“…it just doesn’t accomplish much to claim certain phenomena are “real” while others aren’t. The real task is to determine what kind of reality they possess and what kind of meaning that implies…”
The “Amityville Horror House” is up for sale, in case you’ve got a million and a half burning a hole in your trust fund and you want to own a monument of paranormal flavored pop culture. The news made me a bit sad – not because it’s for sale, but because it still exists. I almost wish the house had been torn down when the myth had been demolished. It reminds me of my youth.
I live in a slightly haunted house myself, by which I mean sometimes folks see things that aren’t there, strictly speaking and that occasionally things are moved, just a bit, though no one recalls moving them. All in all, less disturbance than you’d expect from a well-behaved house guest and FAR less irritation than a pet. I rather like the idea that my abode has a rich psychic past. It’s like talking to someone at a party and discovering they used to be a contortionist in the circus. The “Amityville Horror House” has a different kind of past. A brutal multiple murder took place there. But despite the book and the movies, that tragic fact doesn’t make it any more haunted than mine. A little piece of my childhood died when I learned that Amityville was a hoax.
The movie appeared when I was an early adolescent. At that stage, I was pretty sure the world wasn’t as boring and well-defined as my elders had laid it out, but I lacked the experience and the resulting commonsense to figure out how far the strangeness went until it was just bullshit. My friends weren’t much help. I remember standing around at lunch discussing the book – I still find it hard to say “novel” – trying to use our powerful brains to sift through the “facts” as they were presented in that “true story.” It had to be true if for no other reason than the writing style was so bland and boring, right? My final judgment as I recall was that I didn’t know that this particular event took place but that I seemed to think this kind of event could take place.
Looking back, I’m struck by two things. First, it’s impossible to construct valid theories from fake data, whether it be the cooked books of Enron or the mutterings of a pig named Jodie reported third hand.
Second, to my amazement, my current perspective isn’t really that much different from what I came up with in Junior High. My “cultural ontology of things that go bump in the night” or whatever I’m calling it now is more philosophically subtle after all those years in grad school but I remain convinced that it just doesn’t accomplish much to claim certain phenomena are “real” while others aren’t. You won’t get far with folks who know they’re real, for instance. A better task is to determine what kind of reality a phenomenon possesses and what kind of meaning that implies. Santa Claus, for instance, is real as a story of inexhaustible generosity. If you honestly have to ask how he gets down the chimney, you have totally missed the point.
On the face of things there is a contradiction between these two assertions. If I allow such apparent latitude to “reality,” how can I call anything “fake data?” My point is that nothing is simply real and on the far edge of the continuum, there are stories that are dangerous. This fake data is evidence that pretends to be one thing when in fact very clearly it is something else. Fake data is spin; it’s self-serving assertions made more consciously and shamelessly than the gentle self-projections we make all the time. The first step when confronting fake data is to figure out whose interest it serves then what it really means. But that’s a good first step when looking at anything, whether it’s Santa Claus, a SEC filing or “A True Story.”
So the “Amityville Horror House” is up for sale, even though it has a different address now and at least some of the horrors said to take place there were imaginative fire-side tales. At least, I hear it has a swimming pool.