even in extremis, her resting heart rate of seventy beats per minute only went up to a nonchalant one-twenty—a sign of just how healthy, and in control, she was.
On Katrina’s lap is a book that Annie lent her a few weeks ago when she first visited the house: What to Do When I’m Gone. She explains to Annie, perched on an armchair close by, that she’s been using it to guide an ongoing discussion with Lachlan, her sixteen-year-old son.
“Good on you,” Annie says with deep emotion. Then, at Carol’s invitation, she goes into a detailed explanation of the role—more accurately, the roles—of a death doula. Her tone is frank but soft as she explains what she cannot do (palliative action) and what she can do (almost everything else). She sets out her professional bona fides, which are also her personal bona fides, explaining her Buddhist practice and her own personal experiences with “end-of-life,” a phrase that, while gentle, is acceptably accurate.
There are words and phrases that Annie neither uses herself nor plays along with when used by others because they mislead or obscure. These include: client, patient, to fight, to battle, don’t give up, anger and love. If you drop one of the verboten words into conversation Annie will interject and ask you to explain to her what you mean by that. Love, she has said to me, what does that mean? Tell me the components. What makes up love?
Sometime around 1881, from a house over the Danube, a woman named Elise Brock leaves her three-year-old son, whom she will not see again until he has children of his own. For the rest of his life, the philosopher Martin Buber would remember how, after some time had passed, he stood on the balcony of his grandparents’ house with an older child who told him his mother was never coming back.
“I suspect,” Buber later stated, “that all I have learnt in the course of my life about genuine meeting had its first origin in that hour on the balcony.”
Though he would see his mother again—after decades had passed—it is true that she never came back.
“When . . . I again saw my mother, who had come from a distance to visit me, my wife and my children, I could not gaze into her still astonishingly beautiful eyes without hearing from somewhere the word Vergegnung [“mismeeting”] as a word spoken to me.”
The idea of “mismeetings” explains—by way of counterpoint—his emotional, spiritual and intellectual preoccupation with the true encounters that are possible between the “I” of the self and the equal “I” of the other. That place where pain becomes purpose, where dialogue conquers subjectivity; where we are greater than our parts and where holiness resides.
“The words ‘She will never come back’ remained with him,” his biographer wrote, “and over the passing years they became indelibly fixed . . . [H]e began to perceive that what had happened to him—unusual though it was—concerned not only him but everyone.”
“We—the community, society—think that we are all entitled to live to a ripe old age with no hiccups in the middle,” Annie says to Katrina, who is nodding. “Well, that’s not reality. In my own experience, I know that. Truly.”
The room fills with the scratching sound of Peter taking notes. Satisfied, Katrina stops Annie there.
“If I’m short, please forgive me,” Katrina says. “Can’t always say please and that. Haven’t got the energy.”
Annie is delighted by her straightforwardness.
“Okay, let’s cut to the chase,” Katrina continues, struggling to take a full breath. “Advance care directives.”
Annie is off and running, with gentle authority. “When you are unable to speak for yourself, and only then, the advance care directive comes into play. What things are important to you, in your own life, for you to live in comfort and in peace . . .”
Paging through a copy of her own plan, which she’s brought along as an example, she continues, “For me, it’s important to verbally communicate, the ability to care for myself physically and intellectually, my family, my animals, quality of life, nature, walking, my Buddhist teachings, to live an independent life.” She pauses, looks into the faces staring intently at her from the couch. “At this stage. But I review this. Because it changes.”
Annie continues, outlining which treatments she refuses and in what circumstances. “So that’s me,” she folds the pages neatly behind their staple.
Carol asks whether Katrina should follow a similar process with specifying her wishes.
“Yes.” Annie nods vigorously. “Because when it moves towards the pointy end, I understand that Katrina wishes to die at home. My role is to make that as smooth as possible. Which is why it’s so important to put everything in place. Then myself, loved ones—we’re all here so that Katrina can have her wish and Pete will be supported, and the children will also be supported.”
Carol asks where Annie will get that authority from. Before Annie answers, Katrina interjects and explains briskly how Annie works in concert with the council and the hospital. “So it’ll be a combo of the three supported by a legal document,” she says in a businesslike tone.
“If I get down to the point of not being able to talk—you know, I’m down to forty kilos,” she continues, pausing briefly to cough and spit, “then I would assume I’d be starting to have a bit of pain. They’d have an infusion here, a pump, and I wouldn’t think it’d be too many days after that. My kidneys would’ve shut down, everything’ll shut down . . .”
“Yes,” Annie nods. “That’s when the body starts to take over.”
“I don’t want to be in pain too long, I really don’t,” Katrina says, her tone frank. “As you can see, I’ve given it a really good shot.” She smiles, gives a small laugh. “Hopefully, I might be alive for another six months, but if I’m not . . .” She pauses, conscious of Peter beside her, and that these words, because they are true, are so many razors. “Or whatever it is, anyway, doesn’t matter what it is, six months, six years, sixty years—towards that end, yeah, of course, I wouldn’t want resuscitation. But you’ve gotta put it all in there.” She gestures towards a booklet about advance care directives which Annie has placed on the coffee table, Take Control written in red on its cover. This is said in the tone one might use when handing over files to a co-worker before a holiday. It is this tone that makes this room, where I sit on a soft ottoman, the fire warming the left side of my face, terrifying to me.
Katrina’s illness might have focused her, but I get the sense that she has always been this way. Unlike me, Katrina would not have allowed a friend to waste years of their life on a partner she considered an irrevocable asshole. Unlike me, Katrina would not have reflexively nodded and smiled for the comfort of a person cutting her deeply. You would not wonder where you stood with Katrina. And this is the tone she is now extracting from herself for herself and for Peter, who stands to add a log to the fire.
