Living with... things

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Living with... things
May 18, 2009
DAVID MOORE
The Arab Tribune (Alabama)

iki Vandiver says she's being haunted. She does not use the word "ghosts" in describing the four separate things she has encountered numerous times. She actually uses the word "things."

But saying "things" instead of "ghosts" doesn't ease the terror she says these encounters cause.

"It's so far out there, I have trouble believing it myself - even though it's happening to me," Vandiver says.

The Arab woman's story - part of it, anyway - was depicted Monday and Tuesday on broadcasts of the A&E network's series Paranormal State. The episode, titled "Dead and Back," is set to air again at 5:30 p.m. tonight and at 4:30 p.m. Monday, according to A&E's website.

Though the show never uses her last name or identifies Vandiver as living in Arab - the location is given as North Alabama - there are shots from around the area, including the Arab Historical Village. And the Arab Historical Society is given special thanks in the credits.

The episode ends on a hopeful note, saying Vandiver had resumed sleeping in the bedroom she had abandoned in fear, implying that the shadowy thing haunting her might have departed for hell, where it was reluctant to go.

Not so, she says Wednesday, sitting in her small, dimly lit living room, light coming through an open side door and a small candle on the table. From various cages her 11 pet cockatiels, finches and doves coo and call.

"There's still a shadow here," Vandiver says.
Shadow Viki Vandiver says she felt a presence behind her in the bathroom and shot this photo over her shoulder. The flash lit up the glass sliding door to the shower, at right, while an unexplained shadow appears behind it, inside the shower. Efforts by a Tribune photographer to duplicate the shot using Vandiver's camera and figure out what caused the shadow were unsuccessful.

According to the show, it's the spirit of her deceased father.

Three days after the TV crew departed in early April, she says, the thing made its presence felt with a sound like a baseball being thrown against the outside of the house.

"It's so loud, you can't tell where it is coming from," Vandiver says, adding that it was loud enough one night to awaken a neighbor.

She also hears knocking and taps her fingers on the table to demonstrate the sound.

At the urging of the show's host, Ryan Buell, she bought a digital camera and often carries it with her around the house.

"If I feel something or see something," she says, "I can just aim and shoot."

She's done that twice with the shadow. In the corner of a tilted photo taken in the living room looms a vague shadow, along with some circular reflections from light.

More clear is the shot she took last Saturday. She was standing at the bathroom sink when she again sensed a presence behind her again and, without turning to look, picked up the camera and shot over her shoulder.

There's a glare from the flash bouncing off the sliding shower door immediately behind her, but through the door opening, inside the shower, there's an obvious and immediately inexplicable shadow.

She sent the photos to Paranormal State crew for analysis.

"They've been real good to stay in touch," Vandiver says appreciatively. "They've all been wonderful to help me and tell me I'm not the only one (who experiences these things). They truly seem concerned about the outcome."

The same, she says, is true of people she's met with the Alabama Paranormal Society. It's headed by Leilani Catalan of Madison, who called Vandiver Wednesday.

A cold 'ahhhh'

Alabama Paranormal Society visited Vandiver twice, beginning in March, after being informed of the situation by her concerned daughter, Niki Johnson of Arab, who also appears on the show.

During those visits, members recorded more than a dozen snippets of some of the sounds Vandiver says she hears in the house.

Wednesday she replays the recordings on her computer. Behind the hiss of static one can hear what sounds to be brief and faint voices and noises.

"Go home," a woman's voice seems to say in a recording from Vandiver's bedroom. Other recordings catch a high-pitched laugh and a brief growling sound.

In another, a cold sounding "ahhhh" can heard.

"I hear that all of the time," Vandiver says.

Catalan and APS contacted Paranormal State about Vandiver and her house, and producers planned a visit in July. After they heard the recordings - EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena, as they are known in the paranormal field - the TV crew showed up four days later.

A lot of what Vandiver said during interviews with Buell and his crew were not used in the show, which concludes that her dead father is at the center of this, and it's not the house he's haunting, rather it's her.

A violent death

Her father is not named in the show, and Vandiver asks that he not be named here, but he was a prominent fire chief in the area who died about 20 years ago from a shotgun blast. Accounts vary as to whether the shooting was accidental or suicide.

Over the course of four days last month, about 35 crewmembers with the show came and went, including the cast, production people and various specialists they brought in. Because of a confidentiality clause in the contract she signed, Vandiver was unable to talk about any of it until after the episode aired.

One of those called in during the shooting was Chip Coffey, who appears on some of the shows as a psychic medium.

It's Coffey who makes the strong link to Vandiver's father as the source of the haunting. She doesn't offer details but says that at home her father was a heavy drinker and very abusive, though he put on a different face in public.

"He had a lot of people who thought a lot about him," Vandiver says. "But anyone who knew us knew there was chaos in the family."

Opening a portal?

The show also ties Vandiver's haunting to back-to-back aneurysms she suffered in 1999.

"I never thought that was it," she says. "But they contacted my doctor in Detroit and flew up and talked to him. He told them I actually 'died' for a few minutes."

The Paranormal Crew told her the incident apparently opened a portal to the dead.

As they explained it to Vandiver, it's as if she's in a darkened room, wearing white that makes her stand out. When people die violently or suddenly, they don't always know they are dead. As they look about in the dimness for family or someone they know, Vandiver stands out, so they come to her.

Coffey told her that's the case with her father, who won't let go of this world because he fears where he is going in the next.

Vandiver says she doesn't know if the shadowy thing is her father or not. If it is, he's not alone in his ghostly visits, a point that does not come out in the A&E episode.

Looking back, Vandiver says, after her aneurysms she began thinking she heard and saw things, and she sometimes felt a presence near her.

"I denied it for a long time," she says.

But to focus only on her father and family problems from years ago, she adds without irony, is beating a dead horse.

Unwelcome visitors

It was after moving 11 months ago to the house on Fifth Street NW that things escalated, starting the second or third night there. Vandiver says she was on her back porch when she briefly saw an old woman in the neighbor's backyard.

"I could tell she was not a solid, normal person," she says.

Later, she asked around the neighborhood about who might have once lived in the house. A woman told her "Miss Haney" had lived there, and when she produced a photo, Vandiver says, she immediately recognized her.

"I started crying," she says.

Then the shadow showed up and either continues to be there or has been replaced or joined by others, Vandiver says, adding that it has punched her in the back and hit her across the face.

A few months after "Miss Haney," Vandiver says, she was sitting in the living room when she suddenly saw a woman. She describes her as being about 35, wearing a whitish dress and having something wrong with either the part in her hair or her head.

Later, the woman made another appearance but again quickly vanished.

Most recently, about two months ago, her daughter came to the house to help her store some things in the attic. While up there, Vandiver says, she saw a little girl under the rafters, her face lost in the shadows.

Too shocked to scream

Off camera, the Paranormal Crew suggested, it's perhaps not a curse Vandiver has but a gift, one that could help people. She doesn't see that at all, at least not at this point.

"I'm just making it day by day," she says.

Her encounters with the things, even though only momentary, are terrifying, Vandiver assures anyone who wants to know.

Movies and TV tend to build tension and use gore for effect, and people scream when suddenly confronted with creatures and ghosts. That doesn't jibe with her own experience, Vandiver says.

"It's not really like that. You're just waiting for it to be over so you can figure out what happened.

"You're so shocked at the time, I don't see how you could scream," she says. "Even if I could, I don't think I would speak to them."

She says some of her own research has revealed that speaking to such spirits might encourage them to stay, and they might not be kindly spirits.

Vandiver's two school-aged sons live with her. She says they have heard and seen things, and, though they have never been touched, she fears for their safety but doesn't know what to do about it.

"I spend a lot of nights sitting at the foot of their beds," she says.

Money was not her pay

About 12-15 family, friends and neighbors watched the show with her Monday night.

Her first impression afterward was sadness.

"It broke my heart that my memories of my dad are so bad," Vandiver says.

She said the show was good in that it did not exaggerate things, though she's not in full agreement with Coffey about the haunting being tied solely to her father.

She's gotten no direct feedback from the show yet, other than a sibling who, she says, will not speak to her now. But e-mails on the website give the episode high ratings.

Prior to this week, Vandiver says, she'd only seen Paranormal State a few times. Actually, she says, with what's happening in her life, she steers away from horror shows and movies.

Contrary to what some might think, Vandiver says she didn't get a penny from the show. OK... their last night there, the crew popped some champagne in celebration of it being their final show of the third season, and Vandiver got one of the T-shirts they passed out.

But the real benefit, she says, was being able to talk to specialists in the field of the paranormal. In fact, she adds, she was so grateful for the help that she never got caught up in the hoopla of having a TV crew at her house.

"That was my pay - their help."

Blessing don't work

Prior to Alabama Paranormal Society coming to her aid, Vandiver says, she felt totally alone in her nightmare, unsure if she was experiencing the terror through her eyes and ears or imagining it in her mind.

It was the EVPs that APS members recorded that first offered her proof she was not going nuts, Vandiver says. The Paranormal State crew and the specialists brought in for the show further solidified that for her, she says, and made her realize that thousands of people have experiences with such "things."

"Nobody wants to think it's real because you've heard all your life it's such craziness," Vandiver says.

Members of APS blessed the house once, and they later called in someone from a cleansing group to do it again. The A&E show depicts a third blessing, which includes demands in the name of Jesus Christ for all spirits to leave the house.

Vandiver admits the blessings have not worked, but she says her faith has helped her keep her sanity and probably prevented the hauntings from being worse than they are.

"If it hadn't been for God being in my life," she says, "I don't know how this would have turned out."

Can't understand

Many people simply don't believe in the paranormal? What does Vandiver say to them?

"I'm at the point I don't care what they think," she says. "But I understand. I always made fun of it. That's why I denied it for a long time."

Terror changed that.

"My fear is better now because of the scientists. They tried to explain it to me.

"Anything," she adds with a shrug, "is possible."

But why, she wonders. Why is this happening to her?

"That's the biggest thing - I just don't understand any of it. You think all kinds of crazy stuff. Not 'crazy,'" she corrects herself. "Unanswered."