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

They also had suggestions.
    “Maybe you and Joyce should have a discussion about the case before going in?”
    “What about having Katrina do an interview?”
    I was used to working with a notepad and a gut instinct. Between all the comments, schedule charts, walkie-talkies, and monitors, I felt like screaming. How could I break down the day? You can’t schedule the unknown. Glimpsing something paranormal is always a shot in the dark. Production, though, needed some idea of what to do so they could set up shots and figure out when to give their crew breaks.
    I tried my best to give them what they needed. After all, it was as if we were starting together all over again. I think it was an hour before I was told to go to the front door and ring. Helen was waiting.
    Once we were settled in the kitchen, I began the interview. She told me that Chris, born in 1987, started seeing what he called the Dark Man at five years old, but the experience lasted his entire life. She said that Justin would know more about that. As she explained that it was Justin who’d found Chris’s body, she choked up.
    I gently asked about the drug overdose.
    “It was prom weekend,” Helen said. “He was really tired and couldn’t sleep, so someone had given him something. He went to his room, must have taken it, and just never woke up.” On Mother’s Day morning, she went in to wake him up, but didn’t realize he was dead until Justin tried to rouse him.
    I repeated my question for her from our first meeting. Why did she think he was still there?
    She explained she’d had a dream where she saw him, and his eyes had gone all dark.
    “That is not my son,” she told herself. “That is not my son.”
    Helen wasn’t convinced anything paranormal was going on. She just wanted to make sure her son wasn’t there, that he was at rest. I had the sense there was more going on here, but I didn’t know yet what it was.
    After that interview, our new adviser, Joyce, asked Helen about Justin, why he was upset we were there. She explained he did believe in the paranormal, but didn’t want to be involved. “He’s afraid something might happen.”
    As I tried to get my bearings on the case, the producers asked Joyce and me to sit down to discuss the interview. As we did, they kept stopping us, asking us to talk about this or that, discussions they felt they’d need for the edit. I tried to stay focused, but I wasn’t used to any of this. It got to a point where I wasn’t saying anything that was on my mind.
    I don’t think for a minute they intended to be disorienting. Like me, they wanted a great investigation. But it was too much for me. My thinking was getting fuzzy.
    Finally, Alan asked us to follow him out to the old front porch.
    “I can tell all this input is distracting you,” he said. “Just go back in there and do whatever it is you want to do. We’re just here to follow you. All right?”
    I couldn’t describe how thankful I was. “Sounds great.”
    Things got easier for me after that. We split up into teams to tour the site and hear about the different phenomena reported over the years. Helen took me to a room with an old Victrola, explaining how one night it started playing by itself. Katrina and Heiser spoke with Ray, Helen’s husband. The death must have been hard on him as well, but he didn’t show us much emotion or care to interact, which of course we respected. He did describe hearing heavy breathing, and footsteps. Whenever he went to check out a strange sound, there’d be nothing there. “It’s always like hide and seek,” he said.
    In the basement, Helen explained they’d had some activity in a small room. Her friend Delores was grabbed around the arm there. Delores later told Joyce and Eilfie that the resulting mark started as a sort of hole, and then became a rash. She also reported that a man had drowned in the pond on the property.
    I’d heard that story when we first spoke to Helen. Then she’d told me that