Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2024
Believe in It and It May Appear
by: Dennis Stamey
If there's a theme in our latest book The Halloween Planet: High Strangeness and the Trickster Archetype, it’s that belief plays a crucial role in paranormal activity, probably more than anything else. By belief, we mean that if we collectively imagine something is skulking in the shadows, it could materialize. Somebody sees a strange critter in the woods, people get excited and then they too see it. This scenario happens a lot. But once they lose interest and consequently stop believing, it will disappear. Autosuggestion might play a role, but if multiple witnesses continuously see the same anomaly, that idea doesn't hold.
In 1856, in the small Welsh community of Abersychan, two men were hunting near the Blue Boar public house when they saw a horrifying apparition with two heads. A reporter covering the story said that the men were “believers of ghostly mysteries” and that one witness was so terrified by the spook’s “hideous appearance” that he had to be bedridden. Soon others were seeing the two-headed ghost and this caused “great terror” among the population (we’re referencing the Illustrated Usk Observer for November 1, 1856).
Residents refused to leave their homes after dark, unless “some urgent necessity compels them.” A laborer named Dan Harley, a “true believer in apparitions” had an urgent business that kept him out late one night and encountered “the dreaded phantom.” According to the Observer, “he remained transfixed to the spot for several seconds, but as soon as he thought the specter was disappearing, he made a desperate effort and reached the house wherein he repeated undefinable prayers to his preserver.”
Where did this horror come from? Some locals explained that it was “the ghost of an old man who suddenly met his death by falling downstairs and splitting his skull. The old man, when living, was an apostate from the Roman Catholic faith, therefore, could not have rest in the other world; consequently, he is a wanderer upon the face of this one.”
We’re unable to determine what happened to the two-headed ghost unless people simply got tired of its presence.
Another example is the origin of the so-called Dogman. Although a monstrous bipedal canine creature had been seen by two lumberjacks in Wexford County, Michigan, back in 1887, it remained an obscure fable. That was until 1987 when WTCM Radio was in Traverse City, Michigan. played a song called “The Legend" written by Steve Cook, one of the DJs, as an April Fool's stunt. Later that day, WTCM began receiving calls from people who claimed to have seen the beast.
Cook said that he has collected over 500 reports of the Michigan Dogman but believes about a hundred "seem plausible and credible and just a little too weird to explain away." He also spoke with an elder from the Ottawa-Chippewa tribe who was convinced that the Dogmen were members of a shapeshifting skin-walker tribe. Had people been seeing cryptids in the woods all this time, the song dredging up terrifying memories? Or did the collective psyche put these thoughts inside their heads the same way it does with urban myths (yes, urban myths, these yarns don’t pop up out of nowhere)? A lot of these stories were undoubtedly bogus with possibly only a handful being true. The rest could have been images planted by something we have come to call the Trickster, which is a superorganism created by our collective psyche. In recent years, Dogman has grown as ubiquitous as Bigfoot with reports spreading across the country and even the world, all stemming from a tongue-in-cheek song. Speaking of urban myths, a lot of weird stories we hear could also be put into our thoughts (and we're not talking about malicious gossip). These involve conspiracies, superstitious practices, or current trends in thinking. Right now, many ET proponents are telling us that there are millions of alien hybrids walking around even alleging that they too might be hybrids. Where did that silly notion start? We remember back in the late sixties when there was a massive worldwide UFO wave hearing rumors about space beings coming to kidnap teenage girls. This created a lot of fear among young people and was repeated in different cities of America including my small hometown. On 29 September 1914, Arthur Machen published a short story entitled "The Bowmen" in The Evening News about a ghostly medieval army that helps the British defeat the Germans during the Battle of Mons. Six months after the story appeared there, numerous reports came from the battlefield telling how soldiers witnessed angels and phantom cavalrymen. Phyllis Campbell’s 1915 memoir Back to the Front: Experiences of a Nurse mentions hearing about soldiers seeing Joan of Arc or the archangel Michael. The British High Command was unable to determine the source of these yarns but suggested that they might have been concocted by anonymous officers to boost morale. Belief can also cause strange occurrences to keep recurring in a particular area, places we dubbed haunted zones. So how does belief play a role in the paranormal anyway? We theorized that everything, even emotions and consciousness, has its frequency. Of course, this idea is also taught in The Kybalion which is supposed to convey the teachings of medieval Hermetic texts although there is disagreement over that.
The book's principal rule is that everything is "mind" and that the universal is "mental." Another principle of The Kybalion is that "Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates." A lot of self-help gurus are now applying these teachings saying that an individual can reshape his or her reality through visualization or changing the brain's frequency. We're not sure if they're aware of this treatise, but their ideas are similar. Visualization, however, has always been a concept in Eastern mysticism.
We added our spin to these arcane didactics by theorizing that the higher the frequency, the more there is energy, and with ample energy, the easier the Trickster or superorganism created by our collective psyche can create strange manifestations. One major example is that during times of stress, UFOs and other preternatural events are likely to be reported. In his book Lo!, Charles Fort documented cases of strange aerial lights, ghosts, poltergeists, and even elusive wolves in the United Kingdom during the Welsh religious mania of 1904-05. We also found that there were a series of riding mishaps during fox hunts in England during this same period. A psychic we read about had a term for these events calling them "collective energies."
While fear and excitement can generate more energy than belief, they are like adrenalin rushes dissipating over time. Belief can be long-lasting. Belief is a strong emotion, something every psychologist will agree with. Let's say there's a spot where a murder was committed decades ago or was thought to have been committed (doesn't have to have occurred). Over time, people may see orbs and apparitions or hear strange sounds.
John Keel proposed that such areas or "windows" were centers of geomagnetic disturbances. Ultraterrestrials as Keel called them (we contend that there's only a single intelligence behind the supernatural, not a multiplicity of them; if that were the case, they would have to be extremely well-organized like the demons in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters), dwelling on a higher level of the super spectrum, could use this energy to create transient matter be it cryptids, the men in black, or flying saucers. That could be true in part, areas where there is a high output of electromagnetic energy be it telephone lines or power plants, would allow the Trickster to manifest its illusions (what we term simulated reality or SR, ersatz but ostensibly real). However, belief is another source of power and perhaps the strongest. These window areas Keel envisioned might not even exist as such. Point Pleasant, West Virginia, the home of Mothman, thought to be the quintessential "window," doesn't seem to be sitting on any geomagnetic hotspot, but it does have a bloody history.
Encounters with little people, Bigfoot, and Skin-walkers are quite prevalent on Native American reservations, which is not surprising since these creatures are embedded in tribal folklore. There are numerous Bigfoot sightings on the 27,000 square miles of Navaho nation land, located in northern New Mexico and occupying a space roughly the size of West Virginia. In 2013, the Durango Herald reported that “dark intruders on private property,” were thought to be responsible for stealing or killing livestock and raiding gardens, among other crimes. Sightings of these “dark intruders,” believed to be Bigfoot, were growing, according to the Herald, “more and more with each year.”
A year earlier, New Mexico’s Farmington Daily-Times also reported an increase in Bigfoot activity, mentioning three reports from witnesses who either saw the creature itself or discovered its footprints between January 2011 and January 2012. One man said he came upon Bigfoot while herding his livestock in the Chuska Mountains. “My animals froze and I saw the thing walk over the hill,” he told the paper through a Navajo interpreter. “It was taller than 8 or 9 feet, taller than the bushes, upright and hairy.”
There was also an uptick in UFO reports in that region.
We read about a folktale from Tarboro, North Carolina, concerning a farmer who was executed by the British for his disloyalty to the Crown. Before he was killed, the man threatened that a banshee would rise from the river and come after them, which it did. Since then orbs, disembodied voices, and even the wail of the banshee have been heard along this stretch of the Tar River. This story is unquestionably spurious (a banshee?) but it's the belief locals maintain that has created these anomalies. Interestingly enough, a lot of these ghostly sites, and there are thousands of them scattered across the planet, have no factual history behind them. They are products of urban legend. There's an ornate gravesite belonging to the Nathusis family in La Belle, Wisconsin. What draws particular interest to this plot is the statue of a young woman holding flowers and staring pensively at the ground. Stories say that those visiting the grave die mysteriously. Other legends allege that the statue sometimes drips blood or comes to life as an apparition and walks to a nearby lake where it disappears. There are also creepy tales about the lake where people have indeed drowned either in boating accidents or by falling through the ice. Some have seen specters or heard eerie laughter.
In that same cemetery, a worker was killed in 1917 when a colossal headstone belonging to the wealthy Valentine family fell on top of him while it was being hoisted into place. Since that time, the ghost of a man has reputedly been seen near the plot. Another area of the graveyard that's said to be haunted is Baby Hill where dozens of infants and children are interred. People have reported hearing babies crying there. The laughter of unseen children, by the way, has been heard all over La Belle and even near the lake.
Wisconsin, by the way, has its share of haunted zones. There's Hilbert Road near the town of Hilbert where people have reported encountering a man holding a lantern and leaning against a tree usually between midnight and 5 a.m. If anyone approaches him, he will ask if they have seen his daughter. To their horror, they discover that he has only half a face. If you shine a light on the man, he will vanish. According to legend, a young girl was killed on this road in the early 1900s and the father, unable to accept her death, wandered the highway looking for her even after he too passed away. While there is no record of a girl dying in an accident during that period, there is a newspaper article about a woman killed in a car crash on Hilbert Road in 1922.
Another scary Wisconsin thoroughfare is McKeeth Drive outside Galesaville. As local tradition tells us, a man crashed his car into a tree under peculiar circumstances and since then people have seen either a ghostly man crossing that road or a car smashing into a tree before disappearing. Others swore that they had been followed by headlights until they turned off McKeeth Drive.
Haunted roads in America, and probably everywhere, are a dime a dozen. An urban tale about a car or bus crash can spark anomalous occurrences, some of these tragedies being true while many are hearsay.
Denise Dodge in her podcast "Dark and Divine Encounters," Season 1 Episode 1 talks about two haunted zones, one with a horrible past and the other with a more melancholic reputation. The first is a brownstone house built in 1856 on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, New York, which has earned the sobriquet The House of Death. The first residents were James Boorman Johnson and his wife. Mr. Johnson was the founder of the Metropolitan Underground Railroad and the Broadway Underground Railroad. Although they lived at the house for only a few years, they always talked about how modern the place was and its convenient location near the park. But after the Johnsons left, residents kept coming and going, saying that the house was haunted. A rumor even surfaced saying that a demon dwelled there.
How this notion of the house being haunted started is unclear, but it seems to have begun when cycling celebrity Fred H. Andrew, one of the owners, struck a young boy in August of 1897 during a moment of “reckless bicycle riding." The boy suffered a broken leg and Andrew was arrested.
Three years later, Mark Twain moved in. Twain was in a bad state at the time, faced with bankruptcy and undergoing depression. One evening, he watched a large piece of kindling rise into the air. Twain figured it was a rat and shot the wood causing it to fall to the floor. There were a few drops of blood where it fell. In the 1930s when the house was converted into apartments, ghost activity increased. Residents reported seeing a woman in white, a child, a cat, and even Twain himself. Jan Bryant Bartell, the actress and writer, took up residency at one of the apartments in 1957. She had so many paranormal experiences that she wrote about in a book entitled Spindrift: Spray from a Psychic Sea.
This elegant building has also seen a murder-suicide as well as the abuse of the daughter of children’s author and editor, Hedda Nussbaum by the girl's father which led to her death in 1987. Whether paranormal activity continues there today is unclear.
Flanders Hotel built on the Ocean City, New Jersey, boardwalk in 1923 has a pleasant ghost known as the Lady in White who wanders the hallways of the massive hotel in her bare feet. Sometimes she's seen laughing and dancing. The ghost is thought to be the spirit of a young woman in her early twenties named Emily whose boyfriend was killed in World War I, but nobody seems to know why she roams the hotel.
The old brownstone in Greenwich Village and the Flanders Hotel are good examples of belief-creating spectral images. The curse that hung over the so-called House of Death was probably the result of unfounded rumors which snowballed over the years. Stories about the Lady in White at the Flanders Hotel, on the other hand, might have been based on the fact that the building was named after Flanders Field, the American Cemetery in Belgium, where soldiers killed in World War I are buried. In addition, the hotel has catacombs underneath which has created a spooky ambiance.
We discussed sightings of other phantom women in white in our last book. They are more or less a standard in ghost lore appearing on roads, in old houses, cemeteries, or beside lakes and rivers. It's difficult to determine how they originated but during medieval times, they were known to be harbingers of death. These are archetypal images that date back to the beginning of Western civilization.
In recent times, the women in white have become the spirits of women who were murdered, killed in accidents, or committed suicide. Sometimes there are variations on this theme. In January 1981 when the weather was particularly frigid there were numerous sightings of a half-naked cadaverous woman walking along Kennedy Hill Road in Byron, Illinois. When motorists stopped to help, she would disappear. Scuttlebutt had it that she was either the victim of a hit-and-run while jogging or a teenage girl killed in a car accident while on her way to the prom.
Native American burial mounds as well as burial mounds in Britain have been the scene of strange occurrences, whether it be odd lights or spectral figures, not because these structures are sitting on ley lines or because they were built for mystical purposes but because people have mistakenly regarded them as sacred. Among the most famous of these earthworks is the Effigy Mound Monument in Harpers Ferry, Iowa, which has over 200 Pre-Columbian mounds, many of them shaped like various animals, Visitors to the Effigy Mounds have told of hearing moans and chanting, seeing flitting shadows, and experiencing cold spots.
Several of these haunted zones seem to have arisen just within recent years. On a Facebook page devoted to the paranormal, we found a post from someone we'll call Bill. Bill related that back in the early 2000s, he and his friends were always ghost-hunting.
One night, they hiked to the top of a "pinnacle rock" where Wicca reportedly practiced its brand of white magic, although there were rumors of more sinister rituals by Devil worshippers. After an hour of "not much going on" they began to head back down the trail to the road. Bill espied something out of the corner of his eye moving along the edge of the woods maybe 200 yards away. Within a few seconds, it had traveled 100 yards in his direction. Since the moon was full, they could make out that the shape was seven to nine feet tall and massive.
Bill inched closer to get a better look and saw that the creature had horns like a deer, a horse-shaped head but with a shorter snout, an upper body like a gorilla, and legs resembling that of a goat but much larger. The monster growled and moved toward Bill who started running. His friends had already taken off. The creature chased after him, its hooves sounding like a horse galloping. Bill and his companions sped off in their pickup, too afraid to look back. Bill claimed that years later he met some other people who had also been to that spot and encountered the same monstrosity.
Of course, you have to be circumspect about stories you find on social media. But Bill did begin his post by saying he was reluctant to talk about this incident and ended by hoping no one would laugh at him. That carries some weight we suppose.
Besides hotels, houses, or graveyards entire towns can become haunted zones. Most notable is Whitewater, Wisconsin. Morris Pratt emigrated to the area from New York in the 1880s and established an institute or “college” for spiritualism in 1889 which he named the Morris Pratt Institute. He ran the institute until his demise in 1902 when he died. The institute moved to Milwaukee in 1946 where it still operates.
Pratt’s spiritualism, which raised the ire of Whitwater’s religious community, produced a dark legacy and now Whitewater is so steeped in legends of ghosts and witchcraft that it has become known as “Second Salem.” His institute even became known as Spook Temple. There are rumors that satanic rituals were conducted in secret tunnels beneath the city and around the historic stone water tower in Starin Park and of a “forbidden book” locked away in the basement of the Andersen local library. The tome reputedly can drive readers to madness and suicide. There’s also a triangle, called the Witches’ Triangle, formed by the city’s three cemeteries, the center of which is the original site of the Spook Temple.
In 1923, fishermen claimed they were out on Whitewater Lake when a large creature with tentacles overturned their boat and tried to drag them under. They fought the monster off and eventually broke free but were covered in small bite marks. During the summer of 1944, there were stories that those living alongside the lake were experiencing strange events; however, to this day nobody seems to know what these events were. Local lore says that to make it stop, men from the area gathered at a small local cemetery, where they dug up all of the coffins there that had been buried vertically in the ground. Upright burials are usually done when there is not much space. The men brought the coffins back to the lake, weighted them down with rocks, and threw them in. Then in 1992, three Whitewater students who were renting a house on the lake said they watched four men dressed in black clothes performing a strange ritual on the beach, chanting and swaying. At first, the students, who wanted to remain anonymous, assumed the men were drunk. But then, they claim, a thick fog rolled in from the lake, and a green light was glowing through it. Another resident saw the same spectacle and called the police. In the morning, investigators found small bones and rocks arranged in strange patterns in the sand.
Maybe it's relevant to note that Whitewater is only 14 miles from Elkhorn where a monster is supposed to prowl Bray Road.
Whitewater was also home to three murderers. The first, Mary Worth, likely didn’t exist. She was an axe-wielding maniac who cursed the town when she was executed for her crimes. However, Bloody Mary as she’s commonly known seems to be an urban myth that can be found throughout the country. In the 1880s, four members of the Horan family fell ill and died over a two-year period. The coroner found strychnine in the last victim’s stomach One of the daughters, Nellie, was charged with murder but was later acquitted due to lack of evidence even though a witness testified that she saw Nellie buying strychnine at a drug store. The third murderer was Myrtle Schaude who in 1923 poisoned her husband also using strychnine, She almost poisoned her four children but had a change of heart at the last moment. Schaude only served five years in prison. Even individuals can manipulate reality if their beliefs or fears are strong enough. A self-help guru will tell disciples that if they visualize being wealthy, they can change the frequency around them and become wealthy. A few have, but it takes true discipline and conviction. A witch doctor or sorcerer can put a hex on someone and if they believe strongly enough in their powers, they can alter reality and cause their incantation to work.
In one of his YouTube episodes of La Mont at Large, the host talked about how he spit on the grave of a convicted murderer at the Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, and experienced a series of strange events. The murderer, Derrick Sean O'Brien, was put to death in 2006 for helping kill and rape two teenage girls. After spitting on O'Brien's grave, La Mont left but his van stalled on a highway ramp. After getting his van towed to a shop, he went off to a friend's home on his scooter, but that also broke down. He somehow got home and a few nights later was in his trailer when he heard a knock on the door. He opened the door, but nobody was outside. Minutes later, there was another knock and it was a neighbor holding a rifle. The neighbor explained to La Mont someone had knocked on his window and he wanted him to help investigate. They looked around but didn't see anyone. Both of them were living out in the woods and it's highly unlikely an intruder would have been slinking around there in the dark.
We've always noticed that weird stuff has a habit of occurring on Halloween, which is hardly surprising. People claim they’ve seen airborne witches, hobgoblins, and even UFOs. Back on Halloween of 1987 as the sun was setting, we spotted a flimsy apparition resembling a woman in a flowing white dress standing beside a telephone pole where there had been a fatal car crash two weeks earlier. We were among the first on the scene.
But why not Halloween? After all, since time out of mind in old Europe, this day signified the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dreary, freezing winter, a time of year associated with death. The Celts believed that on the night before November 1, which was their New Year, the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead was lifted. They named this day Samhain, a time when the spirits of the dead returned to earth.
Besides the paranormal, there have been a lot of other disturbing events happening on this date. We would include Orson Welle's radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds but that was intentional. On October 31, 1926, Houdini died from peritonitis having been punched in the abdomen a week before. Four years earlier on Halloween, Mussolini and his fascist black shirts seized power in Rome. Around 11 p.m. on October 31, 1963, there was a gas leak at the Indiana State Fairground Coliseum in Indianapolis that killed 74 and injured 400 others. Then David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" murderer, predicted while incarcerated at the Attica Correctional Facility, an Upstate New York that a couple would be murdered in a Manhattan apartment on Halloween morning 1981. Berkowitz even described the apartment and said that a cult would be involved. The prediction came true, but the killing remains unsolved.
There have also been a lot of unexplained disappearances occurring on or near All Hallows' Eve. On October 30, 1926, Marvin Alvin Clark left his home in Tigard, Oregon, to meet his daughter in downtown Portland but never showed up. Some witnesses swore they saw Clark at a bus terminal in Portland that day, dressed in a dark suit and slacks. A week later, on November 9, Clark's wife Mary received a postcard from Bellingham, Washington presumably sent by her husband. Witnesses in Bellingham said they saw him walking around between November 2 and 3. Clark's disappearance remains the oldest active missing person case.
On Halloween of 1969, two teenage girls from Oscoda, Michigan, Patricia Spencer and Pamela Hobley, went to their high school homecoming game, intending to go to a Halloween party afterward. Unfortunately, they never made it to the party, nor were they ever seen again. One witness said he gave the girls a ride to downtown Oscoda. There have never been any good leads in the case and it almost seems that they walked off the face of the earth. Authorities suspect foul play, doubting the teenagers ran away since they were both "close to their families" and didn't bring their purses or extra clothing with them. What's even more peculiar about this case is that the two girls weren't friends.
On the 31st of October 2001 Cindy Song, a college senior, went with her friends to a costume party at a nightclub in State College, Pennsylvania. At about 4 a.m. the next day, her companions dropped her off at her apartment. When they didn't hear from Cindy after three days, they became worried and called the police. The officers went to the address and found the door locked. Inside the apartment, nothing looked out of place. However, her keys and purse were missing indicating she had stepped out. Investigators checked Cindy's phone records and found that no calls had been made. They also couldn't detect any activity on her credit cards. They also checked her emails and confirmed that there wasn't any suspicious activity on them. From all accounts, she was relatively happy and ready to finish school although she had broken up with her boyfriend a month before, which rules out the notion that she had decided to run away unless she was hiding her depression. There were a couple of leads in the case but these turned out to be dead ends.
Christina Bastian, a 34-year-old teacher diagnosed with bipolar disorder, disappeared around 1:45 a.m. on November 1, 2015, after leaving a female friend's house in Apple Valley, California. She was supposed to stay the night but became upset and left with her small dog. Christina abandoned many of her belongings at her friend's house, including her wallet, identification, and glasses, even though she would have needed the glasses because she had poor eyesight. That same night, the California Highway Patrol found some of Bastian's belongings thrown out along the road near Highway 247. Later that same morning, her pickup truck was found abandoned in Morongo Valley, California. Also that day, a woman discovered her dog near Bear Valley Road. On November 11, someone stumbled across Christina's backpack containing her belongings. Shortly before she vanished, she told her brother-in-law that she "didn't want to be Christina Bastian anymore" and wished to "disappear."
There are other odd Halloween disappearances, but the four we mentioned are undeniably the most baffling. We've noted that when people often vanish in the woods, they're either suffering from depression or trying to cope with a breakup or a death. Do they willingly go out to die from exposure or does something else happen to them?
