The 1949 St. Louis exorcism is one of the most documented and debated cases of possession in American history. It is the case that inspired The Exorcist, but most of what people think they know comes from film, not from the actual accounts. When you go back to Father Bishop’s diary and read what was…
Crazy will always be one of my favorite books I’ve written. First of all, how it was written is different than anything else I have ever done. In 2006, I was personally asked to come to an old truck stop restaurant on Old Route 66. The Tri County Truck Stop in Villa Ridge, Missouri. They…
I heard a quote once that described a haunted house as one that had gone insane. That made a strange kind of sense to me. The idea that a house could harbor something hidden inside it, a kind of internal system that carries something through its walls and floors like a disease. That is what…
I don’t talk about this very often. It’s not because I’m trying to keep it private. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t come up in normal conversation, and honestly, I’ve never felt the need to turn it into something bigger than what it was. I was on the operating table when I died.…
Every once in a while I stop and look at two books sitting on my shelf. The Uninvited and The Architecture of Shadows. They were written many years apart, but in a strange way they belong to the same story. The Uninvited was the beginning of everything for me. It tells the story of what…
When I wrote The Uninvited about the Screaming House, I wanted to reach the people who might be living through something similar. I wanted them to know they were not alone. I have been doing this work for a long time. But I have never gathered what I have learned into one place before. For…
I have been sitting with a question for a while now, and the longer I sit with it, the less interested I am in answering it and the more interested I become in why it keeps showing up, again and again, in such recognizable ways. Across history and across cultures, people have talked about moments…
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…
I want to tell you about this because it’s important to me. Architecture of Shadows came out of the last twenty-five years of my life. Not in an academic way, but in a lived one. Walking into places people don’t like to talk about. Sitting with people while they shared experiences they had carried quietly…