I've always got my trusty blankie...

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to fall asleep last night. Every now and then, I like to watch a scary movie, always with friends so that I never have to fall asleep alone-- not that I'm ever alone in Calhoun or 6 Adams. Anyway, I couldn't even watch an entire movie, but I still managed to scare the bejeebers out of me.

The poster for Paranormal Activity

I was just being silly with a friend when we decided to search for the Paranormal Activity alternate endings on Youtube. For all those with the good sense to not watch the movie, it's about this completely average girl who is haunted by a demon, who gradually gets more and more comfortable revealing its presence within her house. It's a classic horror film: you'll scream, whimper, and maybe even wet yourself if you watched it alone. I literally only watched five minutes of the end, an ending that I've even seen before and had even read about earlier that day. I was fully aware of what was coming, but I still could not bring myself to watch Katie slit her throat with glee in front of the camera. 

I'm pretty terrified of the entire idea of demons in my house, which is I think a remnant of Victorian spiritualism. Before the turn of the 20th century, people really thought these things could happen. In class today, we talked about seances and the witnesses who truly believed that they had experienced something supernatural, something that some scientists of the day thought could be measured. I, with the immense benefit of hindsight, thought the people who believed in such silly things were crazy. I assumed that these witnesses were uneducated, that the medium was swindling her clients, and that none of this had any real consequence today. On the contrary, there were well-respected men (Alfred Russel Wallace!) in the scientific community who set about to explore these supernatural occurrences as if they were real scientific phenomena.

This spirit trumpet was manufactured in the early 1900s by
 E. A. Eckel, in Anderson, Indiana. It was used to measure
and amplify "psychic energy"

So, this whole spiritualism thing isn't completely crazy. But having deprived myself of a restful night's sleep, I thought about today's equivalent of spiritualism. Perhaps the clinical study of intercessory prayer falls into a similar category. What exactly is to be proven in the as yet methodologically questionable study? Surely, those people who believe in the power of prayer are going to do so despite the results of a clinical trial. Maybe in the future, after some incredible technological developments, intercessory prayer will become obsolete. Maybe the future citizens of the world will look back on these studies of the efficacy of prayer in the same way I viewed the Victorian studies of spiritualism-- merely a symptom of the age.

Petrie always makes everything better

For now, I shall pray that there are no demons in this house, in my bedroom, or anywhere near Cambridge. I'm heading to bed with the door open and the lights on, relying on the safety of my trusty sidekick Petrie.