Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown by Stefan Petrucha, Ryan Buell Page B

reserved. I didn’t feel they were hiding anything, just that they were quiet. I do remind myself that when a bunch of strangers come to your home with cameras, you can be anyone you want for a couple of hours. Usually, though, our clients are worried that they’re crazy. Just showing up and expressing a willingness to believe them often gets people to open up. Here, though, it took time.
    Matt did strike me as unhappy. There were things in life he said he enjoyed: rock, video games, and horror films, but he also said his family disapproved of that. It seemed his whole life revolved around maintaining that cemetery. When I asked what it was like, he joked that the customers never complained. He also said it was a special job. “I bury the dead, like the boatman who takes them across the river Styx.”
    It didn’t seem to be a position he’d aspired to. He’d studied film at Penn State, but things didn’t work out. My sense was that now he felt stuck there.
    The cemetery opened in 1881 and Matt’s family had been in charge ever since. His great-grandfather and his grandfather before that were caretakers. His father, Bill Franson, broke the tradition and became a successful banker and Matt’s siblings since found different careers. Matt may have felt like he slipped backward.
    Meanwhile, Matt and Chandra, who was about ten years younger, had married after two months of seeing each other. It was a big change that happened very quickly.
    As I’ve said, I’m not a psychologist, but I’d spent time working with Adam, who’d been trying to figure out how psychology fit in with the paranormal. He shared his sense with me that wherever there’s a trauma, dysfunction, or even ongoing unhappiness, the paranormal tends to parallel it, as if it finds a weak spot and fills it, or feeds off it.
    Here there was potentially a lot going on emotionally.
    To try to draw out Chandra, Katrina and another investigator sat down with her and went through their wedding photos. The few smiles she gave us turned out to be the biggest reaction we got from her.
    As for their relationship, from what I saw, while Chandra had her say, she sometimes looked to Matt before answering my questions. It wasn’t as if she were afraid, more like she looked up to him.
    Between the emotional dynamic, the mysterious urn, and the hallucinations, there was a lot to look at, but the most urgent problem was Chandra’s physical pain.
    She told me she’d never experienced anything like it before moving in, but now it was constant. She’d been to a doctor, had blood tests and an MRI, but there were no conclusive results or even a theoretical explanation.
    To try to figure out what was going on, I brought her for another exam, with Thad Diehl, a chiropractor at the university. He examined her thoroughly, and failed to find anything wrong. He did say that the types of pains she was having were more appropriate for an eighty-year-old.
    Matt already had told me his own theory about what was happening. Feeling paralyzed and seeing a ghostly woman crawl out of his laundry basket made him think a female ghost had grown attached to him. Now she might be jealous of Chandra. He and Chandra both felt it was attached to the urn that had been buried on their property.
    We also spoke with Matt’s father, Bill, who said he believed what Matt was experiencing and agreed the activity was tied to Chandra’s appearance. There was another family member, though, who came by while we were shooting, and seemed to have an affect on Matt.
    Unwilling to appear on-camera, this relative made no bones about being unhappy about my presence. They were worried about the family’s reputation, but also blamed the activity on demons. They felt Matt had opened himself up to it because of his interest in horror movies and video games.
    They asked to speak with me directly, which was a tricky situation. On the one hand, here was someone doing what they felt was right. But Matt and Chandra were