Intorduction

My name's Raleigh Epps, and I'm a shameless ritualist.

I know a lot of people who claim to be into "paranormal investigation". Los Angeles, I live in Los Angeles, seems to attract that kind of thing; and for good reason. LA attracts people interested in the paranormal because there's a lot of paranormal shit to be seen.

I experience a lot of it. Those are just the circles I run in. What I don't see first hand, I hear about through various grapevines; sometimes on the TV. Companies, more every day, are springing up- people claiming to be "experts" in the paranormal. That in itself is absurd, like claiming to be an expert in the "human condition".

This doesn't bother me, per se, but one thing blows my mind a little. All these "experts" bill themselves as Ghost Hunters.

What's the obsession with ghosts? Has nobody heard of a werewolf? They exist. Do these people not go to church? Demons tempt us every day. The preacher/priest/rabbi/imam says so every friggen Sunday/Sunday/Saturday/I don't know when Muslims go to church. Has nobody read effin' Dracula?

What would a self-proclaimed Ghost Hunter say if I told her the spot of cold she just walked through wasn't somebody's dead gramma with unfinished business. What if I told her that's where an fifteen year old girl had been standing the moment she realized, really processed the fact that her mother and father had gotten divorced because of her, because of the way he'd been looking for her since she'd had to start wearing a bra, since that night he opened her door and stood in her room for six minutes (she'd kept her eyes fixed, locked, on the clock radio the whole time) and then walked out without ever having said a word. And what if I told her that singular realization, that loss of innocence, had torn a hole in reality big enough for something black and slime-born to creep through?

That's not a ghost. Do we even have words for that? I should check.

Note: buy a Ghost-Hunting to English dictionary.