In my family, the paranormal is normal.
My grandfather, Bengt Paul, was a graphologist, read the future in cards, and practiced automatic handwriting. He also liked an expensive cigar.
Do you believe in ghosts? I don’t. But I admire the people who make a living in paranormal professions. My grandfather dabbled in them.
This might explain my love for any show about ghosts or aliens, or alien ghosts. I will also watch any program about Alaska or ancient Egypt. Recently there was documentary series called “Alaska Haunting” about ghostly visitations. Had they discovered a pharaoh’s tomb on the Chilkoot Trail it would have hit the trifecta for me.
And when I say documentary series, that’s how the show is listed. But Ken Burns isn’t shooting it. It’s a documentary in the sense that ET was a documentary.
Many of these shows punctuate their stories with interviews of “experts” in their chosen field, be it alien abduction, alien communication through the pyramids, alien fast food preferences, or alien podiatry. When you call yourself a “paranormal investigator,” there isn’t a big vetting process that goes along with it. It’s kinda like being nominated to a position in the current administration. You’re not being chosen for your command of actual facts.
Still, they pontificate with great authority, as if they’re chaired MIT professors, or have anything approaching believable evidence to support their claims. Even their speculation is speculative. But it’s highly enjoyable. These people are on TV talking nonsense—they know it, we know it—and we’re eating it up. There’s nothing more American.
Or European. My Swedish grandfather Bengt was born too soon, and could have been on one of these programs. He practiced automatic writing. That’s when you hold the pen, and the pen writes by itself, as if it’s controlled by an unseen hand. Once the pen wrote, “Do not speak to those without names.” Even as a skeptic, I would have had a hard time sleeping that night.
Grandfather was also known for reading the future in cards. He was like Solitaire in “Live and Let Die,” only not as attractive. He sometimes read cards for his good friends Sofie and Hans Gabler, who believed he received intuitions. In March, 1946 he “saw” Hans in a strange house with Hans’ mother and sister. Six weeks later Hans unexpectedly had to go to Hamburg to live with them for three years.
Once Sofie and Hans asked Bengt about their son’s upcoming marriage. “He will marry a blond woman,” my grandfather read in the cards. “No, no,” the Gablers said, “he is engaged to a brunette.” A week before the scheduled wedding, his fiancée cancelled. When the son came with his new bride-to-be, she was indeed blond.
Given my grandfather’s astounding psychic abilities, I know what you’re thinking.
“Jim, you may have paranormal powers yourself.”
Look, it’s possible. Perhaps my talents lie buried deep within me, waiting to erupt, Carrie-like, if someone dumps pig’s blood on me. That would be cool. It’s almost worth doing the experiment. Maybe on TikTok.
Until that happens, if there are any paranormal show producers out there who need a host or an expert, I’m genetically qualified. I can read cards on CNBC and intuit which way certain stocks are headed. It could be a segment on Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money.” I’m certain my predictions would be no less accurate than any other stock pickers’. In many ways, that profession shares a certain strain of bloviation in common with ghost hunters, with even less accountability.
Like ghostly apparitions, there is much that is unexplainable about the stock market. For example, current market evaluations in the face of 16% unemployment. One in six people can’t find work.
Now that’s scary. Ghosts in Alaska? Not so much.
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