To Just Believe

It is not enough to just believe, or perhaps it is? You might remember the scene in the Peter Pan cartoon where everyone had to concentrate really hard and say “I believe in fairies.” This miraculously fueled the strength of Tinker Bell. Is your belief or your concentrated intent good enough?

When I was a young man, 1984 to be exact, I created a Ghost Hunters company. I was 11 years old. The Ghost Busters movie had set the world on fire, at least in the minds and imagination of my demographic. Lots of movies of the same concept started to come out, Nightmare on Elm Street which dived into the mysterious dream world came out that same year as well. That was Johnny Depp’s first film, btw, kinda funny! The Supernatural was in vogue.

So a friend of mine and I created a company to help root out ghosts and investigate the supernatural. We advertised down a street in my hometown, and of course we targeted the oldest looking houses we could think of. We only had one potential client and that really did not pan out to anything. I think the older lady was just indulging our fantasy. I think the worst possession we came across was my friends older brother who was smoking pot on the front porch and listening to the album, “Defender’s of the Faith” by Judas Priest.

Anyway, one night we wanted to try an experiment. While on the phone he described his living room to me in great detail. I then concentrated with everything I had to try to teleport my body to his living room clear across town. I focused hard, I tried to really believe that I was there. My friend suddenly saw a flash in his living room and we thought, we believed, for just a moment that I had made contact. Yes, I believed so strongly that I almost transferred my consciousness through the asmodial plane to his living room.

We were already Dr. Strange fans, but this experience made us absolutely forever fans. We were at the comic book store the next morning buying every Dr. Strange book the man had. I still have them in my garage to this day. That was our source of truth and buried in Book of Vishanti is where we would develop our supernatural prowess.

Needless to say, I learned later that simple belief is not enough. Years and years later, in 2004 to be exact I realized that true secret. Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Steve Gonsalves launched their TV series called, Ghost Hunters. You see, Jason Hawes is exactly my age. He founded the Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) in Rhode Island. He had the same belief that I had at age 11. We have a similar net worth, albeit, his royalties from creative works far out exceed mine (that was a joke, I have absolutely zero). The key difference here. We both believed at a young age, but one of us just believed, the other had faith.

You see faith is more than belief. It is action. Jason took action, I moved on to Starwars and the Force. Now I would not be married to the beautiful woman that I am today if the day she met me, I would take her out on an EVP session in the Graveyard as our first date. So I guess I should take that as a pretty decent compensation for giving up on my first entrepreneurial enterprise.

Guy Reams