A Halloween Insight

Filmmaker Paul Davids had a ghostly visitation and he’s written the perfect Halloween Insight about it. It includes a death foretold (by a PAINTING) of a sci-fi master and a document that was mysteriously "redacted."

He writes: "Forrest J. Ackerman was best known as the original editor of ‘Famous Monsters of Filmland’ magazine, which burst onto the scene in 1958 and rallied a generation of adolescent boys to appreciate movie monsters of all breeds, from vampires to mummies, from werewolves to giant apes like King Kong. He collected so much fantasy and science-fiction memorabilia that Forry Ackerman (or FJA or ACK, as he was known to his legion of fans) housed it in all in the 18-rooms of his Los Angeles house that he called the Ackermansion. People came from all over the world to visit him and study the collection.

"Forry Ackerman passed away Dec. 4th, 2008 at two minutes to midnight at the age of 92. A painting of Forry that I own, created by an artist named L. Dopp and painted about four years before Forry’s death, shows the clock behind him at two minutes before the witching hour, predicting the exact moment of his passing."

Ackerman promised he would contact his friends after he died, and he seems to have contacted Davids in a very strange way, by leaving him a mysterious message and then "blacking out" some of the words in it. Davids writes: "In my case, the apparent visit from my mentor Forry Ackerman involved physical evidence that could be tested by chemists in laboratories. I spent nearly a year involved with chemists at Indiana University (where tests were conducted on the ‘apparent written message’ I inexplicably received) and then at New Jersey University. Dr. Jay Siegel, Chairman of the Chemistry Department of Indiana University, called Dr. Allison of New Jersey University in on the case when the results Dr. Siegel obtained were confusing and unexpected. He had anticipated finding all the answers quickly. He was an expert in dealing with solvent-based inks and pigmented inks, and he had testified in many trials where testimony on chemistry was needed. Dr. Siegel is on record as reporting that ‘the whole thing is still a mystery,’ and he has also listed quite a number of anomalous things that happened to the scientists who were investigating the case.

"When I say ‘apparent written message,’ what I mean is this: When I was alone in my vacation home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the evening of March 18th, 2009, I had printed out a 24-page document of phone calls and business meetings, a sort of log for tax purposes. The document was completely ordinary when I tossed it onto my bed and went into the bathroom for about five minutes. I know that for a fact. When I came out of the bathroom, intending to climb into bed and to begin reviewing the document, I saw that it had been inexplicably altered. There was very moist dark ink of some kind blacking out four words on one line. The ‘obliteration,’ as the chemists later came to call it, was very neat and precise. Furthermore, there were two intensities of blackout. The words blacked out were: ‘Spoke to Joe Amodei.’ Of those four words, ‘Spoke to’ could still faintly be made out beneath the slowly drying wet ink (or whatever substance had been used). However, the name ‘Joe Amodei’ was entirely blacked out, and as the ink dried (with a little of it leaching through the top page), the precision of the blacking out of that name could be appreciated. There were no leaky pens or ceiling leaks that could explain any liquid near my document, and besides, the obliteration was so perfectly shaped, it was impossible to conclude it was some sort of coincidental accident."

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