The HAUNTING They Couldn't Debunk - Caught On Camera: THE GHOST I N THE ATTIC

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Before that photo would ever be captured though, things slowly graduated. And in a lot of hauntings, that seems to be how it goes. It's a slow roll-out, almost as if the poltergeist, or whatever you want to call it, a spirit, needs to get you comfortable with it in order to have the maximum effect. In other words, if it came out swinging right out of the gate and showed its face, it would be too much. And the person, in this case Jackie, would leave immediately, no matter how inconvenient that might be. But a slow roll, it gets you just used to the uncomfortability of the moment. Comfortableness enough to keep you there. A week goes by without anything, maybe even a month, and you think all is right again. The mind plays tricks, and that's exactly what happened here. It was enough to keep Jackie on edge, but not enough for her to reach out to her landlord out of fear of looking crazy, or at the very least, a problem tenant. And it certainly wasn't enough for her to pack up and move her kids out. At least, not yet. But one day, Jackie came down to the kitchen to find a fowl smelling liquid on the floor. It was thick and dark. She figured it was some pipe issue. She mopped it up quick on the way out the door to work, and she'd deal with it later. A few days after, it showed up again, only this time there was a trail of it. She looked up at the ceiling and saw it was coming from the attic. Then moved the hatch and peeked up there, expecting a surprise. She looked up at the hatch and peeked up there, expecting a surprise. The hatch and peeked up there, expecting a surprise. He looked up at the hatch and peeked up there, expecting a surprise. for years. years afterwards, together and separately, and here's a detail that true believers in this case point to more than anything else. The two of them, Jackie and Taff, they didn't get along personally, and they hadn't for years. And yet across decades of separate interviews, their accounts of what happened in that house have stayed true, same events, in the same order, with the same details. So, that is the story as it's been told, but now let's actually pull it apart a little. Let's start with Barry Taff's credentials, because they get inflated a lot in the retelling. You'll often hear him described as a former associate director of the parapsychology lab at UC Berkeley. Which sounds like a formal academic title with a corresponding academic budget. Well, that's not really what it was. Taff didn't run some official department at UCLA. He was a research assistant in a small, unsanctioned, entirely unfunded lab operating out of a cramped corner of the university's neuropsychiatric institute. It was run by a professor named Thelma Moss, who studied things like telepathy, clairvoyance, and haunted houses on essentially no institutional support, and was staffed largely by volunteers. The UCLA itself eventually shut the whole thing down in 1978, more than a decade before Taff ever set foot in Jackie's attic. And they did that specifically because the university didn't want an embarrassing PR scandal attached to its name. And Taff's most famous prior case is worth a second look, too. The University of Texas, the University of Texas, is the first university in the United States to have a public office. The University of Texas is the first university in the United States to have a public office. The Doris Bither investigation, the one that became the entity, it's generally regarded by mainstream skeptics today as far more likely rooted in Bither's own well-documented history of trauma, substance abuse, and psychological distress than an actual supernatural assault. Ataf himself has said on the record that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 4,800 cases he personally investigated over his career they turned out to have what he called unusual but conventional explanations. Which means even Ataf, by his own admission, spent most of his career finding rational answers. San Pedro, though, is one of the small handful of cases he's ever pointed to as the real thing. Here's where it gets genuinely interesting, though, because Ataf's own theory about why this house was so active, leans a lot more toward psychology than most retellings give him credit for. Now, he pointed directly at Jackie's circumstances. A young single mother, recently separated and exhausted, it was a lot to deal with. Now, since the Victorian era, investigators and parapsychologists have noted that poltergeist-style activity, it tends to cluster around people living through genuine emotional crisis. It could be because of. It could be because a stressed mind is more prone to misperceiving ordinary events as sinister. Or, because emotional turmoil itself is somehow capable of generating the kind of energy that moves nails or tears paintings off walls. Either way, even the man who investigated this case has suggested the real story might be less about an old man's ghost and more about what happens when a person under enormous pressure starts experiencing her own environment differently. Then there's the physical evidence itself, and how little of it was ever actually tested by anyone outside Ataf's own circle. That foul liquid in the kitchen that's been described in some retellings as laboratory-confirmed human blood plasma, complete with traces of copper and iodine. Confirmed by who, though, and published where? It's a detail that tends to disappear the moment you go looking for it. There's no peer-reviewed lab report on that sample. That's never surfaced publicly. And the camera that came apart in the attic and landed in two different corners is presented as proof of something violent and inexplicable. It also is exactly what could happen when a camera strap gets yanked hard enough. It can separate camera bodies from lenses through nothing more exotic than a cheap enough mount. And then, of course, there's the picture. The one everybody remembers in this case. A Wecraft hanging from a nail by a clothesline, wound around his neck, caught at the exact right instant by a camera flash in an otherwise pitch-black attic. And there are really only two ways you can read that photo. Either it's an extraordinary stroke of luck, a second photographer just happening to have his camera up ready and aimed in exactly the right direction at the exact right half-second to freeze a man mid-air, or it was staged. The cord, the nail, the pose, a flash, time to catch it. A photograph, not of a haunting, but of a man playing along. And there's another angle to all this that tends to get left out of the version built purely to scare you. It's the financial one. Because this case didn't end with Jackie moving up to Kern County and trying to put her life back together. It became a commercial documentary. As mentioned, it became years of talk show appearances for Jackie and Taff both. It became books. And to this day, that little bungalow is still a paid stop on Los Angeles go stores. Now, none of that proves a single thing was faked. I mean, plenty of true stories end up monetized. It's just something. It's just something to think about. All the evidence that ever came out of the San Pedro passed through the hands of people who had something real to gain from you believing it was real. And so then, where does that actually leave us? You've got a woman under more stress than most people ever face in a new apartment that may or may not have had something genuinely wrong with it. You've got a parapsychologist with a real interest in the paranormal and an actual track record of her life. You've got a detective with a track record of finding mundane explanations for almost everything else he investigated. And in this particular case, he claims it's all real. You've got a photograph that's either extremely compelling proof of a poltergeist at work or it's a fake. And you've got a piece of physical evidence, that blood plasma sample that's never once been independently verified by anyone with nothing to gain from the answer. And so maybe a frightened, exhausted young mother had her mind playing tricks on her and before she knew it was caught up in something bigger than her and couldn't stop it. And maybe by the time she realized that, if she ever did, she figured, why not roll with it, make a couple bucks? Sure beats working multiple jobs and running yourself ragged. Or maybe a man really did die angry near those San Pedro docks in 1930 and spent the next 60 years waiting in an attic for the right person to help him. For the right person to walk through his door. It shows the vulnerable mother, whose defenses were weak and maybe it even attached itself to her when she left. Either way, the story itself outlived everybody's reasons for telling it. The skeptics couldn't kill it and the believers couldn't prove it. So it's just kept going for the better part of 40 years now. And wherever you fall on that spectrum, that's totally up to you. As it is with every ghost story that's ever been told. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. Hope you all enjoyed it. If you did and you want more from us, check out another episode of either Everytown or Scary Mysteries. Both available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. And please do remember to come on back here next week for another episode filled with scary stories. Scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.