Around 2012, my demented friends and I threw a bachelor party for our close buddy Pat at a haunted hotel. Located in a quaint, strange little valley in Mokelumne Hill, California, the Hotel Leger is one of the oldest hotels in California. It was owned by George Leger, a Frenchman who came and built the hotel during the Gold Rush. The hotel was plagued by misfortune, which included two fires that left George in financial ruin.
Numerous guests of the hotel have reported seeing the ghost of George Leger.
Our bachelor party crew came equipped with EVP readers, whiskey, and marijuana. We planned on getting extremely drunk and then conducting a seance, which is just about the most irresponsible possible way for completely untrained paranormal amateurs to try and contact the other side. Rather than waking the dead, I think we probably annoyed them so badly they left the premises.
When we first pulled up to the hotel, a small, pale boy sat on the bench outside the lobby. It would be difficult to overstate how pale this kid was.
The first thing this kid said was, “You guys know this place is haunted, right?”
“That’s why we’re here,” one of us replied.
By the time we had unpacked our bags from the car, the kid was gone. It was an unnerving little encounter to start the weekend off.
Jason, one of the friends in our motley crew, was a complete skeptic, a hardcore atheist who believes the universe is atoms in the void. He went into the weekend 100% confident that we would have absolutely no luck in contacting the dead, because, in his view, there was nothing to contact. When people die their consciousness is permanently erased from the fabric of the universe. Jason literally winces when I bring up the idea of paranormal activity.
I used to be of the same state of mind as Jason. When I was in high school, I was a militant atheist and engaged in lengthy theological debates with a Christian friend of mine. I would research and write my arguments in advance, as though I were a lawyer preparing for a trial.
Two things turned me towards a more open-minded philosophy regarding spirituality and paranormal activity.
The first was a book entitled The Margins of Reality, which describes a nearly 20-year experiment conducted by researchers at Princeton. The scientists tested the effects of human intention on random number generators and concluded that human consciousness has a small, but statistically significant, impact on the external flow of information. They arrived at this conclusion after repeatedly finding that the intention of a human observer on what should be completely random number outputs established a pattern of mathematical anomalies that can not be explained by current science. The odds, they claim, are one in a trillion that those anomalies are from chance alone.
The scientists who wrote The Margins of Reality went on to create a multidisciplinary group of scientists and engineers called the Global Consciousness Project, which tracks “meaningful correlations in random data” on a global scale.
When I learned of this research, I read The Margins of Reality from front to back. This was in 2000, the same year I left my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas to attend college at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
I was 18 and ready to do some experiments of my own. So with the help of my new California friends, I engaged in a year-long immersion into psychedelics. I coupled this extracurricular activity with an ambitious academic load that included two classes called “The Quantum Enigma” and “The Metaphysics of Color,” respectively. Combined, these courses convinced me that human consciousness has a profound influence on physical reality that science cannot currently explain.
The cumulative effect of all these sources of information during my freshman year changed me from an atheist to an agnostic, and from there I adopted a more general ethos of “I don’t know what’s going on but the universe is insane and anything is possible.” I like to state the fact that over 90% of the universe is comprised of dark matter and dark energy, for which scientists have no explanation.
My first ‘paranormal’ experience also took place on campus during my freshmen year.
UCSC is divided into colleges, which are spread out and separated by acres of rolling hills, nestled in the beautiful but eerie redwoods that makes the university so attractive to out-of-state students. I attended Porter College, the “artsy” college whose dormitories were divided into A Building and B Building. My dorm room--which I shared with my current best friend and co-founder of The Ghost Diaries, Jared Salas--was on the third floor of the B Building.
As freshmen year unfurled, a number of strange stories began emanating from the students on the first floor. Specifically, around a half dozen students reported waking up in the middle of the night to the feeling of a dark presence bearing down on them and choking them in their beds. The hysteria over this escalated to the point where some students asked for and were granted room reassignments.
Though Jared and I didn’t experience the dark presence in our room, the news influenced us to do a bit of research into the history of Porter College. Already that year, one student under the influence of LSD had jumped through the glass of his dorm room and been paralyzed from the waist down. There was a palpable feeling that something wasn’t quite right with Porter College.
What we discovered unsettled us. Evidently, about eight years earlier, a student by the name of David Marculaso had taken to a fourth floor balcony in the B Building, wrapped himself in an American flag, and shot himself with a shotgun. His body fell to the quad below, landing near a number of student witnesses.
We asked ourselves: could the troubled spirit of David be the entity harassing the students on the first floor of the A building?
With no proof whatsoever and freshmen year drawing to a close, I was about to let the issue go. Then something very peculiar happened.
I was sitting on a bench in the otherwise empty quad one Sunday morning, when I slowly became aware of a presence in the near distance. From my vantage point and in my peripheral vision, I concluded that the presence was a young man who had been strolling in a circle around the quad for an indeterminate amount of time. There was something ethereal about him and I only realized in retrospect that the figure had stopped and spent a considerable amount of time staring up at the fourth floor balcony of the B Building.
I looked into it and the balcony the figure had been staring at was the same balcony David M. had fallen from.
Coincidence? Perhaps…
