The Rogues Gallery

The Skeptical Believers (Part I)

A co-worker of mine told me about a website called CreepyConnecticut.net. They profess to be investigators of “The Constitution State’s creepiest sites.” Upon viewing the home page, one cannot help but recognize their tag line “Skeptically Believe!!!”.  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”, I thought to myself.  What do they mean by such a phrase?  My curiosity for all things “skeptical” sufficiently piqued, I delved further into the site and came across what can only be described as their mission statement:

“The Crusade For Truth: Join the grand experiment that Creepy Connecticut is undertaking! We are calling all level-headed, clear-thinking paranormal teams to arms! Are you tired of all the false claims being put out by so-called legitimate paranormal societies? Are you the type of people who value research and truth above rumor and myth? If so, it’s time for you to act! The revolution is here! Creepy Connecticut is calling on all like-minded individuals and groups to begin the Crusade For Truth!”

Well, I for one am tired of all the false claims being put out by paranormal societies! I’m a person who values research and truth above rumor and myth! (Hey, if they can liberally use exclamation points, so can I!)  Among the other things I came across on their website were some articles that the members of this group have written, and a radio interview with the group’s founder and head researcher, Barry Dillinger. I read his articles and the transcript of the radio interview. And finally, I started to get the idea of what Creepy Connecticut was about. I realized that this is not a typical group of “ghost hunters” that we at the New England Skeptical Society have run across many times before. It is best summed up by Barry Dillinger himself in his article titled ‘The Paranormal Sham’:

“I am not a true skeptic. While skeptics disbelieve until they see the proof, I am a believer who is waiting for the truth to be uncovered…While most paranormal groups will go into gruesome detail when describing how an inhuman entity actually behaves during a demonic haunt, they inevitably fail to explain that all their assertions are based on unprovable theory.  There has never been, to date, the positive identification of any haunting on film, audio, or otherwise.”

Whoa! Hold the phone! Is this really a “ghost hunter” admitting that there has never existed any evidence of supposed ghosts or ghostly phenomena?  This is a very rare occurrence in the business of the paranormal - “researchers” with a predisposition of belief in ghosts and an afterlife, and they have yet to see or hear anything that, they feel, can be construed as evidence. 

I decided to call Barry and ask him for an interview so I could report to all of you about this curious organization. Below is the transcript of the first half of the interview. Next week, I’ll follow up with the rest of the interview and my concluding thoughts about this unconventional group of ghost investigators:

Evan: What first got my attention was the tag line “Skeptically Believe!!!” Can you explain what you mean by Skeptically Believe?

Barry: Basically, the whole premise of skepticism seems to bear a lot of different definitions and impressions. My whole belief system in the supernatural is based on what I’ve culled over the years, and what I’ve come to believe is that there is something there beyond the veil. There is something there that we can’t explain. Now, I don’t know what it is, and I’ve yet to see proof of anything supernatural or paranormal, but I believe that being skeptical about all of these spoon-fed theories and conjectures regarding the paranormal is healthy. It drives all other paranormalists to a goal of truth and knowledge about any particular supernatural event or occurrence. If you are not skeptical, and you accept everything at face value, I think you run the danger of falling into the area of deception and fraud. So, in my opinion, for us to be skeptical about everything that’s out there, and to keep searching for compelling and complete evidence, is only going to do the paranormal community a service.”

Evan: So you are saying that you have not personally come across what you would consider to be any evidence for paranormal activity, but you are on the search for it?

Barry: Exactly. There are things that are out there that can be termed paranormal, but more often than not, and I would say nearly 100% of the time we can find, if we look for it, we can find a natural occurrence that is responsible for that so-called supernatural evidence. I have colleagues in the field who are video and photography experts who can point to every occurrence that is termed to be supernatural on film and they can explain it away. They can tell you that its a camera strap, or a person’s finger, or a hair, or an insect, or water vapor, anything that can effect light being reflected back into the lens. The things that are unexplainable, and the things that we tend to come across in very rare instances, are the things that I am most interested in. Those are the things that we need to go back in there, look at it multiple times, to see if we can duplicate any said occurrence.  And if we can, we need to further examine exactly what it is that’s causing it, if it is a natural occurrence. If it’s something supernatural, eventually, we’re going to come across something if we keep looking.

Evan: Do you have one case that you consider to be your most baffling case in which you are totally stymied as to what it possibly could have been?

Barry: Yes, I have one case, and one case only. And ironically, this is absolutely the only occurrence, or at least one of the only sites that The Warrens, Ed and Lorraine Warren, termed this site as not being haunted. And ironically, it was the one site that we picked up what we call an EVP, electronic voice phenomena, and we picked it up on our video camera. It was a brand new tape, there was very little wind if any at all, it was on a day that we only had two individuals at that site, it’s off the road in the woods, it’s very quiet, and we had past one point of the cemetery that was a guard stone, we passed the guard stone, and we heard a voice on the film.  Now of course, this wasn’t apparent at the time we were there, but when we downloaded it into the computer and we listened back at it, we discovered a woman’s voice humming a few notes of a song. For me, this was a compelling thing. We went back to the site and tried to reproduce it several times, and in fact, we did reproduce it two other times in the same exact spot. We looked for radio waves, we looked for any kind of power lines above and below the ground, we looked for evidence for anything that could have effected that tape at that time, and on the subsequent two visits, and we couldn’t determine anything that could have made that sound. Obviously, that remains something that’s, for us, unsolved.

To be continued…