Gone at midnight, p.20
Gone at Midnight, page 20
Her newest tweet read, “I know who killed Elisa Lam. I believe I am the only person on this entire planet who knows what happened. I have just kept my mouth shut because there is a lot more to it and of course . . . cases like this . . . I just did not want to draw any attention to myself but I know exactly why they did it and yes it was indeed a ritualistic murder. Just like Paul Walker’s.”
Joe wasn’t willing to completely write off someone claiming that Elisa had been ritualistically murdered. Stranger things have happened.
When Joe finally got Detective Stearns on the phone, back when the case was still open, he said to him, “I just want to make sure the department is doing its due diligence. Are you interrogating hotel employees or guests? Somebody has to know something.”
“This is still an ongoing investigation, Joe. I agree that it is a very strange case, and tragic. The parents have lawyers assisting them and, rest assured, everyone is doing their due diligence.”
“So you agree that it was likely a homicide?”
“It’s certainly possible.”
“Possible. It’s possible. Okay, well, I just—I . . . demand justice for Elisa. You hear me, sir? And this is just a little taste of the hell you’re going to deal with if you and your boys don’t figure it out.”
It struck me that Joe may have an emotional connection to the homicide narrative in the case. In the intensity of his despair for the loss of a friend, homicide allowed him to villainize an external antagonist, an embodiment of Evil borrowing human skin. Joe believed in Evil. He was a born-again Christian, in fact. A world with Evil made sense to him. A world in which friends died from accidents resulting from mental illness did not.
CHAPTER 16
Dark Synchronicity
I DREAMT OF ELISA AGAIN. Usually, my dreams are incoherent scrambles in which faces of people I’ve known might momentarily materialize. Lately, though, my dreams developed a narrative structure. This time Elisa appeared as the Stranger Things character Eleven, wading through the dismal realm of the Upside Down. She wore her red hoodie and near the end of the dream, she climbed the final flight of stair to reach the roof of the Cecil.
A blurry man opened a door for her and she emerged onto the roof, where the ashy detritus of the alternate dimension hung suspended in the night air.
Another man awaited her arrival. A tall man with shaggy black hair.
In the dream, I climbed up the fire escape of the Cecil, high above the city. Some winged demon hovered nearby, taunting me. When I reached the top, I stole a glimpse of Elisa approaching the strange man.
Suddenly the man’s head jerked to look right at me and I recognized those horrifying eyes of the figure at Pershing Square. The fright shocked me so much that I lost my balance on the rails of the fire escape and I fell. The winged demon laughed hysterically at me as I plunged and then—
I sat straight up in my bed with a panicked grunt.
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Later that evening, a percussive beat drove the frenzied roar of a melody laced with police sirens, helicopters, the shriek of some metallic Mothra, and a loudspeaker voice beseeching humans to “Give up . . . give up!” It’s both the opening anthem of Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis and a serviceable paean to the coming apocalypse.
“Tonight our guest on Ground Zero is Jake Anderson, who has spent the last three years immersed in one of the most mysterious cases of all time.” Clyde’s brassy baritone voice boomed over the airwaves. “I met this guy at Contact in the Desert and we started talking about the Cecil Hotel, which I’ve been fascinated with for years, and it turned out that Jake wanted to make a documentary about the place and this case.”
I sat across from him in the studio, waiting to go down the rabbit hole with my favorite radio host. In a way, Clyde’s show is like an interactive museum of rabbit holes. If conspiracy theories and parapsychology are part of a theatrical play, his show revels in the staging and production of the play, the stuff that goes on behind the curtains.
“I’ve always been fascinated by that place,” Clyde said. “In fact, I really want to do an investigation there because it seems like there is a residual haunting going on. Something evil is there. Generation after generation of people seem to experience the effects of trauma there. You spent the night there, Jake, what was it like?”
“I was nauseous from the moment I walked in the door, Clyde,” I said, genuinely on edge about my impending return. “You know, I like to play the skeptic’s role sometimes, but it definitely feels like there’s something going on there.”
I was conflicted. In my heart, I felt that this case was much more about the disconnect people have with regards to mental illness. Foul play was about as conspiratorial as I could go without feeling like I was aiding in the stigmatization. I’d posted two fairly benign articles on The Ghost Diaries about some of the creepy aspects of the case, but I felt immense guilt for not drawing attention to the mental illness component.
But Clyde’s core audience didn’t want to hear about serotonin and mood disorders. They wanted to hear about the supernatural spirits that lived inside the Cecil Hotel.
And here’s where my real conflict came in: Even though I wanted to focus on mental illness and how it can warp reality far more powerfully than a demon, I was no longer sure there wasn’t really something unexplainable going on at the Cecil. The belief stemmed from a combination of my visit to the hotel and the strange (precognitive?) dreams and synchronicities I’d experienced since.
My seventeen-year-old rationalist self was appalled at what I had become—a mentally unstable thirty-five-year-old man entertaining the idea of paranormal activity—but what did my seventeen-year-old self know? He hadn’t been broken yet.
I didn’t believe in sentient ghosts or demons, but I was starting to seriously consider the idea that paranormal activity is a kind of open-ended information transfer, feedback loops of data generated by consciousness, left like time capsules, notes tucked into library books, waiting to be discovered.
As crazy as it sounds, there’s decades of evidence, championed by reputable physicists, that strongly suggests a link between human consciousness and the quantum core of our universe.
It starts with the shocking conclusions of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century that have been corroborated over and over up until the present day. These experiments, which confounded the greatest scientific minds, show that at the subatomic realm there is no fixed objective reality without a human observer. If you drill in to the very core of the particles that make up matter and energy, there is only potential and probability—no concrete solid states—until human consciousness observes it and collapses the potential into certainty.
The other discovery that baffled scientists was that particles could communicate information to each other instantaneously across space/time. This non-local interaction violated Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and drove him bonkers. Ultimately, he was forced to concede the truth of quantum mechanics and conferred upon the non-locality phenomenon the now-famous appellation “spooky action at a distance.”
The “single particle double-slit experiment,” uncertainty principle, and quantum entanglement are too complex for the space we have here. I bring them up as a foundational premise for the unexplained but powerful connection between consciousness and reality.
There are several other important theories/experiments that began to impact my thinking about the Cecil Hotel and what could be going on there:
• Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch-OR. Renowned theoretical physicist Roger Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff advanced the theory that consciousness is not a purely neurological phenomenon but rather arises as part of a synergistic quantum process embedded in microtubules. They suggest minds can leave imprints, residual information. In January 2014, Japanese researchers detected quantum vibrations in microtubules, providing important corroboration for this theory.
• Global Consciousness Project. A series of experiments took place at Princeton in the 1990s, where scientists launched PEAR (The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research). The researchers there compiled a book called Margins of Reality, in which they describe how the human mind can have a small but mathematically significant effect on random number generators. The PEAR team eventually launched an even larger initiative, one that still exists today, called The Global Consciousness Project. This project collates ongoing statistical data showing that the intentions of a human observer can create order in random number systems.
• Retroactive Precognition. A few years ago, social psychologist Daryl J. Bem produced strong evidence for the controversial ESP concept known as “retroactive precognition.” In his paper, entitled “Feeling the Future,” Bem described a series of experiments suggesting that people are more likely to remember something in the present if they commit it to memory in the future. Let me state that again: According to Bem, you are more likely to remember something right now if you memorize it tomorrow.
• Synchronicity. Legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed the concept of synchronicity, which he defined as “acausal parallelism,” a web of seemingly random coincidences connecting subjective experience with external events. Jung, one of the few renowned scientists to give serious scientific consideration to parapsychology—which assisted in the collapse of his friendship with Freud—also believed “spirits” are the unconscious projection of psychological complexes. Also known as thought-forms, or tulpas (a concept originating in early Indian Buddhism), the physical embodiment of a thought or feeling.
Given these ideas, let’s reconsider the nature of ghosts, possessions and hauntings at the Cecil. Could such activity be data from the emotional states and thoughts left behind by people who died there traumatically? What kind of informational impressions might we expect? Intimations of shape, snatches of dialogue and out of place sounds, unusual and disturbing thought patterns, sudden, indirect movements and changes in temperature—in other words, the kinds of experiences reported by people who have paranormal encounters.
But what really freaks me out is that if what Bem says is correct and present cognition can affect the past, does that mean people may be “haunted” by the future? Could your thoughts now, as you read, affect my writing of this book? Could our analysis of Elisa now have affected her in the past? I started to imagine that in the surveillance video, Elisa sensed us, perhaps even me; she felt the presence of future observation.
Clyde was into it, all of it. “It sounds like there is definitely some residual haunting going on. Generation after generation after generation, you see some kind of imprint, a quantum signature, picking up on these intuitive mumblings from the past.”
During the commercial break, Clyde was giddy. “Wes Craven told me that when Freddy Krueger made it to the big screen, he was truly convinced that the spirit of the fictional character had possessed the serial killer Richard Ramirez. Seriously, he had to get therapy.”
“I read that Unterweger loved the movie Silence of the Lambs.”
Clyde’s eyes lit up. “Really . . . maybe he’s a tulpa of Hannibal, just like Ramirez is to Freddy Krueger.”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said.
After the break, Clyde talked more about synchronicities and thought-forms. Comparing it to the Dark Water synchronicities in the Lam case, he brought up the film Rosemary’s Baby as an example of predictive programming. Director Roman Polanski’s wife was killed by Manson’s family in a ritualistic slaughter eerily similar to the satanic sacrifice in the film.
Are these just random patterns in the static? Our minds projecting meaning onto chaos? Or is there some structure to it all?
The callers gave me yet another reminder of how the Lam case was in the zeitgeist, something that had burrowed into the collective unconscious.
One of the callers surprised me by suddenly bringing up the show Stranger Things. It wasn’t only that I had just uttered the words “stranger things” to Clyde in a different context, the caller referenced the show’s “Upside Down” alternate dimension, wondering if that could be involved in the Lam case.
While, on its face, the connection was absurd, I had only recently had a dream where Elisa was in the Upside Down. These are the kinds of strange synchronicities that stalked me through the entire investigation.
TALK THERAPY
Needless to say, after my Ground Zero appearance I needed to see my therapist. I hesitate to even call him a therapist; he’s a psychiatrist, which means he prescribes drugs. For quality talk therapy, you have to find a specialist, though I did have one therapist at Kaiser who made a good faith effort to tap into some of my thought patterns.
One of the biggest problems in mental health is that the rise of pharmapsychology has marked a simultaneous decrease in talk therapy. Without understanding how your past fuels your thought patterns and how your thought patterns fuel your behavior, all the meds can do is maintain an acceptable level of functionality. There’s no curative power there, only maintenance. You’re bailing water out of a floundering ship.
This goes for other holistic healing as well. Exercise, meditation, nutritious diet, positive thinking, self-love, reciprocal relationships, kinship with nature, etc. are all believed to help carve your neural pathways into patterns of healthy behavior.
There are two major forms of talk therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal therapy (IPT).
CBT is sometimes referred to as a “psychodynamic therapy” that focuses on emotional responses to external triggers. The premise is that thought patterns can be destructive and that through “learned optimism” and neutralizing “automatic thoughts,” the mind can actually change its own reality. Essentially, you learn to control your own thoughts and emotions, creating more beneficial patterns.
IPT focuses more on the present. Instead of working to identify negative triggers from the past, the therapist helps the patient develop strategies for day-to-day life. This includes assessing current relationships, grief, stressful transitions, and isolation. IPT helps the patient establish goals and steps toward attaining those goals. Instead of trying to change the underlying depression, the therapy builds around it so that its effects are minimized.
Some people respond very well to talk therapy. In fact, in patients for whom it is curative, talk therapy has actually been shown to have much of the same effects on the brain as medication. This was demonstrated by assessing a patient’s sleep electroencephalogram (EEG). The reason for this is a mystery, as is depression and mental illness itself. While serotonin—one of nature’s most basic building blocks in species development—and neurotransmitters are involved, simple addition and subtraction of its quantities in the brain have not been shown to necessarily equate more or less depression. The receptor theory, whereby drugs target the brain’s ability to absorb neurotransmitters, has similarly not conclusively solved the problem.
Depression and related mental illnesses seem rather to be a synergistic phenomenon that involves genetic predisposition, traumatic history, psycho-social dynamics, and other factors.
That talk therapy can cause the same biological changes on the brain as medication, Andrew Solomon says in his book The Noonday Demon, might suggest to some that medication is bunk, but the reality is rather that there are multiple ways to positively change neural activity in the brain.
Talk therapy has its own problematic idiosyncrasies. For one, choice of therapist is crucial. One study showed that conversations with English professors could be just as beneficial as sessions with professional therapists, seemingly implying that emotional connection is of primary importance when it comes to therapy.
“SHOULD WE ALL TAKE A LITTLE BIT OF LITHIUM?”
No matter who’s sitting across from me, explaining one’s depression is similar, I imagine, to describing color to a blind person. One thing I can say is that depression is not sadness. Sadness is more like a form of nostalgia, apprehension over absence or injustice. There is a human ambition to sadness, a warrant for some future where there exists a right and wrong. Sadness has almost a sweetness to it, a charming quality. People write poems and songs about sadness. It inspires Hallmark get-well cards and wistful apologies. There is an economy to it.
Depression is an entirely different beast. Depression wrangles your mind, squeezing, crushing, choking, surgically removing your identity. In the depths of a major depressive spell, you no longer feel human, you no longer remember what it feels like to be you. Depression is thus beyond sadness. It makes you pray for sadness.
But it wasn’t just depression and this was the part that was so difficult for me to articulate. I was beginning to think there was something more going on inside me.
The base-level sensation was an amalgam of despair, panic, and claustrophobia. Not a normal claustrophobia that has a relation to confined spaces, but rather a vertical terror that spiked through all other cognitive and emotional levels, pinning them together in a single affected tier. It doesn’t matter where I am. I could be in a wide-open territory. Claustrophobia in fields, in outer space, as abstract and esoteric as loneliness in crowds, just the raw existential damage we accumulate.
The feeling is a panicked fight-or-flight response ripped out of its normal evolutionary cycle. It’s like I missed my life, or that my life has passed me by, or that someone else is me and experiencing my family, my joy, my destiny. It’s like waking up to realize you slept through your entire life, or waking up to find out you’ve been completely replaced. The doppelgänger is in your head, a version of you—a perfect happy version—that got kicked out of the multiverse for impersonating you, and God had the locks changed.
