Chapter 6: Maximum Possession
I Sent a Text to a Demon
After Spiritualism was a norm on the team, it was marketed to make it sound like we’d attained a new level of paranormal prowess. We could now offer everything from the hard side of science, (as hard as you can get without the Scientific Method), audio and photos, to Bigfoot and cryptid hunts, spirit contact through seances, Reiki sessions and spiritual counseling from the Psychic and their coworker. I would have been so happy to be immersed in the full gamut of otherworldly elements and endeavoring to try everything I could if it weren’t for the people dominating the knowledge and the group operations. The Leader, and in part the Psychic, gate-kept every aspect of the group down to the interpretations of our own experiences.
It might sound like a scene straight from the movie Ouija: Origin of Evil, but I promise you this next memory is not exaggerated. It tells itself.
After the night of that harrowing pizza place investigation, we team members were informed it was time to have a new type of meeting. This involved sitting down around a table at the Ardmore Estate and listening to the Psychic lead courses in Spiritualism. I assume the Leader and the Psychic conferred to do this, but to what end I’m still mystified. These meetings, or classes, were apparently mandatory. Upon arriving to the first night of this, the Leader dipped from the lecture room, saying they were exempt for some excuse or another and left us to sit through whatever was coming. I stayed positive and hopeful for the first few minutes until I realized I had prior knowledge of everything in the printed pages in front of me.
I’m sure it was a suggestion of the Psychic and encouraged by the Leader for this person to lecture us in all things pertaining to not just their personal religion, but in what every type of alleged extrasensory ability is defined as. This was an established paranormal team, so did the Psychic think none of us knew anything about this material? Did they assume not a single one of us had ever opened an internet browser in our lives? Let alone what our own backgrounds consisted of. The Psychic had the personality that could talk as much and as circular as the Leader: eternally, if you let them. The events we put on always had egregiously long introduction speeches. 40 minutes of who we are and what we do is 30 minutes too many. By bringing the Psychic to the team, it was almost like the Leader had a new way of getting out of their promise of ‘psychic training’. I should mention now that any and all psychic ‘trainee’s were women. Only women. This way, they could focus on just the manipulation of each team member, and avoid conversations and time spent focused on these alleged extra abilities. 🚩 The extra abilities were how fuckable and coercible we were. Did you pick up on that?
The Psychic was quite a bit older than myself and most of us on the team of young adults, and from how they presented and spoke of themselves, it was evident that they had no interest in debunking alleged paranormal activity. They seemed to disagree with much of any objectivity or skepticism others or myself mentioned when investigating or discussing activity. They spoke about how much they knew for a fact what they were dealing with because of how hard they’d trained. They expressed delight in how they could potentially back up the blinking of the K2 meter and that of similar devices as well, which is a very bold claim for any individual to make in any paranormal investigation. This was the catalyst for how they’d be another “tool of the trade” in investigating. I should have walked away right then and there.
None of this was coinciding with my perception of the paranormal at the time, even in the throes of my vulnerability as I dealt with the Leader on both a personal and professional level. But I was still an adult woman with a working brain and a well-rounded lived experience in the world. None of the previous years of my life before the Leader were for nothing. Everything that was happening on this team began to stick out at wrong angles, but I was in no position to challenge anything, as that usually amounted to gaslighting and placating. The way some folks have the ability to turn any and every argument into someone else’s fault is the real extra ability. Anything I brought up a grievance about got excused or explained away and twisted around as manipulators can so easily do. I had to go along quietly, because I didn’t want to upset and lose this person who had built so much control over me and my emotions, and I didn’t want to lose out on being a paranormal investigator. A part of something. Something bigger than myself (that I couldn’t see at the time how miniscule it all really was).
The lectures on Spiritualism felt like a high school class the way we sat around a folding table and had the Psychic hovering over us handing out page after page of printouts. Full stapled packets. Not only did they disregard all trees for the sake of the evening’s instruction, they seem to have disregarded anything this team of people had experienced or learned prior to then. No one said anything like this out loud in the moment, though, the Psychic just barrelled and lectured as the minutes ticked by, going over everything on every sheet of paper.
I’m not sure at that point that anyone else on the team was really in a place to question what was happening. We were primed to believe and comply with the Leader at the threat of removal. I can’t know what the Leader was doing to anyone else, what kinds of narratives were coached and coerced in private texts, but I know it had to be similar to what was being said to me. It had to be anything that worked.
It wasn’t so much a functioning team at this point as it was four core members trying to navigate positions of power amongst each other. The Leader used titles like Lead Investigator, and roles of each person to keep that control intact. The Leader made sure we knew they possessed unparalleled psychic ability and occult knowledge, so we could not balk in the face of this new person that they seemed to trust implicitly, if not suddenly.
I’m going to try to state some things now that could paint me as a real self-righteous jerk, but, it’s just background information. I was the only person on the team who held a Bachelor’s and a Master’s, and in subjects directly pertaining to the paranormal and even (with a stretch) cryptozoology. My studies and work in anthropology and archaeology, and a field school in the jungles of Costa Rica studying primates, gave me experience, knowledge, and insight that no one else present on that team had. The circumstances of my life gave me a foundation that stood solid under the trauma of more recent years after graduate and field school, and I’d hoped to use my knowledge to help perceive and understand the paranormal. At least I thought I could bring something to the table to further discussions and deep dives. I wasn’t going for a PhD in parapsychology or anything but, fuck, I still had paid access to JSTOR. I was already versed in world religions and belief systems including Spiritualism when the Psychic came along. That’s all I’m trying to say.
On the evening of this instructional meeting, I knew full well who the Fox Sisters were, what the town of Lily Dale consisted of. I had studied how American history with the occult and spiritualism at large had evolved through different channels of belief, cultures and societal changes over the centuries. I had previously picked up the information this Psychic was putting down. Every printed page contained something I had read before. No one else there seemed to have a clue, and yet this was a paranormal team going on the search for knowledge and “answers” to the paranormal.
Even while knowing this, I was really shocked that no one else on the team had even done a light Googling of the Fox Sisters or come across it in using the internet in general, maybe looking up haunted locations or the like. I came to understand how much of what the public at large believes and knows of the paranormal really does come from television and movies.
This was where my cynicism kicked in and I felt that for all the knowledge I’d come to the team with, not a speck of what I could offer had been taken into account. I started to feel almost like an operating system, not a person. I could perform the duties of a perfect Lead Investigator, so long as I kept hold up, keeping attention on, and investing emotion into the Leader. They made sure I did. As far as what we were doing, how we were interacting with the spaces we investigated and the people we encountered, not a glance at my, or anyone else’s, individual value was given.
The Leader had long decided it was not what I could intelligently bring to the team that they wanted from me, it was website design and management, copywriting so nothing on social media appeared with typos, the team logo, artwork, merch, the social media management, photos and presentations for events. I was not a person to be listened to for what I knew, none of the team members were. I was a person to be utilized to advance that team leader’s own personal wants and carefully crafted public reputation.
The team was relegated to the School of Spiritualism that night at the Ardmore Estate without any discussion as to how we felt going forward with this person as part of our investigation protocol. It felt like being reduced, scraped bare, and infantilized into someone who was less than what I knew I could be. To this day my work is used as the team logo, the tagline, and all social media and physical media items. My art, my time, my labor from over a decade ago, going strong because the Leader molded my devotion to them while I thought they were simply as devoted to the paranormal as I was. This field was simply easy to utilize to manipulate and then assert control over all of us with.
But then it gets weirder and cringier.
That evening included another surprise. A new member who’d expressed interest in the paranormal was present, and they definitely didn’t expect to receive a lecture on spirits, possession, seances and mediumship as their introduction. We never learned how these people came into being part of the team, and even though the Leader had convinced me they loved me, I was never privy to the truth of who they were communicating with, or how much.
This potential new team member was treated the way we’d done so with anyone else besides the Psychic, it was a temporary situation to let them know what we’re like, what we’re about and if they’d fit into the team with the same general intentions and enthusiasm. However, this young person was very new to anything concerning this subject matter, and that became evident when the Spiritualism instructional ended. The Psychic stayed downstairs packing their belongings while myself and one other team member went upstairs with the Leader this newbie (I’ll call them the Affected) to share with them the haunting stories of the historic estate we called headquarters.
We stood in the second floor atrium between four ornate bedroom doors. One door led to the former primary bedroom, and was one in particular that had been heard and seen closing on its own in the presence of the Executive Director and several team members. The sound of it slamming was an instance I witnessed from the room across the atrium, and on the audio recording of the incident the sound of footsteps leading up to it could be heard before the phantom slam.
That “hotspot” was where we wandered toward as a group, three of us understanding that area to have some sort of poltergeist potential or at least repeated unexplained phenomena. The Affected was very serious and engaged the entire time. They were immediately comfortable talking about how they felt and what they seemed to perceive from the space and what emotions they were feeling already.
Our night had already included being spoken to about channeling spirits of the deceased yet I had no idea how much the Affected had absorbed. As the minutes progressed they got more and more serious, to the point of their mouth becoming a thin smirk as they stared directly at the Leader. They said less and less as the Leader stopped speaking about the home and more about what the Affected was feeling. They gave terse, one word answers or didn’t respond at all, just kept staring. The Leader then started asking questions as though they were doing an EVP session, like age and name and if they lived in the house. Literally asking this new person, still a stranger, questions as if the Affected were a ghost. The Affected proceeded to speak as though they were a former resident of the home, like they were upset and distraught over something happening. There weren’t any details in the answers, and myself and the other teammate just exchanged wide eyes as if to say “what the actual fuck is happening here?”
This person who’d never set foot in this estate home before was transforming into the women who’d lived there 200 years before. They thought they were possessed or at least they thought they were portraying what it would be like to be possessed, but I am certain I was watching a performance of some sort. Maybe they were trying to prove how psychic they were? I’ll never know.
Myself and the other team member watched this unfold, standing just behind the Affected as they and the Leader faced off. The Leader kept asking questions with a smirk almost trying to get the Affected to stop or confess to taking things too far, but they both stayed with the ruse. I remember as I looked between these two people, one was acting out a spirit possession and the other was someone who had convinced me they were previously possessed by a demon. Watching all of this as it quickly became a scene made me question why I’d believed the Leader so easily about their own alleged possessions. What I was seeing was utterly ridiculous. I really thought at any moment one of us would burst out laughing and it would all end, but they both continued speaking as though the Affected were literally a long-dead 18th century estate resident. My guess? Easiest personality to pretend to embody, having just learned about her a half hour before.
They were fearful one second and assertive the next. Sometimes they spoke in whole sentences and sometimes just single words or grunts. They started getting physical with their hands and pacing around the atrium which was open to the main (original) staircase. We ended up standing around the curved balcony railing as we followed behind. Keep in mind this estate and everything in it is priceless, historic, and part of a living museum governed by an historical association that I had close ties to. It was a privilege and a tenuous situation to be able to access this property ourselves, overnight, and utilize its space for our team functions when we wanted. This was not a place to be making a scene in.
The Affected got so worked up by being spoken to and by allegedly being taken over by a spirit that they grabbed onto the bannister with both hands and began to squeeze, leaning forward slightly and speaking about falling. I don’t know if they used the words “jump” or even said the word “death”, but this played out for several more extremely tense, cringe-inducing minutes before myself and the Leader coaxed them backward in some way and “brought them out of the possession.” Seeing them grabbing and shaking an irreplaceable component of this historic home had my gut in knots.
To this day I don’t believe this person was possessed. I believe they took what they heard from the Psychic and put on a performance they hoped would convince us of their own psychic mediumship. This stranger had just appeared at the doorway of this home for a meeting and introduction that became a lesson in Spiritualism and then proceeded to act as possessed as Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body. It was unreal, like an out-of-body experience of someone else that I was standing and witnessing. My skeptic radar was desperately pinging and yet there had to be such a careful way to pull back on this person’s actions before they caused a severe liability, or we had an absolutely absurd 911 call to make. I had to watch this scene play out with the other team member likely feeling the same way I was, but we were powerless in this scenario to the psychological and spiritual (and theatrical) power struggle playing out in that historic, haunted old home. If you’ve ever seen the South Park episode where Cartman pretends to be psychic, you have an idea how dysfunctional this evening was.
My memory then cuts to after the Affected went home under assurances they’d be just fine, and that their supposed memory loss and confusion after that incident was “normal”. No one told them to go home and rest and really think critically about what happened and what they had just done. No one advised them on how how their own mental health is more important than whatever we were doing here, or if this was too severe to handle maybe they should refrain from joining a paranormal team. I mean, it was the first time we’d met the Affected and they were severely affected. However, you’d be correct to think that due to the way this kooky paranormal team operated, we’d be seeing them again!
But not before the Leader and myself spoke to the Psychic, (still downstairs, still heard all of this play out), to address whatever it was that had just occurred in that second floor atrium. At this point I believe the other team member had gone home as well. This is what still astounds me - even the Psychic did not think what the Affected had just gone through was authentic. They thought it was acting at best and maybe delusion at worst. The Leader and I agreed. We all agreed that this person had basically succumbed to their own desire to be psychic or be a medium. The Affected had either an unwavering ability to believe themselves, or acted possessed without breaking character in hopes of being believed by everyone that they were, in fact, extremely, surprisingly psychic. I felt insane watching that. I feel insane typing it.
Who were we to use discretion and part ways amicably before this kind of drama occurred again at the peril of priceless artifacts and irreplaceable architecture? We were apparently peasants who bowed to the decisions of the Leader as they invited this person back to be part of the team. When I say no objective thinking, no questioning, no skepticism, I do mean it. Just a ‘welcome back” to a bone dry sponge of an equally curious and perilously undiscerning person ready to take everything they were provided in the paranormal as solid, irrefutable fact, and every feeling recognized as proof of something otherworldly affecting them.
That is dangerous.
There’s probably someone you know of right now who could be described the same way: the sponge so fascinated with our mysterious, uncanny world and the possibilities is holds (valid) that they fall victim to their own belief spiral (reel it in). Every new piece of information adds to their ‘truth’. Nothing gets looked at with an eye-roll of skepticism, no nugget of wisdom from any team member, leader, influencer, psychic, witch, claire-anything, is doubted. Nothing is perceived as just someone’s opinion or personal experience, everything is taken as ‘more knowledge’, more ‘truth’. The New Age to enlightened masters to conspiracy theories and all the way to red pill purgatory if you scroll to the bottom, you know what I mean? Belief spiral.
Dangerous!
That made it hard to speak critically of how we investigated, debunking became less of a priority, and how each person was feeling in the moment became much more the focus. This mindset on the team persisted and grew as the Psychic became integral to every facet of what we did. Our public ghost hunt events at different local locations lessened and we took on a new type of public event, the Spirit Circle. First we’d get an overly-long lecture from the Leader about the team, then we’d get a self-important introduction to why the Psychic is The Psychic and finally everyone would cram into a circle around a table and listen to Indigenous American flute music to center ourselves. The event would proceed with people trying to convince each other that we did hear that random noise, or smell that phantom smell. The Psychic would affirm what people said out loud with their reactions, feelings and the ‘presences’ in the room. It was always the ghosts, never just someone moving their foot under the table.
Nights of public seances lead by the Psychic and hosted by the Leader in that same haunted old home were organized monthly and I, as Lead Investigator, had to be part of them. Door greeter, ticket counter, welcome-girl. The more events we put on, the less cases we attended to. The less time I had with the Leader. The more I had time to examine what I was experiencing, and not just the ghosts. My doubts got louder. I had wanted to spend with with the Leader in the form of a relationship, I was being told I was loved, I was a soul mate, everything in time would be exactly as we’d imagined. I was important to them.
I wanted to hone abilities I was still trying desperately to believe could be real, but as the cracks in the Leader’s stories and excuses grew to fractures, I wanted to spend time with the Leader to keep chipping away at their facade of lies.
Thanks for reading. See you next week for chapter 7.