š A Paranormal Adventure š
One manās deep dive into the realm of paranormal believers, far-right religious fanatics, and space alien/demon sex.
āTry staring at the sun,ā he wrote. āIt can help you see their physical aura. When I see them, I pray, and [I] can see violet auras from angels fighting them.ā This was user Juliet, a regular at the forums over at LDS-themed website ldsfreedomforum.com. Without any prompting, he continued to give me advice. āThey donāt like salt or hand forged iron,ā he continued. āSprinkle salt around all the doors and windows. They canāt possess you unless your life force, your natural aural protection goes below 50 %.ā I wasnāt sure what that meant, but he was earnest and interested and, above all, concerned.
I had just told him about my run-ins with demons and ghosts and the paranormal in general. I had detailed for him supernatural contact I had had since I was a child.I had elaborated on experiences I had had with shadow children following me. Experiences with possession and hauntings.
Experiences that I had completely and entirely made up.
71%. According to a recent Gallup pollĀ¹, thatās the percentage of Americans that profess a belief in the paranormal. I consider myself a part of the 29%. Donāt get me wrong, I wish I was in the first group. Iāve always had a fascination with the supernatural. Whether it be cryptids or ghosts or the belief that a secret lizard race has taken over our government, I love learning about and researching the unexplained and the unexplainable. But for all my love of the paranormal, I take a little bit too much after my math-brained engineer father: logical to a fault.
But for all my skepticism, I still like to consider myself a hopeful skeptic.
It was with that hope that I decided to take a journey for myself into this world of belief. I wanted to get a first-hand look into the life of those with a fervent conviction that the paranormal existed. And so, feeling a little like a wolf in sheepās clothing, I scouted out a group of paranormal believers on Facebook, convinced them to let me join the group, and began my journey to try and convince them that I was a believer, too. And not only that I was a believer, but that I had had unique paranormal experiences, too.
I lasted six days. The group, based locally in Utah where I live, was quick to welcome me. They shared paranormal experiences like they were an everyday occurrence for them, like they were nothing more unusual than taking a shower in the morning or watching Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! at night. I was fascinated, but eager to start my infiltration. Using my meager knowledge of audio editing, I created an audio file that I had purportedly captured on a camping trip. In it, you can hear a woman screaming for help in the distant woods. I (like every white man in every horror movie) get out of my tent to go towards the screaming. When I get there, I discover that the womanās voice was merely a lure, and I find myself face to face with a skinwalker, a monster out of Native American mythology.
The group tore the audio file apart. I shouldnāt have been surprised, but I was. I had seen things within the group that I considered ridiculous; why was my made-up experience any less believable? The people in the group were quick to explain where I had gone wrong. The levels on my audio fluctuated in too wide a range, my voice acting was unconvincing, and I had (apparently) chosen the wrong type of sound for a skinwalker. They branded me a fake, an implant, and a liar, and within an hour after posting my āexperience,ā I was kicked out of the group.
Undeterred, I moved on to the next group. First, another local Facebook group that focused specifically on Northern Utah paranormal experiences. I lasted even less time there; they were pros with first-hand knowledge of skinwalkers, and blocked me from the group within the day. Next was a worldwide paranormal believers Facebook group, where my post was all but ignored. I moved on to the next group, the next forum, and the next. All of the groups either ignored me or branded me a fake, chasing me out of their private spaces with digital pitchforks and torches.
I came to realize that these groups and the people within them had become used to fake experiences and doctored images and videos. They were used to being made fun of and ridiculed and treated as lesser-than because they believed in something that couldnāt be proven. In order to protect themselves, they had become professionals at both discovering the paranormal and discovering the fakes. Curiously, the less an image seemed photoshopped or altered, the more they believed it. If a spot in an image had just as high a chance of being a speck of dust as it was a ghost, these people latched onto it. Other people couldnāt disprove that, right? It was starting to make sense to me.
And then I stumbled across a forum that would finally believe me.
It was pure coincidence that I came across ldsfreedomforum.com. Someone I donāt know in a Facebook group that Iām a part of (a group that is about cute animals, even) mentioned the site in a comment, and I navigated my way to the site. What I found floored me.
As a former Mormon ā and a devout one at that ā the fanaticism and zealousness displayed within the site was both terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time. It was as if someone had taken every politically-outspoken middle-aged balding man that I had ever met at every LDS church I had ever been to, and gathered them into one space where they fermented into something even stronger and worse. The siteās mission statement is fairly innocuos:
This is a forum for discussion of the principles of Liberty and the many topics encompassed in the gospel of Jesus Christ ā which embraces all truth.
Which made what happened after I posted there even more of a surprise.
I came onto the site knowing that I needed to change my approach. Obviously my audio file was lacking, both in believability and professional quality. Taking what I had learned from my numerous previous failures, I decided to concoct a new story, a new experience. A new encounter with the paranormal.
My post on the website has since been removed (more on that later) but hereās the text I posted:
So Iāve been here a while, but Iāve just been lurking. Enjoy reading everything, but havenāt really had a reason to pitch anything in myself. But recently some stuff has come up in my life that I want your guyās perspective on. I tried bringing it up with some friends on Facebook and I just got laughed at (imagine that), but I know you guys are more open-minded.
Iāve never really believed in the supernatural. I mean, ghosts and spirits and stuff are real, of course. And Satan is real, too (Iāve had way too many experiences there to discount that). But Iāve never really had reason to think that monsters and stuff like that are real. Are they based on experiences people have had with evil spirits? Sure. But I used to think that was about it. I myself have had quite a few experiences with evil spirits, though. Iāve had to cast out evil spirits on more than one occasion, and Iāve seen a few possessions (they donāt really warn you about the crazy stuff you can see on your mission!). But Iāve had to deal with this kind of stuff since I was a kid. I just thought it was normal, or that maybe I was extra sensitive to spiritual stuff like that.
Over Thanksgiving, though, I went back home and was looking through some of my old stuff. I came across a disposable camera, one from the 90ās. It looked a lot like the one below:
After some research I found out that some Walgreens still develop them, so I went and had them developed. Most of the pictures were totally normal: most of them were from a vacation I took with my family when I was 4 or 5 years old. I found something in a couple of the pictures though that freaked me out. Iām still trying to decide if it was just something wrong with the camera, or maybe the film was so old it started to decay, but it sure looks to me like thereās shadowy figures in these two photos.
What are your guys thoughts? Am I being followed/haunted by evil spirits? If I am, what do I do next? How do you cast something out thatās not really possessing you, just following you? Maybe Iām just overthinking this and those photos really are just coincidences.
The only thing that was true about that post was me finding a disposable camera and developing the pictures on them, and nothing was wrong with those pictures when they first came out. If youāre having a hard time finding the paranormal in the two photos, then that means I accomplished what I was trying to do! As I had discovered previously, the more inconspicuous the paranormal elements, the more believable. With that in mind, the photoshopping I did on the two photos was subtle. Below is the process I took to create one of the photos, and youāll be able to see how little was actually done to the photo.
Apparently going subtler was better. Or perhaps I had finally found a forum willing to believe. Either way, with an hour, I had gotten 6 individual responses to the post. By the end of the day, over 30. And it just kept growing.
And getting weirder.
Juliet, the user I mentioned at the beginning, was the first to respond to my post. They were kind, albeit intense. They wanted to make sure that I knew that I wasnāt alone, and that I had those who believed me. Many others chimed in as well, and soon I had a whole group of people who believed in my experience.
The explanations to what was happening in my pictures started off in a very typical way. Some people believed me and sympathized with me, others believed me and warned me of the potential dangers. A very few didnāt believe that I had anything to worry about, telling me to ācheck both your glasses and your intellect.ā But then someone suggested that perhaps the demon was an alien, sent by an interplanetary organization to follow me and document my life. With that post, it was like a floodgate had opened. Weirder and weirder posts started to follow each other, as can be seen below.
A narrative started to emerge, one that I didnāt expect and yet wasnāt surprised by. These were religious fanatics, the majority of who were incredibly far right, and their concerns and worries about the current state of the world had translated into bizarre beliefs. Looking through other posts confirmed this suspicion of mine. The user who posted about believing that the Earth was hollow and contained a race of hyper-advanced metahumans had made other forum comments stating that he was concerned with Americaās focus on social programs instead of technological and societal advancement. The user who was posting about demons being able to infiltrate your body during sex and make you commit terrible acts described in another thread how he was trying to seek forgiveness from his wife for his infidelity. The user who, for some reason, brought up the idea that Obamaās presidency had started the Apocalypse and Trump would bring about the āCleansing of Americaā talked frequently elsewhere about his concern with Democratic policies and what he called āthe moral degradation found amongst liberals.ā
All of these concerns these users had are common issues that far-right or religious people often bring up, but blown out to an ever-increasing ridiculousness. It seems that in an attempt to seek meaning or justification, these people have sought out the impossible and the unreal to offer explanation.
The Gallup poll mentioned previously also showed that Christians are more likely to hold paranormal beliefs than non-Christians. That belief percentage grew even higher with Christians outside of the mainstream religion, with those people also believing in more types of paranormal and supernatural occurrences and events.Ā¹ None of that surprised me. What did surprise me was the intensity with which they did believe. What also surprised me was what these people claimed to have as professions in their real lives. One claimed to be a local high school teacher, another an Econ professor at a community college. One was a nurse, another a published author (with a link to his Amazon page, of course). I couldnāt help myself but ask myself questions. āAre these people the same in real life as they are online? Are they expressing and teaching their viewpoints to those around them ā especially the teachers? And if so, what do I ā we ā do about it?ā
I wish I had the answers.
As I reached the end of writing this post, I decided to come clean to the forum. The people there had shown a genuine interest in me and, although I found myself concerned for their mental well-being, I felt they at least deserved the truth from me. I came forward, shared with them my story as well as the un-doctored images. Before I had even had a chance to get any kind of response from the users in my thread, it was deleted. I received only a very brief message from one of the moderators of the site, and then my account was deleted as well. Thankfully I had saved all of the responses from the thread, but I wasnāt able to save his message before my account was gone. To the best of my knowledge, what he said was, āHere at ldsfreedomforum.net, we accept only people of the highest calibur. This community is built on trust and mutual respect, and you violated that. We do not tolerate the influences of Satan here.ā
Donāt quote me on that, but the general sentiment was the same.
The parallels this experience as a whole share with our current world werenāt particularly obvious to me at first, and yet became blindingly clear the longer I thought. In a world where people believe anything that their friends share on Facebook, a world where Snopes has to be used to navigate the political climate, a world of ominous chain e-mails and elaborate internet hoaxes, should we be so surprised that people believe in the paranormal?
At least Iāll always have the final message posted in that thread saved, a message that reminds me that, for at least a brief time, I was a member of this community. A community that I didnāt belong to or believe in, but a community nonetheless. A community of people who watched out for each other, lifted each other up, and helped each other examine and modify their ideas and theories. And a community that also coincidentally believed in demon sex, demon aliens, and a demon Obama.
I donāt think Iāll be headed back.
