It’s October, so Let’s Get Metaphysical

Why it happened or how, Nicole isn’t sure. But she is sure it happened, just as she is sure her name isn’t really Nicole.

She doesn’t want me to use her real name and that’s understandable. With two kids in school, Nicole doesn’t want people thinking she’s some kind of weirdo just because she’s seen a ghost.

The day before, a ghostbuster of sorts had led me to the door of this Tujunga apartment, but no one was home. This day, Nicole answered my knock and invited me into a living room so dark that I bumped into a coffee table. I followed her into a bedroom where the TV was tuned to a rerun of “Law & Order.” We talked over the sound.

It all started one August night about an hour before midnight, Nicole said. The 25-year-old woman was sitting on the bed and her fiance (now ex-) was standing in the middle of the room when “we heard this shwoo.”

Two flashlights that had been on a shelf suddenly flew a few feet and banged against a wall, she said, breaking into pieces. Their neighbor complained, “If you want to fight, don’t throw things!” But they weren’t fighting, Nicole says, not right then.

Later they saw “a figure in the doorway . . . like a dark shadow.” And Nicole’s 7-year-old daughter told them she saw “a white fog” above her bed.

Soon her boyfriend had borrowed a camcorder and was staying up nights in a vain effort to record the images. Nicole, meanwhile, soon found herself venturing into a new shop down Foothill Boulevard called Auxien Metaphysical and met the owner, Eric Pepin, who identified himself as a psychic.

“Well,” Nicole explains, “they always say on Montel and Ricki that psychics do this and that.”

*

“Poltergeist Investigation in Tujunga.”

In any month but October I’d have probably ignored the fax. With Halloween looming, I traveled to the twin towns of Sunland and Tujunga in the crumbly foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. The towns have always seemed a tad eccentric, maybe even spooky.

Five years had passed since I spent an unusual evening in a Sunland radio studio where the host interviewed a psychologist who specialized in treating people who believed they had been abducted by extraterrestrials. Many years ago, I had a close encounter with the absolutely true tale of the mudslide that washed part of old Verdugo Hills Cemetery down suburban streets, the caskets spilling their ghastly contents on front yards.

And now came a news release touting this Auxien place as “a hub of paranormal reports for the local area,” investigating “poltergeist activity, UFO sightings, paranormal events, etc.”

The big scoop: “Auxien has recently assisted a family that was being attacked by a poltergeist. The mother of the family . . . was regularly attacked as the family observed in horror . . . This action left many bruises on her leg. The poltergeist also has moved & flung objects through the air. Balls of light swirled over the children’s beds.”

I showed the press release to Nicole and she said it was true.

It seemed odd that, while his news release described an “attack,” Eric Pepin said he really doesn’t think supernatural spirits meant any harm. These “energies,” he explained, are simply trying “to communicate” with people who for whatever reasons seem sensitive to their force. It takes a powerful energy, he said, just to move a pencil.

Pepin, who is 32, said his father had been involved “in psychic work” in Connecticut and so he pretty much grew up in the business. He calls himself a “new school” psychic, meaning he is more “scientific” than the old school. “There are energy patterns that man does not fully understand,” he says. “Anything human beings don’t understand, we are afraid of.”

Pepin said he had worked with law enforcement authorities on homicides and missing persons cases, but declined to provide details.

When Pepin visited Nicole’s apartment, he decided the trouble was in the children’s room. Nicole told me Pepin felt such strange vibrations he couldn’t stay in the room for long. He explained the room and its furniture were structured in such a way that “electrical currents had opened a vortex.” Those water spots in the acoustic ceiling, she told me, weren’t there before the poltergeist came.

Pepin suggested anti-ghost measures that seem so simple you may want to remember them in case you have poltergeist troubles of your own. As he spoke, I had the strange sensation he was channeling Martha Stewart.

First, adapting the Chinese principle of feng shui--a belief that spatial relationships have certain spiritual consequences--try rearranging the furniture. Second, sprinkle salt around the home because this supposedly helps neutralize the energy.

Pepin said he used his own psychic energy to intervene in the haunting.

Nicole says she took it upon herself to do a couple of other things. She went to a church and left some of the paintings she had created at age 13 that had been inspired by the deaths of some friends. And while Pepin provided his services free, Nicole decided to buy some “purifying” incense from his shop and burn it every day.

The ghosts are now gone.

*

The fiance is gone too.

They had been together several months, Nicole says, but after the poltergeist came, her boyfriend got more and more edgy. One night they had an argument that had nothing to do with a ghost. When he wrapped his arms around her to restrain her, she says, she responded by biting him.

Although he had never been violent to her before, she says, he struck her repeatedly, even though he knew she was two months pregnant with their child.

Nicole called the police. Her boyfriend had been arrested on an assault charge before, she says, and because he had violated terms of his parole by attacking her, he was sentenced to a year in jail.

Whether all this somehow figures into the ghost story, I’m not sure. At any rate, Nicole says she and the kids plan to stay in Tujunga and in the apartment. It will take more than a poltergeist to scare them from their home.

Besides, it’s not as if Nicole had never seen a ghost before.

“An aunt of mine in Oregon lived in a haunted house,” she tells me. “I watched the walls bleed, I heard the walls rumble. We saw ghosts. . . .”

*

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St. , Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com. Please include a phone number.