Signs of the Old Ones.

Tree roots? Or harbinger of Cthulhu? You decide.

"Nightmares...become reality."

“In this world, there is real evil: in the darkest shadows, and in the most ordinary places. These are the true stories of the innocent and the unimaginable. Between the world we see and the things we fear there are doors. When they are opened…nightmares become reality.”

I started watching “A Haunting” on Discovery last summer. I like old school reenactments (the badder the better, as my long-lived affair with “Unsolved Mysteries” proves) and I love stories of the paranormal — so the show seemed a natural fit. I tuned in, thinking I would get a couple of “boo” scares and a few belly laughs.

It turned out that I got something else altogether.

At first I was put off by a Christian bias in the stories. It seemed that most of them involved possession or “demonic” type entities. In fact, I started writing a piece about that, but I saw several more episodes and came to conclusion that I just saw a few similar shows in a row — the Christian/demon thing wasn’t the predominant theme. Oh, it’s there — don’t get me wrong. But it seems to me that the religion aspect is actually part of the show’s blue collar bias.

You see, “A Haunting” isn’t really about religion — it’s about social class.

People who purchase haunted homes are usually in a difficult financial position. They ignore the fact that even their realtor won’t enter the house, or the creepy feelings they have initially. They focus on the fact that the house is a bargain, or the perfect size — and they move right in.

It’s only later that they realize what a terrible mistake they’ve made.

I would estimate that a good 80% of the families featured on “A Haunting” are lower middle class, or working class. They’ve had stories with single mothers who scrimped for years to make a down payment, people juggling school and multiple jobs, and even the occasional haunted renter. These people had few options when it became clear that their homes were haunted.

More than one person on the show has admitted that they were so financially strapped that they couldn’t even come up with a deposit for a place to rent. They were trapped.

And it’s just that feeling that pervades many of the stories on the show. Dream homes become nightmare homes, and any existing problems become vastly magnified. As the haunting situation spirals out of control, other (sometimes preexisting) problems follow the spiral in tandem. In fact, some of the hauntings could be seen as metaphors for existing domestic strife — abusive spouses, out of control teenagers, poor money management.

They don’t show stories about haunted penthouse apartments or demon-infested McMansions in gated communities, though. Oh, I’m sure that sort of thing happens, but having access to money makes a big difference in how these things are handled. If you’re wealthy and you buy a new home that happens to be haunted, you move on as soon as trouble rears its ugly head. You rent it, or flip it — whatever it takes — but you have the means to leave at the first sign of the unexplained. And you certainly wouldn’t chat about it on national television — even on basic cable. That would be unseemly.

Plus, dismissing the paranormal as superstition and moving at the first sign of trouble doesn’t make for a good campfire tale, anyway.

Working class homeowners, with their stereotypical tendency to superstition, have just the right blend of intense pressure, financial woe, and access to older fixer-uppers that will keep “A Haunting” churning out low-rent demonic docudramas for the foreseeable future.

Resisting the Allure of Webbed Feet.

I’ve recently gotten an earful of Atlantean nonsense, and I’d like to make a little statement here.

I’m weird, sure. Crazy, maybe. But I am not irrational.

Atlantis doesn’t make sense — at least not the way it’s portrayed in classic “In Search of” episodes. It’s not the lack of evidence — there’s plenty of ignored evidence of advanced stone building cultures long before the standard archaeological time line fits them in. And yes, we can say with some authority that the continents have drifted around. But that’s not usually what people are talking about when they bring up Atlantis.

I reject Atlantis (and Mu, and all of those other “lost” continents) because they are just the goofier side of our regular cultural programming.

The myth of Atlantis originated with a few lines in a fragmented manuscript written thousands of years ago by Plato. He placed Altantis’s time around 9400 BCE, which puts it into the pre-history of pre-history. Any idea Plato had about about places or events 9000 years before his own time would probably be about the same as ideas we have about things that took place in 7000 BCE. Think about it — we are closer to Plato’s time than Plato was to supposed Atlantean time.

I think it’s fairly safe to say that Plato was not talking about a well-remembered historical time, but something fanciful and possibly allegorical — something going on in Plato’s current time that needed to be spoken about in veiled terms.

Keep that in mind. Atlantis began as an allegory, and the modern interpretation of Atlantis is something in the same vein.

Most people who talk about Atlantis (or Mu or Lemuria) mean an island populated with “star people” or alien/human hybrids — the civilization which “fell” due to technological misuse. These are completely modern interpretations — mostly inspired by Madame Blavatsky’s writings in the 1880s. The Atlantis tale gives a warning, true — and possibly a good warning in light of our current planetary predicament — but this Atlantis narrative places humanity as something apart from and above nature.

And I think that’s the point. Culturally we are supposed to believe that humans aren’t part of nature — that we’re super special, and not just the smartest monkeys. Saying that Atlantis was populated by star people is just another way of saying that we’re made in god’s image — but nobody else is. Being descended from Atlanteans seems just a new age way of perpetuating that old cultural message: humans aren’t like the other animals, and we’re clearly bad or evil because of it.

This Atlantis is the new age’s version of Original Sin.

At least it’s not Eve’s fault this time. It’s those pesky aliens (or those pesky fallen angels who bred with human women, depending on your take of the mythos). But still…

I’m so tired of the Atlantis thing. I mean, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you’re probably still dealing with a duck — even if the duck in question is some sort of allegorical tool. It’s tempting to mistake your duck/allegory for something else — particularly if it serves your needs — but let’s give it a rest and talk about something with teeth.

Like this, for example.