Sometimes it is easy to miss the forest through the trees. If one was to apply this to the study of ghosts, you could say it is easy to miss the clues contained within the historical data of hauntings. Most specifically are a goldmine of clues into the workings of full body apparitional displays. I was also missing an amazing story, but one book set me on a new course for a series of profound revelations. And it wasn’t a book about ghosts.
Many of you know of my fascination with the 1947 Black Dahlia unsolved Los Angeles murder case. Some of you even joined me at my show when we made an attempt to unmask the killer’s name. The book I was reading is called “Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder” by Piu Eatwell. I personally believe this author has solved the murder of Elizabeth Short (The Black Dahlia’s real name). I won’t spoil all her findings here, but if her theory is correct Elizabeth Short was murdered at a place called the Aster Motel, not at the famous Snowden House, the home of Dahlia murder suspect physician George Hodel.
In the book the author is meeting with a forensic scientist to see if blood tests could be taken in cabin 3, the location where she believes Elizabeth was tortured and bisected before being dumped in an empty lot. On Page 262 she writes:
Susanna and I were in the process of clearing away the test materials when the woman from the front desk of the motel came running up to us. She had with her one of the men who worked the night shifts at the motel reception desk.
“We want to show you this,” she said. She held out a cell phone. On it was a video taken from the phone of footage running on the motel security camera. The video had been taken earlier that year. The woman explained that her colleague had been sitting as usual, at the font desk in the early hours of the morning. The screen at the front desk relayed footage taken from a security camera placed to overlook the motel parking lot. Suddenly what appeared to be a female figure could be seen on the security footage. The figure exited cabin 3 and hurried away, finally disappearing out in the street. As the security footage was showing the image of the figure crossing the parking lot, the cell phone video panned across the actual lot. It was empty. The security footage therefore appeared to be showing a figure hurrying from cabin 3 when in reality there was nobody there.
He has seen this happening before, always about the same time, early in the morning,” the woman explained to me, translating from her colleague’s Spanish. “But this time he took a film of it.”
I replayed the video, nonplussed. It was indeed difficult to explain.”
“This place,” the woman said, “has too much history.”
Eatwell doesn’t comment on this any further within the book and as you can see she doesn’t refer to this as an encounter with a ghost. Clearly she is letting the reader read between the lines and draw their own conclusions. I do find it incredible that this story made its way into the book but I understand why she chose to include it. It must’ve been difficult to resist another validation of her theory - even if it was clearly rooted in the paranormal.
This event has all the earmarks of a residual type of haunting, believed by some to be a sort of visual playback of a past event. It also fits the telltale signs of a ghost encounter where the apparition is visible in the infrared spectrum via the security camera footage but not in the visible light spectrum as filmed by the cell phone.
The monstrous deeds done to Elizabeth Short are almost unimaginable, a horror movie come to life. I will not recount them here but I do want to impress upon you the amount of blood loss which occurred during this heinous act. Henry Hoffman, the owner of the Aster Motel at that time described finding blood and feces spattered over the floor and up the sides of the bathroom walls. His brother-in-law Burt Moorman said that two army blankets in the room looked like somebody had poured a gallon of red paint over the blankets. Moorman used to work in a mortuary and thought the blood on the mattress would be what a human body would contain.
For the sake of this discussion I want to assume that Eatwell’s theory is correct. In 1947 Elizabeth Short was murdered in cabin 3 of the Aster Motel and now 70 years later on multiple occasions an apparition of her has been seen hurrying away from this spot. Some might say that this is Ms. Short’s way of helping us to solve her own murder. After all, hasn’t everyone been focused on the wrong location? Even Ghost Adventures’ Zak Bagans did his investigation at the Snowden House, a.k.a. The Black Dahlia Murder House.
Before we continue I need to let you know my first rule of Portalogy. It is as follows: We leave as we came and we return as we left. In other words, our sentience is a thing before it inhabits a body. At birth the body and consciousness join and we are defined as a human. We inhabit this physical vessel for a time and then when we die this spiritual consciousness does not fade along with our bodies. Our memories do not fade. Our ability to think and make decisions remains. We do not become dumbed down versions of ourselves. When a spirit returns, it is the same sentient being that left this world. There will be great confusion, but not over the fact that we have died. Believe me, you will know that you are dead. How many ghost shows have you seen where the investigators are talking down to the spirits? Even screaming at them like they’ve lost their hearing. When I lost my sister on 9/11 I didn’t suddenly become incapable of performing in life. I was a mess, but there was still a path to follow. While losing a loved one is not the same as realizing you yourself have died, just as in life when you die, there is still a coping mechanism that allows you to figure out the next step in the process. Some spirits cope by revisiting our world. They know exactly where they are but are confused by the “when” of the moment. I’ll talk about the strange time travel aspects of spirit visitation in Part III.
Spirits can only return to the place where they lost their life. This is the Dahlia Effect.
So why in the world would Elizabeth return to the site of her brutal murder 70 years after the fact? To help us solve her own murder? I don’t think so. This can’t be a residual haunting since she didn’t escape her captor and run free of the motel. Why would she visit her cabin of horrors? Isn’t this the last place on earth she would want to return? Remember, I don’t believe spirits are confused about what they are doing. This got me thinking. Isn’t this what most ghosts are actually doing? Returning to the place where they died. Maybe this is a rule of the cosmos. Spirits can only return to the place where they lost their life. This is the Dahlia Effect. It is also rule number two of Portalogy.
In Part III I will discuss what conditions are necessary in order for the Dahlia Effect to occur. Remember all that blood in cabin 3? That is an important clue.
