They're Baaaack

To think I almost didn't get a blog post on this website in the year 2025!

This year is one that has felt like a century and we're still several weeks from the end. 2025 is chaos, and it has been due to people in power, and names that every reader will already be familiar with. I choose not to taint this space with those names. May the hexes I send daily reach them tenfold.

In the paranormal, myself and Ryan have spent the year sitting back and observing while we delve into things that are simply not ghostly in nature. Ryan's music, bands, shows and recording and my art and home projects are where we've placed our peace and focus, and it's helped to alleviate some of the pressure to perform that comes with being content creators. I don't even like that phrase "content creator", because it's so vague and so meaningless on its own, it simply sounds like nothing. It's silly to me. It might as well be "heavy internet user". There's so much AI slop pulsing through every media platform now, I'm really horrified by the 'dead internet' theory and I think we're living in it. So the platforms have meant less, and we've invested in our own personal endeavors as we stand by on the edge of a precipice in American and world politics.

Hey, just to reiterate - neither of us voted for this. You probably already knew that though. And those who did? We have no love and no grace to give you.

All this is not to say that the paranormal in a wider sense has not been "rife" with interest, drama and complex issues.

We can start with the Warrens, who, even posthumously, have a chokehold on this field of weird and ghostly. Their home which contains the basement museum (collection?) of artifacts (Halloween decor?), including the infamous Raggedy Ann doll, is now being rented to and under the caretaking of a paranormal YouTuber and a divisive comedian with heavy lip filler.

That sentence is cursed.

Their collection is something that has made its way to a massive movie franchise and it, the legacy, and the oversized doll are not going anywhere. Now, in order to provide access to this collection, the Warren estate maybe wanted to offload the cost of keeping the property maintained by putting it in the public hands of these two somewhat famous people. It's a little strange that the entire basement of things has been kept in the same space since the death of Ed and Lorraine, considering it was their private residence. Bringing people there can be complicated and shady if it's not a business, but it's taking payments. I think that's why it seems left in limbo there, in situ like an archeological discovery. There's something very magical about the Warren basement being frozen in time. But how do people get to experience it?

There hasn't really been public access to the haunted artifacts of the Warren's life's work that's been wide-reaching, and even now this looks somewhat like it's meant to stay behind paywalls. It just looks complex for the owners, and laws and regulations, and what to do with that for now. Who knows what happens in another 20 years? But this has happened, the collection has had some movement with a recent tour as well, with Annabelle inspiring social media posts to speculate over the death of a longtime colleague of NESPR. He passed while on the tour with the doll, and since movies inspire a lot of people to get imaginative or click-baity, that also spurred some fire online.

Then there's the Aaron Goodwin situation. The most likeable Ghost Adventures cast member went through a horrifying situation and the entire public got to hear of it. So surprising. Not surprising, though, is the footage of him receiving the police call about his now-former wife plotting his murder, is included in a new Ghost Adventures episode. It is up to them to publish the footage if they want, but good grief, that's a heavy topic and I'm guessing quite traumatic to go through, let alone give to the public in a serialized, format. I wonder if the most absurd part might actually be Zak's voiceover on the footage, narrating the dire circumstances of that awful phone call. It's all very weird, but it's also part of what Zak and company have kept consistent over the years without fail: drama. I hope Aaron is doing better each day.

Then we get to the Conjuring House. Like a sunset, for a while it was every damn day with the drama and uproar about that poor old house that carries a mega reputation. The owner, a woman from Boston, pulled a real estate moved that locked the sale of the property into her hands, and she took over from a couple called the Heinzen's a few years back. Things seemed to go normally there for a while, as normal as paranormal rental locations go, before official social media posts from the business devolved in a way that stopped making sense. It was clear the owner was in distress, and while the paranormal public made their opinions well known, it all felt really icky. This is the only place I've talked about it besides with friends in private, but it brought out some relentless cruelty, and all of that sucked to watch play out. Everything eventually died down, the business of the location was legally halted, and it seemed like it would eventually be sold.

Did you think it ended there? It does not. The house was slated to be sold at auction on October 31st (so tongue-in-cheek), but before that auction could occur, a mysterious buyer purchased the mortgage from the bank and decided to eventually auction it in the near future anyway. This is weird. But then the lovely Andrea Perron made a public plea to Jason Hawes (of Ghost Hunters) to save it by buying it for 1.5 million dollars. It seems that the Hawes estate was not prepared to take on that financial asset alone so he created a GoFundMe which has pulled in almost $300,000 (IN THIS ECONOMY!?). The catch from Hawes and the "well known but wants to remain anonymous" buyer is that if the GoFundMe can raise half a million dollars (again, I ask, how the fuck in this chaotic economy), the buyer will match that, and Hawes will put up the rest to buy it.

So, this is all I know: The Conjuring House is up for sale. Someone with epic financial ability bought the bank note, whole thing, mortgage, etc. It needs to be auctioned still, and in order to keep the house within use for the paranormal, Jason Hawes made a GoFundMe and if it can raise half a million dollars from the public, the new owner and Jason will match that amount to purchase it at auction. They have not said who this owner is. They have not said who will manage it as a public venue. There is no more information than Andrea Perron wanted Jason Hawes to save it and now a lot of people have put money toward it. The updates to this ongoing fundraiser remain shrouded in mystery asserted as necessary privacy. It's understandable, but that also feels odd.

I think this all feels strange to me because I'd rather the house itself be put on the Register of Historic Places and put under some physical protections. But as a private or entity, it's always been up to the owners to endeavor to do that. It's also a home in a rural community of residences and I know from experience that the surrounding neighbors have never been enamored with that home attracting so many patrons over the years. The fact that a home of paranormal repute has been publicly accessible at all, especially one that rose from the 1970's Satanic Panic and demonization of the occult, is astounding. To keep it that way would be pretty cool, but I don't really know how to trust this particular process, you know what I mean?

It's like that Reddit "am I the asshole" forum - Would I be the asshole to think it might be a good place to turn into a living history museum on a small scale, and provide overnight or late night rentals for investigations only part time? Wouldn't an accessible museum be so cool there? I guess I'm not as enamored with it as a lot of other people are, and my bias might come from having spent a night there and getting it out of my system, but I feel like right now there's no real perfect solution to this situation. The GoFundMe that's underway now is not something I feel the need to participate in. Nor do I have cash to donate to that home, IN THIS ECONOMY. There's people starving right now, donate to food banks.

So the paranormal is ongoing and ever-swirling with new phenomena, it's been more about observing the big, strange real-life stuff rather than ghost hunts for us. Full Dark's current work is outside of investigations and more in creating physical things like music and artwork. Oh, fuck's sake - we also got a puppy! Thorin Barkenshield, goodest boy. If you're not a Lord of the Rings fan, this won't make sense. I hope you are, though.

As well as personal life that crosses into paranormal, I've got a new article in Haunted Magazine number 47! It's all about the investigation in Iceland my friends and I embarked on years ago and the results we were surprised by. The culture of ghosts and 'little folk' over there is astounding, so get a digital or physical copy of Haunted Magazine to read that and all the work of fellow weirdos in this issue!

We're looking back at all the things we've done over the years, and realized we hit over 30 mega locations in 8 years. That is so unbelievably humbling and exciting. I never thought I'd be able to experience so many of the places that really influenced me over the years, and our videos show every one of them. The more we've talked with friends, the more we've realized there's a lot of fun in bringing new people to investigate, and potentially having a strange experience to walk away with too. So as we get back into investigating, we'd like to head out with friends that have never tested their boundaries by asking for the unexplained in a darkened, empty, historic property.

I'll just be frank - collabs (another word that I find dumb) are fun with fellow creators, but to be in these allegedly haunted places hoping for something startling or shocking with your best friends - nothing beats that! We have friends and family who we think would make the nights worth so much more if we were to distance ourselves from the creation aspect and focus on the experience aspect of investigations. And of course, our closest paranormal friends are staying by our sides too.

We'd still film, I love to make videos, but a little more frankness here - boy howdy is the paranormal played the fuuuuck out. It's repetitive, anyone can see that. And in creating through video format with the same methods and the same expected segments of footage, over and over, has made me want to pull my hair out. If I never do another estes method again, I'll be happy. The Panasonic DR60 is fun and all, but it sounds like garbled shit and only rarely gives an astounding recorded response. I want different. I want something else. I want new. I want the tried and true to sail off into the sunset. Full Dark has long needed a rest and a refresh, and since this year has felt like a fucking century from hell at every turn - again, if you voted for this, is this what you hoped for? What is your damage? - so we're on the upswing of the refresh soon. It's been peaceful to turn inward toward artistic endeavors and observe the periphery of the paranormal for now, when it comes to this field we're in.

I mean, the other thing is - the paranormal is not a necessity in a world where so many people are currently under threat or suffering due to Shitty White Men in Power. Awful, horrible people who do not care about a single citizen of this country. So, the paranormal seems a little extraneous right now, when we feel like our focus should be on continuously championing people who need help and donating or assisting causes that do the work to help. That can be done without a social media post about it.

Things are wild out in the world right now, we're making art and raising a puppy with our other dog, Ruth, and working on our 1940's home renovation (it is never ending). We'll see you out there next year, in the dark!