International Society for Paranormal Research

Zombie Boy: Giving Ghost Hunters What They Want?

In Season 5, Episode 2 of “Kindred Spirits”, investigators Amy Bruni and Adam Berry suspect that “zombie boy”–a supposed ghost that was ramping up activity and scaring investigators at a Massachusetts estate–is a creation of the very people who so fervently believe in him. Much like “Phillip”, the invented ghost from a series of seances in the 1970’s, “zombie boy” had started to appear to investigators and even possess one of them. The photos provided as evidence of his existence were unconvincing to Amy Bruni, and after a few frustrating attempts to figure out his identity, it is she who starts to wonder if “zombie boy” might be an “egregore”:

“Egregore is an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people. Historically, the concept referred to angelic beings, or watchers, and the specific rituals and practices associated with them, namely within Enochian traditions”

In contemporary, paranormal circles an ‘egregore’ has come to mean any entity that manifests as a result of the collective efforts to conjure or investigate it. Amy and Adam decide to test their theory by providing ‘zombie boy’ with a back story. They create a family tree and a Civil War tragedy, and lo and behold! The EVP sessions yield back exactly the names of zombie boy’s parents, and Chip Coffey picks up on his story remotely during the investigation into another area of the property.

Zombie boy is a multi-layered entity created first by paranormal investigators who believed in his existence based on others’ evidence, and rounded out by Amy and Adam who suspected that he was not an independent being, after all. Then, zombie boy comes to life and answers questions about his invented upbringing correctly, and a psychic hundreds of miles away picks up on the details of his fabricated story.

Amy, quite appropriately, expresses shock and awe, and wonders what this means for paranormal investigations and for our lives as humans on this planet. How much of what we experience is created by us? Are the ghosts we seek simply aspects of our collective consciousness responding to our desires, our needs, our assumptions, and our emotions? Are we, during paranormal investigations, simply hearing what we expect to hear? Is the Other us?

I have always objected to the idea that we create our own reality, because it seems to suggest that individuals are responsible in some way for grim realities such as cancer, poverty, domestic violence, genocide, and disastrous cultural and political situations that are beyond anyone’s control. We don’t ‘create’ those realities, but I suppose we are responsible for our reactions to them. However, if your child is murdered in a bloody and pointless war, HOW are you supposed to react? How do you create your own reality when reality itself is so overwhelming, violent, unjust and cruel? I don’t have answers for such enormous questions. Here is what I don’t understand: if we can create a being out of thin air and give him a story that he lives out according to our will, then why can’t we escape illness, poverty, and death? Perhaps because a will far greater than our own has created us and our back stories.

I suspect that we all possess powers far greater than we are aware of. At the heart of this conundrum is the concept of Self and Other. We assume, as investigators, that we are seeking the mysterious Other. And yet so often, we receive responses that seem tailored to our expectations, suggesting that something or someone is reading us and responding appropriately. I remember one investigation in particular where there was an absolute and clear dividing line between the spirit in the house and me. As soon as I crossed the threshold of that house, I knew that something completely dark and utterly draining was attempting to overtake my will and drive me to despair. That entire night was a battle between my sense of self and agency and the thing that wanted to destroy my light. I was sick for days afterwards, and all of my equipment either malfunctioned or broke, leaving me with no trace, no evidence, of what I had experienced.

Yet on other occasions, the voice on the recorder is simply repeating something I had said earlier, in a bizarre act of mimicry. Other times, the voices are nonsensical for the location and the history of the site, such as the little girl singing a strange, tuneless song in a mental hospital. Her odd voice followed me to Linda Vista and other locations, and it took me awhile to realize that this was no child’s voice. In fact, identifying the spirit in the box or recorder is nearly impossible, even if they provide you with excellent clues. There are liars, tricksters, and delinquents that frequent the inter dimensional spaces that we love to explore, and I wonder if we truly know when an entity is playing games with us, perhaps due to boredom or malice. And then, of course, there is the unsettling idea that we might have created them all for our own entertainment or other purposes, of which we are not entirely aware.

There is no way to answer the original question: are we, or are we not, creating the paranormal phenomena that we seek out? It’s not an either/or question, I suspect. I am wary of data that is too obvious, too easy, too easily responsive to our wishes and will. The best evidence is that which surprises you, shocks you, or seems utterly bizarre or incoherent at first. When you receive a message that you sincerely do not expect or even want, you might be on the right track. When your life feels different after an investigation, when you’re amazed and struggling to fit new knowledge into your existing paradigm, you’re probably heading in the right direction.

And what is the ‘right direction’? Simply where you find yourself struggling to incorporate new and perhaps contradictory information that forces personal growth and spiritual transformation. In that sense, the reality of the spirit you contacted might be less important than the new path it opened up for you. Maybe that is what the spirit world knows about us that we still don’t know about ourselves.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

The Spirit World — Living Streams Church

Time and the Paranormal

Albert Einstein quote: Time does not exist - we invented it

I have long thought that if we understood time, or how consciousness creates the concept of temporal flow, we would understand religion and all things we currently call paranormal.

I was attending my first, post-Covid church service outdoors at Saint Hugh’s Episcopal Church when I realized that the liturgical calendar (we are currently in the second Sunday of Easter) and the death and Resurrection of Jesus are atemporal events. In other words, Christians cycle around a calendar of Biblical happenings that repeat forever. Conventional wisdom says that the Resurrection is an event that happened in the past, and we are forever paying homage to a particular week that occurred a very long time ago. A somewhat blasphemous thought keeps hammering away at me, however, regarding these Biblical stories: they may have happened as events at some point, but their importance is about the fact that they are continually happening. The death and resurrection of Jesus represent sin and salvation, eternal realities that are always happening, continuously occurring, and the idea is for us to alter our consciousness to experience those events for ourselves. The timing of such Christian celebrations is a mere detail of convenience–as is whether or not there was an original event–for what matters is that we are reminded of the moral and existential lessons of a Savior. The Passion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, are all concurrent and ever existing, always real, perpetually unfolding. Human beings are the time creators, placing everything into order and organizing our experience so that it appears that time is flowing from somewhere, to somewhere. But there is nowhere to go.

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Events cannot be perceived as concurrent, or there would be no way to organize our lives or create the illusion of progress. In reality, however, everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen already exists. We simply cannot access events that fall outside of our perspective; we are limited by our awareness. This helps to explain precognition, clairvoyance, ESP, and other phenomena that involve a wider perspective on reality, outside of our normal awareness and time-locked perceptions. In moments of intention, crisis, or suspension of ordinary consciousness, we are able to widen the temporal net and perceive what is about to occur. A small example of this happened to me just this week. I changed lanes while driving on the freeway moments before the driver in front of me slammed on his brakes, nearly causing multiple accidents. Right before I moved to the lane to my left, I ‘saw’ the driver in front of me hit his brakes, and I knew that I had to get out of his way. It was as if the act of slamming the brakes had already occurred and was about to play itself out again.

This brings me to Colin Wilson, whose tome Supernatural is one of my all-time favorites. He writes this in his chapter “The Mystery of Time”:

“What is being suggested is that time is an invention of the left brain. Time, as such, does not exist in nature. Nature knows only what Whitehead calls ‘process’–things happening. What human beings call time is a psychological concept; moreover, is is a left-brain concept.” (432)

I believe that this ‘two brain’ hypothesis has been debunked, but Wilson still writes convincingly regarding time as nonexistent in the natural world, and human beings as bizarre, time-creating creatures who occasionally transcend their (our) clock-bound existence in order to perceive reality as a whole, as a series of unending cycles. It is my personal belief based upon far too much reading on the subject, that ghosts, poltergeists, hauntings, and supernatural powers are all atemporal–slips and glitches in our time constructions that allow us a wider vision of a world where everything is happening at once, and we can–under the right circumstances–perceive the multiple layers of consciousness that permeate the dimensions of our unrecognized and often unseen experiences.

There is, of course, far too much to say on this topic for a Monday night in 2021, where we still occupy pandemic time; days and nights piled on top of one another, in a place where all movement, all momentum, have ceased. It is from that perspective that I say goodnight, and I will see you tomorrow . . . or yesterday.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

Creating Your Ghosts . . . and Your Hell

'Kindred Spirits' Paranormal Investigators Face Frightening New Challenges in Season Five | Kindred Spirits | Travel Channel — KINDRED SPIRITS: Chip Coffey, Adam Berry, Amy Bruni

The Holzer Files | Travel Channel — THE HOLZER FILES: Shane Pittman, Dave Schrader, Cindy Kaza

The Philip Experiment | Paranormal witness, Paranormal, The ancient one — The Philip Experiment

There is this nagging question that I have asked myself for years. Do we create–at least in part–the paranormal phenomena that we later claim plagues us? Or that intrigues us? What, exactly, is the relationship of what is “out there” as objective, disembodied intelligence and “in here”, a product of our own consciousness? Is there, perhaps, no such binary opposition, and instead, a sort of continuum along an imaginary line of interrelationship with the unseen?

Allow me to back up. I am returning to the world after more episodes of “Kindred Spirits”, “The Holzer Files”, and the “Dead Files” than I care to confess to. I find all of these shows fascinating for what they reveal about human psychology and our need for answers. The vast majority of the time, shows that center on the paranormal are looking for a resolution that involves the restoration of order to a household or historic site. If no restoration of normality is possible, then explanations are offered that, once again, allow us to exert some control over circumstances that threaten our sense of equilibrium or our emotional state. This is far easier to accomplish if the activity is separate from us; if we are living with something that we had no hand in creating. The Other can be discovered, explained, and neutralized. In the case of the “Dead Files”, the Other often appears irrational and beyond our capacity to manage; in that case, the only option is physical removal from the haunted place.

In all of the above scenarios, we are the experiencers and the Other is the instigator, the bully, the foreign element; the thing we need to ‘learn to live with’, or run from. In a few cases, however, there is the recognition that we play a part in our haunting. There are episodes of “Kindred Spirits” and the “Dead Files” where it’s clear that the home or business owner–or the occupants of a haunted site–might have allowed the presence, the specter, to exist in the first place. In those cases, the lines a blurred between Self and Other, to the extent that the Other only exists because we create the space for it via our unconscious drives, motivations, desires, and traumas. We all know that a certain percentage of poltergeist cases are believed to be potentiated or originated from the unconscious energies of a ‘focus’–typically, but not always, a teenager in the throws of monumental changes.

The famous case of “Philip”, the ghost that was created beforehand and then manifested during a series of seances in the 1970s, exemplifies the power of human intention;

Many researchers of the paranormal suspect that some ghostly manifestations and poltergeist phenomena (objects flying through the air, unexplained footsteps and door slammings) are products of the human mind. To test that idea, a fascinating experiment was conducted in the early 1970s by the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (TSPR) to see if they could create a ghost. The idea was to assemble a group of people who would make up a completely fictional character and then, through séances, see if they could contact him and receive messages and other physical phenomena – perhaps even an apparition. https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-create-a-ghost-2594058

And yes, as it turns out, Philip had some impressive abilities. He levitated the table, dimmed and brightened lights on command, and performed many other feats. He could not, however, provide additional information on his life and afterlife that was not already created beforehand by the investigators. His physical prowess was, however, impressive. This case was often used to debunk seances, but that misses the point entirely:

What are we to make of these incredible experiments? While some would conclude that they prove that ghosts don’t exist, that such things are in our minds only, others say that our unconscious could be responsible for this kind of the phenomena some of the time. They do not (in fact, cannot) prove that there are no ghosts.

Another point of view is that even though Philip was completely fictional, the Owen group really did contact the spirit world. A playful (or perhaps demonic, some would argue) spirit took the opportunity of these séances to “act” as Philip and produce the extraordinary psychokinetic phenomena recorded.

In any case, the experiments proved that paranormal phenomena are quite real. And like most such investigations, they leave us with more questions than answers about the world in which we live. The only certain conclusion is that there is much to our existence that is still unexplained.

If we can create a “Philip”, then what else are we capable of manifesting? I do believe in the objective existence of a spirit world or realm; I also know that how we contact that world depends on us making contact via our non-material nature. We are, as we often forget, ghosts encased in flesh. We are also potent creators of our reality and the reality that surrounds us, to a degree that astonishes me. Our repressed emotions and the effect of trauma in our collective psyches can explode in a home, for example, darkening the corners, creating a conscious entity that haunts us, or causing objects to disappear or go flying across a room. In the end, these manifestations are often a fragment of our own, agonized consciousness. Not always. But more often that most of the paranormal shows are willing to admit.

I know people who haunt the place they were raped, assaulted, or attacked. Those people are alive; they have split off a part of their psyche and created their own ghost. If you think about it, don’t you suspect that you still occupy another space somewhere? Perhaps the place where you were happiest; or perhaps the corner of the universe where overwhelming emotion dissociated you from yourself. Those aspects of ourselves that have ‘spit off’ from our body might be in close contact with other entities created by similar trauma or desire. What is a ghost but the surviving fragment of an intense emotion?

Amy and Adam in a few episodes of “Kindred Spirits” gently inform the homeowners that perhaps they have unwittingly manifested their own rage or depression as a haunting presence in their house. This requires a certain level of recognition and willingness to let go of the past and one’s own repressed drives. Not everyone is willing to let go; you can see it in the homeowner’s eyes. This is my anger, my revenge, my ambition: I am not releasing it. In “The Holzer Files”, the resurrection of old, unresolved cases often reveals how the homeowner or site manager is not only unwilling to admit how he or she has “co-created” the activity that they claim they wish to “release”, but is actively interested in holding on to the presences in the house. There is occasionally a coldness in their eyes during the “reveal”, which tells me that they have built a wall around themselves and their spirits. And, finally, in the “Dead Files”, there are clients who seem invested in the haunting to the point of possession by “something” in the house or site. This possession is often about a codependent relationship between the entity and the repressed darkness in their soul.

We can create our own “Philip” on purpose, it seems, or we can create unknowingly the most vile of demons through our fascination with our own dark side. To understand anything mysterious, we have to discard the binary oppositions–the “either/or” mentality that seeks to divorce us from our perceptions of reality. Sometimes, we are the ghost and the ghost is us.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

Keith Linder’s Poltergeist: The Ongoing Saga of the Sadistic Spirits

Follow this link for more information on the Bothell Hell House case: https://demonsinseattle.com/

Bio
Keith Linder is an IT professional – holding over four certifications in Information Technology and Project Management. Hobbies are fishing, sports, football, basketball, the outdoors, movies, sci/fi, proud geek of just about anything dealing with technology. In 2012 my girlfriend and I moved into a house, right outside of Seattle. The phenomena we witnessed while there would change our lives forever. I’m now living between two realities now.

https://demonsinseattle.com/about-us/

Keith Linder, Bestselling Author

The Bothell Hell House – Poltergeist of Washington State
Attachments – Poltergeist of Washington State Part Two
Poltergeist – The Night Side of Physics.

There is something about the Keith Linder case (also known as the “Bothell Hell House” and “Demons in Seattle”) that really disturbs me. It’s so well documented that you can find extensive explanations of every aspect of the activity online. There are documentaries, interviews, podcasts, web pages, social media sites, three books on Amazon, and a YouTube channel dedicated to everything that happened during and after Keith’s case. In fact, there is so much data, analysis, and information that one can quickly become overwhelmed.

The activity itself is overwhelming, ranging from your typical haunting–EVP, EMF anomalies, shadow people, voices, and apparitions–to the utterly bizarre: actual heartbeats in the mattress, succubi that won’t let the victim sleep, demonic graffiti, burning Bibles, and extreme poltergeist activity that regularly knocked over heavy furniture and rearranged chairs, ‘disappeared’ cameras, crosses, and household objects, and even, at one point, moving a chair upstairs and on top of Keith’s desk. Most upsetting, it appears that one of the tenants of the house committed suicide as a direct result of the personal chaos she experienced while living in the Bothell house.

Keith has listed, categorized, studied, written about, and examined all of the above–and much more that I did not mention–with such meticulous attention to detail that there is nothing I can add by way of my role as a paranormal investigator. I was not there, and I cannot, post-mortem, offer any new explanations that Keith has not already considered. In fact, every time something occurs to me and I ask him if he has considered X, he answers that not only has he considered X, but Y and Z, as well. My point: I cannot and will not attempt a new angle or spend time attempting to convince a reader of the reality of what Keith said he experienced. You either believe him, or you do not. If you believe him, then you can only wonder at how he manages his life and survives psychologically and spiritually. If you do not, then he is one impressive opportunist who has invested all his time and energy into creating and maintaining a seriously complex hoax. I don’t see any motivation for such trickery, and it’s clear in his first book that the damage these forces have inflicted cost him a significant amount of money in repairs and replacements of missing (and often expensive) items, in addition to the time and labor of fixing what was broken and repainting damaged and defaced walls. His irritation is palpable.

I have pondered my course of action here for a long time. I read Keith’s first two books and am starting the third. I watched all the videos, the documentary, and reviewed the supporting data. I am disturbed and confused by it all. I rarely suffer from writer’s block, but I have felt paralyzed with this case, not knowing what to make of it nor how to write about it; and yet, it feels like I need to say something beyond “I believe it” or “I don’t believe it”. Let me start here.

Keith’s activity feels utterly chaotic, without a cohesive narrative. There are Native American elements (the upside-down man painted in his office), EVP with Irish accents harking back to Irish settlements in the Bothell area, apparitions of a woman who lived in the house and died tragically by suicide, evidence of demonic activity and oppression, in addition to classic poltergeist activity (which, I should say, strikes Keith as belonging to the category of the demonic). The activity was both intelligent and residual. If ever there was a potpourri of paranormal phenomena, this is it. And that is a hallmark of the demonic–the deliberate creation of confusion, the delight in creating chaos, the impossibility of stitching together a story that explains why all this is happening. There is no particular reason that Keith’s house should have been the locus of such bizarre and threatening phenomena, and that fact alone is disconcerting. Keith’s very dedication to arriving at the truth and researching the possible causes of his experiences was used against him, as if he were suffering punishment for attempting to document his ongoing torture.

This strikes at the heart of two issues that consume me: how much can we know about non-material or immaterial phenomena, and how does our consciousness interact with spirits of the dead, or with nonhuman entities that we do not understand at all? Do we feed these entities with our own curiosity, empower them with our attempts at communication? Should we tread very carefully when seeking knowledge about phenomena that uses our psychology and manipulates our emotions? I wonder if ignorance is bliss. And yet, that attitude is the exact opposite of my personality and negates my most basic drive: to figure it out. It is interesting, however, that the more I attempt to “figure something out”, the less I feel that I actually understand. There may be no answer here, or no answer that the Universe is willing to share.

That doesn’t stop Keith from trying, nor does it keep Kirsten away from haunted hospitals and endless reading on the topic of all things bizarre and unexplained.

As of today’s writing, Keith shared with me a couple of bizarre text messages from “Christine”, a friend of his who did NOT send these messages, even though they came from her phone (see below). This is yet another random occurrence without any particular context, reason, or purpose other than to confuse, disorient, and call attention to itself. We do not know who sent these messages, since it was not Christine and no one else had access to her phone. Keith notes that “13” is the number that results when you add up the numbers in his address, although that could be a coincidence.

There are spirits who act out with the sole intention of calling attention to themselves in order to remind the target that they have not forgotten about him and are still on the lookout. I have to assume that the more attention they receive for such antics, the more they will bother, torment, or annoy the victim. Could Keith just say no to these mysterious forces? Of course; would that end all the abuse?

I believe that we are co-creators of our reality–we have a certain amount of free will to adjust or modify our path, but there is something else, vastly larger than human consciousness, that has set forth for us certain parameters, limitations, and patterns that are difficult to break. If you are born into poverty in a social system that does not allow for upward mobility and does not provide economic opportunities, then your free will is limited by your socio-economic circumstances. If you receive a terminal diagnosis, you can respond and react to that in a variety of ways, but you can’t will cancer to disappear. Keith could ‘just say no’ and refuse to engage with the entities that he might have unwittingly encouraged; but perhaps this ongoing activity is something fate threw his way, or God, if you will, as part of the unalterable circumstances of his life; in other words, this is his test, and there is little he can do about that.

I know from personal experience that ignoring bizarre phenomena in your home does not stop it from happening. I know that you can pretend you don’t see the shadow person, don’t feel the hand on your arm, don’t hear your name called out in the middle of the night, or refuse to acknowledge the palpable sense of evil in a downstairs room where you no longer feel welcome. None of that stops it. If something–whatever you wish to call it–decides that it wishes to communicate with you, it will continue to find ways to do so. It might even send you a nonsensical text from another dimension, asking you to meet it in Room 13.

Much more to come on this . . . .

Yours in paranormality,

Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

Membership in the ISPR

Welcome, friends, to the International Society for Paranormal Research. If you are interested in becoming a member, please read below:

MEMBER GUIDELINES:

Criteria for membership in the ISPR:

A body of investigative work in the field of the paranormal or of anomalous experiences and/or phenomena;
A willingness to publicize your work for professional review and to contribute to the ongoing work of the ISPR;
Demonstrated integrity and adherence to the highest values of transparency, honesty, and open communication with those working in the field and the interested public.

As a Member:

You will be part of a ISPR’s growth as a society and will contribute to future endeavors such as investigations, conferences, and professional reviews of contributor’s work; you will have priority for publication of your work and findings in the field; you will be a part of Founder’s and Members’ meetings to discuss and determine policies for review of specific cases presented and/or under investigation; and you will have an open invitation to participate in investigations with other members of the Society.

In order to remain in good standing in the ISPR, you must adhere to the member qualifications at all times. As the Founder, I can call for removal of any member who violates the guidelines. Removal from the group may be initiated due to extended inactivity of a member, knowingly engaging in fraud, collusion, deception or falsification of results, or due to lack of communication and/or cooperation with the members of the ISPR.

I would personally like to extend an invitation to all interested readers to join us on this (ad)venture. If you have something to contribute, please consider contacting me with your bio and a sample of your work (this can be data from investigations or any summaries, analyses, or discussions of said data).

The ISPR is an open organization dedicated to investigating and presenting evidence for all aspects of the “paranormal”, including, but not limited to: all manifestations of human consciousness in post-material form; alleged hauntings of homes and sites; poltergeist activity; the work of mediums, psychics, clairvoyants and empaths; anomalous experiences that include UFO activity or any other unusual or unprecedented event, sighting, or manifestation. We are:

Open to all amateur and professional investigators who wish to contribute their data and conclusions for review;
A forum for investigators and researchers to share their research and data, but also a site for meaningful conversations among investigators regarding methodology, personal experiences, concerns, and questions;
International in scope, since we are all interconnected more now than ever, and paranormal phenomena is not restricted to one, particular country;
Non profit, with no financial or professional interests that would interfere with our primary mission;
Not a ‘team’ of investigators, but may announce investigations and/or invite participants.

I hope you are all as excited as I am!

Sincerely,

Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD; Founder, ISPR

Regarding the Paranormal

Are you a professor of Psychology with a specialty in parapsychology or consciousness research willing to share your work with the readers of the ISPR? Are you a paranormal investigator who wants a more solid grounding in theory and research? Are you a medium, a clairvoyant, a Near Death experiencer, or someone who is struggling to comprehend non-material realities? I intend for the ISPR to be both a source of information and support for all those who are looking for a deeper and wider truth in a strange, strange, world . . .

The Soul Bank: Stories, Research, Essays, (B)Logs

The issue cannot be avoided. Are paranormal investigators qualified to make statements on the afterlife and all things immaterial? What degrees or experience do we have that allow us to analyze “data” with any measure of professionalism? Are there no experts in the paranormal, as fellow member Keith Linder (MUCH more about him coming) affirms in his books? Why do I think that I have anything to contribute to this field of inquiry?

There are no stand-alone degrees in Paranormal Studies. The University of Virginia offers a degree in the Division of Perceptual Studies (https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/history-of-dops/) through the School of Medicine; you can take courses at the University of Arizona through the Department of Psychology, where the preeminent researcher of consciousness, Gary Schwartz, carries out his research into survival of consciousness (https://psychology.arizona.edu/users/gary-schwartz); and The University of Edinburgh offers programs and courses through the Koestler Parapsychology Unit…

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