If you didn't get the love you wanted for Valentine's Day, try a love doll. No, not the blow-up kind — the magical kind.

Love dolls are poppets, dolls created or modified specifically for magical purposes. "Poppet" is a Middle English term for doll or small child. Poppets have been in use for magic much longer, however, dating to ancient times when people made little images of clay and wax. Poppets are usually associated with hexes and curses, thanks to the media, but they are used equally for healing, blessing, fertility and love.

How is a poppet used in a magical spell? It substitutes for a person. For a spell-casting, the poppet is colored or decorated to mimic a specific person: a bit of real clothing, some snippets of hair, even a photograph pasted on the doll.

A relative of mine, who will remain anonymous, is a former Catholic priest. He and I recently revisited the story that was responsible for birthing my interest in the paranormal. Since this very story was so influential for me, I wanted to share our compelling discussion with our readers.

Emily: You are a former Catholic priest. Although you were never actually part of an exorcism, you've heard about them from a first-hand witness, correct?

Anonymous: Yes.

Emily: Before you elaborate, what are the rules when it comes to sharing information about demonic cases dealt with by the church? Are there restrictions concerning what you can tell me?

J. Allen Hynek is perhaps most well known for his UFO-encounter classification system. He developed a three-tiered system: in a close encounter of the first kind, the witness sees a UFO but does not interact with it; in a close encounter of the second kind, the witness or her environment is in some way affected by the UFO (marks on the ground, radiation burns, etc.); and in a close encounter of the third kind, the witness sees or interacts with an alien life form. This system inspired the title of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Hynek himself served as a consultant for the film.

However, Hynek was also a member of Project Blue Book, a United States Air Force project founded to catalogue and investigate UFO sightings. Hynek, an astronomy professor, had been hired by the Air Force to debunk such UFO sightings, but he found them so numerous and plausible that he became convinced of their existence. After Project Blue Book folded in 1969, he founded the Center for UFO Studies in 1973.

The lights are first visible just under the water. At first glance, you think they may be nothing more than reflections, perhaps some strange refraction of the moon overhead. And then the lights move with a life of their own, bursting out from beneath the surface of the river and rocketing like missiles toward the sky.

It sounds like a scene from some fantasy novel, but if you happen to be walking along the banks of the Mekong River in Thailand during the month of October, you may very well see this puzzling sight. The lights are attributed to the Mekong Dragon, a supernatural spirit of the river who governs the water flowing there. The Thai people propitiate this ancient being with a festival of lights. Dragon boats are raced upon the river, and human-made fireballs are launched into the sky in the form of cunningly crafted fireworks. But all of this pales to the amazing sight of the fireballs themselves, which emerge from the depths of the river and blaze forth in the night.

Are the lights man-made hoaxes? Perhaps they're merely swamp gas — although they would have to originate from some well-timed emissions, since the lights only emerge from the river during the time of the annual festival. Certainly, some strange things have come out of the Mekong River. Given the 646 pound catfish caught in 2005, the idea of a dragon lurking beneath those same waters becomes suddenly far more credible. Giant catfish aside, the river-born fireballs remain a mystery. While skeptics ponder, the Thai people engage in their lively festival, mingling Buddhist and animist beliefs in a richly textured worldview that leaves plenty of room for dragons.

It was Sir Francis Dashwood who founded the Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe — a group whose more appropriate second name became The Hellfire Club. Wealthy young intellectuals made societies like The Hellfire Club trendy during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, England rests the Dashwood family on the land of their former estate; an enormous mausoleum contains their bodies. Below the crypt is one of the most eerie, disorienting hand-carved cave systems in the world. The entrance to the caves, carved to resemble a Gothic church, lures visitors several hundred feet below ground and continues for over half a mile.

The original chalk mines were expanded by order of Dashwood in the 1750s. Inspired by the temples and landscaping he witnessed during his travels through Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Dashwood decided to dig his own temple underground. He also had the cave system cut into intricate patterns. Part of the cave crossed a stream that was called The River Styx, referencing the river of Hades. In Greek mythology, souls were ferried across the river to the land of the dead.

In 1986, Father Gabriel Amorth, a priest for over 30 years, became an official exorcist. Since then, he claims to have performed over 50,000 exorcisms and to speak (and wrestle) with the Devil everyday. He founded the International Association of Exorcists, and is honorary president for life.

Amorth had never thought much of exorcism before 1986, when he was assigned to assist the famous exorcist of Rome, Father Candido. Amorth says from that point on, he realized how much work must be done, how few exorcists there were to do it, and how he must dedicate his life entirely to exorcism. He learned how to differentiate between physical or mental illness and genuine possession, and he found out quickly that no two cases were ever the same. During his tenure as an exorcist, Amorth authored two books on the subject, which do include references to official Roman Catholic beliefs on demonology, but mostly deal with his own experiences.

Case File: 2007.11.43F
Code Name: "Asylum"

DIRECTOR'S LOGS
These logs have been condensed and edited, but to the best of our ability, they remain an accurate account of the case.

OVERRULED
Originally, we turned down the idea of investigating the old asylum. My team, myself excluded, thought it was overdone and cliché. "What is the moral or scientific benefit of doing a nearly abandoned building?" Eilfie and the gang asked. I understood where they were coming from, so I didn't hold their decision against them. We've all seen the countless television specials of investigators going in to abandoned buildings and running out screaming towards the end. My team didn't want to be a part of that genre. The core of the problem, especially with Eilfie, came down to respect. An asylum, for instance, has many terrible and sad memories. Eilfie and the gang didn't want to go in and desecrate the memories of the dead. I assured her that we wouldn't do that, because that's not what PRS is about. If we went in to the asylum, I said, we would treat the place with the utmost respect. And like all cases, we would see if there was anything we could do to help.

There are many lesser-known types of divination. Acutomancy is divination via sharp objects, in which one drops seven needles or pins on a table in order to read the patterns. Aleuromancy is divination via fortune cookies, carromancy is divination via melting wax, and ichnomancy is divination via footprints. Papyromancy is divination via the folding of paper.

The word "papyromancy" is said to come from the Greek word "papyrus," meaning paper, but it's possible that it originated in Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: "Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers — the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper." No online examples can be found of divination via rolling papers, perhaps because the word "papyromancy" has more recently been used to describe divination via the folding of paper money.

According to many psychics and energy workers, each and every human being is surrounded by a nimbus of light. This full-body halo is the human aura, and it is believed to be the extension of our personal energy fields. Some claim to be able to see the aura, describing it most often in terms of light and color. Still others claim to have invented gadgets that can photograph this otherworldly glow so you can own a picture of your own aura for $19.95 — and sometimes, considerably more.

There are a baffling number of aura cameras out there, and they claim to reveal everything from potential health problems to a person's current mood. If you're shopping for a camera that will just let you point and click and get an image of your aura, however, you might find the market a little thin. Most aura cameras out there don't actually photograph the energy field around a person. Instead, they rely on principles of bio-feedback and galvanic skin response to compile the image of a probable aura, and then they project this onto a photo or other image for the curious to see.

Case File: 2007.11.43F
Code Name: "Asylum"

SUMMARY OF PHENOMENA
From the mid-19th century until the early 1990s, the Willard Center was an asylum. The first patient arrived naked in a cage. Ultimately, over 5,000 bodies were buried in an unmarked field. Now a drug-treatment prison, several guards and employees claim to experience supernatural phenomenon on the grounds. A few guards fled the quarters after seeing the spirit of a woman screaming at them. The superintendent of the facility has requested PRS to come on site and conduct an investigation.

On a side note, PRS is bringing in Chris Moon, a paranormal researcher and operator of a controversial new tool called "Frank's Box." This box, developed by Frank Sumption, is being hailed as a "telephone to the dead." PRS has decided to experiment with using the box on this investigation and see what insight it provides.

NOTES FOR THE DISPATCHED FIELD RESEARCH TEAM
• Can we explain away the Willard Asylum haunting?

• If Willard is truly haunted, why are the spirits still remaining?

• How can PRS resolve a case that does not involve any living clients?

• Is Frank's Box a legitimate tool?

Not getting enough EVP bang out of your digital recorder? Try a bat detector!

It's true — devices made to pick up the ultrasonic soundings of bats can record electronic voice phenomena (EVP), the imprints of disembodied voices not heard but registered on recording equipment. The bat detectors don't often pick up as much as a digital recorder, but success with them demonstrates that the dead and spirits don't need magnetic tape or digital recording technology to leave messages.

Bat detectors operate at much higher frequencies of sound waves than can be detected by the human ear. The human hearing range is from 20 hertz (hz) to about 20 kilohertz (khz), which are the number of vibrations made per second. Bats emit ultrasounds between 12 khz and 100 khz, and some even as high as 160 khz. There are two types of bat detectors. One is a super heterodyne, which tunes to specific frequencies. The other is a down-converter, which transforms bat pings to sounds that can be heard by the human ear. The second type of bat detector is the one suited to EVP.

In 1952, an amateur hypnotist in Colorado performed a past-life regression with a local named Virginia Tighe. In the first hypnosis session, and for many times after, Virginia spoke in an Irish accent, sang Irish songs and told stories, and identified herself as Bridey Murphy from Cork, Ireland, born in 1798 and dead in 1854. The hypnotist, Morey Bernstein, published the bestseller The Search for Bridey Murphy to tell the tale, renaming Virginia as Ruth Simmons. Tapes of the actual hypnosis sessions were also sold, snapped up in droves.

Support for the story came from the number of obscure details about Ireland that Virginia furnished. But disbelief came from numerous sources and for many reasons. Newspapers traveled to Ireland to investigate — did a Bridey Murphy live in Ireland in the 19th century? No evidence was found. But one domestic paper reportedly found a Bridie Murphey Corkell that lived in the house across the street from Virginia’s childhood home in Wisconsin, indicating the stories told under hypnosis were memories rather than past-life experiences. Additionally, other reviewers noted that the obscure details Virginia provided were probably familiar to any person of Irish descent.

The success of the book made many readers look twice at reincarnation and ideas outside of common religious beliefs of life after death, as well as accepted science. Believers say that this accounts for the vociferous attacks upon the book at the time and after.

Is there a monstrous being haunting the Pine Barrens in New Jersey? The sightings started in the early years of the twentieth century. According to the Devil Hunters, official researchers of the Jersey Devil, in 1909 the Devil was sighted almost daily for a week in the month of January. How can a cryptid manage to exist hidden away in an area so close to civilization? It's hard to say, but the Jersey Devil continues to haunt the imaginations of investigators, as this video clip attests.

Evil twins make for great soap opera drama. But this idea, used to drum up ratings and appeal to viewers' fears and desires, actually has a basis in paranormal folklore and history in the concept of "doppelganger." The term, German for "double walker," can refer to a number of different phenomena, including the appearance of a ghostly double or apparition, or a vision of an identical twin in the flesh. Doppelgangers often have distinctive physical characteristics, including no shadow.

The ancient belief of doppelgangers could represent a danger-free curiosity, with the fascinating idea of a having your own non-related identical twin somewhere out in the world. In some stories, doppelgangers exist as a result of magic or temporal shifts. But more and more throughout history, the idea of a doppelganger indicates a dangerous or malevolent force. Doppelgangers will act like an evil twin, causing mischief by confusing friends and family and giving bad advice. Alternatively, doppelgangers could be hands-off but be a silent sign of extreme bad luck or even death. The poet John Donne claimed to see his wife's doppelganger in the 1600s, shortly before their child was stillborn. Percy Bysshe Shelley told friends of seeing his doppelganger not long before his death by drowning, and Abraham Lincoln also saw his twin before his assassination.

In 2006, researchers found that electromagnetic stimulation of a certain area of the brain made patients see "shadow people," figures that at times resembled themselves and other times appeared as strangers. This development could be a fascinating insight into the long history and folklore of doppelgangers.

Ever hear a disembodied voice call your name out loud? If so, take care — it may be a bad spirit luring you to doom.

At least, that's the explanation given in a long tradition of folklore. "Calling ghosts," as they are sometimes called, speak out the name of a person to attract his attention. Sometimes people who live in or investigate haunted places say they hear their names called out, but no one is visible.

In folklore, calling ghosts lure people to their deaths. They are related to evil-minded spirits in mythology, as such the sirens of Greek lore: water nymphs whose beautiful singing lured sailors to their deaths. The sirens lived on an island between Circe's isle and Scylla. They sat on a flower bed surrounded by the rotting corpses of the men they killed.

What became known as "The Philadelphia Experiment" began with a book published in 1955 called The Expanding Case for the UFO. This book was never famous for its topic but for the events that followed its release. The author, Morris Jessup, was an astronomer, Michigan University graduate and professor and UFO researcher. In January of 1956 Jessup received a letter from a "Carl Allen" who also called himself Carlos Miguel Allende. This and subsequent letters referred to Jessup's work but turned to an incident having to do with the US Navy. According to the letter, the US Navy had conducted a top-secret experiment in October of 1943. The result, according to Allen, was the total invisibility and teleportation of a US destroyer. Allen asserted that the experiment was an application of Einstein's Unified Fields Theory.

Allen claimed that in 1943, while he was aboard the USS Andrew Furuseth near Norfolk, Virginia, the U.S.S. Eldridge suddenly appeared out of thin air but remained partially shrouded by a spherical green fog. After several minutes the ship disappeared. According to a Philadelphia newspaper, Allen claimed, observers at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard witnessed the opposite — a ship disappeared and then came back again. He actually claims that the ship was teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk in a matter of 15 minutes.

Travis Walton set out on the morning of November 5, 1975 to cut timber in an Arizona forest and never made it home that night. For five days he was missing, and then suddenly he found himself dumped on a highway near Heber in the middle of the night.

His explanation made headlines: he had been taken aboard an alien space craft, and had seen extraterrestrials. Thirty-three years later, his story is still controversial.

On the fateful day, Walton was part of a seven-man team thinning out trees in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, where he lived. It was dark by the time the team crammed themselves into their pickup truck and departed.

In 1836 during the Texas Revolution, the 13-day battle at the Alamo mission in San Antonio left nearly 2,000 dead and the ground soaked in blood. Many of the dead are still buried in the space around the Alamo, a space now covered in newer and taller buildings, one of which is the reportedly haunted Emily Morgan Hotel. According to legend, the hotel's namesake is the woman who inspired the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas," but the real story of Emily Morgan is much sadder.

Emily West, a free black from Connecticut, took a boat to Galveston, Texas in 1835 to work for James Morgan as a servant in a hotel. While in Galveston, West and her fellow servants were captured by members of the Mexican army and forced to travel with them to the place where the Texan army had made camp. It was there that the Texans charged the Mexican camp, defeated the Mexican army, and won Texas its independence from Mexico.

"...I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

This is how President Abraham Lincoln described a dream, which would later be considered a premonition of his own death, to his friend Ward Hill Lamon. Apparently Lincoln experienced the dream several times and told a few other people, including his bodyguard W.H. Crook. Ironically, he related the dream to his bodyguard the very day that he was assassinated.