Classic Mysteries—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2023
The Rain Boy Case of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvani
by: Brent Raynes
The following story was aired originally on TV’s Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack (Season 5, Episode 18) on January 27, 1993. It became known as the Rain Boy Case. It involved a series of high strange paranormal occurrences that revolved around a young man named Donald Decker.
Here is a link to that specific program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgF79n6otjc Seasoned paranormal investigator Peter Jordan recently shared with me his memories of being involved in this bizarre and extraordinary case that came to the attention of police officers, corrections officials, clergy and others beginning back in February 1983.
Peter and his fellow investigative partner Chip Decker (no relation to Donald Decker) conducted extensive interviews of the many witnesses, as well as follow-up work on this case and were included in the Unsolved Mysteries segment. Chip became involved initially when his cousin, Richard Wolbert, a patrolman of the Stroudsburg Police Department, showed up at night knocking on his door. Chip noticed that he seemed agitated and was trembling. “Now Richard Wolbert, his cousin, is a cop who isn’t scared of anything,” Peter recalls for me. Chip says, ‘What?’ He thought someone died or something bad happened, and the patrolman goes, ‘Get your camera,’ because Chip was a photographer. ‘You got to see this?’” Peter recounts how Chip was hesitant to comply with his cousin’s request. He couldn’t understand why he didn’t just get a police photographer to take pictures of what he assumed must be some sort of crime scene. His cousin wanted him to immediately come to some house to see something and to document it for him, but Chip wanted to know why he was needed for whatever this was. He insisted he be told what this was about. So the officer explained it was something very odd that was flying around the room of this house.
Then at this point Peter explains to me that what was depicted in Unsolved Mysteries wasn’t completely accurate. In the recreation of events in the show it was merely depicted as the mysterious appearance of water or a wet mist. But he said while it was somewhat similar to water it was more than that. “At the time, you’ve got to remember, they didn’t have all the special effects,” Peter noted. Not back then. “Nowadays it would be much easier with CGI and probably a lot less expensive to do it.”
Peter continued that Chip was like, “What do you mean it’s flying around? What’s flying around the room?” and his cousin goes something like, “Water. But it’s sticky.” Naturally, Chip wants to know what he means by sticky, and he’s next told there’s not a lot of it, that it’s like beads and they’re luminous looking. Chip then responds with something to the effect of, “Wait. So, you want me to go down there and film these beads of water? Do they hurt?” His cousin assures him they don’t hurt. That they fly around the room and when they hit your clothing they dry within seconds. In the end, Chip decides not to get involved. “Probably one of the great lost opportunities,” Peter says. “But on the other hand, knowing what we know about photography and the paranormal, the batteries would have been thoroughly drained or there would have been nothing but black images. There wouldn’t have been anything on the film.”
“Wolbert goes back. After this is over the police are very upset. At this point there’s probably like maybe 12-15 witnesses to this already. Seven of them are from the police department. One of them is the Police Chief who saw it. The Landlord, his wife, their family, their children – all these people came in at various times and saw it. Some are absolutely fascinated by it. Some are absolutely petrified, believing it’s demonic, and one didn’t want to ever go back, calling it a house of horrors.”
“I get a call from Chip Decker saying, ‘I’ve got this case. Stan Gordon [a long time Pennsylvania ufologist – editor] said you might be able to help me out. He tells me and I can’t believe what I’m hearing that nobody went down there to film it. So, I meet with the police. I go to the police department and there’s these big burly cops sitting there and we tape and record on video and audio tape everyone’s testimony, and I’ve got to tell you when I was done with that I was like holy maceral, I never had a case with so many great witnesses who have seen something not just happening briefly but happening over a long period of time, and they’re seeing something that sounds like something that’s out of a mediumistic séance back in the 1700s or 1800s where you have ectoplasmic formations. So, we get into great detail about this.” “In the beginning it looked like it was coming down the wall, like its coming from let’s say a leaky pipe, but it would be dripping down like let’s say about a foot below the top where the roof line is. So, in other words, it’s not coming from a corner or anything like that. It’s coming from a point a short distance below. It looks like it’s dripping, but it looks like it’s dripping at that point. “So, there’s two tenants and Donald Decker is one of the other tenants. They had found him living at the YMCA. He was homeless at the time, and they felt bad for him, and they brought him in. They said it was the worst decision they ever made. They bring him into the house and within a short period of time of him living there he gets word that his grandfather, with whom he’d had a tumultuous relationship, died.” Later the young man would reveal a dark secret about his grandfather, claiming that as a young boy he was repeatedly raped by his grandfather, along with his younger sister, right in front of him. His grandfather was regarded as an esteemed member of a local church. But according to Donald Decker, the grandfather would constantly tell him that if he ever even so much as thought about breathing a word of this to anybody about what was going on in their house, he would be dead along with his sister.
“So, he gets word that his grandfather died and part of him is greatly relieved,” Peter recalls. “He goes to the funeral. Comes back from the funeral but has these weird feelings about his grandfather’s spirit because his grandfather had said to him, ‘Even if I die, I will come back and take care of business, so let’s not talk about this at all.’”
“The tenants start noticing Donald, when he was sitting in a chair, in the living room watching TV, he was, they called it zoning out, where he looked like he was in an altered state of consciousness. They would say, ‘Donald!’ and he was just staring blankly. At that point, they said the temperature would start changing in the room, and it would become cold. All of a sudden, this water starts dripping. Suddenly Donald would like snap out of his altered state of consciousness. It would be gone. No water dripping down. All they see is gray residue.”
“They start checking pipes. They start doing all the things people do to see if there’s a leak. Nothing. They call the landlord. He comes over and looks at it and says, ‘Well, this is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,’ and then when Donald’s there sitting in the room, often in a trance state, this would start happening again.”
“When I heard this my first impression was Donald is a medium. How did he become a medium? I don’t know a lot of kids, in all the years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve never been involved in a case like this where a poltergeist’s alleged focus goes into a trance state and then things start flying around the room. I’ve never seen that. In all the cases I’ve been involved with there could be things happening that people report but everybody is fully conscious and awake. It doesn’t appear that anybody is in an altered state when that’s happened at that time. In this case, it seemed dependent on Donald being in these weird trances. I found that really interesting.” “So, the landlord calls a plumber. The plumber comes over and checks everything. He said, ‘This isn’t a leak. There’s no pipe here by this wall, so I don’t even know how’ – and you could see the stain where it was. It always left a stain. The plumber said, ‘It’s not dripping from overhead, so I don’t know what you’ve got going on here.’”
“This gets worse and worse. Eventually, it gets so bad, there’s so much of this stuff and the room is getting so cold and then it would get warm again. They decide they need help. They don’t know what to do. They call the police. I think the landlord was friends with John Baujan, another police officer in Stroudsburg, and he comes to the house by himself, because he figures what can this be. He goes in and he sees Donald sitting there and they’re talking and there’s nothing happening, but then all of a sudden, he starts seeing this and then he starts feeling it on the side of his face and goes like ‘What the hell’s that?’ And he reaches up and he said, when he pulled it apart, he said it was sticky like a spider’s web.”
“I don’t know if you know but the classic description that people have of ectoplasm from years ago, in seances and so forth, parapsychologists would be there, they’d take their hand and put It through it and it would be cold and clammy, and the texture was that of a spider’s web.”
I interrupted Peter at this point. “And then there’s angels’ hair too,” I said.
“Ah ha,” Peter said. “Right. You’re starting to see. Remember we talked about Keel? Keel’s knowledge was probably 50 times bigger than anybody I ever knew about occult literature. A lot of these things in there are highly reminiscent of what we hear and have heard reported in UFO contactee literature and other Fortean events. There are these weird parallels and that’s why Keel after enough of doing this saying, ‘What is it we’re dealing with? Why is everybody so certain that it’s just this physical thing when there’s all of these occult markers? Why is this so similar to manifestations in seances?
“Baujan brings in other police officers. Now they’ve got four police officers. Like good scientists and skeptics these cops say, ‘I think it’s the kid, meaning Donald Decker, is spitting. So, we’ve got to do some serious testing here.’ I asked several of the police officers what made you come to the conclusion that he was spitting? Was it simply the fact that it looked like spit?’ They go, ‘It was the combination of that, plus on a couple of occasions we caught him spitting.’ I go, “Actually spitting?’ They go, ‘Well, not really. Like we would see something. My eye was always focused on him because I thought he had something to do with this.’” “They’re not making the association like a poltergeist investigator would. They’re looking at it as a cop. ‘We’ve got this kid here who is doing tricks. There’s no other way. And he’s spitting. That’s how it’s getting on the wall. It doesn’t really make sense, but they said out of the corner of their eye a couple of times they caught him spitting.’ I said, ‘Spitting like just spitting?’ They said, ‘No, no, no. He’s really good at it. He spits out of the sides of his mouth.’ I said, ‘You know how that sounds? That’s crazy. How would he do that?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. We tried duplicating.’ This is how serious they were. He goes, ‘We’d go in the bathroom, and we try and see if any of us could spit that way. We did some off to the side, but it wouldn’t go very far.’ But they go, ‘Maybe he has something in his mouth because sometimes it would come out of both corners of his mouth.’ One of the police officers said to me, ‘I saw it come out and it actually looped up’ – listen to this – ‘looped up into the air and then continued on its way, and then would hit the wall, so I knew that’s how it’s getting on the wall. It’s from him spitting and creating these spirals.’’ “So, understand this. Imagine someone being in a situation where he has no knowledge, no history [of this kind of thing]. They don’t know what’s going on. What is the first assumption going to be? It’s always when the kid is present. Therefore, he’s doing it, doing it through trickery. The police were like, “We’re going to figure it out.”
“So now what they decide to do they do this experiment, which they showed on Unsolved Mysteries. They take a paper bag and they put it over his head. He’s standing. They put his arms at his sides and one officer holds his hands there because they’re convinced that’s also the way he’s scratching himself. That was the other thing that came up. He would have these long scratches, like made by a cat or a tiger, on his arms, and they said, ‘I think he’s a cutter.’ There were suggestions that in his past Donald had been a cutter – a cutter like a psychiatric patient or whatever that will often cut themselves with knives. He had been known to do this when he was put in certain facilities. So, they hold his arms down and then they surround him [three officers – editor]. He’s got a paper bag over his head. What a sight this is, and all of a sudden they said the room started getting very chilly. Very cold. They’re wearing heavy police unforms. All of a sudden, Donald says, ‘It’s going to happen.’ And they go, ‘What?’ And he goes, ‘You’ll see.’ And with that they said it was like a rocket. His body flew out of their hands. They saw him fly out of their grasp. He flew across the room, slammed into the wall, fell down, and when they took the paper bag off his head there were these long gashes. He was in a dazed state.”
“Needless to say, this was the capper. That convinced them that whatever this was it wasn’t a trick. There was something going on here that as they said, was beyond their area of expertise, and it was time to get the religious people involved.”
“The story is so long, so convoluted and it’s so fascinating. I remember at the time, after all of this work they were very disappointed.”
Peter described how the officers wanted to secure a sample of the liquid, but instead all that was left was a gray residue. Peter noted how many early paranormal researchers like back in the 1800s detailed observing this stuff they called ectoplasm that issue from mediums. “This stuff would attach itself to the clothes and it would evaporate quickly and leave a gray residue,” Peter said. “It’s documented.” He felt it was the same phenomenon. “Unfortunately, the history of seances and spiritualism is littered with fraud. So, what happened was the reaction against it was so severe that even to this day most people feel there’s no legitimacy. Most parapsychologists nowadays feel that this is an ugly part of the past. It’s been totally discredited, and we shouldn’t pay any attention to any of it, that probably none of it is true. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” I interjected, “It’s like the contactee thing.”
“It’s the exact same thing,” Peter replied.
“At the time I remember reaching out to Scott Rogo and other researchers and asking them what they thought and they said, ‘Ectoplasm isn’t real.” I decided to research it. In New York I went to the Parapsychology Foundation, which was on the upper west side at the time. They had this incredible library. I ran in there because I was trying to find old books I couldn’t find on ectoplasm that had been written by certain people. There was one I was looking for in particular. I remember walking into the Parapsychology Foundation, identifying myself to this woman. I told her what I was looking for and she said, ‘Why are you looking for this? Nobody has ever come in here asking for this.’ I go, ‘Oh really?’ She goes, ‘No, they want all the modern things or they want the journals from the American Society for Psychical Research or the parapsychology research letters or clinical experimental articles, journal articles. We have some of those books but nobody has ever asked for them. I said, ‘Well, I have this case.’ I mentioned it. She said, ‘What does it have to do with these books on ectoplasm? Surely you don’t believe that this is ectoplasm. Who told you that?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m just going on the basis of what’s been seen.’ And she says, ‘No, there’s no such thing.’ I remember being struck by that thinking, ‘Wow, that’s how far that this has gotten. It’s not even something that’s considered viable.’ So anyway, I got the book. I couldn’t take it out. I had to stay there. I went through the whole book. It was like this big fat book. There was a copy machine and back in the day you had to put nickels in. I was there for the longest time. I copied them and I brought it all home and as I’m reading, I’m thinking, ‘This is exactly what we’re talking about here.’ The only difference was that the ectoplasm didn’t ever seem to form faces as you see in seances and so forth, or bodies of people. This was basically restricted to manifestations of just in most cases beads of what they said looked like oil. There was like a luminosity to them. They were reflective.”
“One cop said to me, ‘You know what? The weirdest thing was sometimes they would behave like they were airplanes.’ I go, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Well, you’d see these, out of the corner of our eye, and after a while we got good at seeing, and we knew to watch Donald, but if you looked straight on at Donald he was out of it.’ Nothing would happen, and that goes back to poltergeist cases. If we’re here and the person is over there, that’s the focus of it and very often something will distract us and we’ll look away and then it takes place over on the left side instead of the right side where we’re looking. So, it’s associated with distraction very often.” “He said we knew we had to look peripherally, look out the corner of our eye and watch what he’s doing and suddenly something would happen, but occasionally you would see if form out of his mouth, go across the room, but then, I swear to you, it would stop on a dime, and then it would resume it’s journey, which was usually toward our face or side of our head or somewhere on our clothing.’ And again, he goes, ‘The thing that was amazing is we couldn’t get over the fact that we tried this. We actually did experiments back at police headquarters. We would take spit and shoot it out of straws at one another.’”
“In the beginning, we had assumed that it ended. We knew there were some incidents after he was basically kicked out of Ann Street, because they didn’t want to deal with this anymore. Wherever he went to stay in people’s houses they would experience the same thing. But then he would steal from them. So, when somebody took him in they would find missing jewelry and things like that, so he would be arrested again, thrown back in jail and that’s when we learned later that people at the jail were complaining about him like his jail mates would suddenly start being pummeled with water. They were scared of him. They kept asking to transfer him out of their cell and he kept getting moved. He was in with some of these really bad guys that would just kill you, but when they realized that this kid has the ability to do these things, he loved it because he said it was a cloak of protection.”
“Then I met one of the prison heads, David Keenhold. He did his own test where he would stand outside of the cell, in an adjacent cell, and he would say, ‘Okay, Donald, go ahead. Give me what you got.’ It was separated by these cinder block walls. So he’d tell Donald, ‘Go ahead.’ He said all of a sudden, he would hear Donald cackling on the other side. Laughing. ‘All of a sudden I would see these semi-luminous beads, oil beads, coming through the cinder block, very slowly and then accelerating, and they would splatter me all over.’”
Reflecting on the possible implications of these events, Peter commented: “I had a lot of poltergeist cases where people will see doppelgangers. They will see someone like a family member who is sleeping in bed, but they’ll see their doppelganger, thinking it’s them, coming into their room, and they said sometimes it’s like not the full vision of the person. It’s like half the body. The top of the body could be physical looking, but the bottom portion is kind of hazy. So, what we have to ask ourselves is that person able through mental ability to actually disgorge something of a substance like this out of their body and then use that to create a vision of a person. And let’s go beyond that. What if that person is able to actually create a UFO scenario. An abduction? To create, or co-create, as Greg Bishop would say.”
“When we did Unsolved Mysteries, the producer and the director were really pressuring both me and my ex-partner to commit ourselves to this being demonic possession, and I can’t even tell you how many times I felt like I was in an interrogation room because they didn’t like what I was saying, which was I don’t have any evidence that it was demonic possession. I can’t disprove that. But I can’t prove it. It could have something to do with his own abilities and that he internalized this conflict, this trauma that he had with his grandfather.”
“We had much greater evidence that he was producing these effects. It was seen coming out of his body.” Peter further pointed out there was no apparition or any paranormal voice of the grandfather. “There was none of that,” he said. “The only thing we can say is Donald believed that, in the beginning, but years later when I re-interviewed him, I remember I even asked him, ‘Do you still think it was your grandfather and he said, ‘He may have been involved. He may have contributed, but I think a lot of this is my ability that I learned.’”
