Not a documentary or re-share post (although there is a full documentary video in this post midway down), this is something coming straight from the Phantoms author himself. I’d been waiting a while to show this off.
I am not a collector of horror stuff beyond paranormal documentaries stuff – I don’t have serial killer memorabilia or loads of haunted items (or at least items I knew were haunted before I got them) like many other paranormalists like to collect. I don’t have space for it, don’t have time to chase’em down and don’t have the spare green to drop on items that are just decorations I get to brag about. This post showcases a very rare exception to that and it brings the entire operation here to a sort-of full circle.
Phantoms Fill The Southern Skies is my ghost book and paranormal website. Both are the brand and culmination of my personal interest and hobby in supernatural affairs that had always been present in my being, but only really came to an active participation in subject after I came across video footage of what I would eventually discover more than a handful of years later was the “San Pedro Haunting“. The San Pedro Haunting/Case/Poltergeist/etc. (it has several names) is one of the most famous paranormal cases in American history where a single mother in San Pedro, California, was being attacked by unseen forces – literally attacked by at least two entities – and was able to bring in a team of people who were both investigators and videographers. What followed were a series of nights where at least one of the entities went on a series of unprecedented rampages on a house full of people that included strangling a photographer on the rafter of the attic, leaking human plasma down the walls and furniture of the house, producing an electrified energy that made a series of snapping sounds in front of some of the witnesses and shocking one of them, and, in its most chilling action, marking one of the mother’s infant children with something red on their forehead that was never identified or given any idea of what it was supposed to communicate to the adults. What made this mad tale of literally unbelievable entity enmity unique at the time is that much of those nights were caught on film, and although the viewer doesn’t get to see a demon or ghost or something that proves these things exist beyond any doubt, the footage is compelling and, as I can personally attest, totally terrifying. It does not look faked, it looks like the real deal.
The story doesn’t even end there, but my summary of it does as the documentary for which many of my earliest paranormal documentary viewings that scared me as a young man, “An Unknown Encounter” by Barry Conrad, covers that story before half of the 82 minute documentary is finished. The San Pedro nights were just the first of three major haunting events that followed members of the team that were at the San Pedro house during the first of the rampages. The mother, Jackie, moved way north to North California and one of the entities (the main offender) followed her for more nights of hauntings and physical attacks, the second of the three main encounters, and then the video team themselves, who were over 100 miles away from Jackie by then and resuming their videographer careers for non-paranormal events, during one night at an apartment that one of them occupied. Oh, it seems my summary continued after all. That’s kinda how this story is – unlike many paranormal cases that I return to ever so often, this is one where I learn and discover new things about it every time I find it in a new medium.
Many of the elements of the story stuck with me from the first moment I saw them on the documentary. One of them is the sentence that allegedly comes from the entity itself during an ill-conceived ouija board session: “Phantoms fill the skies around you”. That sentence never left me and, lo and behold, it inspired the book and website fit for literate eyes today.
So that’s the backstory, here’s the frontstory – ever since the San Pedro encounter, Barry Conrad, the main videographer, had produced a number of some of the earliest and rather most pleasing to watch paranormal documentaries every so often since then in addition to running his Barcon Video Production company which continues to work as an all-purpose video and camera production company. Many of them had subsequently appeared online on Youtube and ohers. Last year, I wanted to watch “California’s Most Haunted” but could no longer find it anywhere, so I got the bright idea to look up Barcon’s website and write them asking where they’ve got it online these days. The person who wrote me back was Barry Conrad himself, and in a few emails, I was able to purchase right from their headquarters two DVDs that I was most interested in. Not only was “California’s Most Haunted” available for purchase and shipment, but a proper DVD copy of “An Unknown Encounter” that was a 2-DVD set. I about freaked out again – there’s a 2-DVD set of this??? Yes, I’ll buy that as well!
After some time in printing and shipping, here it is – two of my favorite paranormal documentaries ever, created and personally sent to me by one of the people who was present at the actual famous hauntings that inspired me to this paranormal enterprise in the first place. For baseball fans, this is the equivalent of buying a clean new baseball from Babe Ruth’s house that he keeps a supply of during practice and having it packaged and sent from Babe Ruth himself.
At least I think it’s that important, and that’s all that matters here. 😀
