In Sherlock Holmes and the Sign of the Four, Dr. Watson gives Sherlock Holmes a pocket watch. Holmes looks at it for a second and quickly determines that the watch belonged to Watson’s father and then was inherited by his older brother, who was well-to-do, fell in and out of good fortune, and drank himself to death. Watson is furious and assumes that Holmes has been making inquiries into Watson’s family history. But Holmes explains that he figured it all out more or less scientifically; the initials engraved on it match it to Watson’s family, and he can assume that it would pass to the firstborn son when the owner died. The scratches on the face indicated that Watson’s brother was well-to-do enough that he could carelessly carry an expensive watch around in the same pocket as his keys, the dents around the winding-hole indicated that he may have gotten drunk and missed the hole with the key a lot, and the tiny numbers scratched into the inside showed that it was pawned and repurchased repeatedly.
Holmes was right about everything, but he conceded that a lot of it was just instinct on his part that happened to be correct. Holmes never claimed any psychic ability, but he probably could have gotten away with it if he had wanted to. The difference between psychic ability and “instincts” really comes down to little more than good old semantics.
Ken describes himself as clairsentient—he can’t see or hear ghosts any more than the rest of us can, but he can sort of sense them. This is distinct from the abilities of clairvoyants, who see things, and clairaudients, who hear things.
But Ken never claims any intimate knowledge of the spirit world or anything (unless he’s in the midst of one of his arguments with Hector, during which all bets are off), and, after an initial period of raising my eyebrows at him, I ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I saw him in action quite a bit. I saw him talk to people and suddenly know which army unit they’d served in, where they’d served, and where they were injured. If you take him into a haunted graveyard, even one he’s never heard of, he can walk around and tell you which graves are said to be haunted with a pretty high rate of accuracy. Even if I chalk it up to Sherlock Holmes–style detective work on his part, it’s a pretty remarkable skill. Indeed, he doesn’t claim that there is anything “supernatural” about his abilities at all—it’s just really good instincts.
After months of working as a guide and not quite feeling that I’d gotten to the bottom of all of the ghost business, but after deciding to give Ken the benefit of the doubt, I sat down with him at his apartment and asked him to explain all of the psychic stuff to me.
When you imagine a psychic’s house, you picture crystal balls, soft red and blue lights, or at least some beads hanging down in a doorway. Ken has his fair share of skeleton and monster figurines and books on the occult, but such things are outnumbered in his apartment by the video-game paraphernalia. Dogs and cats run around all over. Rarely are there flashing lights in evidence. He does have some broomsticks, cauldrons, and other stuff that you would expect to find in an apartment rented by pagans, though.
“So, that’s all it is?” I asked, as we sat at his kitchen table, watching a black cat (of course) jumping around on the countertops. “Better instincts?”
“Well, I think that ‘psychic ability’ is a big misnomer, to begin with,” he said. “People associate it with the supernatural, which means that it’s above and beyond nature. I think it’s just the opposite; I think it’s within nature. I think that everybody has psychic ability. Women, in particular, seem to be a little bit more adept at it than men. Kids are better than adults. With most people, it’s just a fluke—like people who have good artistic ability or good athletic ability. And there are certain professions where you use your instincts on a daily basis. Like being in sales. Police detectives use it when they’re trying to solve crimes. My ability is just something that is just like that, only a bit more intense. I think that one of the main reasons that people tend not to believe in psychics, though, is that there are a lot of fakes out there.”
Ken then rattled off a list of well-known TV psychics that he believed had given the real ones a bad name.
“So, how do you tell the difference?” I asked. “Besides just spotting the tricks that fake psychics have been using for hundreds of years?”
“Accuracy.” said Ken. “Straight-up accuracy. If what they say comes to fruition.” He paused to get one of his black cats off of the counter.
“You witches and your black cats!” I chuckled.
“What it comes down to,” he said, sitting back down and pouring some coffee, “is that psychics are just normal people. I can’t read your mind any more than your mailman can read your mind. In fact, he’s probably more likely to know what’s going on in your head, because he knows what kind of pornography comes to your house. But the point is, people pooh-pooh this stuff because there are all these phonies with goofy names running around. I mean, I don’t show up for a reading saying that my name is Thundering Howling Coyote Six-Finger Monkey Man. I’m just Ken. And it’s the same thing in the ghost community—people expect ghost-hunting groups to be a bunch of weirdos with a funny group name. You and I are a big exception, in that we’re just Ken, Adam, and sometimes Troy.”
“Unless we’re calling ourselves Captain Spooky McGuffin and his Paranormal Posse,” I said.
“I know, right?” he said with a laugh. “But that’s still less corny than most of the group names out there. Same thing happens in the pagan community.”
Ken, for the record, is a witch. You meet a lot of witches, Wiccans, and other varieties of pagans when you hang out with geeks (even in Georgia), and find that paganism is just a religion about like any other,12 and pagan groups are subject to the same drama and infighting as any other religious group. And, just as in the ghost-hunting community, there are a lot of flaky types who give the more levelheaded pagans a bad name. I believe that the “flaky” ones are referred to as “Glindas” in the pagan community.
“So,” I asked, “if all of this is just normal, what goes on in your brain that maybe doesn’t go on in the other guy’s brain?”
“Well, there are a couple of theories about that,” he said. “There have been a whole series of studies that were done on what makes psychic people more psychic. One of the things that they found that’s quite common is that a lot of people who have high psi ability also happen to have seizure disorders. That’s one thing. So are people who are colorblind and people who are borderline diabetic.”
“Like you,” I said. Ken was all three of those.
He nodded. “One of the other things that we’ve found, and this has nothing to do with me in particular, but people who have extreme diets also tend to have higher psi ability. There are, say, Eskimo shamans that have a diet that consists almost solely of meat, and we find that they have a high psi ability. Same with people who are complete vegans. We don’t know why that is. People who play games more have higher psi ability, because they’re using and stretching their psychic muscles. One of the things that I do when I teach my class on psychic development is talk to people about playing board games instead of video games, because they’re always trying to outguess their opponent in board games.”
“So, say, Battleship is essentially a psychic contest?”
“Absolutely,” Ken said, getting back up to get the cat off of the counter again. His psychic powers certainly did not give him clairvoyance enough to guess what the cat was going to do next. Hector and I used to pick on him over this sort of thing all the time. If the bus blew a tire or if one of the pubs on the route turned out to be closed on any given night, we’d say, “Boy, Ken, bet you didn’t see that one coming!” and we’d all have a good laugh—Ken included.
“Now, you come from a long line of psychics, right?” I asked.
“As far back as I can trace,” he said. “My grandfather, Don Melvoin, was a TV personality in Traverse City, Michigan. He played both Count Zapula, the local horror show host, and Deputy Dan, the kids’ show host. He was also a psychic. His speciality was psychometry, which means he got information from objects. He’d hold an item in his hand and pick up things like emotional content. I also had a great-grandmother who never claimed to be a psychic, but she did teach me how to read a crystal ball. And I think that one of the ways this helped me develop as a psychic was that my parents treated it as perfectly normal. Kids tend to be more psychic than adults, like I said, and a lot of parents really praise kids when they predict things, or when weird things happen. And the kids want praise, so they will just start to get creative. On the other side, really religious parents might see it as satanic and try to suppress it. But in my family, it was just normal.”
Ken went on to tell me that some of his earliest psychic experiences were predicting the deaths of family members, which made him pretty popular at family gatherings. Later, he continued to develop his ability while studying under Irene Hughes, the famous psychic who predicted the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, the death of Howard Hughes (who was not a relative of hers, but was a client), and the Chicago Blizzard of 1967. She was apparently very famous in psychic circles, but I didn’t recall ever having heard of her personally. I asked Ken what he learned from her.
“Oh, Irene is wonderful,” he said. “She contacted me to come to work at her psychic fairs right at a time when I was looking to move out of Detroit to Chicago. Which was awesome, because Detroit is a shithole, except for the fact that it has great radio stations. She’s one of the only people I’ve ever seen who can walk into a casino, pick a slot machine, and come out with five thousand bucks.”
I raised my eyebrows. One thing that we skeptics say all the time is that no one’s ever found a psychic who could break the bank at Vegas. Ken himself opened most tours by assuring people that he didn’t know what the lottery numbers were.
“So, she’d use her psychic instinct to figure out which slot machine to use?”
“She used numerology more than instincts. A lot of number crunching with a little bit of intuition thrown in. I mean, when I teach astrology or numerology, I sort of describe it as the algebra of life. We can say that the moon has some sort of gravitational effect on people’s moods and the weather, but we can’t say what that effect is. So, the effect is sort of x. It’s all algebra.”
I’ve never been a big believer in astrology—or even a little one. Ken worked it all out for me as a form of number crunching. It wasn’t enough to make me start reading horoscopes or asking people what their sign was, but it was at least a fairly coherent explanation.
“So, now you’ve been doing readings for twenty years, including a lot of rock stars and celebrities,” I said, before Ken could say another word about algebra. “Any juicy gossip?”
He shook his head. “Really, celebrities want to know the same stuff as everyone else. Love, health … all of the usual crap.”
“Come on,” I pressed. “Hasn’t there been any crazy celebrity that has really freaked you out?”
He paused, smiled, and brought up the name of a certain rock star.
“She freaked me out so much that I wouldn’t do a reading for her,” he said. “I flat out refused the second she walked into the room. Her aura was just … the only way I can describe it is that she had this aura of being as slimy as two eels having sex in a bucket of snot.”
He asked me not to name any names, but this is also just about the way most non-psychics describe this particular rock star.
“Now,” I said, “you’ve also worked with police forces on murder investigations and things like that, right?”
He nodded.
“What leads them to seek out a psychic rather than doing normal detective work?
“Usually frustration,” Ken said. “They run out of regular clues or leads, so they’ll call me and ask for help pointing them in a way that’ll lead them to another clue or a piece of evidence that they need in order to go for the conviction. I’ll get as little information as possible and go into a sort of a delta-theta state, a meditative state, and see what I come up with. Like, I might say, ‘There are two Native American men and one woman, and a gray pickup truck with rust spots. You’ll find something under the lumber in the truck.’ And it’ll turn out that that matches the suspects they have in custody, and one of their friends will have a truck like that with bloodstains in the back.”
Ken has done this many times. For a time he was part of a group of psychics that would get blind e-mails about missing persons. These psychics would send back whatever information came to them, and cases would be built based on any consensus that was reached. The success rate was very high, but egos and politics got involved, as they usually do in things like that, and the group fell apart. He’s been trying to restart it ever since. At the time of the interview, he’d helped on about twenty different cases with law enforcement agencies all over the country and even internationally. All of this work was done off the record and was entirely pro bono.
“Now, what’s all this about a delta-theta state?” I asked. That’s what I wanted to get into—the science, or at least the pseudoscience, behind psychic ability. If, as Ken insisted, all of this ghost and psychic stuff was totally natural, not supernatural, it stood to reason that there should at least be some scientific theories to attempt to explain how it worked.
“Well,” he said, “hang on. Let me get my cheat sheet.” He disappeared into his office and came back with a printout with various numbers on it.
“You see,” he said, “there are electrochemical signals that travel through the brain, with a rate of speed measured in cycles per second. Fourteen to twenty-eight cycles per second are called beta waves, which is the speed of the brain at normal consciousness. Eight to thirteen cycles per second are beta waves, which is the subconscious. Four to seven are theta waves, and below that are the waves generated during a really deep sleep.”
This made sense to me. After all, I’d just found out the rate at which eyeballs vibrate. I didn’t have any data of my own to tell about electromechanical signals in the brain, but this all seemed reasonable enough.
“The delta-theta state is sort of a state between asleep and awake. It’s like … have you ever had a dream where you were trying to scream, and woke up almost screaming? Or woke up feeling like there was a fat guy on your chest?”
“Yes!” I said. “Just the other night!”
Recently, I had had a dream about trying to look up a story I’d heard years ago about a headless ghost who wandered around singing, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” In the dream, I was trying to find the story online, and I kept coming across images of ghostly old women that were so frightening I could hardly look at them. No ghosts are quite so scary as old lady ghosts, if you ask me.
I woke up feeling as though I were pinned to the bed by an unseen force; in particular, there was a distinct pressure on my chest. Even in my half-awake state, I remembered that this was a fairly common form of ghost sighting—waking up with the feeling of pressure on the chest. Often, these reports seem to be connected to ghostly old ladies. Like the scary ones in my dream.
But I remember thinking, as I lay there feeling the pressure, This isn’t really so bad. It just feels like someone’s set up a laptop computer on my chest. As long as I don’t open my eyes and see the scary old lady, I’m gonna be all right!
When the feeling went away and I became more alert and awake, I thought of a few more rational explanations. The most obvious solution was that I’d been awakened by the cat walking onto my chest and sitting down. The next-most obvious is that I was still half asleep and still dreaming the whole thing.
It may well be that neither of these is actually correct. But, from a strictly rational point of view, there are an awful lot of explanations that make more sense than blaming it on a ghostly old lady. It’s even more rational to suppose that my roommate had, in a moment of severe drunkenness, decided to set up a laptop on my chest and get some typing done. He did do some strange things when he drank.
In fact, on further research, there turned out to be a lot I didn’t know about the “old hag” experience—suffering from it is common enough to have given rise to the term “hagridden” for those who have suffered from it. Traditionally, it was attributed to having an old hag sitting on your chest, sending bad dreams into your head. Today, it’s known as sleep paralysis—no one knows exactly what causes it, but it does seem to be a form of hallucination, triggered by any number of reactions of various brain tissues and synapses to the REM sleep state. Most commonly, it’s suspected to be due to a lack of melatonin. A lack of melatonin can lead to a lack of depolarization, the process that keeps you from moving your body as you move around in dreams (i.e., if you’re running a race in your dreams but not flailing your legs around and kicking the crap out of your sleeping spouse, you have depolarization to thank). No one knows for sure, but, as I expected, there were plenty more rational explanations going around that I should consider before blaming the whole thing on a ghostly old hag sitting on me (and thank goodness for that).
I described this whole chain of events to Ken.
“Well,” he said, “what you were in when you woke up, not quite awake but not quite asleep, was a delta-theta state. And that’s the state that we induce to sort of tune into psychic stuff.”
This was also, I noted, the kind of state in which Dr. Bernard Hollander had said people were more likely to pick up on those “living thoughts projected into space by the personality.”
“All right,” I said. “Now here’s the real issue. How does all of this relate to ghosts? Are there brain waves that sort of create ghosts or allow you to be in tune with them?”
Ken took a deep breath, then went to get the cat off the counter again. This, I knew, was a loaded question, as almost all questions about ghosts and the theories behind them are.
“Well,” he said, “There’s a current metaphysical theory that the thing that ties the body and the soul together—the soul, for lack of a better term—is our consciousness, our intellect, and our emotional content. That’s what our soul is. How that ties into the body is the spirit. The spirit, we think, lives in the blood, so when it’s spilled, it leaves an energy residue behind that could either be picked up by certain sensitive instruments, or it can be picked up by certain types of sensitive people.”
He paused and poured some coffee. “Have you worked with any other psychics before?”
I shook my head. “Not really,” I said, “unless you count the ones that we get on the tour.”
We got a lot of self-proclaimed psychics on the tour, many of whom were pretty clearly just senile or who wanted to be psychics so badly that they had convinced themselves that they were. Under Ken’s theory that everyone is psychic, I suppose we could say that they were, but they pretty clearly didn’t know what they were doing. Hector and I had a whole system—when someone claimed to be psychic, we’d make up a ghost and see if they could “really feel” that one. Most of them failed miserably, but at least none of them ever pulled a piece of cheesecloth out of their butt and told me it was ectoplasm, which I suppose is progress.
Troy did say, though, that he’d once worked with a psychic on an investigation who said that the only way to get the fairies out of a haunted barn was to roll around in horse dung, so we can’t have progressed that far from the ectoplasm days.
“You see,” said Ken, “this is where I differ from most of them on investigations. They’ll sense an energy or something, but since they’re not that well trained, they won’t really know how to analyze it, and they’ll just start making stuff up. Remember that guy at Odin Tatu?”
Recently, a TV crew had brought a supposed psychic through Odin Tatu, which remained open—and haunted—after Tapeworm’s death under the name of Old Town Tatu. The people there had set the psychic up by asking him trick questions, and he’d failed. He had said that he was hearing the f-word an awful lot—which sure sounded like the ghost of Tapeworm—but, for the most part, according to Ken, he was probably just reacting to the energy in the room and making up stories to go with it.
“So, if these people are picking up on energy, what kind of energy is this, and how does it get there?”
“There are different theories, of course,” he said. “But what happens is that emotional energy is like any other energy; it can’t be destroyed.13 And strong emotions can sometimes leave an emotional residue—that psychic imprint stuff that we talk about. And untrained psychics will mistake this for a ghost. A good example of this is the Anne Frank house in the Netherlands, which I investigated. If you know the story of Anne Frank, you’ll know that nobody died in that house, but a lot of people think it’s haunted. What happens is that people go through there and feel bad about the Holocaust, about the Nazis, and about what happened in the Netherlands. And that leaves behind this emotional residue, and people pick up on it and think it’s a ghost.”
“So, sometimes what we call a haunting might have been caused by a dead guy, but it isn’t actually a dead guy in the room?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “The Eastland is a good example of this.”
There did seem to be emotional residue, or whatever you call it, at that site. Lots of people had reported walking over the bridges near the site and being overcome by a profound sense of sadness and sorrow—oddly, high school groups always wanted to try walking across the bridge to see if they could feel it. I was always amused by how eager they were to feel profound sadness. Kids nowadays!
“See,” said Ken, “at the Eastland site, it’s sort of six of one, half a dozen of the other. There are ghosts there and that emotional residue. The first time I was there, to be honest, it was awful. It was one of the worst-feeling places that I had ever been to in my life, outside of Dachau concentration camp. And to go there on a regular basis, like I do, I have to sort of shut it down. That’s part of why I never do readings on the tour. If you’re at a place where 844 people died in a terrible tragedy, you don’t want to open yourself up to that emotionally. I don’t know if that makes sense to anybody, but people who are a little bit sensitive can understand it.”
“So,” I said, “are some of the ghosts that are actually seen or photographed possibly ghosts caused by this emotional residue from people who are still alive?”
“Sure,” he said. “That happens a lot. You’ve heard stories of that—people waking up seeing an image of their brother and finding out their brother had just been in a terrible car accident on the other side of the world. That’s emotional energy, not a ghost, in and of itself.”
What we had reached was the ultimate question: what counts as a ghost and what doesn’t? To me, this emotional residue stuff was fine to count as a ghost, especially when it manifested as a vision of a dead person. To Ken, it was only actual, intelligent, independent spirits that really, truly counted.
“Now, one last tough one,” I said. “Let’s talk about when psychics are wrong.”
No psychic is always right—even Irene Hughes only claimed about 80 percent accuracy.
“Well,” said Ken, “it can be really hard to tell the difference sometimes between actual psychic intuition and just second-guessing myself based on regular instinct. And, naturally, sometimes I’m going to be wrong. Like, a few years ago, I actually made some phone calls to the FBI saying I thought that there was about to be a terrorist bombing in Atlanta. And there wasn’t. And some people suggested that maybe my calls led them to stop it from happening, but I’m totally sure that I was just wrong. But you know, I love this country. I think our diversity makes us the greatest country in the world. And there are all these self-proclaimed psychics who are saying that they predicted 9/11, but didn’t say anything because they were afraid they’d look foolish. And I think they should be considered traitors. I’m willing to make a fool of myself. Heck, I’m great at making a fool of myself!”
“You got that right,” I said. And we had a good laugh. When Ken and I ran podcasts or investigations or tours together, we had a really nifty dynamic in which Ken would be the “believer” and I would try to reel him in with logical explanations for things. I was, if you will, Scully to his Mulder. Sometimes I’d score a point on him, and sometimes he’d score one on me. Ken and I are living proof that skeptics and psychics don’t have to try to shout each other down. We can, in fact, learn from one another and live and work together in peace.
12. Paganism and witchcraft, for the record, really aren’t much different from most mainstream religions—the modern forms draw from a variety of ancient, earth-based religions. There’s no demon worship or animal sacrifice going on. Some of my best friends are pagans.
13. This is basic science—the three rules of thermodynamics are: 1. Energy can never be created, only spent or transformed. 2. All actions use some energy. 3. Energy can never be completely depleted. This is often summarized as “You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t get out of the game.”