It is no secret to longtime readers of the site (or even short time readers for that matter) that Katie and I write books about the paranormal, specifically ghosts and haunted places. We’ve been doing this for about three years and in that time have completed three books and are in the middle of a fourth with at least one more on tap. I feel very blessed with the opportunity to have my work published in this sort of lasting way and being a published author is one of my greatest accomplishments in my life and is one that I have wanted since I was a child. Lately, however, I have found my enthusiasm waning and as much as it makes me feel like an ungreatful dick I find my first reaction to doing paranormal things is not usually one of excitement. Before I get in to why, a little background.

I have been interested in the paranormal since I was very small. It always fascinated me. I grew up in a haunted house from the time I was three although I didn’t know that what I was experiencing had anything to do with ‘ghosts’ until about 8th grade when my parents finally shared their experiences with me. Up until that moment I thought that the shadowy man I saw go into their bedroom on a nightly basis while they were in the den watching TV was a product of my having gone insane. They held back the information from me because they thought I would be scared but I was very relieved to know I wasn’t nuts or at the very least they were just as nuts as I was. Of course, the ever increasing list of people who have had experiences in that house over years makes everyone being nuts somewhat unlikely. At any rate, my interest in the paranormal didn’t really come from that as much as I always just thought it was cool. It might have been Ghostbusters, a movie I watched north of 5o times on video the first month we had it, much to my mother’s chagrin. Whatever the origin, I have always found the paranormal interesting and exciting.

In college when I found out about Pima College’s parapsychology class I was very interested. It was a class in my department as I was majoring in psychology so my cousin, also a psych major (now with a Master’s Degree and teaching psych at the same school), and I decided it would be fun to take the class. While we explored all different takes on the paranormal the instruction was science based as my teacher, William Everist, was very serious about the science and published papers on the subject when there were significant results. I loved my class and while it was about more than just ghosts and hauntings I really latched on to that aspect. It was a time in my life when all of the spiritual beliefs that I had held up to that point had been shaken to their core and I was looking for some sense of ballast and wanted to know what the scientific study of all this said. After the class was over I joined the college’s investigation team and remained an active member of it for many years. When the satirical website that Katie and I wrote for and helped create ended abruptly, we decided we wanted to do something a bit more serious and legit. Wailing Bansidhe was born. Our book deal came just a month after our first solo investigation and after I moved back down to Tucson from Arkansas, we knocked out 14 locations in two months. It was awesome.

I worked for my parents helping to build their house during the week and on the weekends we would go out and investigate and then write about it the next day. It was new and fresh and awesome and we felt really good to be doing it. Sure we had some issues with some locations not being receptive or big timing us like one place in Tombstone that has enjoyed some success on television shows but is also roughly as authentic as the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, but generally we were doing something we loved and loved what we were doing.

I think things got to be a bit less fun for me after my divorce, but we were still excited about writing and investigating and talking about the paranormal. We had done a few talks and book signings and they were great. We loved talking with people who would show up and who had taken the time to see us. We started making friends with other people in other groups and we were very much into the notion of a big community that could be happy and function without bullshit if we could all just come together. Toward that end, we enlisted the help of a couple of groups we had become friends with to help with a documentary we wanted to do about our favorite haunted location, the Noftsger Hill Inn Bed and Breakfast in Globe, AZ.  This place is really awesome and we had gotten great results there for our first book so we wanted to share it with our friends and at the same time show three different groups using their own unique methodology cooperatively. So we would go first and everyone would follow our protocols, then the next group would go (really that group was just one person on that trip) and we would use his protocols and then the last group would go and we would all follow their methods. It was meant to show that there are different ways to do things but they can all be valid and yield results. And I think that that would have worked out if group number three hadn’t tanked us like we were the Titanic and they were an ice berg.

Their behavior was insane and I was very horrified and caught off guard by the level of hostility there especially given that for almost two years we had all been friends. I found it baffling and bewildering and the aftermath of it was even more perplexing as they blamed us for their behavior as if Katie paying for two of their members to go so they could be included and inviting them along to share in this idea we had was nothing more than a Machiavellian plot to…honestly I have no idea what they were on about. They broke pretty much all the rules for the event and were generally pretty nasty to us about it (to be fair only one of them was really all that nasty, the others just didn’t follow the rules we all agreed upon).

They say the first cut is the deepest and I have been carrying that shit around like Frodo getting stabbed with that Nazgul dagger (nerd alert!). It has festered and corrupted in me something awful and I was almost ready to just say fuck it and walk away from the field altogether. This was my first taste of the petty bullshit that goes on in the paranormal and sadly it wouldn’t be the last.

That group eventually disbanded. We absorbed one member and made up with another only to have another rift when something Katie said in a blog post was taken the wrong way. Whatever. I would rather have friends than enemies but I just don’t have much left emotionally for that nonsense. If that person wants to be butt hurt about something that wasn’t directed at that person then that is that person’s deal. Not my chair, not my problem.

Now when I think about the paranormal, I don’t think about the excitement and mystery of it all, I think about the bullshit drama. And it is hard not to as it seems like everything you read about the field (this post included I suppose) is about how this person fucked over this person or that bitch is crazy and her methods are bullshit or this guy is a liar or what have you.  It always seems to be about paranormal events too. Someone fucks someone else over on money or doesn’t show up or gets drunk and fucks everyone or some other such drama. I don’t hear much about the investigations these people are doing or what their results happen to be. It is just all about whatever radio show they are doing and what they can get this guest to say about someone else in the field or who they happen to know.

I think part of the problem is that through Facebook and social networking sites of that type, people have regressed back to a high school mentality where people who never got the chance to be popular douche bags are suddenly handed some kind of passable status amongst a subset of people that others are interested in getting into. There are all sorts of people who come in to the field with all sorts of backgrounds and with all sorts of motivations and that is the perfect set up for legendary personality clashes. Some people want to prove that ghosts exist. Some people want to prove that they don’t. Some people think it is really fun, some people think it is stupid and want to expose it (evidently by talking about putting dildos in your ass or something. It is hard to tell with the spelling), some people want to feel good about themselves and feel like they belong. Others want to bilk the unsuspecting out of money. Still others want to be famous and rich and important. Some people come from a scientific background, others from a spiritual one and others come from a special effects background that is really handy when building custom devices made out of a glad air freshener, black and yellow spray paint, and a wish.

When you have this many people in one field of study with very little by way of checks and balances you are going to get the sorts of rumbles that, if it were all housed in one city, would make a great 70’s exploitation movie. I want to be one of the Baseball Furies because their costumes are so much cooler. And that is what happens. All of these people try to come together and clash because more often than not they are not on the same page. What they want and how they want to get it differs so greatly from that of their fellow enthusiasts that there is bound to be friction.

This friction is really unfortunate because it becomes so loud and so drowns out the paranormal discussion that it becomes the discussion. No one is talking about best practices anymore they are talking about who bilked whom, who lied about what and who just flat isn’t cool enough to be at the party in the first place. Honestly, given all this, it is no wonder the skeptics don’t take any of us seriously and no one has any credibility. How can they when all we ever talk about is the equivalent of high school politics played out deep in to the 30s and 40s.

It really makes me angry that when I think about working on my books or going on investigations that I feel anxiety, dread and exasperation. It really bothers me that this thing that I have loved since childhood has been perverted into a many headed monster of bullshit and nonsense. I am tired of all of those things that get in the way. It is kind of like my argument against doctrine and dogma in religion. If your goal is a real personal relationship with your higher power, whatever that may be, then all the ceremony, ritual, pomp and circumstance just dilutes that experience and gets in the way of meaningful contact. If you focus on the worldly trappings then there is little room or attention left for the relationship. Much in the same way I feel that religious people should worry less about what other people are doing and focus on their own behavior and how they treat people, I feel that people in the paranormal community should worry far less about what the other groups are doing and focus on their own integrity and minding their own Ps and Qs. Sure, it is frustrating to have to clean up the mess of an irresponsible group who are spinning some yarn about a modified space heater drawing in the ghost’s energy so it can just sort of hover in that corner but hey at least it is leaving your closet alone, but all the time and energy wasted on worrying about things you can’t change is going to make you crazy. It will also drive down the quality of your own work and corrupt you into someone who isn’t really doing much but complain and talk shit.

And you know, I get if someone takes you for a lot of money for some event appearance then you will get pissed and want to expose them but what in god’s name were you paying them that much money to show up to an event for in the first place? I mean I don’t want to cut off my nose to spite my face as I think being paid for an event appearance would be pretty fucking cool but there is a point where if someone quotes you the sort of money that could pay for your house for six months to show up for an hour long talk you need to tell that douche to go fuck himself. But see here is where the problem with status comes in. If you can’t be the guy everyone loves then you want to be the guy who can GET the guy everyone loves. It is status by proxy and if that is what you are concerned with such that it is worth risking quadruple digits to secure then that is a risk you have to be willing to take. I suppose since it is easier to do that than do something of note yourself then it might be worth the risk but maybe in the future look at someone more comfortably within your price range.

I think at the end of the day the biggest problem in the paranormal field, at least insofar as this celebrity clique war that seems to be going on, is that no one is really paying attention to the actual investigations anymore and there is no checks and balances in place to make sure that when they do they have something of value to show for it as opposed to reading newspaper clippings on the wall and then using that information in your bizarrely accurate psychic impressions. “Wow, not only was there are fire and a man jumped out the window but you describe the overalls he was wearing in this picture perfectly.” I  think it would be cool to replace all the real newspaper clippings in a place with fake ones and just see how many psychic impressions show up based on the faulty information. Experience tells me it would be a lot.

I can’t tell anyone how to do anything and I know these words will be a drop in the bucket. If anyone takes time to read it they will either see themselves in it and get defensive or see others they dislike in it and feel superior. I don’t really want that. Ultimately I just had to write about it to try to get my head right. You know, after all the dread and worry and drama, once I get into a location to investigate and the results are coming and they are matching I feel fucking electric. It feels great and it is just as exciting as it has always been. And having the opportunity to sit down and share it with others is equally fun and exciting. Sadly, with all the other nonsense and hurt floating around in my head I haven’t done that as much lately. And that is my fault for letting any of this bullshit in. For me, I am going to make a concerted effort to just try to focus on why I was interested in this stuff in the first place and let all that other nonsense fall to the floor. I miss how fun it was and I miss the excitement and I miss the sharing. It is time I get back to that and if you feel the way I do, hopefully you can do the same.