We started our journey in June, 2011. We had so much fun. We went on so many investigations that I’ve lost count; we have hundreds, if not thousands, of EVP, all of them little snippets of what we believed were amazing voices from the beyond. We thought our recordings, our data, would change the world. We were going to prove life after death. It all seems so innocent now, something we did when we were young. I don’t feel young or innocent now. I don’t think we, or I, can change the world. I couldn’t even change anyone’s mind. My big paranormal quest fizzled out, and the ‘real’ world beat me down. But perhaps the other ladies found inspiration elsewhere–I hope so. I really don’t know. We are still together, but it’s 2020, so we are also apart.
But it wasn’t simply that our dreams of making a significant and lasting impact didn’t go as planned; through our research, our blogs, and our interviews and media appearances, we discovered some hard truths. People cared more about entertainment than education; most people had already made up their minds regarding what they are willing to accept as evidence, and that is based on their preconceived notions of reality, something that we could not change. I found that the spirit world wasn’t ‘fun’ when your back was scratched, your beliefs shattered, your emotions unleashed and your fear spiked to unmanageable levels. That was the strangest realization for me: our experiences were exciting and addicting when we were not convinced that what we were seeking existed. As soon as it became abundantly clear that consciousness could manifest itself in myriad ways, the fun vanished. What we were looking for was real; and I realized that the more I sought to understand spirit, the less sense I could make of it all.
I didn’t believe in demons, and then I walked straight into a house where the owner was possessed; I watched my mind struggle to retain control of logic and critical thinking in the face of overwhelming evidence of the presence of evil. Paranormal investigations affected all of us in different ways; but I think it’s safe to say that as a group, we hit a wall with the spirit world. I became overwhelmed by it all the more that I connected with something that I didn’t understand; Marsha pushed herself further into meditation and personal experiences; Erin just wanted to enjoy herself like we used to, but she was surrounded by the rest of us who were struggling in different ways. Jennifer found herself unable to emotionally connect the way she used to; and Kimberly wanted the data to be scientific and unassailable, and wasn’t finding our data convincing.
We drifted. Our searches led us in different directions. I had started out wanting to be scientific in my approach, and I ended up as something of a medium; I didn’t expect that, and my new-found enthusiasm for impressions and visions embarrassed most of our team. It seemed that we were torn apart by our own success at finding what we were looking for, or by not finding what we wanted or expected. I think we all had some expectation about how our explorations would go and what we would find–and after years of going deep into abandoned buildings, we ended up deep in our own psyches, realizing that we were just as engaged in self exploration as we were spirit seeking. And maybe the ladies won’t agree with that . . . I don’t mean to speak for us all.
My spiritual quest became personal, and I separated myself from the whole concept of communal ‘ghost hunting’. I dove deeply into reincarnation, mediumship, alterations in consciousness, intense meditations, and spiritual awakenings that left me humbled and overwhelmed. During that process, I lost the team. We were, we are, friends; we’ve been through too much as a team to lose that connection completely. Of course, this terrible year hasn’t helped at all; it’s simply reinforced our separation, our isolation. But beyond the horrors of 2020, there is this sense of loss that I feel; a loss that centers around having a common purpose with a group of people who, in the beginning, just wanted to contact the dead. Writing that, I wonder why we wanted to do that in the first place . . .
We were all very different people from the beginning. Connecting with spirit, or consciousness without material form, or ghosts, shadow people, entities without bodies, or whatever the hell is out there that communicated with us, was our common passion. We all knew that non-material beings existed, and we wanted them to communicate with us. Perhaps we all feared death on some level; we all had dealt with serious illnesses and knew that life was fragile, at least material life. We wanted some consolation, perhaps, some evidence that all would not be lost after our deaths. We wanted, maybe, to feel hope that we would have more than just this one opportunity at existence. We also wanted to understand our anomalous experiences, our ghost contacts, our memories of other lives, all the weird phenomena that followed us all for most of our lives.
Our differences, however, became more marked over time. We formed alliances with each other that shifted and caused pain, even if we didn’t intend for that to happen. We would get annoyed with each other’s eccentricities or newfound spiritual passions that seemed to have little to do with our original goals. Or, we would simply gossip about each other or feel justified in striking out on our own, because we couldn’t agree on what to do next, or how to do it, or even what we were looking for. There were political divisions, emotional divisions, and the sense that we had changed.
I still struggle with this change. I know that I was part of the problem–I delved so deeply into my research and my spiritual experiences that I no longer cared to ask questions to invisible entities in abandoned buildings. I was tired of ‘them’, whoever they were, doing nothing but leaving one-word responses on my recorder, giving me migraines, making me sick, and never, never, never, identifying themselves. It felt like a game that something was playing with all of us, and that game did not go anywhere. I didn’t know what else to ask, what else to do, because mostly, I didn’t know what I wanted to discover. What closure was I seeking? Perhaps, I should have simply loved my parasisters without taking it all so seriously. Perhaps, the spirits I should have sought were in us.
What’s next? What can happen now, or after this miserable year has dragged itself to the grave? What should happen now? Is there any reasonable way to go back to old-fashioned investigating? I wonder if there is any way to return to the old days, knowing that it leads nowhere, really, in terms of spiritual discovery. Or perhaps I am wrong; it’s possible that something extraordinary could still happen, even though I no longer need any proof of life after death. I don’t think any of us have any doubt about that any more. I don’t know if I am looking for anything anymore; or, maybe, I’m just afraid of what IS out there.
That’s probably the most honest answer. I am afraid of the energies that linger in places they shouldn’t be. I will never understand what is out there; never. It’s hubris to think that any of us will ‘figure it out’. We can’t; we won’t. Any attempt to further investigate fragments of disembodied consciousness can only lead back to ourselves and our interpretations of reality. That’s the ‘paranormal’ game: to reveal you to yourself, and to divide you from those who don’t agree with your version of paranormality.
And that leaves you very much alone with your experiences and your theories. It concerns me that a team could be driven apart by the very forces that we once sought to ‘understand’ and explain. And yes, of course, there were more issues that divided us than the paranormal. The realities of this world and our individual lives and families pushed us apart. During this year of total trauma and division, we are further apart than ever. I don’t want this, really. I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts and emotions and ideas. I used to share those things. And now, I don’t.
Ultimately, I hope that we find our way again, even if that journey back to each other looks different now than it used to. Maybe, it’s not about the object of our search; perhaps that doesn’t matter so much. Maybe, it’s about a group of people with little in common, that probably would never have been friends outside of our common interest in the paranormal, finding inspiration in a common passion that involves exploring dark and disturbing places filled with mystery. Did we REALLY want to find all the answers, or was the real joy in the search itself? Of course, it was about looking and not finding. Once you answer all your questions, is there anything to do after that? The fun we had was running around places we weren’t supposed to be attempting to accomplish the impossible. It was never about proving anything to anyone, or landing a big show on SyFy. We lost our way, like so many other groups did; but I think we can find it again by giving up the need to be right and the pretense of proving something we already know: we are eternal beings that will have many forms in the future–but the Paranormal Housewives only have this life. We shouldn’t let that go.
–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
The Soul Bank: Stories, Research, Essays, (B)Logs 