Free Second Sight by Judith Orloff

other hand, agreed that it all seemed far fetched, but he wanted to check it out. Though he and Kerry, another researcher at the lab, suspected that the mother was emotionally disturbed, they decided to pay one quick visit to her house in Culver City. When they went inside, they later told me, cabinet doors in the kitchen appeared to open and shut of their own accord. And although their visit was on an extremely hot autumn day, the bedroom where the alleged attacks had occurred was as cold as the inside of a refrigerator.
    During a ten-week investigation, Barry and other members of the research team found cold spots in various places in the house and an overpowering stench in one of the bedrooms. On several occasions, as many as twenty separate observers from the lab saw whirling balls of bright light flying through the bedroom. To eliminate outside influences, they hung heavy quilts and bedspreads over the windows, but these precautions only increased the brilliance of the light show in the darkened surroundings. Simultaneously, the register on a Geiger counter, which previously had been constant, suddenly dropped to zero.
    At one point, the lights actually began to take shape, forming a partial three-dimensional image of a man. Unfortunately, although a battery of cameras flashed pictures of the form, no images were picked up on film. At a later time, though, after a particularly elaborate display, Barry photographed one of the cold spots in the bedroom. When the film was developed, in the center of the photo he found a ball of light about a foot in diameter.
    Midway into the investigations Barry invited Frank DeFelita, who had previously done a television special for NBC on ghosts, to visit the house. DeFelita brought in equipment for documentation, and was lucky enough to witness many of the phenomena. (He went on to write a novel about this extraordinary situation,
The Entity,
which was later made into a feature film.)
    My job on the project was to relate the psychic impressions I received while in the house. The greatest challenge was to distinguish my emotional reactions from a definite influence that existed outside myself. As a psychic, I was discovering how to separate the fine points. True, everyone present was tense and on edge. But also, apart from this, I sensed a buzzing and swirling energy, chaotic and disturbing, pushing in on me. Physically, it was a dull pressure, a tightening band around my head, fading in and out. The odd part was that within moments of leaving the house, I would feel this oppressive sensation lifting. Other psychics had similar responses. Unfortunately, though I'd been excited to encounter the lights and faces that many researchers had observed, I wasn't there for these occurrences. Barry and the others were staked out at the house, whereas I was only able to visit a few times. I learned that this type of phenomenon doesn't happen on command. You have to be there at the right time to catch it.
    Aside from the question of what team members saw or did not see, many of our energetic perceptions were consistent. Furthermore, there was the house itself—dilapidated, twice condemned by the city—and the family, terrified by events they couldn't explain. Although they didn't complain, it must have been a burden, all these strangers in their home lugging around massive amounts of equipment. I barely spoke in a personal way with them; I simply conducted an interview about the facts. Actually, I was afraid to get too close, lest what was happening there might somehow rub off on me.
    Barry believed that in the vast majority of ghost cases, even if the manifestations were authentic, they were misinterpreted. The unexplained activity, he felt, generally had little to do with a specific house. Rather, it was an outgrowth of the anger or frustration within a family, an unconscious by-product of human emotions that created physical manifestations (psychokinesis), such as objects flying around the room