The Supernatural

In what many consider to be one of the most intriguing and paramount cases in the paranormal, many speculations and theories arose in the paranormal community (and the outside) about what really happened in that old and small Culver City home in southern California in the early 1970s. No one knows what really happened to Doris Bither or any of her children. Did they finally escape the evil that was so present and dominate in their home? Did they come out and tell the truth and admit it was all a hoax?We here at GhostTheory.com, having a journalistic approach to the paranormal, were lucky enough to get ahold of Brian Harris, Doris Bither’s son, to set the record straight. In this interview, I get to the bottom of the case and give you an insight to the true day-to-day life of the Bither household, the alleged spectral rape, and behind the scenes of the investigation conducted by Dr. Barry Taff and Kerry Gaynor and the resentment it left on the children.Doris Bither had 4 children. 3 boys and one girl. Brian Harris is the middle child out of the three boys. It has been his long-time wish to speak out about the story.Doris Mcgowan (Mcgowan is her maiden name) came from a upper middle-class family. As stable as many people might think that sounds, Doris’ parents ran a turbulent household. Both were alcoholics and were not suited to provide a well-rounded upbringing for a child. At the age of 10, Doris and her family moved to California from the midwest. Details of Doris’ childhood are not clearly known by her relatives. In her teenage years, Doris had a major altercation with her family. Both her parents, an Aunt and Uncle had decided to disown Doris and was cut off from having contact with any of her family.As her parents died off, her Aunt and Uncle also, it was apparent that the abhorrent feeling that they had towards her was so great, when she learned that all of the inheritance was given to her brother. With no money and being a single mother, Doris set out to make a life of her own. Throughout her life, Doris had a number of failed marriages and relationships. She had given birth to 4 children, all from different fathers. Being a single mother and trying to support 4.

Myths, mysteries and urban legends are plentifull just about everywhere, and some pieces of the country are particularly odd - like Nevada housing Area 51. Few paranormal cases are three dimensional or physical by description, as opposed to the more common apparition sightings and EVP captures. West Virginia has its Mothman creature from 1966 to 1967, something looking like a man, but with moth-like wings and large reflective red eyes. Arkansas has the Fouke Monster, a Bigfoot type creature seen in and around Fouke, Arkansas, since the 1950s - immortalized in the 1972 docudrama, Legend of Boggy Creek.More paranormal cases involving seemingly physical things include what we commonly know as cattle mutilations - possibly traced back to the Snippy the Horse mutilation from Sept. 7, 1967, in Colorado. While cattle seem to be the current choice of mutilations, other animals have had their day in paranormal history. A most recent case, also from Colorado, was investigated by fellow Paranormal Science Examiner Alejandro Rojas in a series of stories.While this list of physical cases is not exhaustive, my final example is the mysterious Thunderbird - gigantic birds with huge wing spans and enormous lifting power - including the ability to pick up and snatch a human off of the ground.Paranormal InvasionBut Pennsylvania battled a mysterious two-fold paranormal invasion there from 1973 to 1974 that baffled many police agencies. The bizarre activity was so strong and so frightening, that at one point during its peak, local investigators actually feared further escalation.In the early 70s, UFOs did not receive much mainstream attention - the ridicule factor hung tight and most news flowed from fringe magazines or stuffy research journals. The Bigfoot creature was extended an even more remote space in American media, popping up in occasional fiction and other places very clear of mainstream.Ufologist Stan Gordon, of Greensburg, PA, studied and tracked the UFO phenomena since the late 60s, not long after the UFO crash at Kecksburg on Dec. 9, 1965, a short drive from his hometown. Now a young man in his 20s by 1973, Gordon was known to police agencies as the go-to guy for UFO.

DEAD people don’t scare her, but living people occasionally do. “I’m afraid of mankind; I’m not afraid of dead folks,” confessed Concetta Bertoldi, a 55-year-old Jersey-born psychic and medium who makes a snappy living (check out the snow-white customized Audi and the devilish red Porsche Boxster in her garage) siphoning messages from the dead, whose observations don’t alarm her, to the living, whose behaviors often leave her cold. This may be the reason the earth-motherlike Ms. Bertoldi, who wrote the best-selling “Do Dead People Watch You Shower?” for Harper in 2008 and whose follow-up, “Do Dead People Walk Their Dogs?,” came out last week, has installed a security system to protect her three-acre hideaway on one of New Jersey’s more heavily wooded hillsides. The babbling brook and elephantine boulders came with the property, which is contiguous with a suspected American Indian burial ground. Hence, plenty of soothing spirits in the neighborhood. The security system is another story.It beeps aggressively whenever anyone corporeal enters or exits the sprawling homestead that her husband, John Bertoldi, built from a four-room cabin they bought 12 years ago on the advice of Ms. Bertoldi’s deceased brother, Harold Ferrell. Her sole sibling, he also advised her to bid $30,000 less than the asking price. Successfully. “I think I scared the Realtor to death when I said it was my dead brother who led me to this house,” Ms. Bertoldi said. Harold died of AIDS almost 20 years ago at age 38, but Ms. Bertoldi said she saw it coming 20 years before that. She was a teenager, growing up in Montville, N.J., and briefly shut off the voices in her head after hearing the negative prognostication for her slightly older brother (by 11 months, which made them, she says with a saucy wink, “Irish twins”). She told her parents the voices were terrifying her; her father told her that until she was ready to deal with the dead and the affirmations they wished to convey to those they had left behind, all she really needed to do was command them to, in the name of God, go away. So she did, and they obliged.“At that stage of my life I wanted to date guys, not talk to dead guys,” she said. She barricaded her unusual ability.

Late on the evening of 3 January 1804, a bricklayer by the name of Thomas Millwood left his home in Hammersmith, to the west of London. He was smartly dressed in the sort of clothes favoured by men in his trade: "linen trowsers entirely white, washed very clean, a waistcoat of flannel, apparently new, very white, and an apron, which he wore round him." Unfortunately for Millwood, though, those clothes proved to be the death of him. At 10.30pm, while he was walking alone down Black-lion-lane, he was confronted and shot dead by a customs officer called Francis Smith - thus setting in motion one of the strangest, best-remembered and most influential cases in British legal history. The Millwood murder is of interest to us because Smith's motive for killing him was decidedly peculiar. Hammersmith, then a village on the outskirts of London, had been terrorised for more than a month by reports that some sort of malignant ghost or spirit was haunting the graveyard of St Paul’s chapel-of-ease. Today this cemetery stands in the shadow of the A4 flyover and right next to the busy four-lane Hammersmith roundabout, but 200 years ago it was considerably more isolated. St Paul’s was then still surrounded by fields, and the paths that ran past the graveyard were unpaved and unlit. It’s not difficult to see how, in the depths of winter (the Hammersmith ghost scare ran from December 1803 to January 1804), frightening stories could readily circulate, nor why several local men took it upon themselves to patrol the darkened streets in the hope of encountering and 'laying' the ghost. Milwood, in his all-white clothes, had been mistaken for the apparition twice earlier that same day. It was his bad luck that the third time the same mistake was made, the man facing him was not just nervous but armed with a shotgun. Smith, when he realised his mistake, was horrified. He gave himself up immediately and was swiftly charged with murder and tried at the Old Bailey less than a week later. There, though, the prisoner's hurried surrender and obvious contrition stood him in good stead. The prosecution accepted Smith's version of events, and the jury was plainly anxious to show mercy; instead of finding the customs man guilty of murder, they returned a verdict of manslaughter instead. It was left to the judge to.