Paranormal Case 9

Prologue

In the little town of Pacific Grove, California, the typical summer fog descended upon the waterfront homes in wisps and clouds. The larger Victorian "charmers," many of which have become Bed and Breakfast Inns over the last fifty years, go back to an age when the little seaside community was a strict religious community. It was here where a small paradise was declared by those bold enough to come out West to the Central Coast from more refined areas of the new nation. They came into California by wagons across prairies or "around the horn" of South America on sailing ships. Today, the quaint community of Pacific Grove, one hundred miles south of San Francisco, has grown into a touristic town. It's early inhabitants once were the libertine artists who founded a sanctuary there in the last century, and the religious "teetotalers" who a century earlier claimed it as a retreat.

This entire geographic region, known as the Monterey Peninsula, juts out majestically into the blue Pacific. It boasts of the quaint village, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and just over the forested ridge, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in America—Pebble Beach, with its seventeen-mile drive of meandering properties where billionaires call home. But over the centuries the pristine area went on to attract many eccentrics and free-thinkers to this edge of the world--all bent on living-out an otherwise isolated life in a spectacularly beautiful place.

But there was a darker underside to this sleepy and visually stunning coast, as well. Emanating from tales of buried Spanish treasures, and notorious pirates who would roam the rocky coastland to torture and murder the gentler folks of the settlements—legends soon were spread about the place to faraway lands. It brought in a tapestry of vagabonds—priests, artists, healers and adventurers who, as characters, became grist for books and movies. Tales of intrigue as well flourished on the Central Coast of California which remain alive and are told on the Peninsula today.

This phenomena of the macabre and unusual piqued the interests and imaginations of men like Mark Twain and Robert Luis Stevenson, both early writers who came to the area to record in print the uniqueness they found there. And to this day, with a confluence of Native American and European spiritual currents, modern-day healers and shamans, the Monterey Peninsula is home to New Age mysticism and 'mindfulness' philosophies which push up against the boundaries of what is known as "paranormal" in reference to activities and experiences. It is not surprising then, that the stories of certain extraordinary occurrences and anomalies of nature have been recorded and investigated this area for many years.

This is the story of one such string of occurrences which became the focus of investigators from a broad range of backgrounds—all of whom took particular interest in the case for its paranormal elements. Once such explorer who was brought into this case early on was from an academic background. She was a young researcher of Hispanic origin and with a driven disposition to passionately discern the truth in such matters.

Valeria Alvarez was in the midst of her master's thesis at the University of Arizona when she became aware of certain paranormal claims involving a family in Pacific Grove. Because of the credible involvement of one young subject presenting verifiable facts, the story had taken on statewide and even national interest. The attractive, twenty-five-year-old had done her undergraduate work earlier at the University of Virginia, where a project titled Division of Perceptual Studies was one of the few paranormal programs left in the country and was officially sanctioned by the school's psychology department as far back as 1967. It had historically investigated claims of reincarnation and 'past lives' phenomena.

Valeria's current graduate work, continuing at the University of Arizona, and in connection with the paranormal, SOPHIA Research Program, was working with reported incidences of 'apparitions' and 'after-death communications' occurrences, along with 'altered states of consciousness', as well as what are known as the 'transmigration of souls.'—in other words, ghosts.

What this young researcher was to find, there in the little coastal town through her persistent investigations, gave evidence to realize that all which science purports to know in matters of supernatural phenomenon, is still in its stage of infancy. This story is a true accounting of that young researcher's life-changing and harrowing descent into the world of the paranormal.

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