Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture

2 The Truth Is Within

20 2 The Truth Is Within Sometimes it is easier to recognize a phenomenon than it is to define it. So it is with the loose association of beliefs, ideas, phenomena , and experiences variously labeled “new age,” “paranormal,” “the supernatural ,” “occult,” “unexplained phenomena,” “metaphysics,” “pseudoscience ,” “mysticism,” and a host of other terms. Depending upon one’s personal definition, crystal balls, Bigfoot, ghosts, and palm reading are similar things; by other definitions they are vastly different. Adding to the confusion, researchers and retailers often label the same phenomena using different terms than do the general public. For example, scholars of religion often use the term “New Age” to refer to a social movement that started in the 1960s, which focused on the development of personal enlightenment and freedom from conventional thinking and religion.1 To bookstores, New Age is simply a section in which employees shelve books on ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, psychic powers, Atlantis, and books about a host of other beliefs or experiences. We do not wish to add to such confusion here by coming up with new terminologies, but we hesitate to use a term such as “New Age.” First of all, the term refers to a specific movement that emerged at a particular time. Further, it suggests that our phenomenon of interest is something “new.” This is far from the case. Consider the following tales: Seattle, Washington Sara and her husband moved into a rental house near the University of Washington, sharing with an old friend, Jason, to save money. Sara fell in love with a room on the main floor; Jason happily took one of two rooms on the upper floor. About a month after they moved in, strange The Truth Is Within 21 things started to happen. Sara was the first to get up in the mornings. Oftentimes while getting ready for work, she would hear the unmistakable sounds of someone walking down the stairs. The footsteps ceased at the landing, but no one was ever there. Sara learned to ignore the sounds, becoming flustered only when her two cats would on occasion stare and hiss at the stairs. She even put up with the lights in her bedroom, which sometimes switched on and off by themselves. The experiences were irritating but never felt menacing. Jason was not so lucky. He worked a swing shift at a warehouse pulling orders for grocery stores. One evening he arrived home at around 11 p.m. and went up to bed. He had just turned off his light when he felt a weight at the end of the bed. In the darkness a hazy form slowly took shape near his feet. What looked like an old man with a hunched back was facing away from Jason, its head in its hands, seemingly distressed. As if it could feel Jason’s eyes upon its back, the “man” turned and looked directly at him. Jason shrieked upon seeing the wrinkled, balding visage with completely black eyes, and he flipped on the light. The spirit faded away, but an impression remained for several minutes where it had been sitting on the bed. Jason slept with a light on after that. Charleston, South Carolina Before moving its location in 2007, the Orange Grove Elementary school in Charleston, South Carolina, was surrounded by woods that backed up to the Ashley River. John and his brothers attended Orange Grove as children. After school they would often enter the woods to play (sometimes even sneaking into the periphery during recess). Near the center of the wooded area in a small clearing was an old cemetery with weathered headstones from a prominent Charleston family dating back to the 1600s. The local kids told tales of specters and spooks that walked among the graves, and they dared one another to enter the cemetery. Later, developers purchased the land and immediately made plans for a new subdivision . The graves were dug up, and the coffins were moved to another graveyard nearby. In the process, however, many of the old grave markers were broken, and the careless workers simply threw them into a pile. One day John and his brothers found the pile. He grabbed a broken tombstone and brought it home, thrilled to have a gruesome souvenir to use as a doorstop for his room. 22 The Truth Is Within From the day he brought the headstone home John was uncomfortable . He felt someone...