Read Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown for Free Online

investigated, whenever suicide is the official explanation, some people just don’t accept it. Given his situation and the fact he’d brought his rifle, suicide seems likely to me. Matthew was five at the time the body was found and his parents kept the news from him.
    This history provided a direct explanation and an identity for one of the spirits. Spirits tend to be connected to location. Timothy would naturally feel attached to his former home, and possibly be as afraid to leave it in death as he had been in life. Spirits are also often disturbed when their environment is changed. The house renovations, the clearing of the field, and the discovery of the body may have contributed to the activity.
    While interviewing Matthew, Adam asked if there was any specific place that the spirits appeared. Matthew led him down into the basement, pointed to a corner near the furnace and immediately started walking away.
    “Over there?” Adam asked. “By the furnace? Right now or some other time?”
    Matthew paused long enough to say “now,” and then kept walking.
    Did Matthew’s reaction mean Timmy was actually there? Maybe.
    Unless someone manages to videotape a full-body apparition, or something levitating in laboratory conditions, hard evidence of the paranormal is, to put it mildly, tough. In my own experience, even when something amazing seems to happen right in front of me, one of the hard lessons is that it’s still very possible there’s a natural explanation.
    I can’t stress that enough. There’ve been times when I’ve been certain something paranormal occurred only to wake up a few mornings later and say to myself, “Wait a minute, could there be another explanation?”
    In Matthew’s case, the simplest explanation may be that he was imagining things or making them up. After all, no one else sees Timmy or the mists. While we were there, he wouldn’t even bring them up himself. He never said to us, for instance, “Oh my gosh, I’m seeing them right now!”
    Are they there so often that Matthew just doesn’t bother mentioning it? Despite the history, I had to wonder if at least some of his experiences weren’t real. To go back to that basement scene a moment, first Adam asked if there was something there, which could have led to Matthew’s answer. Then again, during the interview outside, Matthew is often looking over his shoulder, as if something’s there. A close examination of that basement footage also reveals that he moves quickly away from the corner before Adam asks about it.
    Matthew also spoke about things in a way that made more sense if he actually were in touch with Timmy. For instance, he described Timothy as wanting to find “the guy who cut down all the trees.” Why? “Because when Timmy was alive, all the trees weren’t cut down.”
    Other evidence began to mount. The Dopiks told us that Timothy constantly wore Walkman headphones, something I didn’t know until we interviewed them. Yet, Matthew described Timmy as wearing something in his ears or around his neck. It’s hard to imagine how Matthew would know that, or why he’d make up something so specific.
    Mike and Lori Dopik also provided us with a great way to test Matthew’s story. They had a group photo from their wedding, taken years ago, in which Timothy appeared. As far as we were able to determine, Matthew hadn’t seen any photo of Timmy. All we had to do was show this picture to Matthew and ask if Timmy was in it.
    In a pivotal sequence in the investigation, I brought the photo to Matthew in the Seighmans’ backyard. As I walked down to the swing set, I prepared myself for a negative result. “He’s not going to pick out Timmy,” I told myself. “Don’t hype this up. Don’t let him see that you’re disappointed when he can’t do it.”
    It all happened very quickly, on-camera, without any cutting away. I took out the picture, a shot of about twenty people, one of whom was Timmy about ten years before his death. I