Steven LaChance Blog

There is something I have been watching happen again and again in paranormal spaces, and it worries me more now than it ever did before. It is not the unexplained that concerns me. It is what people do to one another in the name of explaining it.

When people reach out for help, they are rarely doing so from a place of curiosity. They are afraid. They are overwhelmed. They are often already dealing with loss, illness, stress, or instability. They are not looking for performance. They are not looking for certainty delivered with confidence. They are looking for steadiness. They are looking for someone who will slow the room down and help them breathe.

Instead, what they often encounter is ego.

I see investigators speaking with moral authority they have not earned. Mediums declaring themselves the final word on a situation they just walked into. Religious voices rushing to label something demonic because fear feels safer than ambiguity. Everyone seems to know exactly what is happening. Everyone speaks in absolutes. And almost no one is willing to say the most important sentence available to them.

I do not know.

That sentence matters more than people realize.

I want to be clear about something. My book The Uninvited is not fiction. It is a real account of what happened to my family and me, written from inside the experience, not after it had settled into clarity. It reflects what I saw, felt, feared, and struggled to understand in real time. I was not presenting a theory or crafting a narrative. I was recording what it was like to live through something frightening and unexplained while trying to protect my family.

The book was written from inside a very human place, at a time when I was dealing with something most of us would struggle to explain, even to ourselves.

In the beginning of what would become The Uninvited, and what the world would later call the Screaming House, I was not a case study. I was not investigating a phenomenon. I was a single father already carrying grief, loss, and responsibility, trying to keep my family steady while our footing was slipping beneath us.

We did not step into a clean, contained situation with boundaries and protocols. We were already vulnerable when the noise began. The Screaming House became a name later. At the time, it was simply our home. And once the outside voices arrived, the noise never stopped.

I was given names. Different names. I was given explanations that contradicted one another. One person insisted it was a human spirit. Another was certain it was something darker. Others framed it through religion, psychology, folklore, or personal revelation. Each voice spoke with confidence. Each one implied authority. None of them agreed. And very few ever paused to say what would have actually helped.

The right and correct thing for anyone to have said to a frightened family was this:

I do not know. Let us work toward acceptance. Let us understand that you may never have complete answers.

Only one person approached me that way.

They did not rush to name things or frame the experience through certainty. They did not add fear to an already overwhelming situation. They offered steadiness, patience, and a way to quiet the noise so I could think, breathe, and live with what was happening without being pulled apart by competing explanations. That guidance mattered more than any label ever could, and I remain grateful for it.

At some point, I stepped away from the public paranormal world almost entirely. For nearly ten years I shut out the noise so I could research, think, and live with the questions without being pulled in a hundred different directions by other people’s certainty. That distance mattered. It allowed me to study patterns, psychology, history, and human behavior without the pressure to declare conclusions. It allowed me to accept that some experiences resist tidy explanations.

Coming back years later, what struck me most was not how much had changed, but how much had not. The noise is still there. If anything, it is louder now. Social media has amplified it. Certainty travels faster than care. Authority is claimed rather than earned. And people in crisis are still being handed answers instead of support.

I am not saying any of this to scold anyone. I am saying it as a human being who lived through something frightening, destabilizing, and unexplainable with my family. I am saying it because I know how damaging it is to be surrounded by people who refuse to stand in humility.

The harm was not only whatever was happening in the house. The harm was the accumulation of certainty layered on top of fear. When you are already struggling, being surrounded by conflicting absolutes does not bring clarity. It erodes trust. It teaches you to doubt your own perceptions. It pushes you to chase answers instead of stability. And when things finally break, the same voices that spoke so confidently often disappear.

This is why I have grown wary of anyone who cannot admit uncertainty.

Saying “I do not know” is not weakness. It is ethics. It is restraint. It is care. It protects families. It protects investigators. It keeps the focus where it belongs, on the people living through the experience rather than the people explaining it.

There is a difference between helping and performing. Between serving and branding. Between walking beside someone and standing above them. The unexplained does not belong to whoever speaks the loudest or with the most confidence. No one knows for sure. And pretending otherwise does real harm.

I do not know. But I am here.

I have always thought about that line from The X-Files: The truth is out there. What I love about it is that it never claims the truth has been found. It does not close the door. It simply leaves space for the idea that meaning exists, even if it remains just beyond reach.

I believe I was haunted. I believe my family was haunted. Something real happened to us. What that something was, I cannot define with finality, and I have never claimed that I could.

I believe the truth is out there. I also accept that it may not be a truth I am meant to fully know. And that is okay.

What I wish is that more of the paranormal world could stand in that same light. Not the need to explain everything, but the willingness to sit with what cannot be explained without turning it into spectacle. Not answers delivered with confidence, but presence offered with care.

Because for people who are living inside something frightening and unexplainable, the most important words are not declarations or labels.

They are these.

I do not know. But I am here.