Truth

  • Angels?

    What do I believe? That question has haunted me for years. Angels. Guiding beings. Protectors. Light. Love. The word itself carries a kind of warmth, does it not? But what if we have been looking at them all wrong? During the Screaming House haunting, something strange would happen. The phone would ring, and on the…

    Read more →

  • It Only Takes One

    The danger of what lies ahead feels familiar to anyone who remembers Kent State. On May 4, 1970, in Ohio, a group of college students gathered on the Kent State University campus to protest the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. They were young. They were angry. They were unarmed. The National Guard had…

    Read more →

  • I’m Wondering

    How many places do we touch in an average day that once held meaning for the living? How many rooms have we slept in where someone took their last breath? You might think that sounds strange, but is it really? How many hotel beds, how many houses, how many quiet corners have absorbed a final…

    Read more →

  • I have always disliked the word field when it is applied to the paranormal. A field suggests rules and boundaries. It suggests experts, degrees, certifications, and governing boards. It creates a false authority that does not exist. When you call the paranormal a field you fence it in too tightly, and that is not what…

    Read more →

  • If you believe in free speech and the First Amendment, then you also have to believe in the right of others to speak their minds, even when what they say clashes with your own beliefs. That is the hard truth at the center of democracy. Free speech was never meant to protect only the voices…

    Read more →

  • The Zeitgeist of Hate

    I came to an understanding recently. What we are dealing with in the United States is not political and should not be framed that way. It runs deeper than red or blue. Yes, people often line up that way and the extremes on both sides dominate the noise. But most Americans live in the quiet…

    Read more →

  • Examining the gap between the Constitution’s ideals and lived reality Many will tell you the United States is a great country. In some ways, they are not wrong. There is a difference between the ideals written on paper and the reality lived by its people. For some, especially those who are white, straight, and Christian,…

    Read more →

  • The Satan We Don’t See

    We like to imagine evil as obvious. We picture horns, a pitchfork, a sinister laugh. Or at least a villain with the flair of a comic-book nemesis, grand speeches, black suits, and a mustache to twirl. Even in politics, we point at figures like Trump or Vance and say, “There. That’s the bad guy.” It…

    Read more →

  • I Am Not the Secret

    I am not the secret,though they tried to make me one—hiding truth behind closed doors,feeding silence instead of love,teaching bitterness as inheritance.I was the boy they blamed,the brother they resented,the son who stood in the shadows of lies. I am not the sin,though they laid it on my shoulders.I am not the weight of their…

    Read more →

  • Seventeen years ago my book The Uninvited was released into the world. At the time, my son Elliot looked at me and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “Who would want to read about our lives?” It was honest, simple, and impossible for me to answer back then. What I did…

    Read more →