OMG Horror.com

We sit down with renowned parapsychologist Dr. Barry Taffand talk about his extraordinary encounters with ghosts and reveal everything you ever wanted to know about real poltergeists.

Dr. Taff, do you believe in ghosts?
Yes.

What do you see the most of in photos claimed to be authentic images of ghosts?
Over the course of four decades, what I have generally seen appears as a luminous light gas. Sometimes it's bluish white, other times it's white, and it's never visible to the naked eye. It shows up on film and digital. The question is what produces these luminous anomalies and right now we don't know.

The fact that these are photogenic but not visible to the naked eye makes us wonder what this is. That's the paradox because anything we're able to photograph we should also be able to see with our eyes and vice versa.

Tell us about some of the most convincing cases of poltergeists you've come across.
The granddaddy of them all came in late spring of 1976 in Hollywood, California. It's on a street called Hollymont . As far as I'm concerned this is the high water mark because we were there numerous times and each time objects were thrown at us. Objects were disappearing and reappearing. We had one instance where we were standing in the pantry and thousands of coins started raining down from nowhere.

Objects were pelting us so we backed up--the pantry was filled up with several inches of coins, mostly pennies and dimes. A news crew from KTTV was even chased out of the house by flying objects. A body was later found buried under the house before it was built. It's never been exhumed and I suspect the place is still haunted.

Think about this, when I was living in the house for ten days, 32 years ago, the main bathroom upstairs which had an old-fashion shower head didn't work and I was trying to repair it. There was a big tool kit in the laundry room so I brought it upstairs, put it down on the tile floor in the bathroom. I'm in the house alone and the doors are locked. I got some wrenches out of it and when I turned around to get another wrench for leverage the tool box was gone. It had somehow returned itself to the laundry room. Things like these really make you question what's going on.

Have you ever gotten into any physical altercations with a spirit?
In 1971, in the Hyde Park District near Inglewood we were called in to investigate a house. The people who had lived in the house were killed in a violent accident but neighbors will still reporting seeing people in the house. When we went into the house, it was odd because everything was covered in dust except for one piece of furniture. We held a séance--nothing happened, but then we heard a noise coming from the bathroom. We went into the bathroom, saw nothing, but when we came back a very large man, about 5'10", stocky was standing there. He lunged at me and started choking me, pushing me back into the bathroom.

He literally picks me up and throws me into the bathtub. You know, I have martial arts training, so I tried to break his arms off my neck. Nope. Tried to knee him in the groin. Nope. He lifted me up and threw me into the bathtub like I weighed an ounce. He continued choking me shouting 'get out of my house, get out!' It took five or six of the men there to drag him off him. We were looking at the man as he was on the floor and his image just dissolved. What's there is the man who brought us to the house named Dwayne. When he came to, we told him what happened and he showed us a photograph of his grandfather who used to live in the house. That's the image we saw attack me. He had been dead for months by that time. What's really weird is that the women, who of course didn't come to my aid, saw the grandson attack me. Everyone else including me saw the grandfather.

Another case that was a positive story of a physical encounter with an entity was when I was staying in a house across the street from Robert Blake's house in Studio City. I woke up one night at six in the morning, wondering why I was awake. Suddenly, the covers go up in the bed next to me and something rolls into me. I feel a body. I feel breasts. I feel long hair. I smell a floral fragrance. Something comes over me, like an arm, and I try to respond to it and it's gone.

You've investigated other phenomenon other than standard ghosts such as doppelgangers. What are doppelgangers?
Doppelganger means double-walker. We believe it's a form of bi-location. Say you're sound asleep and yet many many miles away, even thousands of miles away someone sees you as if you were there but you're actually at home asleep.

I have had a few cases like this actually occur to me. Again, we have names for it but it doesn't mean we know what's going on. In 1973, I met a girl who came to the lab. She was just strikingly gorgeous, beyond beautiful and her name was Carol. So we started to talk and she was dating a married man and that was going nowhere so there was a lot of sexual tension. And a couple of weeks after we met when he hadn't done anything yet, I'm lying in bed just about to go to sleep. I felt the covers lift and a body gets into bed behind me. The body pressed up against me. I could smell it. I feel it. It touches me. I feel the breath and then the arm comes around me. When I turned around no one was there.

I jumped up. Next the phone rang and it was Carol. Literally this was 2 in the morning and she asks 'what happened, what happened?' I told her 'you tell me,' and she said "well, I don't know. I was suddenly in bed with you. You moved and scared me and I found myself back at home. The reason I entered this field was not only because of pure scientific curiosity, but also because of the fact that when I was growing up I had a lot of paranormal experiences myself. My friends weren't having these, my parents weren't having these, so why me? I was tested at UCLA back in 1969 and the study was published in 1975. Okay so you're psychic, telepathic, clairvoyant, precognitive, but what is it and how does it work?

When you're investigation a purported haunted location, what kinds of instruments do you bring along and how do you work?
We have a large collection of instruments, one of which is called a geomagnetometer which measures the Earth's magnetic field. We've discovered that there are areas, for one reason or another, where the Earth's magnetic field is either too low or too high. It's the change in magnetic field amplitude that may be triggering some of this stuff.

We also bring out low frequency magnetometers for DC to about 40 cycles per minute to measure other forms of energy in the environment. And then we bring out AC magnetometers and electrometers to measure electromagnetic noise generated by bad wiring and machines which also has an effect.

Laser temperature probes are used by us to see what we can determine in terms of temperature radiance. Another device is called an air ion counter which detects and measures the presence of positive and negative ions where atoms have gained or lost electrons.

And then of course if the case warrants it, which is rare, we bring out thermal imaging. If you've ever seen the movie Predator it's the creatures POV. It's extremely expensive and most of the time the situation doesn't warrant its use. A good system is over 100 thousand dollars.

Do horror films such as Amityville Horror and Poltergeist deal with ghosts in an accurate manner or do they get it all wrong?
By in large, a lot of the films in this genre are really a joke. There have however been a few that have stood the test of time. To me and my fellow academicians, the best film that dealt with this is the 1963 version of The Haunting, not the one from the early 90s. It was a black and white film directed by Robert Wise that was just extraordinary. It stands up even today because it leaves the nature of it to your imagination which is always more volatile than anything you can see on the screen.

Second to that would be a movie called The Legend of Hell House from 1973--both the book and screenplay penned by Richard Matheson. It is a classic and seemed to know what was coming in the way that a lot of what was in that movie is turning out to be true. Matheson was way ahead of the curve.

Another superb film is The Changeling and, of course, the film The Entity which was based on my case. I investigated the real case in 1974 to 1975, publishing articles in numerous journals of the paranormal. I personally didn't like the film because myself and my colleague helped the screenwriter write portions of the script and the book. We thought he did an exemplary job and director rewrote the script and cheapened it. But once you're finished writing and the script is out of your hands there's really nothing you can do. It's the nature of the business.

You were also on an episode of Playboy's The Girls Next Door. What was that like?
It was interesting. First of all because I've never been to the Playboy mansion before that. The creator of the series over at Fox called me and told me the place was haunted. I'm like 'yeah, yeah, sure' and I'm really skeptical about this. When we went there, we talked to Hef and the girls and it turned out that one of the girls, Bridget, had phenomenon around her most of her life, which means by our definition that she's a poltergeist agent. The ambient magnetic field was way over what it should be. My guess is whenever she moves out of there, that energy will move with her. We interviewed Bridget, Holly, and Kendra and everything seemed to be surrounding Bridget. Most of the phenomena I've investigated centers around people rather than places. We used an electromagnetometer and measured five-thousand milligauss coming off her body. Normally people are at around five-hundred milligauss.

The film The Entity was based on a case you investigated where a ghost rapist repeatedly sexually assaulted a living woman. Can ghosts really rape people?
Whatever we are dealing with appears to mimic human behavior. As in normal life, there are good people and there are bad people, so I suspect that if some part of our being survives physical death, some of them are going to be good and some of them are going to be bad. When the woman from the real case The Entity was based on claimed this the first day we met her in August of 1974, we rolled our eyes and thought this woman needs psychiatric intervention. However, over the course of time we witnesses psychokinetic displays that were extraordinary. We saw objects thrown at her. A fuse box was torn out of the wall and launched at her. We saw lights appear out of nowhere after we sealed the house off from all external lighting. They were always lime green... I don't know why. They were swimming around people and they were around the size of your fist.

We captured one of them in a photograph and it looked like a comet with a tail on it. At one point, the lights coalesced and congealed in one corner of the house. What resulted was an apparition from the waist up. If you see The Entity DVD, you'll see this in the special features section. We saw the waist, the shoulders, the head, the neck, the jaw, the brow ridge. It was amazing and then poof, like a light going out, it was gone. We were shooting hundreds of pictures of that, although we never saw that in photographs--it never showed up. The fact that over 25 people could witness the same thing at the same time, something that wasn't photogenic, made us wonder what was going on.

Going back to the subject of rape, you can't prove a negative. The woman wasn't a virgin, but what was intriguing from a psychological standpoint was that she claimed she was being raped by three male entities. Two would hold her down and the third would rape her. In her life, she had three male children and they had a volatile relationship. So from a psychoanalytic standpoint, she could have projected things from her own life. It's possible that she pulled this upon her, but we don't know. From what we experienced in her environment, it's a different story. The very first time we were there, after she called us back because she knew we thought she was crazy, we saw a frying pan fly out of one of the lower cupboards and across the room. That's pretty impressive. Again, we have names for these things, we call it psychokinesis, but what was it?

Why are ghosts always portrayed in movies and popular culture as pissed-off ghosts?
The reason this type of phenomena is displayed as belligerent and malevolent has to do with the fact that people aren't interested in friendly ghosts. When we don't understand something, we tend to be frightened by it. If you look back at the last 126 years of this research, most of this stuff is benign. Rarely people are hurt. But you don't stand behind a jet as the turbine is on or you'll get blown away.

There was a case in Van Nuys, California where money was floating down from the ceiling amongst other things. Five dollar bills, tens, twenties, fifties, and hundreds amounting to over ten thousand dollars. The people weren't complaining about the money, nor declaring it, so hey what's the problem? It is unnerving though. I've been in numerous situations where you put an object down and you turn around and it's gone. You find it in another part of the building, but you know you didn't move it and there's no one else around who could have moved it. I can see why this would frighten people because the world we live in works in a very consistent way. When something works outside of that way we become frightened. It's the nature of the human condition.

You know if you die and you go into another form of reality, you're living there but you no longer have your body. It'd be like a dream but you never wake up. Sometimes people hang around for whatever reason, but we don't really know why.

Have you investigated any celebrity ghosts?
I was at the comedy store several times, which is definitely haunted. I was there a bunch of times for various shoots for production companies. I remember one instance in particular where I was closing my briefcase as I looked up and saw three men standing there in pinstripe suits, wide lapels, and hats on. I thought that they were extras hired to do a recreation piece, but they smiled at me, I turned around and they were gone. I realized that where they were standing was a booth where no person could be standing on.

Another celebrity encounter was at Ozzie Nelson's house. The couple who were living there at the time didn't want their names used, but the woman was sleeping one night and the covers were torn off her by something and eventually that thing was fondling her. There was nothing there that she could see.

One last question Dr. Taff, are you afraid of ghosts?
Absolutely not. What I'm afraid of are real things, like people with guns. The most frightening thing I've ever seen in my life was a little woman driving a gigantic SUV with a cell phone in one hand, a bottle of water in the other, and a dog in her lap. That's frightening. I've seen the economy break down in front of us and the president saying 'I don't see a problem.' That's frightening. This stuff I do is like being at Disneyland and everything is free. The only problem is because of the work I do, I meet a lot of beautiful women but all of them are crazy. I meet these really stunning women but they're all insane. It'd be nice to meet a woman who is into this and who isn't flying around in her own reality.

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