Halloween Haunts 2013: Haunted Halloween Party by Joe Augustyn

Like most of you, I have a lifetime of Halloween memories, starting in that magical bygone era when it was deemed safe for five-year-olds to wander the city streets without adult supervision, led perhaps by an “older and wiser” eight-year-old sibling. While the joy of dressing up and collecting a feast of candy was heaven enough for most of us, my brother Mike took it to the entrepreneurial max, maintaining a list of addresses of people who gave out coins instead of candy. He’d lead us out the door to please our parents, then send our slow-moving asses on our rounds while he swam off like a shark to make his own. He’d come home with a drooping bag of jingling treasure and a satisfied grin.

The simple pleasures of childhood gave way to more adventurous Halloween treats in the mind-expanding years of young adulthood, including one surreal evening that I’ll save for a future blog. I’ll also bypass the memories related to the Halloween themed movie I wrote and produced, because my most memorable Halloween experience happened years later.

Haunted house attractions abound in October, but parties in real haunted houses are not so common.  To be in one while paranormal activity is happening all around you is something you never forget.

The house in question belonged to my friend John. It has been featured on several TV shows, from Henry Winkler’s “Sightings” to “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files.” Multiple experts have endeavored to debunk the phenomena in the house; none have succeeded. The investigators included UCLA parapsychologist Kerry Gaynor, who was the researcher in the “Entity” case dramatized in a film starring Barbara Hershey. Kerry declared that out of the thousands of cases he’s investigated, only the Entity case and the “ghostwriter” case at my friend’s house appeared to be authentically paranormal.

John’s rustic, cabin-like home is situated on a large, heavily wooded lot in the hills of suburban Los Angeles. Sitting on the porch surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees you can hardly believe you’re in the middle of a sprawling metropolis. A variety of ghostly sightings, noises and other strange activity were reported by residents, houseguests and neighbors. But the house is best known for the “ghostwriter” phenomena witnessed by dozens of people over the course of several years.

The ghostwriter activity began when John’s roommate (also named John) snapped a few Polaroid pictures in the house, after getting an eerie feeling and witnessing a door open by itself.  Unseen by the naked eye, something that looks convincingly like a ghost appeared on the snapshots. Even more convincing, it seemed to move forward towards the camera in successive shots.

The two Johns began a series of Polaroid experiments, which led to communication with a spirit that identified itself as “Wright.” The most impressive involved the “Sightings” crew, who arrived with Kerry Gaynor and Edson Williams, a photo expert from the Scripps Institute.

They also brought along a sealed case of film sent straight from the Polaroid Corporation, whose own experts had already examined ghost pictures from the Wright house and were baffled as to how they might have been hoaxed. Under carefully controlled lab conditions involving long hours of prepareations, they were only able to produce unconvincing replications.

With their video cameras rolling, the Sightings crew documented a fresh pack of Polaroid film being logged, unsealed and loaded—followed by a question being asked by one of the observers and answered by Wright via the Polaroid. The question “Are you an entity attached to a person or a place?” was answered on the photo in ectoplasmic scrawl, “genius loci”—a spirit attached to either a person or a place.

When the Johns threw a Halloween party in 1994, several guests showed up toting their own Polaroid cameras.

For the first few hours no one captured anything supernatural. Enthusiasm for the ghost hunt dwindled as the party wore on. Conversations grew deeper and livelier and veered away from the paranormal as the amateur ghost hunters tallied the cost of Polaroid film and realized how expensive a proper ghost hunt could be. They had been snapping pictures off and on for hours, with not even vaguely paranormal results.

Then Wright made his entrance, in the best Hollywood tradition.

Fashionably late, of course.

I was outside joking with friends when a sudden escalation of the party chatter inside the house drew our attention. I hurried inside, eager to investigate

Party guests were gathered in several clusters throughout the living room and kitchen, hurrying from one developing photo to the next. It is beyond my capacity as a writer to convey the sense of raw energy emanating from those photographs… the spine-tingling elegance of watching the Polaroids develop before one’s eyes… the mind racing as it connected the inexplicable images to the context of the live reality in which they were captured… the looks on the faces of the photographers and those who were photographed as they saw on film what they hadn’t seen in the air only moments before when the photos were snapped.

The only way to convey even a vague impression of the experience is to offer a few examples.

Three photos stand out clearly in my memory, for the ectoplasmic images that appeared on those three Polaroids were nothing short of phenomenal.

The first was a medium shot of a young man taken by one of his pals. A straight on frontal portrait, from the waist up. The photo might have ended up a routine party memory in the young man’s scrapbook someday—except for the bizarre ectoplasmic squiggles exploding upward from the base of his neck.

These were not the random splotches of faulty or damaged film. They were a fountain spray of tiny white “ghostlets” flying upward in a cohesive pattern, seemingly organized by some intelligence to create a very specific effect.

Catching sight of the photo from an arm’s length away, I was struck by that effect immediately—the illusion of a man with his head exploding, perhaps having it blown off by a shotgun.

Most chilling of all, in a comically sinister way, was the photo taken of a young man who came to the party in a Grim Reaper costume. In a close-up picture, he’s facing a single ectoplasmic entity in the shot—a weird fetus-shaped demon with an oversized fetal skull, which appears to be engaged in a “compromising position” with the costumed guest’s Grim Reaper skull mask.

Were those two pics Halloween pranks by Wright the Ghostwriter? Or pranks perpetrated by ingenious human hoaxsters?

The third picture seems to support the first supposition. It is a wider angle including both of the party guests, and the same phenomena described above are evident in both. It only takes a minute to calculate the difficulty of staging three such interrelated shots in the midst of a bustling party.

Mr. Grim Reaper was so freaked out by the pictures that he immediately fled the property.

The Halloween parties at the Wright house became an annual event, but were stopped in the late ‘90s after hundreds of costumed strangers invaded the house, and several “souvenirs” disappeared from the house, from Polaroid pics to tchotchkes.

More investigations followed, with the most recent just a few years ago, when the photo expert of “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files” was thwarted in her attempt to debunk the ghost photos and voice analysis of the house tenants indicated they were being truthful, leading the team to declare the phenomena as genuinely unexplained and not faked.

The high cost and increasing rarity of Polaroid film put an end to the Polaroid ghost pictures, but in recent years the residents have successfully renewed their experiments with digital cameras. I haven’t seen any of the new photos, but have been told they are very interesting and unique. For personal reasons, the Johns aren’t sure they want to share them with the world.

TODAY’S GIVEAWAY: HWA member Tonya Hurley is offering one copy of her novel Precious Blood: The Blessed, three Precious Blood tee shirts, and a Precious Blood prayer candle.

Giveaway Rules: Enter for the prize by posting in the comments section. Winners will be chosen at random and notified by e-mail. You may enter once for each giveaway, and all entrants may be considered for other giveaways if they don’t win on the day they post. If you would like to comment without being entered for the giveaway, include “Not a Giveaway Entry” at the end of your post. You may also enter by e-mailing memoutreach@horror.org and putting HH CONTEST ENTRY in the header.

JOE AUGUSTYN wrote and produced the cult Halloween movie Night of the Demons (the original, not the recent remake) and wrote the first sequel. His first novel The Nine Lives of Felicia Miller was published in 2012. He just wrapped an untitled zombie novel. Told by the late psychic medium Peter James that he was a natural medium and should develop that faculty, Joe comes from a family with a history of paranormal experiences and has lived in several haunted houses. His personal stories including more details about the Wright house and dozens of amazing photos are in his next book, Ghostwriter: True Tales of the Paranormal. He can be reached at mojoguzzi@comcast.net.