Preview--House of Wills: It Feels Evil

Author's note: This preview was written sitting inside the main chapel of the House of Wills the first day that the Travel Channel's show, It Feels Evil, was shot. But there was literally no way to suspect that the investigation would take the turn it did. Present initially as a writer, not an investigator, I was quickly sucked in with the rest of the team as we tried to decipher just what in the hell was going on in that place. Or to us, to be honest.

When the team pulls into the parking lot of the House of Wills in Cleveland, Ohio the wind howls around us while rain slashes against the crumbling building. Perfect conditions for a landmark paranormal investigation. The team heads into the building for its first look at the location, and there’s a definite sense of unease pulsing around all of them. Although it’s still daylight, the interior of the building is dark. The central chapel would be pitch black and silent if it wasn’t for the thunderstorm pounding outside and the chamber open to the sky. But despite the wind that is shrieking through the narrow corridors and winding staircases, the air is heavy…humid…and smells of decay, death, and rot. I always thought something about the building was disconcerting.

Sitting inside it, I now see why. 

The House of Wills has a definite sense of purpose. A will of its own, if you’ll pardon the pun. The atmosphere is watchful and definitely sports a malevolent edge. There’s no way to escape the isolation of this ravaged beauty on a June afternoon that feels more like March, but it’s only inside the building that one gets the sense that something’s not quite right.  

The House of Wills is cold, cold, cold and its atmosphere presses in upon you like the grave.  

Through the gaping windows on the second-floor gallery, the sky looks orange and the tree branches are whipping from side to side. The chapel has gone from repressive to malevolent. The House of Wills is nothing like it was in its heyday. Once it was a Turnverein, a German social club that promoted the ideals of Eugenics—a theory which would become the foundation of Hitler's genocide in WWII—in the twilight of the nineteenth century. Then, in a staggering reversal of purpose, the building served as a Jewish school in the dawn of the twentieth century. Most famously it was a funeral home that was one of the largest African-American-owned businesses in the US for over three decades. This ruined building went, within the space of fifty years, from a building whose owners espoused beliefs that led to the Holocaust but then became a power structure at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.  

How would such an volte-face affect a building? Is that conflict at the heart of the alleged haunting here?

Current owner, artist Eric Freeman, is high priest of a religion he co-founded with the grandson of Anton LeVey. LeVey took Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic cult and his writings on magick and turned them into a religion (and profitable business venture) in the San Francisco of the 1960’s.  Freeman uses the  former House of Wills not only as his curated art gallery, but also for religious purposes.

There’s never been a place more perfectly suited to be haunted, but that’s not what brings the team to Cleveland. The House of Wills was designed to channel, store, and conduct energy.  The building, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was built by renowned area architect Frederic Striebinger, a thirty-second degree Mason, in 1900. 

That energy is what we're chasing.

This chapel was once a consecrated site, where thousands of families attended the Christian last rites of loved ones. But since the death of J. Walter Wills in 1971, the building’s been desecrated, first by the family who owned it, then by the gangs and drug dealers who took it over when it was abandoned. Now, the building would be almost unrecognizable to the people who once loved it. 

Something inimical and cautious lurks among these relics of Egyptian grandeur—fake relics, of course. A reproduction sarcophagus shares the space with a massive carved head of Baphomet, the horned god of Satanic worship, and the crumbling plaster of art deco glory. This old building still possesses dignity in her aged splendor, but has been cannibalized by her own children and desecrated by her own community. You can tell that desecration has been dark for it is never daytime in this place.

In the House of Wills, it is always night. 

On the former chapel's stage, an ornate casket sits upon a bier, flanked by two massive red-upholstered chairs that look like thrones. In front of one throne, ritual candles await their time to burn. The uses the building is put to are painfully obvious. The House of Wills is decaying faster than its owner can repair it. For all practical purposes, there’s nowhere in the world better suited to the task the team has been set: researching what we're beginning to believe may be a demonic attachment.  

I have to wonder if it's wise to expect this team, several of whom have been battling against their own demons for years, to attempt contact with any diabolical agency. The House of Wills, therefore, is both a battleground and a research facility, but hopefully will lead us all down a path that hopefully will lead to greater knowledge.  

Is it worth the risk? I'm not sure.

I have to be honest: this is one of the few places that has ever creeped me out instantly. I'm as sensitive as a brick so I'm used to everyone else around me being able to sense there's something about a site that just isn't right. Other folks have the instincts that lead them to paranormal activity. Tim Wood, our lead investigator, is one of the best guys I've ever seen when it comes to that. I tend to get dragged into paranormal synchronicities (like what happened when we were conducting the Zozo experiment) or I piss something off and get slapped upside the back of my head (like numerous trips to the haunted fields and cave involved in the Bell Witch haunting).

But in this moment, right after I first set foot into the House of Wills, I'm overwhelmed by the cold certainty that this is not a place to be trifled with. 

Aside from the general decrepitude of the building, it's pouring rain outside. And inside. That's rendered almost every square foot of floor into a slick, threatening expanse to navigate. Despite the fact that it's summer, the interior of this building is freezing. I'm usually the person who walks into an alleged haunted site without concern, automatically looking for anything that could debunk evidence previously caught by other teams or witness accounts. At the House of Wills, that's not possible. 

Not just because it's spooky. This place plays to a lifetime of horror movie tropes.

But something in this building feels like it's aware, and it knew we were coming. The House of Wills is anticipating...something. Or someone.

Naturally, that sends me straight into "blame Tim" mode.

Always has to be Tim's fault, right? I mean my research is rarely targeted by some supernatural entity...unless Tim's involved. Then all kinds of crazy stuff happens. But this trip is different. The crazy stuff started before I started the car to drive up here. I'm starting to think whatever is gloating at me in the House of Wills sent me a direct warning at home yesterday...the day before I left for Cleveland: 

Be careful. I'm watching you. No one involved in the shoot knows what I'm about to relate except the executive producer and Tim.

Yesterday, I was packing for the trip in my office, so my suitcase was open on the bed. I was talking on the phone when all of a sudden, a section of the ceiling collapsed. Flooring, drywall, insulation, and God knows what else fell all over me and my nearly-completed packing. 

Ever have to dig insulation out of a suitcase? I don't recommend it. Not fun. 

Aside from a sizable lump on my head, the way the whole incident went down was baffling.

Evidently something heavy in the attic had fallen between the floor joists onto the drywall, bringing a full three-foot section down in the middle of my office. Missed my bookcases, thankfully. I would have been hugely pissed if my books had been screwed up. In fact, the majority of the material that fell went smack dab into the middle of my suitcase. 

Except for one chunk of drywall. That smashed me in the head.

Here's the kicker: everything was dry. Not wet. As for whatever had caused the collapse, there wasn't a sign. It was almost like someone had stepped between the joists and stepped directly on the drywall. The incident made no sense in the normal, mundane everyday would we all inhabit.

But shivering in the dark chapel of the House of Wills, that "accident" makes perfect sense after the fact. The irony of trading one collapsed ceiling for another is too pointed to miss.

I was being warned by something that maybe this little jaunt to Cleveland wasn't such a great idea. Me being me, I shrugged it off and came up anyway like I'd been double dog dared by Flick on the playground. Nothing like a challenge, right? 

But as I sit here, with the storm lashing the building and the day waning into nighttime, I have to wonder if accepting the challenge was the smart thing to do. I have a good idea what might be lying in wait for us now that I've taken my first steps into this site. A familiar miasma, hovering over everything. The difficulties the film crew are having to combat. The mood of the investigators. The sense that something is just not right. 

I've felt this supernatural aura before. This is the first haunted location I've ever walked into and immediately had to evaluate my judgment as a result. I have no idea what's about to happen, but I have the feeling that it's going to be bad. 

Really bad.

Author's note: By the end of that episode shoot, it was apparent that this time we had all miscalculated what the effects of putting this investigative team into that location would be. 

Disastrous. 

You can check out what happened at the House of Wills tonight at 11 pm EST, 8 pm PST in It Feels Evil on the Travel Channel. Basically, it's a master class on 'why you shouldn't ignore your guts when investigating'...for all of us. 

Additional note: As I was preparing to schedule this post for release, the same section of the same room's ceiling just collapsed. Again. Apparently, I've pissed something off. 

Again.

When The Demonic Knows Your Name

(Author's note--this is a 2019 reworking of a 2016 post that is very pertinent to what's going on right now. Enjoy it--except for Chip Coffey, who now hates me. Read on for why...it's hilarious. But make no mistake: the rest of this post is decidedly not funny, as you'll soon see for yourself.)

So you guys know I'm normally keeping myself pretty busy, and especially at this time of year. 2019 was originally supposed to be a leisurely writing year with a light publication schedule, but that has changed thanks to some stuff I can't announce yet. (Darn NDAs) So because I just cannot be too busy, this story is one I need to update, including new information we've learned that makes everything clearer.

And scarier.

I spent October of 2015 shredding the abysmal A&E television show Cursed: The Bell Witch and the absolutely execrable Destination America Exorcist Live! and putting together my blog series The Real Bell Witch, all of which you can see by going to the Paranormal, Bell Witch, and Zozo page tab at the top of the blog. I should probably mention here that because of me trashing Exorcist Live! I was blocked on Twitter by Chip Coffey, who must have psychically found my blog and gotten offended at the way I felt about his contributions to this said show. It's actually pretty damn funny when you think about it--I didn't follow him. Heck, I didn't really care enough to even check. Then a couple of years later someone directed me to a Tweet of his but I couldn't see it because I'd been blocked!

I had no idea a psychic needed Twitter. After all, shouldn't everything on their feed be old news? Shouldn't they have heebie-jeebied and known everything on their feed.

But I digress.

I'd been working with Tim Wood out at LiveSciFi on a series of articles about an investigation they did in Oklahoma City--an investigation into an entity known as Zozo or the Ouija board demon. If you've never heard of that name, do a quick Google search. In 2016, you would have turned up over 34 million results. 289,000 of those results were YouTube videos. And Tim was the king of the paranormal on YouTube with over 400,000 subscribers and 68 million views--and counting.

Now in 2019, those stats have all increased: 37 million results for Zozo on Google, 367,000 YouTube videos. Tim Wood's LSF channel now has over half a million subscribers and 90 million views. The weekend of the 2016 post, LSF was working with a guest investigator, Darren Evans, for a huge live stream collaboration. 

Let's link everything up real quick so that you can go see my 2015 articles, the Blogcritics interview, and the LiveSciFi site.

Tim and I subsequently conducted an experiment in 2017 where we tried to learn more about the entity. Tim contacted Zozo on the Ouija board every night for a month, while I stood as the control of the experiment. We live-streamed every video, documenting all the activity in front of the LiveSciFi audience. We collaborated on different things to try so we could arrive at a conclusion of what Zozo really was, and the evidence we got was actually pretty staggering. We subsequently co-wrote a book about our findings. Stalked by the Zozo Demon came out two months later, was a bestseller in paranormal non-fiction, and is available now on Amazon and other online e-tailers. (#ObligatoryBookPlug)

But the Zozo experiment led to serious repercussions.

I've since expanded my studies within the paranormal field and have delved deeply into the history and lore regarding the demonic. Won't be too much longer before I announce a couple of things that will encompass all that information. For that, you'll have to stay tuned. But this is my blog, so here I get to tell you about some of the crap that's gone on since Tim and I started researching the diabolical four years ago. We're still conducting that research--hell, the night we dissected a voodoo doll (video to the immediate right--> ) was the direct result of that research, and one of the creepiest paranormal objects I've ever seen by the way. (The woman who made that voodoo doll was consumed by hatred and rage that was seething through every stitch and ripple of fabric in the damn thing. That artifact is without a doubt the worst cursed/haunted object I've ever investigated.) But all this research also leads me to a story I've hinted about, but never told before the book came out.

My first encounter or battle against the diabolical. It's your lucky day.

In 2015, when I was interviewing Tim Wood and Darren Evans prior to the Zozo investigation,  I noticed several odd similarities in Tim and Darren's stories. Not the 'they talked ahead of time' similarities, but elements that popped up in their individual experiences with the demonic that had also popped up, frighteningly, in my own.  One of the articles I did, Ouija Board Demon Zozo--Connecting The Dots outlined those similarities. What I neglected to include in the story was how I shared many of those characteristics with the two investigators, and those events stemmed from my adolescence and two hauntings. One of those hauntings, of course, was the Bell Witch case in Adams, TN. You guys have heard all about my opinions and experiences with that right here on this blog (or you could hear about them if you click on the Bell Witch, Paranormal and Zozo tab). The other was the demonic oppression of a friend of mine in college--an oppression that manifested in activity right before my eyes that I absolutely could not explain. Seems appropriate to tell that story now. All the names, naturally, have been changed, and bear with me: by the end of this post, it'll all make sense.

My friend's oppression began after the death of his younger brother in a mysterious car wreck. The brother had been involved in a high school "coven" with nine friends. Of those ten kids, eight died: four in the same car accident, two by suicide, one murdered, and the last of some totally bizarre infection. I have no idea what happened to the other two. After his brother's funeral, the entity hopped to my friend, Jeno. 

Jeno was a smart, good-looking guy--football player, math whiz, popular kid with an infectious grin and a sweet personality. We attended the same college but I'd known him since high school, when he'd been in the same class I was. His family was Mormon and in every aspect he was just a normal, happy guy. But after his younger brother's death, everything suddenly went wrong. He literally started to almost wither into nothingness. Within a month, he looked gaunt and uptight. We shared a mutual friend--a guy named Rob and we would hang out some nights. We usually would go to this bizarre park in the middle of town, down this crazy steep hill and tucked away under the big railroad trestle that loomed hundreds of feet over our heads. That park was basically some fifty year old swings and a parking lot, but behind that were a few trails and a creek. We liked it there. People rarely went there during the day, much less the night, so we could hang out there and act like idiots or talk about our lives and no one ever disturbed us. 

On one of those nights during the fall of my sophomore year in college, we went to that park. It was September, and still warm but despite that, Jeno was wearing a turtleneck sweater. And as we sat in our usual spot in a clearing tucked out of sight of the road, Jeno told us what was happening to make him look so gaunt and stressed out. 

His house was haunted, he said, since his brother's death a few months earlier. He would wake up in the middle of the night, fighting with an unseen force pummeling him in the bed. Things would fly off his wall. Drawers would open and crash against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Strange shouts, bangs, and terrible smells would emanate from his younger brother's closed and unused bedroom.

I was fresh off my first investigation of the Bell Witch Cave and the Edens farm, where I'd experienced things much like what Jeno was talking about. In fact, I'd stood outside on the front porch of Bimms Eden's empty house and listened as the living room furniture was rearranged--things that neither Rob nor Jeno knew about. So I was able to take Jeno's story at face value.

But what I didn't expect was the condition of his body. 

The first time he lifted his shirt and showed the massive bruising on his torso, I was startled--and I couldn't help but be slightly skeptical as well. What I couldn't figure out was a trio of scratches that started on the right side of his neck and continued in an unbroken, continuous diagonal across his chest and finally terminated on his left hip. It was like someone had taken one of those little three-pronged gardening forks down his body, but the cuts were too deep and sharp-edged for that. They had scabbed over, and even the scabs were precise and identical.

For a few days after, I tried to figure out if there was some way to do that to oneself. It was so weird because the scratches were the same depth, the same width, and completely seamless. On top of that, Jeno was right-handed. There was no way he could have done that to himself with such perfect symmetry. But I didn't say anything to him about it at the time. When you're eighteen and a good-looking guy is telling you he's being attacked by a ghost his dead brother's coven conjured up, you figure it's probably not a good idea to interrogate him but just to act as if you totally buy into his story and be supportive of him that way. After all, he had just lost his brother. It only made sense to me that he would be have trouble dealing with his death. 

A few weeks later, we were hanging out in the same park. It was October--my birthday weekend, in fact--and it was one of those perfect, crisp autumn evenings you get in Tennessee when the season is changing. We weren't even talking about the haunting at the time; we were planning a road trip as I recollect. Jeno didn't drink, I couldn't drink, and Rob...was Rob. He was drinking, mean thing that he was. At any rate, we were laughing when all of a sudden Jeno screamed and fell backwards, landing basically on my lap. Instinctively, I grabbed his shoulders and his body was so hot (temperature) that I could feel the heat baking through his jacket and sweater.

The next thing I knew, three burns came up on the side of his throat. Each burn was as wide as my thumb and almost instantly blistered. Rob pulled off Jeno's shirt and those burns followed the exact same path as the scratches had. 

I saw those burns pop up. If you're a woman and have ever burned the side of your neck with a curling iron, that's exactly what it looked like. Except Jeno was six feet tall and those burns crossed his body like a sash and disappeared into the waistband of his jeans while he was wearing a thick cable-knit sweater and a Member's Only jacket. (dated myself there) And these weren't surface burns either; they were second degree burns. We took him to the ER--I don't even remember the BS story we told to try to spin the whole mess. That night after he was released, we took him back to Rob's place, figuring he might be able to rest there. Jeno pretty much passed out as soon as we tucked him up on the couch, exhausted as he was and full of pain meds, while Rob and I sat across the room trying to figure out what in the hell we'd just seen. 

I had been at the Bell Witch cave just a few days before, and had gotten several EVPs (my first ones, actually) before the cave suddenly went spook-monster on me and drove me out. So I was already a tad...jumpy and Rob knew this. But as we sat there trying to rationalize what had happened, the light bulb in the hanging lamp over his kitchen table exploded...like--legitimately exploded, glass shattering, sparks in the wiring, sounding like a pop gun kind of exploded. 

Rob and I just stared at each other over all that glass, and Jeno said suddenly from the couch, "It followed me here." 

My first thought at the moment was uncharitable to say the least. Thank you so fucking much for bringing your pet ghost, Jeno isn't the best retort in such a moment. But Jeno's voice was terrified and quiet all at the same time, and it made such an impact on me that I couldn't say a word. Rob, bless him, instantly popped up with, "Man, we need to take you to a church." 

That's when Jeno told us that the Mormon church in town had excommunicated him. He'd gone to them for help when all the manifestations began before his brother's death, and they had kicked him out of the church! 

Rob and I were both raised Catholic--Rob's mother was Spanish; mine was French--and we figured that if anyone would help Jeno, it would be the parish priest. So we loaded  Jeno into the back seat of my Bug (yes, I was a vintage VW kind of punk girl back in the day--a 1972 Superbeetle, Tennessee orange of course) and took him to the rectory next to the church both our families attended. Our parish priest was an awesome guy--a chain-smoking, Scotch-drinking, honest-to-God Irish lean whip of a man who had baptized, christened, and First Communion-ed me. The drive lasted maybe five minutes, and it was the longest five minutes of my life. After what we'd already seen that night, and the knowledge of how Jeno's brother had died, a VW Bug didn't seem like the safest place in the world to be. On top of that, it was three o'clock in the morning, and we were going to wake up a priest. 

It's a testament to who our priest was both as a man and a religious that we didn't even hesitate about going to him. This was the same priest I argued reproductive rights with, the same one who always told his congregation that if they were in spiritual trouble to come to him. Rob and I figured this would qualify, and all we wanted to do was to get Jeno to someone who knew what to do. 

The rectory was a sold-looking Victorian building. Rob, who was quite a bit smaller than Jeno, was literally hauling him up the front porch steps while I banged on the door and rang the doorbell. The porch light snapped on and our priest peered out then he opened the door. He took one look at the three of us (we probably looked like we were crazy) and immediately let us all into the house.

And what happened from that point on is something I don't talk about. I can't. We went through months of serious terror. There were further occasions when Jeno was attacked in front of me--the worst happened one night after he'd been kicked out of his parents' home and was living in a small apartment right off-campus. Jeno had two couches in his shabby living room. I was asleep on one and he was on the other when suddenly he screamed. I jumped up like a scalded cat and he was fighting for his life against something that was only visible because it was under the blanket with him, like some huge freaking guy had crept up on that couch with him and crawled under the quilt to strangle him. I hauled Jeno off the couch into the floor, the blanket went flat, and the attack stopped.

We sat up the rest of the night in the floor with every light in the house on and my rosary beads around his neck.

But there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't help him and organized religion wouldn't (at the time). The response of both the Mormon and Catholic Churches to Jeno's situation made me angry--angry enough to forego religion for a long, long time. Exorcisms were not something the Catholic church approved or even talked about openly at the time. Although our priest prayed with Jeno, blessed him, and conducted minor rites in the hope that something would alleviate his suffering he was told by his superiors to stop.

Father protested on Jeno's behalf (and also for Rob and me, since we were now getting peripheral notice from the entity), but the diocese was emphatic. The Catholic church rarely approved exorcisms, there was no exorcist in the diocese, and the bishop flat refused to sanction anything remotely resembling an exorcism for a non-Catholic. Probably as a result of his protests, our priest was moved to another parish within six months.  But before he left, he told me that it was dangerous to spend so much time with Jeno trying to help him and told Rob the same thing. Being know-it-all twenty-somethings, we ignored him.

Unfortunately, Rob told Jeno what the priest had said. Six weeks after that, Jeno left town and I have never heard from him again.

All that is history. Let's talk about the present, as in what has happened from 2015 to 2019 and specifically for Tim and me.

After I began to research and write the articles surrounding the 2015 investigation of the Zozo house, I was getting poked paranormally in my house. The notes I took that night and Darren's phone number mysteriously disappeared from my computer, even though I had saved my work (being a writer makes you autosave-suspicious) and turned off the computer that night. A pair of lights in my living room blew within three minutes of each other. One lamp fell from the end table for no reason--I watched it fall and there wasn't a cat near it or under it. My mother's rosary beads disappeared from my closed jewelry box in the bedroom. (I later found it under the living room couch.)  Had a few random bangs on the front door and one from inside the linen closet in the hallway. (I live in a century-old house). I spent three days looking at the TV or computer screen with one hand over my eye due to an almost incapacitating migraine that wouldn't respond to any kind of migraine medicines. Despite all this, I managed to get four articles and three press releases done on top of my normal, everyday workload.

The Zozo experiment exacerbated everything exponentially. As the month went on, Tim and I both began having parallel paranormal experiences including nightmares, poltergeist activity, shadow figures in our non-haunted homes, and extreme emotional swings. Lightning struck my house when I was interviewing I ended up quadruple-saving the rough draft of the book and my notes because they kept disappearing from my computer. We did several investigations together after the experiment, and no matter where we went, the demonic pursued us. I ended up taking a break from investigations for a while, and gradually the activity on my end slowed and stopped.

This year, Tim and I started investigating and working together again. The last trip we took we were deliberately looking to contact the Zozo entity, and once again Tim and I began to experience parallel activity. That started up in the two weeks prior to the investigation and has not only continued but increased and intensified. Eventually, once I can announce the super secret big projects we're working on, all of you will be able to hear the rest of that story. Shouldn't be too long.

Here's the thing. I know there are no coincidences when it comes to paranormal activity. For two hundred years, authors working on the Bell Witch story have reported losing their entire manuscripts. I know a writer who lost his entire book--back when writing a book required a typewriter and lots of Liquid Paper. The physical manuscript just disappeared from inside his locked desk drawer. Film crews would find their equipment malfunctioning inside the Bell Witch cave or the landing outside it--but it all worked perfectly on top of the cliff. This happened famously during the late 1980s when the show Unsolved Mysteries tried to film there. Also, when you're writing about the Bell Witch your source materials and research--particularly the Ingram book--disappear. So I know the history involved with writing about paranormal entities and resultant paranormal activity that interferes with that.

For the same thing to happen here makes me suspicious.

In an era when demonic attacks are perceived to be on the rise, when the Catholic church is suddenly embracing the rite of exorcism in order to meet the rising need to help victims of demonic oppression and possession, when non-Catholic "exorcists" are working openly with paranormal investigators who are looking into demonic hauntings you have to stop and think: is there some reason the diabolical forces are increasing? It's kind of a chicken or the egg sort of dilemma. Is the increased interest in the paranormal the reason we are hearing more about demons or demonic hauntings? Or are demons becoming more openly prevalent and that's why there are more paranormal investigations?

Make no mistake, any time an investigator like Tim or a researcher like me starts to poke at demonic entities, it's playing with fire. People who understand the dangers of this type of paranormal research also understand the need for protecting themselves as they proceed. But sometimes, depending on the entity, that protection isn't enough...or fails. Even the most experienced paranormal investigator can sometimes end up with an attachment or worse. And if multiple people on the same team end up with parallel activity--and especially if they don't live in the same place like Tim and me--that's a huge red flag. At that point, whatever methods of self-protection they employ have been compromised, leaving the investigators open to worse and increasing activity.

I knew when I first wrote this blog post that because we were investigating Zozo, an entity that has Ouija-bombed and stalked Tim for years, there would be paranormal consequences. That didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was how quick and how severe those consequences were. They had far-reaching effects on everyone involved.

Make no mistake: paranormal investigation is NOT a game. It's dangerous to everyone involved. So getting a cheap voice recorder and running around a deserted haunted house at night or "playing" with a Ouija board isn't some kind of cheap thrill. It's potentially deadly, and these cautionary tales shouldn't be ignored or dismissed. Leave it to the experts, because even the experts in the paranormal field know that this type of investigation weighs heavily in favor of the demonic, not the investigators.

Hopefully after this, you'll know that too. Stay tuned, folks. This ride is getting to be VERY bumpy. Oh, and if you want to learn more about Tim and his experiences with the Zozo entity, watch that last video I posted. You'll learn a lot.

Particularly why you don't want to get any closer to that entity than reading about it in a blog.

Author's note: I had just finished typing the line directly above this one when the ceiling in my office/spare bedroom suddenly collapsed. I was hit with plaster and insulation, and the guest bedroom which I had just finished renovating was pretty much destroyed. The collapse barely missed taking out all the electronics--tv, desktop, laptop, Nintendo Switch--but managed to destroy the overhead light. So allow me to reiterate one more time: dealing with the diabolical is not a game, is not "fun", is not an adrenaline rush. It's dangerous on multiple levels.

Once the diabolical knows your name, it never forgets it. When it knows you're planning to confront it, the demonic will make its presence known. 

LiveSciFi Zozo Investigation Day Two Live Blog

So here's what sucks about falling asleep. You miss stuff. 

I was up early yesterday, had a conference with my literary agent, then wrote my column, and all that fun stuff. On top of that, considering the pain level a chronic pain sufferer deals with, the medications totally knock you out. Unthinkingly, I took my meds at the regular time last night. So by the time we started hitting 3:30 - 4 am, I was pretty much done for the night. 

I kept waking up when things would happen, but then dozed back off. My own fault. Should never have said, "I'll just lie down for a while." 

So now I'm hours behind, and will have to watch catch-up footage here in a bit when it's posted. My own fault. 

That being said, though, right now the house is empty and for the past hour it's been echoing with bangs and snaps and clicks on a fairly constant basis. To me this is compelling because there is literally no one there. 

10:56 HUGE bang in an empty house. Something feel somewhere.

11:12 Another huge bang followed by what sounded like a cough.

11:30 in the past half hour, we witnessed extensive tampering with the camera system in an empty house. IR lights going off and on, cams switching from day to night vision, and all accompanied by significant noises. This house isn't just haunted at night. It's haunted by day.

11:49 One of the things that makes a live streamed investigation interesting is the simultaneous chat. Even when the investigators aren't in the house, there are hundreds of people still monitoring the equipment. This serves a couple of purposes. First off, it keeps people engaged in the event. It also leads to an ongoing dialogue about what's happening. Sure you get your kooks talking about orbs or claiming to have seen stuff that isn't there. Middle school kids need hobbies too and for the most part that seems to be annoying grownups. But if something significant happens, like a loud noise, the chat rooms dissect it the same way investigators do. But second, those transcripts provide time stamps to evidence. The team can go back later and match up the video with the log the chat room creates, and that can lead to evidence they might otherwise have missed.

Although probably not in this house. No way to miss what's going on now.

12:36 If you talk on speaker phone during a live stream, the entire world hears your conversation. And nothing else. That is all.

1:03 If the tornado siren test is going on, it's probably not the best time to do an EVP session. Mostly because you can't hear anything. Just sayin', Darren.

1:47 Okay, I'm going to be a little stern here because I'm seeing things I do not like. First off, the only reason a paranormal investigation has any validity at all is through the strict adherence to protocols and running a controlled experiment. You eliminate as many external influences as possible. You turn off your phone. You create a control. You document any changes you observe, like something falling over. You use your own equipment. You handle other people's equipment with care. If a session is disrupted by outside sources, you end the session and discount any potential evidence.

For almost an hour and a half, I and the rest of the chat have watched in horror as all of the above strictures have been ignored. YOU DON'T HANDLE SOMEONE ELSE'S PERSONAL EQUIPMENT OR POSSESSIONS CARELESSLY, like holding an antique doll by the head or so roughly a limb falls off. You don't try to use someone's personal technology.

How do I know this? Because I did my first investigation in the late 1980s and multiple ones since. Pretty much the last two hours and counting can be tossed out the window because someone who doesn't know what he is doing is destroying the validity of the investigation with every step and decision he makes.

It's a damn shame.

2:27 And the torture continues, unabated. Talk about a room of pissed off viewers. Good lord.

The thing I've always liked about LSF is the interactive nature of their live streamed investigations. Evidence captured in a totally silent house while the investigators are asleep or out. All of that has been destroyed. We went from a morning of continuous activity, to an afternoon of absolute bullshit. What makes that even worse is that the LSF team isn't there and all this destruction is coming at the hands of a guest to the investigation who is trying to force activity when he didn't need to.

Paranormal investigation is about creating a situation in which activity can happen, not bombarding the place in the middle of the afternoon with frantic trigger object shifting and blaring music and constant movement. One of these dolls could get up, walk down the stairs, and dance a jig in the middle of the living room floor and it couldn't be construed as evidence because of what's going on around it.

3:45 and all's well. Torture has stopped--mercifully--for the time being. I'll be glad when the investigators get back and turn this back into a serious attempt to capture paranormal activity.

LIVE BLOG UPDATED EVERY 20-30 MINUTES

LiveSciFi Zozo Investigation Night One--Live Blog

October 21, 2016 (7:00 pm EST) So what am I doing, you ask? 

Tonight at 10 pm EST, the LiveSciFi paranormal investigators will kick off a three-day ghost hunt at a residence in Oklahoma City that is purported to be haunted AND oppressed by a demonic entity known as Zozo. Now, if you read my last blog post, you know that I did a lot of research and wrote a few articles ahead of this upcoming investigation...and that the nasty critter set off a chain reaction of paranormal activity around my house and particularly around my computer. 

Ergo...I figure this is a safer and more fun way to take notes during the investigation. Blogger will automatically back my stuff up, and I can jot down observations, opinions, and instant reactions to what happens during the lockdown. So take that, Zozo! 

And here's the kicker. Although I enjoy paranormal investigations, I am also seriously skeptical. I don't put much stock into orbs, or creaky noises, or random lights. If I see something that might be paranormal, I'll jot down what I saw and an approximate time so I can go back once that block of video is done and go through it. 

But if I think something is out and out hokey horseshit, I'll jot that down too. Sorry kids--just the way I roll. At the end of the weekend, I'll put it all together in a followup article and we'll see what we've got. See something you think I should look at? Leave me a comment (time stamp or approximate time place) and I'll take a look at it. Sound good? 

Lay in the snacks, kids. Going to be a long night.

8:35 pm --dangit, isn't this thing started yet? Viewers are starting to show up on the LSF website chat and the YouTube chat. Seems to be more anticipation for this investigation than I've seen in quite some time.

9:00 The normal plethora of trolls and spammers are showing up now. Guess there's not a middle school in America that has homework over the weekend anymore.

10:03 So far, my "live feed will start 5 minutes late" bet is still alive.

10:04 still alive

10:05 c'mon man! It's ten bucks!

10:20 Time is money, guys. Time is money.

10:38 So yeah. I totally lost the start time betting pool.

Okay so it's 11:00 and time for the first Ouija session. Why you ask? Because Zozo is the Ouija board demon, and that's how the entity selects its victims and stalks them.  That whole thing about opening a door? Yep. Ouija. Spiritual door opener.

11:10 So the Ouija session has kicked off pretty darn quick. If nothing else, Zozo is predictable. According to what's coming through, it seems pretty happy to have company. Especially this company since it's spelling out H-A-H-A-H-A

11:14 Zozo just claimed it was a friend. Not sure to what, but there you have it.

11:19 Well, Zozo at least can tell a bad joke. "Saint Zozo" smfh

11:25 Zozo just said it would make a noise/create a disturbance at 1:34. I will be watching, and if that doesn't go down, I will totally call it out as a liar. I ain't playing.

11:28 Sure would have been nice to get the answer to Nicole's question about the possessed woman in SF who went after Tim, but Darren decided to pull the focus instead of letting that line of questioning proceed for some reason.

11:29 Doesn't take Zozo long to get back into its MO. All the laughing and joking aside now, and we're to gloating over a dead cat and threatening to kill Tim.

11:40 End of the first hour-ish. I think the strongest takeaway I have at this moment is that the Ouija session was moving much faster than normal. Also, getting the loud growl on the EVP session fits entirely with Zozo's recent interactions with Tim on the Ouija board. And that's disconcerting. For that EVP to have occurred so early in the live stream can only mean bad things are ahead in the next two night. Craziness.

11:46 Tim's first scratches of the weekend and it's not even midnight yet.

See, here's the deal. Coming up on ten years of dealing with the Zozo entity for Tim, and thirty-five years of dealing with the entity for Darren. This is like an all-you-can-eat spiritual buffet for it. When you're working in this field and you already have a paranormal attachment or you're sensitive to paranormal events, in a charged location and with another person present who suffers the same thing the entity is pulled in like a magnet to iron fillings.

11:51 For a guy who didn't want to say the word "Zozo" an hour ago, he sure is saying it a lot now.

11:53 So Darren is wearing a shirt with a skull on it, is looking into a scrying mirror and he sees...a skull. Wow, dude--really?

11:56 All right--let's talk research. The "14th century source" Darren Evans cites for the Zozo entity being known as a demon isn't a 14th century source. It comes from an 1876 issue of the Catholic Review, and it's referring to a sermon St. Bernardino preached regarding gambling with dice. The term " commune omnium daemonum" is a generic term of the medieval church. And if you want to check out that source, head here and look for yourself. I asked Darren for the original 14th century source when he questioned me not citing that story as fact in my articles. He did not provide me with that source. That does not mean the source doesn't exist. The Catholic Review has access to Vatican documents and this article could very well have been taken from such a legitimate source. But you cannot call a 19th century source a 14th century one just because it refers to something that happened then, and particularly with a church document from that time because all that stuff was edited heavily to fall into political lines of necessity.

That's not how source citation works. That would be like me saying I know JFK was killed as the result of aliens because I read somewhere once that's what really happened. Without that source, I could be referring to the National Enquirer for all you know.

In proper research, the word Zozo being mentioned like that five hundred years later is secondhand--kind of like hearsay. This isn't a reliable or valid source citation, so much as it is forcing something totally unrelated and MAKING it sound like a source. Want to convince me? Show me a literal, physical source from the 14th century, not an article from a journal 400 years later.

And then, too, the source isn't about a demon named Zozo. It's about a sermon preached by a saint where he substitutes gambling terms for the items used in a Catholic Mass. It's about how to take a sermon and relate it to your audience in terms they understand and relate to--a sermon used as an example of how to create an effective Catholic Mass during the season of Lent. It has nothing to do with demonology, and it doesn't chronicle or identify a demonic entity. It's an allegorical tale, created by a priest to demonstrate the evils of gambling. (BTW St. Bernardino didn't like much of anything. Even hear the phrase "bonfire of the vanities"? That's where people take the things they enjoy or that give them pleasure out into the street and throw them on a fire. This guy is the one who started all that crap)

The earliest source this Latin, Greek, and French-reading writer with mad Google-fu skillsfound in my research is the 1818 Dictionairre Infernal, regarding an event in France two years earlier. And THAT source can be found here. At the end, I have to question this as being presented as fact, because it's not. And it bugs me that it was presented as such.

12:03 So Darren refuses to touch the Ouija board, but he'll confront the entity, and look in scrying mirrors for it, and scribble things on paper in an attempt to summon it? I am confused. And that Z-word he didn't want to say is now being used every other word. I wonder...how long will it take him to touch the Ouija board? Hmm... Earlier he said it had to do with intent, right? So here's my question--what's so different about intent in why he wouldn't say Zozo early on in the investigation, but will now?

12:13 Hard to do an EVP session in the house when someone is in the other room bellowing like a drill sergeant.

12:35 EVP session not in your skill set man. Ask a question, give them 30 seconds to answer. then ask another question. Don't tell it stories.

12:38 we are now winding down the second hour of this investigation. The last 40 minutes has been the Darren and Zozo show. Unfortunately, even Zozo appears to be dozing off.

12:52 Getting creeped out off a letter--rare.
Just turning on the Ovilus for the first time and it says "Z" when you're investigating the Zozo house? --priceless

1:04 Okay the voice that Ovilus generated is uber-creepy. Also find it interesting that it said "birds" considering the connection that's come up with birds before in both Tim's and Darren's history with the entity. And yes, the South Park version of R. Kelly's In The Closet is now stuck in my head. Travolta and all.

1:10 'abort' 'sharp' and 'cross over' rapid fire on the Ovilus. Again...interesting.

1:14 setting up for a Ganzfeld experiment--whenever sensory deprivation is involved, the paranormal activity seems to get more intense. Also, keep in mind Zozo's promise of activity at 1:34

1:34 Since this moment occurred during the Ganzfeld experiment, it's hard to say if Zozo kept his promise. Did I notice paranormal activity? No. Did Tim act totally bizarre all of a sudden? Yes. But was it what Zozo said it would be? No. So yeah==> so totally unimpressed Zozo. A demon should do better.

1:36 Things not to do on an investigation 101--never rip ping pong balls taped over your co-investigator's face. Be gentle and kind to his eyes.

1:36 "DO YOU HAVE A HEADACHE" is probably not the thing to
yell into someone's face if you think they have a headache. Just sayin'.

1:45 The third hour is in the books and we have a couple of good EVPs. Not bad, but not exactly burning down the house here, either.

6:30 AM, October 22-- I'm not sure what to make of this place. That there's paranormal activity seems completely undoubted. As the night went on the activity increased and even when the house is empty, there's nearly constant noise. I personally don't trust my eyes after being up all night, so I'll wait until I can go back and see the footage for myself after some sleep but--this is beyond creepy. That being said, this place is loud.

Zozo Investigation and that Demonic Haunting Story I Never Told You

So you guys know I'm normally keeping myself pretty busy, and especially at this time of year. Not only is football season in full swing, which means writing for the Orange & White Report and my weekly Fact or Fanatic column, but I'm in the middle of publishing eight novels (two more to go in digital; six more in print). And because I just cannot be too busy, this month is also October which means my mind turns none-too-gently to the paranormal world. 

We spent October of 2015 shredding the abysmal A&E television show Cursed: The Bell Witch and the absolutely execrable Destination America Exorcist Live! and putting together my blog series The Real Bell Witch, all of which you can see by going to the Paranormal, Bell Witch, & Zozo page tab at the top of the blog. 

Wait...you noticed the extra name, didn't you? Well, that's because this year, I'm trying something different. 

I've been working with Tim Wood out at LiveSciFi on a series of articles about an investigation they're doing this weekend in Oklahoma City--an investigation into an entity known as Zozo or the Ouija board demon. If you've never heard of that name, do a quick Google search. You'll turn up over 34 million results. 289,000 of those results are YouTube videos. And Tim is the king of paranormal on YouTube with over 400,000 subscribers and 68 million views--and counting. This weekend, LSF is working with a guest investigator, Zozo expert Darren Evans. 

Let's link everything up real quick so that you can go see my articles, the Blogcritics interview, the LiveSciFi site, and Darren's blog and new book, just released in May, about the entity. That's my formal work. But this is my blog, so here I get to tell you about some of the crap that's gone on since I started doing interviews and crafting articles last week--and that leads me to a story I've hinted about, but never told before.

It's your lucky day.

Last Thursday, the three of us talked on a three-way call just as a preliminary. and you know me--I was taking serious notes. First off, I find paranormal things pretty fascinating, but primarily I was noticing similarities in Tim and Darren's stories. Not the 'they talked ahead of time' similarities, but elements that popped up in both their experiences that have also popped up, frighteningly, in mine.  One of the articles I did, Ouija Board Demon Zozo--Connecting The Dots outlined those similarities. What I neglect to include in the story was how I shared many of those characteristics, and they stem from my adolescence and two hauntings. One, of course, is the Bell Witch haunting in Adams, TN. You guys have heard all about that. The other was the demonic oppression of a friend of mine in college--an oppression that manifested in activity right before my eyes that absolutely could not be explained.

This is the story of that incident--an incident I referred to last year but did not tell. Seems appropriate to do so now. All the names, naturally, have been changed, and bear with me: by the end of this post, it'll all make sense.

My friend's oppression began after the death of his younger brother in a mysterious car wreck. The brother had been involved in a high school "coven" with nine friends. Of those ten kids, eight died: four in the same car accident, two by suicide, one murdered, and the last of some totally bizarre infection. I have no idea what happened to the other two. After his brother's funeral, the entity hopped to my friend, Jeno. 

Jeno was a smart, good-looking boy--football player and brain, infectious grin, and a sweet personality. I'd known him since high school, when he'd been in the same class I was. His family was Mormon and in every aspect he was just a normal, happy guy. But after his younger brother's death when we were both in college, everything suddenly went wrong. He literally started to almost wither into nothingness. Within a month, he looked gaunt and uptight. Our mutual friend Rob, Jeno, and I would hang out some nights. We usually would go to this bizarre park in the middle of Clarksville right off Crossland Avenue down this crazy steep hill. That park was basically some fifty year old swings and a parking lot, but behind it were a few trails and a creek. We liked it there. People rarely went there during the day, much less the night. 

On one of those nights that fall of my sophomore year in college, we went to that park. It was September, and still warm. Despite that, Jeno was wearing a turtleneck sweater. And as we sat in our usual spot in a clearing tucked out of sight of the road, Jeno told us what was happening. 

His house was haunted, he said, since his brother's death a few months earlier. He would wake up in the middle of the night, fighting with an unseen force pummeling him in the bed. Things would fly off his wall. Drawers would open and crash into the opposite side of the room. Voices would suddenly issue in an empty room, and terrible smells would emanate from his younger brother's closed and unused room.

I was fresh off my first investigation of the Bell Witch Cave and the Edens farm, where I'd experienced things much like what Jeno was talking about. In fact, I'd stood outside on the front porch of Bims Eden's empty house and listened as the living room furniture was rearranged--things that neither Rob nor Jeno knew about. So I was able to take Jeno's story at face value.

But what I didn't expect was the condition of his body. 

The first time he lifted his shirt and showed the massive bruising on his torso, I was startled--and I couldn't help but be slightly skeptical as well. What I couldn't figure out was a trio of scratches that started on the right side of his neck and continued in an unbroken, continuous diagonal across his chest and finally terminated on his left hip. It was like someone had taken one of those little three-pronged gardening forks down his body, but the cuts were too deep and sharp-edged for that. They had scabbed over, and even the scabs were precise and identical.

For a few days after, I tried to figure out if there was some way to do that to oneself. It was so weird because the scratches were the same depth, the same width, and completely seamless. On top of that, Jeno was right-handed. There was no way he could have done that to himself in such a perfect symmetry. But I didn't say anything to him about it at the time. When you're nineteen and a good-looking guy is telling you he's being attacked by a ghost his dead brother's coven conjured up, you figure it's probably not a good idea to comment but just to be supportive. 

A few weeks later, we were hanging out in the same park. It was October--my birthday weekend, in fact--and it was one of those perfect, crisp autumnal evenings you get in Tennessee when the season is changing. We weren't even talking about the haunting at the time; we were planning a road trip as I recollect. Jeno didn't drink, I couldn't drink, and Rob...was Rob. He was drinking, smartalec thing that he was. At any rate, we were laughing one minute and the next minute, Jeno screamed and fell backwards, landing basically on my lap. Instinctively, I grabbed his shoulders and his body was so hot (temperature) that I could feel the heat baking through his jacket and sweater.

The next thing I knew, three burns came up on the side of his throat. Each burn was as wide as my thumb. Rob pulled off Jeno's shirt and those burns followed the exact same path as the scratches had. 

I saw those burns pop up. If you're a woman and have ever burned the side of your neck with a curling iron, that's exactly what it looked like. Except Jeno was six feet tall and those burns crossed his body like a sash and disappeared into the waistband of his jeans while he was wearing a thick cable-knit sweater and a Member's Only jacket. (dated myself there) And these weren't surface burns either; they were second degree burns. We took him to the ER--I don't even remember the BS story we told to try to spin the whole mess. That night after he was released, we took him back to Rob's place, figuring he might be able to rest there. Jeno pretty much passed out as soon as we tucked him up on the couch, exhausted as he was and full of pain meds, while Rob and I sat across the room trying to figure out what in the hell we'd just seen. 

I had been at the Bell Witch cave just a few days before, and had gotten several EVPs (my first ones, actually) before the cave suddenly went spook-monster on me and drove me out. Ultimately I had been dive-bombed by crows on my way back up the cliffside trail. Creepy birds and animals tried to get hit by my car the whole twelve miles home--which has happened to me more than once on that winding country road between Adams and Clarksville. There is a strong voodoo element in the Bell Witch legend due to the fact the Bells owned slaves. The story is full of strange-looking black animals, blackbirds, dead men's lanterns, and "witchballs"--a kind of fetish the slaves made to protect themselves from the entity. So I was already a tad...jumpy and Rob knew this. But as we sat there trying to rationalize what had happened, the lightbulb in the hanging lamp over his kitchen table exploded. like--literally exploded, glass shattering, sparks in the wiring, sounding like a pop gun kind of exploded. 

Rob and I just stared at each other over all that glass, and Jeno said suddenly from the couch, "It followed me here." 

My first thought at the moment was uncharitable to say the least. Thank you so fucking much for bringing your pet ghost, Jeno isn't the best retort in such a moment. But Jeno's voice was hard to describe--terrified and quiet all at the same time--and it made such an impact on me that I couldn't say a word. Rob, bless him, instantly popped up with, "Man, we need to take you to a church." 

That's when we found out that the Mormon church in town had excommunicated Jeno. He'd gone to them for help when all the manifestations began after his brother's death, and they had literally shunned him. 

Rob and I were both Catholic. Clarksville is a military town. Rob's mother was Spanish; mine was French. 

So we loaded  Jeno into the back seat of my Bug (yes, I was a vintage VW kind of punk girl back in the day--a 1972 Superbeetle, Tennessee orange of course) and took him to the rectory next to the church both our families attended. Our parish priest was a great guy--a chain-smoking, Scotch-drinking, honest-to-God Irish lean whip of a man who had baptized, christened, and First Communion-ed me. The trip over lasted maybe five minutes, and it was the longest five minutes of my life. After what we'd already seen happen that night, and the knowledge of how Jeno's brother had died, a VW Bug didn't seem like the safest place in the world to be. On top of that, it was three o'clock in the morning, and we were going to wake up a priest. 

It's a testament to who Father Mike was that we didn't even hesitate to go to him though. This was the same priest I argued reproductive rights with, the same one who always told his congregation that if they were in spiritual trouble to come to him. I figured this would qualify, and all I wanted to do was to get Jeno to someone who knew what to do. 

The rectory is a sold-looking Victorian building next to the original Church of the Immaculate Conception in Clarksville. Rob, who was quite a bit smaller than Jeno, was literally hauling him up the front porch steps while I banged on the door and rang the doorbell. The porch light snapped on and Father Mike peered out when he opened the door. He took one look at me, then on to Rob and Jeno, and immediately pulled us all into the house.

And what happened from that point on is something I don't talk about. There were further occasions when Jeno was attacked in front of me--the worst happened one night after he'd been kicked out of his parents' home and was living in a small apartment right off-campus.Jeno had two couches in his shabby living room. I was asleep on one and he was on the other when suddenly he screamed. I jumped up like a scalded cat and he was fighting for his life against something that was only visible because it was under the blanket with him, like some huge freaking guy had crept up on that couch with him and crawled under the quilt to strangle him. I hauled Jeno off the couch into the floor, the blanket went flat, and the attack stopped.

We sat up the rest of the night in the floor with every light in the house on and my rosary beads around his neck.

But there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't help him and organized religion wouldn't. The response of both the Mormon and Catholic Churches to Jeno's situation made me angry--angry enough to forego religion for a long, long time.

As in decades. Father Mike protested on Jeno's behalf, and was moved to another parish within six months.  Before he left, he told me that it was dangerous to spend so much time with Jeno trying to help him and told Rob the same thing. But being know-it-all twenty year-olds, we ignored him. Unfortunately, Rob told Jeno what the priest had said.

Six weeks after that, Jeno left Clarksville and I never heard from him again.

So how does this all tie back to the Zozo investigation? 

Several elements of my story--French background, involvement with slavery, voodoo, blackbirds/crows, creepy-acting animals, death in a suspicious car accident, demonic oppression of friends or associates, Ouija boards, and paranormal activity--line up exactly with the similarities between Tim Wood and Darren Evans as I outlined in that Connecting the Dots article. 

All that is history. Let's talk the present.

Since last Thursday after I hung up the phone and began to research and write the articles surrounding this weekend's upcoming investigation of the Zozo house, I've been getting poked paranormally in my house. The notes I took that night and Darren's phone number mysteriously disappeared from my computer, even though I had saved my work (being a writer makes you autosave-suspicious) and turned off the computer that night. A pair of lights in my living room blew within three minutes of each other. One lamp fell from the end table for no reason--I watched it fall and there wasn't a cat near it or under it. My mother's rosary beads disappeared from my closed jewelry box in the bedroom. (found it under the living room couch)  Had a few random bangs on the front door and one from inside the linen closet in the hallway. (I live in a century-old house). I spent three days looking at the TV or computer screen with one hand over my eye due to an almost incapacitating migraine that wouldn't respond to any kind of migraine medicines. And one of our cats, a perfectly healthy eight-year old with no health issues, died for no apparent reason. Despite all this, I managed to get four articles and three press releases done on top of my normal, everyday workload.

Here's the thing. I know there are no coincidences when it comes to paranormal activity. For decades, authors working on the Bell Witch have reported losing their entire manuscripts. I know a writer who lost their entire book--back when writing a book required a typewriter and lots of Liquid Paper. Film crews would find their equipment malfunctioning inside the Bell Witch cave or the landing outside it--but it all worked perfectly on top of the cliff. This happened famously during the late 1980's when the show Unsolved Mysteries tried to film there. Also, when you're writing about the Bell Witch your source materials and research--particularly the Ingram book--disappear. So I know the history involved with writing about paranormal entities and resultant paranormal activity that interferes with that.

For the same thing to happen here makes me suspicious.

This weekend, Tim and his team along with Darren are investigating the house now infamously known as the Zozo house in Oklahoma City. Starting Friday night at 10 pm, they're going to live stream the investigation for the whole 72 hours. If you read my other articles, you'll see the history both Tim and Darren have with this entity. The chances of the entity not showing up for this investigation are practically non-existent. And it's fairly obvious to me that for some reason, I am being discouraged from writing about all this.

That never works.

So, I intend to live blog the investigation while it's ongoing with my thoughts, my observations, and how what occurs ties into the history I've uncovered and the theories currently percolating in my head. As you'll know from my blogs last October with those two aforementioned hokey 'reality' shows, my opinions will be unvarnished and blunt. If I think something is horseshit, I'll say so. If I think it's intriguing, I'll admit that too. And in the process, I'm hoping to create a unique narrative to accompany the investigation.

Plus I'm going to do a follow-up article to the interview piece I sent to Blogcritics.

I have to admit. This Zozo thing has me intrigued. Not in a "I want to play with a Ouija board!" kind of way, but in a "this history and entity makes me want to learn more" kind of way. So we'll see what happens. Check it out starting Friday night at 10 EST/9 CST, and join in what should be one of the craziest paranormal investigation events of the year. I'll be interested to hear what you think as well.

Author's note: Just as I hit send on the Twitter link to this post, Voodoo by Godsmack came on the radio. Think something's sending me a message? Timing is everything, isn't it?

Cursed: The Bell Witch--Travesty...I mean...Episode Two

Okay, folks. Anyone who follows me on Twitter witnessed some of my outrage last night at this latest attempt by A&E to Hollywood their show Cursed: The Bell Witch. So today, let's break down the episode and discuss something that may have actually redeemed this show just a little bit.

A very little. 

First off, let's establish a foundation at the beginning. If you're going to produce a show that purports to investigate actual, documented events, it behooves you to KNOW THE SOURCE MATERIAL. If at any time John Ceallach and the producers of the show could have read any of the published works based on the recollections of the Bell family who were actually victims of the haunting and eliminated all this bogus rumor-mongering that so far has been the basis of the show and could therefore avoid the heinous and borderline stupid mistakes they've made so far. This leads me to question the authenticity of the show from the get go, especially when you compare John's last name, Ceallach, to the Gaelic word cailleach. Why is that important, you ask?

Cailleach is the Gaelic word for WITCH.

Uh huh. Exactly. 

Anyone who had read the source material would be aware that John Bell died BEFORE Cate Batts, thereby nullifying any idea that he'd knocked her up and killed her. Anyone who had read the source material would be aware that John Bell's excommunication from the church was based on a spurious usury charge, but that everyone in the community was well aware that the notoriety of the haunting and the subsequent effects on the area had been responsible for the action--a community-based effort to protect themselves from the demon infesting the Bell farm. Anyone who read the source material would have known that Mrs. Batts' name was Cate, and the witch's Kate was spelled differently to differentiate between the two. Anyone who read the source material would have known that Cate Batts was an eccentric woman, looked upon with suspicion for succeeding in her disabled husband's role, but that she was respected, at the very least, by the people in the area. 

And, of course, anyone who read the source material would have read the statements of John Bell Jr., where the entity specifically says "I will not haunt or curse your descendants."

Poof. There goes the premise of the show. 

So, what did this week offer us? First off, two cops in the woods around Adams were more than a public nuisance--they were a positive danger, whipping out their handguns and panicking every time they heard a rabbit or possum in the woods. They're lucky some poor hunter didn't get blasted out of their absolute ignorance of what lives in the woods. Do they not have woods in Mississippi where there's wildlife? Cause if every little crackle of leaves around them makes them leap to the conclusion that the witch is around, then they're really, really, REALLY stupid. 

In fact, wood seems to offer a particular terror for these guys. First, there's the scary tree that's "as cold as a coca-cola right out of the ice chest". (How many nights did Chad sit up, plotting a way to use that line? He must have loved it since he's used variants of it twice.) Then there's the four by four that falls out of a barn when one of those scary noises in the woods causes our two intrepid officers of the law to whip out their handguns and charge after the witch. And then, the itty bitty little tree that falls gently onto the top of the house. 

If not the witch, the spirits of the forest definitely have it in for you dude. 

Then, of course, was the visit to Tish the Witch. Ah, Tish! After confirming that the (made out of wood) corn dolly is indeed a voodoo doll--because people in rural Tennessee are known to practice voodoo, right?--she proceeds to offer to burn said voodoo doll and that she's going to sage her shop as soon as they leave. 

Note to Tish--Febreze works better.

This brings up the Cate Batts-John Bell affair theory, which they then extrapolate to mean that she was carrying his illegitimate child and that he killed her and the baby to hide his shame. Of course, the fact that she was older, than the sources list her own children as already grown when the haunting commences, added to the fact that she not only fulfilled all her wifely duties, but ran the farm as well as a cottage industry of clothmaking with her slaves--without whom she was rarely if ever seen. Cate Batts was also a fervent member of the local church, and a really funny story about her at a revival is something I'll share in a later post. Any of these documented facts would have headed this bogus theory off at the pass, but our suspiciously named cop and his buddy apparently don't worry about things like that. 

This alarms me for the state of crime solving in the state of Mississippi. 

Then John and Chad head down to talk to the descendants of the Batts family, who would never have let this pair into the house if they knew how they'd been desecrating the memory of their ancestress for the past show and a half. But there, finally, the red herring they've been chasing for an interminable hour and a half comes to an end. Even Katie Bell, God love her, laughs in Chad's face when he tries to correct her knowledge of her own family and insists that Cate died before John Bell. 

And considering that--you know--the entire Bell family at the time of the haunting categorically denied the idea that Cate Batts was the source of or behind the witch, it seems like perhaps their woefully ignorant descendant has finally learned how off-base he was. So, strike her off the list. 

At this point, the audience--and the Wonder Twins--begin to be confronted with actual facts, so to cap that off, they then begin to--

Look at something else entirely unrelated. 

Are you kidding me? Seriously? So now, you're going to opine that John Bell cursed himself and his family and his own descendants? Well, if you're going to head down that road, let's bring on Pat Fitzhugh on and see what he has to say. 

But hold on a second here. The story goes that in North Carolina, before the Bells moved to Tennessee, John Bell shot his overseer John Black because of comments he made about how much he liked the oldest Bell daughter, Mary--according to Fitzhugh. And yet, on Fitzhugh's own website, on the genealogy page, the oldest Bell daughter is named Esther, not Mary, and was born in 1800. The Bells came to Robertson County, Tennessee in 1804-05. So there is no Mary Bell and if she had existed--say, for example, a child who died before the move to Tennessee, she wouldn't have been old enough for any overseer to talk smack about getting in her knickers.(And if he was talking about a child of that age, I don't blame John Bell for shooting the SOB in the gut, quite frankly, and I doubt anyone else would either) The oldest Bell child, son Jesse, was born in 1792. The oldest any mythical daughter named Mary could have been was 10-11 when the Bells left North Caroline for the frontier of Tennessee. 

By the way--Jesse is the oldest Bell son, and he lived a seemingly pleasant and prosperous life, happily married with nine children. He ultimately moved to Mississippi and passed away in 1843 in unremarkable circumstances.

Some curse. 

So yeah, after the first dose of reality in the whole damn show, they go to a Bell Witch expert who spins a completely bogus yarn about an imaginary daughter and incident that didn't even exist as far as I know--and as far as the expert's own website relates. That's just...wow. As for the Bells fleeing North Carolina because of the murder of their overseer, here again you only have to look at the source material--and Fitzhugh's website--to discover that two failed crops (1801 and 1804) were the impetus for the decision to go west. 

But here, the episode takes a turn that actually, for the first time, gives me the tiniest sliver of hope about the direction of the show. Getting a hold of the Bell family bible from Bob Bell, a bible that is contemporary with the haunting, from another Bell descendant is the first actual bit of evidence portrayed so far that I have never seen. This is so much more compelling than hanging fake voodoo dolls on a tree in the woods! Why in the HELL would anyone think that would somehow make this story more frightening or compelling? Ridiculous. But when the Bell family bible--which the actual family believes to be haunted, passes into John's hands, then finally the show starts to deliver the tiniest bit on its promise.

(But, oh Mr. Bell! You're really going to let these two keystone cops handle your two century old family heirloom bible, haunted or not? Oh geez...the antiquarian book collector in me is cringing.)

So then another Skype call home to John's son, and then--a nugget of activity that begins to give me hope. Of course, the idiots run out with their guns--because guns work soooooooooo well against the Bell Witch as we've already discussed in a previous post--and more noise in the woods has our guys acting like total idiots again. A teensy little tree is leaning against the house--conveniently against the bedroom where John sleeps. 

Maybe it's the famed Adams Bigfoot? Surely A&E can cook up a dude in a ghillie suit, right?

But then a little irregularly shaped mist floats into view on the cctv feed, and for the first time we are confronted with an anomaly that might actually be paranormal in nature. It makes sense, actually, since the history of the Bell bible is attached to bizarre supernatural events in the past and the bible is even now sitting in the cabin (in probably horrific conditions for the preservation of two century old paper and leather--someone send Mr. Bob Bell some acid-free tissue and a storage box pronto!). So now, for the first time, someone on the production staff has a GOOD idea. They call in John Zaffis, world-renowned demonologist, paranormal investigator, and haunted collector.  

Now, at last, someone with experience, relevant knowledge, and real insight is talking about the paranormal aspects of the case. No voodoo crap, no scary trees, and the deliberate mention not only of the Native American connotations of the case but also poltergeist AND demonic haunting potentials. And while the poster falling off the wall's timing if VERY convenient, I find it difficult to believe that John Zaffis would knowingly participate in any sort of hoax. I will point out, however, that the poster in question is secured with an alligator clip dangling off a nail--and it wouldn't be all that amazing for it to fall EXCEPT for the timing of that fall. So if it had happened without Zaffis there, I'd totally dismiss it. His presence, however, saves A&E from that particular scathing blog post--one that I'm sure I'll be able to use at some future conveniently timed occurrence though. 

And then we come to the stupidest question on the face of the earth. "Do you think this bible caused this curse on my family?"

What? WHAT? You REALLY think that a BIBLE can engineer a generational curse? Are you that stupid? Let's stop and think for a minute. If you believe in the concept of a curse, then you are automatically bound to assume will and intent--two specific energies that can only be propelled by a sentient being, whether human, animal, or paranormal. A BIBLE can't generate that kind of energy. It's a BOOK. It can have energy attached to it, but I'd be inclined to consider that kind of a paranormal residue, a miasma of energy siphoned off from the true paranormal event that lingers in and around the object. 

So now, the dynamic duo have added a real paranormal investigator to the hunt, and they're headed out--finally--to a site where paranormal activity is known to have occurred: the old Bell -cemetery, where John Bell, Senior is interred. And for the first time, an event that is frequent in paranormal investigations occurred and one that I have witnessed myself. The camera inexplicably stops working. There's a long history of this happening on the old Bell homestead, especially around the cave which is just a quarter of a mile away. In one particularly famous incident locally, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries came to the cave in the 1980's. They set up their camera equipment on top of the cliff and began to film as they descended the trail to the mouth of the cave. But once they got into the cave, none of the equipment worked. They went back up to the top of the trail and everything worked fine. They went down again--no film equipment. The UM crew tried unsuccessfully to film the cave for the better part of a couple of days, but finally gave up. They packed up and left and until the Ghost Adventures episode in the cave last year, no one had ever been able to record activity in the cave except for the occasional tourist or local. 

So I was so outraged last night that I didn't even bother to try to write this post. I waited until today, watched the episode again, and have written this post as the episode was running. I have to tell you--I'm in a quandry. Do I find the show entertaining? No, because all the BS and the apparent disregard of the legend and historical fact completely distracts me from viewing this show like any other paranormal based entertainment. I find myself completely incapable of buying into this man and his proclaimed concern about this curse--a curse I know for a fact was never placed in the first place, according to the Bells that lived at the time as well as the entity itself. The suspicious correlation of this man's last name and the Gaelic word for witch makes me feel STRONGLY that this is a clue that this man's entire story is BS, planned by the network so they could exploit the legend of the Bell Witch. But, in the second half of the show, there were some small moments of activity that could be paranormal, including an incident that I know for a fact many have also experienced in the same place with the camera difficulties in the old, private Bell cemetery. John Zaffis's addition to the episode counterbalances the absolutely bogus red herring of the North Carolina murder that Pat Fitzhugh related, and finally brings some authenticity to a show that, up to this point, has been, quite frankly, crap. And with the addition of a real paranormal investigator, perhaps John and Chad won't be so prone to whip out their guns. 

How they managed to shoot a whole season without one of those guys killing an innocent hunter in the woods is beyond me. I would not be surprised, however, if there were a couple of near misses--or that the guns were empty and are really props to help establish the identities of the two primary cast members. Anyone who knows even the slightest bit about the paranormal would know better than to think a gun would have any effect upon an entity or spirit. What are they going to shoot at? Mist? The wind? 

Just ridiculous. 

But I've made a decision. Halfway through the episode, I was about to chuck the whole mess and not watch anymore. But I'm going to keep watching--not because I think anything valuable will come from this fiasco, but because I'm having a hell of a good time fact-checking such a blatant fount of bullshit and letting you guys know what a veritable insult this whole production really is. And, of course, keep reading my blog series, The REAL Bell Witch Legend, for the FACTS regarding the Bells and the haunting that took place on their farm from 1817-1821 and still haunts Adams today. 

And most importantly, the cursed that was never placed on the Bells and their descendants--except for poor John Ceallach (remember--Gaelic for witch is cailleach),who's apparently colluded with A&E and invented this whole ridiculous mess for some kind of self-aggrandizement that becomes more evident with every single minute his face is on the television set. 

Stay tuned for episode three! Thank God there's football to pass the time before next Monday!

.