[page 7] Abstract: In the broadly conceived paranormal community, synchronicity is a well-traveled concept used to describe meaningful coincidences, acausal connections between parallel events. While psychologists are skeptical of the scientific verifiability of the concept, synchronicity proves useful for social scientists detailing the meaning-making process of paranormal investigators and researchers. Mobilizing the paranormal docuseries Hellier about a group of paranormal investigators examining a case of cave goblins in Hellier, Kentucky, this article interrogates the investigators’ use of the concept of synchronicity to explain various parallel events and scenes. Synchronicity also pairs with the investigators’ invocation of “the weird” to explain feelings, thinking, and the general “vibe” of the case and place, whereby synchronicity is similarly explained as “weird.” I suggest that accounting for feelings and expressions of weirdness in relation to synchronicity demonstrates how synchronistic events can potentially challenge or upend normative meaning-making processes and the ontological ground on which one stands.
Keywords: anthropology, coincidence, documentary, Hellier, paranormal
The story goes that when French poet Emile Deschamps was a teenager in 1805, he met a man with a strange name—Monsieur de Fortgibu, an immigrant from England—and was introduced to the rather English dish of plum pudding. Ten years later, Deschamps came across a restaurant in Paris serving plum pudding, but when he went to order the dish, the server lamented that someone had already ordered the last one. As it turned out, when the waiter pointed to the man in the back, it was none other than Monsieur de Fortgibu. Several years passed and Deschamps was at a dinner party when the host announced that, yes indeed, plum pudding was to be served. Deschamps joked with the other guests that all that was missing was Monsieur de Fortgibu when soon after, a now [page 8] elderly Monsieur de Fortgibu arrived at the party. While Monsieur de Fortgibu was invited to a dinner party, he was not invited to that one.
Deschamps' story is well-travelled, often invoked to talk about the extraordinary characteristic of some coincidences, those coincidences that seem too interconnected to be mere happenstance. The connection between plum pudding and Monsieur de Fortgibu is meaningful for Deschamps, enough to tell the story in the first place, but it is also a strange and hard to believe tale. Carl Jung refers to such phenomena as synchronicity, invoking specifically the story of Deschamps to theorize the nature of “meaningful connections,” or “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state” (Jung in Main 38). It is not exactly clear what “psychic state” Deschamps may be experiencing, but Jung’s point is that the connection between events is meaningful because they parallel one another.
Synchronicity is a useful theoretical tool for social scientists, especially anthropologists, not least of all because we are often concerned with processes of meaning-making in everyday life. That synchronicity describes a series of coincidences that are meaningful to individuals invites anthropological meditation on how people connect happenstances together to render those connections somehow meaningful for both individuals and communities. Anthropologist Michael Jackson refers to this as “intersubjective life,” invoking Jung to remark that “what is common to all these interpretive traditions is the mysterious relationship between the visible and invisible dimensions of human existence, the ‘landscape of shadow’ that lies between the known and the unknown and is at once exterior and interior to us” (xi). The landscape of shadow seems not just to be an indeterminate causality (we are not sure why that happened) but the sense that the causal relationship is motivated rather than arbitrary (as with coincidence). In what follows, my concern is how this [page 9] “landscape of shadow,” or the meaning ascribed to particular coincidences is, for some, fundamentally weird. I argue that accounting for feelings and expressions of weirdness in relation to synchronicity demonstrates how synchronistic events can challenge or upend normative meaning-making processes and the ontological ground on which they stand.
Synchronicities are meaningful, yes, but they are also equal parts weird: beyond whatever individual meaning Deschamps may ascribe to the string of events, the story’s audience cannot help but feel a sense of oddity and strangeness, for how could a coincidence be so pointed that it feels almost wrong or out of place? In her ethnography of UFOs, abduction narratives, and the American uncanny, anthropologist Susan Lepselter tells similar stories of the “resonance between uncanny memories, hauntings, conspiracy theories, captivity narratives, and everyday life,” noting that “[e]veryone understands what is meant by the weird stuff . . . it is a manifestation of the unfinalized and the liminal . . . we become suffused with a sense of the potential in the real” (1, 118). For Lepselter, weird exists in the potential, in the process of becoming, in part because becoming and potentiality can move in multiple directions simultaneously: towards the glorious, the horrific, the mundane, the monstrous, the unreal. Yet the weird, for me, does something different. I contend that the weird exists when ontological expectations are violated. We do not expect Monsieur de Fortgibu to show up all those years later, just as we do not expect the UFO.
A foray into the paranormal proves useful in this endeavor as it compounds synchronicity and the weird in ways that potentially challenge individual experiences, beliefs, and truth. For Jung, synchronicity is particularly prevalent in paranormal encounters, such as out-of-body experiences, and supports his broader psychological framing of the archetype and the collective unconscious (Jung, On Synchronicity; Kerr), as I discuss below. I therefore mobilize expressed moments of synchronicity and weirdness from the first season of the para-[page 10]normal docuseries Hellier (2019). The first season tells the story of a group of paranormal investigators researching a case of goblins in Hellier, Kentucky, a case that soon expands into a much larger and historically situated case of what they call “high strangeness” in Appalachia—they link specifically their case to the Mothman case of Point Pleasant, West Virginia from the 1970s. 1
A brief aside into my usage of the term “paranormal.” There are multiple interpretations of what paranormal denotes, and likewise multiple debates as to how one ought to refer to these “experiences.” Some use paranormal to mean ghosts, spirits, or hauntings, whereby paranormal investigations are primarily forms of “ghost hunting.”2 Others refer to the paranormal as “alleged psychic abilities that defy accepted scientific understanding of human mental capabilities” (Waskul and Eaton 8) and thus supernatural is the better catch-all term. Yet I use paranormal for two reasons. The first is that I take a more literal definition of paranormal as para normal, or beyond normal, a notion I revisit later in this article. The second reason is that the Hellier team uses the term. They refer to themselves as paranormal researchers and investigators, and that which they are investigating and researching as “the paranormal.” This includes all manner of topics: ghosts, bigfoot, cryptozoology, UFOs, aliens, and the occult. They believe the paranormal to be a bricolage of experiences, objects, events, and topics because, as one of the team members, Greg Newkirk, explains, he believes it all to be connected. I revisit this point below as well.
There is growing scholarly attention to both paranormal experiences and paranormal investigations. Dennis Waskul and Marc Eaton’s collection surveys a range of paranormal, or what they call “supernatural,” topics, including ghost hunting (Eaton), fortune-telling and tarot reading (Muzzatti and Smith; Baldwin), cryptozoology (Krulos), and alien abductions (Scribner). One common approach is to interpret paranormal beliefs and experiences through the lens of religion—attention [page 11] here is on the believers and those who have paranormal experiences (Baker and Bader; Bader, Baker, and Mencken). D.W. Pasulka provides an ethnography into paranormal researchers and investigators, including a clandestine group of scientists dedicated to paranormal research, and the ways technology impacts a religiosity associated with UFOs. Similar studies into the use of technology and the production of evidence also permeate the social scientific interrogation of the paranormal, including Michele Hanks’s piece that explores the doubt that ghost hunters in England have regarding the evidence that they collect through scientific and technological means.
A parallel interpretation of the paranormal sees anthropologists attuned to the epistemological narratives of recounting paranormal experiences and investigations. Lepselter, for instance, describes a “narrative resonance” between different UFO, contactee, and abduction experiences that connects the stories in a rather uncanny manner. Similarly, Eaton writes of ghost hunting and investigations and the interactional meanings produced and narrativized through the investigations, particularly as they resonate with either science or spiritualism. Rather than focus on theorizing belief and religiosity of the individual, interpreting the narratives of believers, experiencers, and investigators enables broader social and cultural resonance. Lepselter, for instance, draws resonance between alien abductee stories she heard to the history of captivity narratives in the United States, including stories of Native American capturing white settler women.
The docuseries Hellier fits within a growing repertoire of paranormal reality television shows, part of what Annette Hill refers to as “paranormal media”: not only works of fiction like The X-Files and Fringe, but so-called reality television, including Ghost Adventures, Haunted, 28 Days Haunted, and Encounter (see also Chabot; Beard; Smith and Ironside; Toikkanen). Amy Lawrence’s book details in particular the rise of paranormal reality television and attends specifically to [page 12] differences in gender and class—men typically engage in ghost hunting while mediums are typically women. Focused specifically on spirit photography and technological documentation, Cecilia Sayad is concerned with the relationship between this emerging “horror genre,” material reality, and the image itself. Indeed, the focus on scientific method and technology usage in paranormal investigations demonstrates “the rhetoric of persuasion in our current postmodern, perhaps post-supernatural moment” (Lauro and Paul 222). Yet Hellier does not fit any singular mode, for it combines different aspects of the paranormal—ghosts, goblins, UFOs, aliens, spiritualism, and the occult—and does not draw onto logical lines of separation between them. As such, Hellier is a unique cultural artefact to interrogate in order to tap into a broader understanding and representation of the paranormal and the ways synchronicity and the weird challenge considerations of experience, belief, and even truth.
In what follows, I unravel the usage of synchronicities and the weird in Hellier to draw epistemological and anthropological attention to the intersection of synchronicity and the weird, both theoretically and in practice. Similar to Lepselter, I am concerned less with the actual beliefs of the Hellier team and make no effort to disentangle “the phenomena” from their methods and practices. In other words, I focus on how meaning is produced through the use of synchronicity and the weird, as both are epistemological tools for the Hellier team to understand their experiences. Finally, as with all anthropology, my goal is not to proclaim their experiences or beliefs true or untrue—a sticky point for paranormal investigators, particularly the Hellier team—but to instead illustrate how their methods of making meaning of these experiences is anthropologically rich and generative to understanding weird encounters and experiences. [page 13]
Unraveling Synchronicities
Hellier opens with filmmaker Karl Pfeiffer telling the story of how he came to be involved in the case. He describes what happened as a “synchronicity storm,” given that the coincidences “drop[ped] all at once.” The original synchronicity involves Pfeiffer listening to a podcast featuring paranormal researcher Greg Newkirk talk about a series of emails he received about goblins terrorizing a man and his family in Hellier, a series of back-and-forth Tweets he and Newkirk then exchanged, followed by a random Tweet from Greg’s blog “Week in Weird” about the goblin case. Pfeiffer interprets this seeming coincidence as a synchronicity because he believes it to be a reason for him to work with Greg (and his wife, Dana Newkirk) on investigating this goblin case. It is meaningful as a personal experience that Pfeiffer has, but also meaningful to Greg, as we find out in the docuseries, as a valid justification for Pfeiffer to become involved in the case.3
Important in both Pfeiffer and Greg’s understanding of synchronicity is that the meaningfulness, and the way it “feels unlikely,” derives from something outside of them, outside of the coincidence. As Pfeiffer states, he felt “supernaturally called” to partake in the Hellier case. Here, Jung’s theory of synchronicity proves useful. Jung’s theory of synchronicity fits within his broader psychological framing of archetypes, or “patterns of behaviour” that “constitute the structure . . . of the collective unconscious . . . [a] psyche that is identical in all individuals” (Jung in Main 15). As Roderick Main writes, “synchronistic events tend to occur in situations when an archetype is active or ‘constellated’” whereby the “constellation of archetypes in the life of a person is governed by the process of individuation—the inherent drive of the psyche toward increased wholeness and self-realization” (15-16). In other words, synchronicities point us towards the invisible and unclassifiable force or spirit responsible for the coincidences in the first place. As such, synchronicities are meaningful in a [page 14] Jungian sense because of that force, or the collective unconscious.
In delineating Jung’s theory of synchronicity, Main identifies, and then critiques, three potential categories of synchronicity: an acausal coincidence occurs that links the internal psychic state to an “objective, external event” thought to be inconceivable; a coincidence between an internal psychic state and an external event that happens “outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterwards”; or a coincidence of an internal psychic state and a “corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and likewise can only be verified afterwards” (16). As Main notes, the second and third potential occurrence “capture cases in which the coinciding external event occurs either at a distance or in the future (giving ‘clairvoyant’ or ‘telepathic’ and ‘precognitive’ coincides, respectively)” (16-17).
Consider the following string of parallel events from Hellier. Paranormal researcher Connor Randall is sitting on a porch in Pikeville, Kentucky, with Greg Newkirk, his wife Dana, filmmaker Karl Pfeiffer, and their cameraman surrounding him. Randall is undergoing what is called in paranormal research circles as The Estes Method. This involves Randall being hooked into a spirit box—a machine that quickly scans radio frequencies, some words occasionally emerging from those frequencies and interpreted as ghosts or entities attempting to communicate—with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and a blindfold. The point of the method is for the others to ask questions aloud while Randall, unable to see or hear the others, responds with what he hears over the spirit box. Conceptually, this method is supposed to tap into spirits, ghosts, or something attached to what they call “the phenomena” that allows the researchers to communicate, via Randall, with that supposed entity. At one point late in the session, Randall remarks that an image of a generic tin can appeared in his mind, strange enough for him to remark upon it. In interviews, both Randall and the other investigators note [page 15] the strangeness and even unsettling nature of such an image “shooting” into Randall’s mind, an occurrence that Randall had professed not to have experienced prior. A couple nights later, the team are trekking towards a cave in Hellier when, at the mouth of the cave, they come across an old tin can on the ground in front of them. While interpreted by Randall as a synchronicity—and meaningful to him individually as the one who experienced the image of the tin can “shoot” into his internal, psychic state, to invoke Jung—the others also view this as a strange synchronicity, a sort of clairvoyant moment made meaningful by their collective agreement that this was “weird.”
Main expands on Jung’s definition of synchronicity, finding Jung’s conceptualization restrictive. In particular, he does not limit the connection as one between the internal, psychic state and an external event—the inner and outer state—and instead does not specify the “nature” of the parallel events. Main provides an example of witnessing a lunch companion fold a paper napkin into origami while later that afternoon he witnessed a boy at a bus stop reading instructions on how to make origami. While Main witnesses both, and claims that the coincidence is meaningful for him, neither involve an internal, psychic state of Main or those involved: “it was a physical event happening in the environment outside of me” (Main 18). Such an expansion dovetails into the other significant retooling of Jung’s theory, namely that meaning derives, in part, from the psychological framing of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Instead, Main notes that for parallel events to be synchronicities, “the experience must be meaningful beyond being notable” (22), whereby meaning is intentionally left open and even vague to account for whatever meaning people may ascribe to the series of parallel events.
It is important to note that synchronicity is not a widely used concept in contemporary psychology, as Jung’s theory is “far from convincing to the skeptic” (Bonds 240). The primary reason this is the case is that it is scientifically impossible to [page 16] prove a synchronicity is different than any other coincidence—meaning, in other words, is subjective and thus to scientifically prove an objective truth of the synchronicity is not yet (if ever) possible. Psychologist William James, for instance, “pointed out that we tend to impose our own expectations and interpretations on our sensory impressions” and went on to describe how we “can perceive entirely random patterns, and even know that they are random, but nonetheless derive meaning from them” (italics in the original, Yaden and Newberg 208). While this has not stopped some from experimenting with synchronicities (e.g., Mishlove and Engen), some psychologists like Main have attempted to recover Jung’s theory of synchronicity and make it relevant today.
The Hellier team does admit that some parallel events are not synchronicities but mere coincidence, as they do not find them meaningful. Yet the distinction between meaningful or not also indexes a psychological condition that entails ascribing meaning to randomness: apophenia. Apophenia is sometimes connected to delusions and even schizophrenia, though this connection is also debatable. As David Yaden and Andrew Newberg write,
Apophenia—and synchronicity experiences—could be characterized as overmentalizing or perceiving mind in ongoing events. Whereas in numinous experiences mind perception seems to occur as a sense of presence surrounding one’s self, synchronicity experiences seem to involve a perception that the casual flow of events is being impacted by an external mind of some kind (214).
I am not claiming that synchronicity is a type of apophenia—alas, I am no psychologist—but I make mention of it to situate the term within psychology.
Anthropologically, synchronicity can describe a way in which people make and ascribe meaning to events. I follow Main’s expansive view of synchronicity and its usefulness as a descriptor—not a diagnostic tool—and thus part ways from Jung in similar directions that Main does: synchronicity need [page 17] not be meaningful only in connecting an internal state and objective, external event, though it can, as the example above of the tin can demonstrates. Jung’s short-form definition—synchronicity as a “meaningful coincidence”—for me, best encapsulates the capaciousness of the concept and can anthropologically frame interactions and experiences through the construction of meaning. What that meaning is, for me, is less relevant than the how that meaning is created and managed through the coincidences.
Invoking Lepselter, Jackson notes that “coincidences . . . lead us to cast about for stories that simultaneously restore our sense of agency and explain the events away” (6). Indeed, “this ‘hit’ . . . is then celebrated as a moment of synchronicity, while all the ‘misses’ . . . are forgotten” (Yaden and Newberg 212). The example that Yaden and Newberg provide of a friend or family member calling is illustrative here, for they note that a common occurrence is when one is thinking about a friend or family member and then that individual calls or texts. We then interpret this coincidence as meaningful—“I was just thinking about you”—but all other times when either one calls without us thinking about them or we are thinking about them and they do not call are forgotten because they are “misses.” In other words, only the “hits,” only the moments when the coincidence happens does it prove itself meaningful; all other times, we simply forget the experience.
Despite limiting synchronicities to the relationship between an internal, psychic state and an external event, it is still necessary to consider how synchronicities—ascribing meaning to seemingly random occurrences—happen at both the level of the individual and in groups. Indeed, what may be a synchronicity for one person may not be a synchronicity for others as meaning making is a deeply personal, though simultaneously collective, experience. For as Jackson also suggests, “any interpretation of a coincidence is inadequate unless it considers the lived experiences and immediate circumstances of those to whom the coincidence happens” (xii). [page 18]
The example of Randall and the tin can work well to elucidate this point, for Randall’s lived experience of seeing the tin can is quintessential to understanding why seeing the tin can is meaningful, but also why later, when they happen upon a tin can, the connection or coincidence is meaningful. It is meaningful for Randall having that individuated, lived experience, but also meaningful for the team given their collective experience during the Estes session.
A Trip into the Weird
The Hellier team all remarked how the synchronicity of Randall’s tin can experience was “weird,” that he saw an image of a tin can one night and then they found a tin can at the mouth of a cave a few nights later. Such weirdness, whether tied to synchronistic events or not, weaves through the Hellier series and the experiences of the team. The initial story that brought the team to Hellier in the first place is itself rather weird. In 2012, Greg received a frantic email to his ghost hunting email from when he was a kid from a doctor claiming that his family was being terrorized by a group of cave-dwelling goblins that only came out at night. The doctor’s daughter referred to them as “hairless children” that would tap and chirp outside of her bedroom window. The doctor noted that he received Greg’s information from a mutual friend, “Terry Wriste,” and thought Greg could help. While initially intrigued, Greg was confused why he was being sent an email about goblins, particularly to a ghost hunting email, and who this “mutual friend” was. Greg thus asked for proof, to which the doctor sent pictures of three-toed footprints and what the doctor claims are photos of the creatures themselves. And then, the doctor disappeared; his email was turned off and Greg was left with a case he debated as even real. It was not until he received a series of emails from this mutual friend, Terry Wriste, asking why he had stopped looking into Hellier—a place Greg had never publicly mentioned prior—and saying that he would have information for him in a week. [page 19] A week later, Wriste sent Greg an email that the Hellier team interpreted as GPS coordinates. Once Pfeiffer’s “synchronicity storm” occurred, the team was formed and their journey to Hellier took place.
Greg has a theory. He thinks that there are windows and doors between dimensions that allow for UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts and spirits, and other creatures to phase in and out of our reality. He notes that this is similar to a theory proposed by John Keel, paranormal researcher and famed author of the book The Mothman Prophecies about a series of weird events, often involving what was dubbed “Mothman”—quite literally, a giant moth-man hybrid—in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, between 1965 and 1967. Throughout the first season of Hellier, both Pfeiffer and Greg note the oddity of the seeming connections between their case and the Mothman case.
This “weird” connection between the Mothman case and the Hellier case, for Greg at least, lends credence to his theory, a theory that matters less to me than his continued invocation of the “weird.” Indeed, the Hellier team—along with others in this so-called paranormal community—refer to these types of happenings (goblins, UFOs, ghosts, etc.) as events of “high strangeness,” another way of labeling paranormal experiences. The weird, the strange, the odd, the eerie: these terms permeate Hellier while never fully being explained as to why these things and feelings are “weird,” just that they are. It is my task to try and unpack the weirdness of these feelings. If synchronicity is the process in which meaning is made—the interpretation of parallel events as more than a coincidence, but as meaningful—then the quality of that interpretation is weirdness. Again, I define the weird as a break with ontological expectations that, when tied to synchronicity, challenges normative meaning-making processes. Easily the most common description of events, synchronous or not, that the paranormal investigators used in Hellier was weird: their overall experience in Hellier was weird. I suggest that accounting for the ways synchronicities may be interpreted as [page 20] weird elucidates, to some extent, what synchronicities do for individuals experiencing them, for while they are making meaning, what, too, does said meaning do in the context of these events?
I take my cue from Mark Fisher, who argues that the weird and eerie may be colloquially considered to be horrifying and terrifying, but these terms in fact describe a more fundamental condition: “the weird is that which does not belong” (10). Rather than the horrific, strangeness conjoins the weird and the eerie, "a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” (8). Fisher distinguishes the weird and eerie from Freud’s unheimlich, the latter of which describes “the strange within the familiar” where the weird and eerie “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside” (10). As Fisher writes, “[t]he sense of wrongness associated with the weird—the conviction that this does not belong—is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new” (13).
Greg and Dana visited Hellier a year prior to the whole team visiting the town. Both Greg and Dana agreed that Hellier had a “weird vibe” and “weird feeling” to it, punctuated by the drive into town as they passed under an unfinished overpass as if it and the town were somehow forgotten or even liminal, to invoke Lepselter. The weird thus emerges in the unfinishedness of the town, the forgottenness of the place, on the periphery and marginalized while also being hidden. Hellier is “not going to anywhere and not coming from anywhere . . . there’s no reason why anyone would go there.” The mere fact that goblins are supposedly terrorizing a man and his family in such a town is itself weird, but as Greg and Dana soon found out, this was not the only case of “weird stuff” happening in Hellier.
During their day visit, the pair drove around the town and came across a gas station that doubled as a pizza restaurant. Outside the gas station, the two began striking up conversations with different locals and were inundated with [page 21] stories about Bigfoot, ghosts, UFOs, and other “weird stuff” happening. These are things that are “wrong” and out of place—these things “do not belong” (Fisher 10), either in a place like Hellier or in general. In season two the team explores more fully how these marginalized places, like Hellier, may in fact be “open windows” into the high strangeness and what they are calling “the phenomena” given that they are marginalized, out of the way places. Places like Hellier attune to what Kathleen Stewart calls the “space on the side of the road,” given Hellier’s “incessant compulsion to story things that happen to interrupt the progress of events, its endless process of re-membering, re-telling, and imagining things, its tactile mimesis of decomposing objects and luminous signs that speak to people and point to the possibility of the ‘something more’ in culture” (7). For the Hellier team, that “something more” moves beyond culture to the nature of reality itself, that as a “window” into the high strangeness, places like Hellier come to displace perceived notions of reality. For the anthropologist, this, too, is cultural—or, perhaps more expansive, a process of meaning-making.
The eerie, for Fisher, “concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions . . . why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” (12). Dana remarked after meeting folks from Hellier for a second time that what was weird was that no one had any weird experiences to talk about whereas the last time Dana and Greg visited Hellier and spoke with some locals, they were inundated with stories of the strange and the weird: UFOs, bigfoot, creatures. What makes the second time weird or eerie is the lack of weirdness, where something should be present—strange stories—but the lack of stories makes the experience itself weird and eerie. This is a notion and experience that the team repeats multiple times throughout the first season, that what is weird is the seeming lack of weird, including the lack of interest from the police and [page 22] media who, according to Greg, usually enjoy interacting with paranormal investigators.
The “sense of wrongness associated with the weird” reminds me of Janet Roitman’s interpretation of crisis “as instances when normativity is laid bare, such as when the contingent or partial quality of knowledge claims . . . are disputed, critiqued, challenged, or disclosed” (3-4). As such, crisis “signifies a diagnostic of the present; it implies a certain telos because it is inevitably, though most often implicitly, directed toward a norm” (4). If we take Fisher seriously, then the weird operates in a similar manner to crisis, insofar as the weird is a moment of disjuncture between the perceived norm and the experience. Dana expected residents of Hellier to have strange stories—her established norm based on her past experience—but the lack of strange stories disrupts that perceived norm of strange stories. Indeed, for most invocations of the weird in the first season of Hellier could very well be similarly interpreted as moments of crisis between the expected normativity of the moment and the experience.
Yet what makes these scenes from Hellier also weird are both the feelings they elicit and the fascination that the weird has over the paranormal investigators, “an enjoyment which, in its mixture of pleasure and pain, has something in common with what Lacan called jouissance” (Fisher 13). An aside on the fascination that resides in Lacanian jouissance comes from an unlikely example: the sinking of the Titanic. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar point with the sinking of the Titanic and our fascination with the story alongside the material remains of the sunken transatlantic liner (including pictures), for “it was read as a ‘symbol’, as a condensed, metaphorical representation of the approaching catastrophe of European civilization itself” (76). He goes on to note, though, that there is an uneasy enjoyment we glean from even looking at pictures of the sunken ship: “by looking at the wreck we gain an insight into the forbidden domain, into a space that should be left unseen: visible fragments are a kind of coagulated remnant of the [page 23] liquid flux of jouissance, a kind of petrified forest of enjoyment” (76).
Stated alternatively, the weirdness of the experience enthralls the paranormal investigators further into both the investigation and the weirdness—weirdness is a “loop . . . that wrap[s] back on [itself], where all parts are interrelated and embedded in an emergent whole” (Turnbull 277). They are drawn to the weird, for when they describe something as weird, there is fascination there because they want to know more. They strive to know more. As Greg notes in the second episode, he thrives on the weird and wants “the weirdest thing you can throw at me.” That jouissance, the merging of both pleasure and pain and pleasure in pain—where pain here points towards the just out of reach nature of “the phenomena” and the case, that the more the Hellier team learns, the less they actually understand—punctuates the weirdness of both Hellier and Hellier.
Weirdly Synchronistic
The weirdness and eeriness of synchronicity particularly lie in the challenge that parallel events pose to the normativity of expectations and even experiences. One does not necessarily expect to be called when one thinks of someone—when I think of my father, I do not expect his call. So, when he does call the moment I am thinking of him, I not only interpret this overlap as meaningful, a synchronicity, but find it weird as it exceeds my expectations. These expectations are predicated on past experiences, for all other times I may have thought of my father, he did not call. This created a normative expectation, normative not only because I normalized the expectation through experiences, but also because, as discussed above, con temporary psychology discredits the existence of synchronicity as scientifically impossible to validate.
The same is true for paranormal investigators and the Hellier team. Despite their openness to the strange and paranormal—and perhaps a more flexible set of expectations—[page 24]they continue to interpret their experiences and the case, particularly the synchronicities that seem to flood the investigation, as “weird.” Expectations work in both directions. On the one hand, the Hellier team might not expect a connection to manifest, such as with the tin can, as I describe below. Therefore, when events do seem to parallel one another, the team draws a connection between the two, interprets it as meaningful (and thus a synchronicity), and labels it weird. On the other hand, the breaking of expectations, where the team might expect something to happen, a story to be told, a synchronicity to form, and nothing manifests, this, too, they deem weird, as explored above.
When the Hellier team ventured to Hellier and began speaking with locals, none had seen pictures of three-toed footprints like the ones the doctor had sent Greg. Yet they knew of others who had seen three-toed footprints in caves. Upon further follow-up, the team learns that these three-toed footprints that others had seen, though not matching their pictures, were weird enough to be sent off to a university for further study. While the Hellier team were not finding their goblins—indeed, throughout the two seasons, the team never actually “find” the Kentucky goblins—the team felt that there were too many overlaps, connections, and synchronicities to ignore. For example, the only instance that Greg could find as to a similar case of goblins terrorizing folks was a case in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1955 when a family claimed that a group of little green men (interpreted as goblins) were terrorizing the family on their farm. The Hellier team later finds out that the mammoth cave system connects Hellier to Hopkinsville, implying that the creatures may be the same. These connections and synchronicities are weird for the team because they challenge ontological expectations—not only ought there not be connections between the two cases, so many years apart, but goblins should not even exist.
The example of Randall’s visualization of the tin can during the Estes session and then the team happening on a tin [page 25] can at the cave is also described as a synchronicity, particularly because of the seeming clairvoyance involved. As Greg says, “there’s no logical explanation . . . it was basically precognition . . . [and the] weirdest thing I have been a part of.” Randall even remarks, while stumbling across the tin can at the mouth of the cave, “that was weird.” For Dana, “we were in the shit then.” Part of the weirdness and eeriness behind such seeming clairvoyance is that Randall interprets the image of the tin can as intentional—someone or something had “shot” an image of a tin can into his mind, rather than his mind serendipitously imagining a tin can. Their subsequent discovery of a tin can acts, then, as evidence to prove that intentionality. This fits within the team’s broader conceptualization of “the phenomena,” for they interpret synchronicity as a manifestation of the phenomena, a method of communication.
While odd that Randall would see an image of a tin can during the Estes session—why a tin can, why then, and why there?—what is particularly weird is the fact that one was “waiting for them” when they reached the mouth of the cave a few nights later. This mirrors Jung’s famous synchronicity example of a patient at a treatment impasse having a dream about being given a golden scarab. After recounting the dream to Jung, a noise came from his window and as he opened it, he caught a beetle, the creature making the noise, and handed it to the patient. The treatment impasse, according to Jung, soon lifted. Not only were the beetle and tin can appearances not expected, but both instances pushed the limits of the human experience. We are not supposed to be clairvoyant, but both experiences, for those involved, challenged that expectation while being significant and meaningful for each individual.
For Greg and company, while they could not answer why the tin can and the parallel events were meaningful—this would require a fuller understanding, in their estimation, of “the phenomena”—they still found them experientially meaningful. In other words, they were unable to brush the [page 26] experience off as a coincidence given that it disrupted the ontological ground on which they stood: there ought not be precognition or clairvoyant tendencies. Even if we momentarily set aside clairvoyancy, there still ought not be a connection between a vision one has and an object one encounters—who put the image in Randall’s mind in the first place? Who created the connection? For what purpose? There ought to be answers but there are none, thus making the entire event, in their admission, weird. This follows the general experience that the team has in Hellier.
Interpreting the usage of weird, both in general and in connection with the invocation of synchronicity, thus contributes to how we can understand the meaning produced in synchronicities. If synchronicities are meaningful connections—and such meaning is ascribed individually or collectively by those involved (or not)—then the weird is part of that meaning-making process. Given that the Hellier team assumes that “the phenomena” is laying out these synchronicities, then the synchronicities are meaningful because they are supposedly leading the team towards something, whether that be a person, an object, or an experience. The meaning may be delayed and not understood until that person, object, or experience appears or happens, the expectation that a mean ing will be revealed frames the connection, the coincidence, as meaningful.
The weird enters this meaning-making process as a commentary on the state of affairs, in addition to the team’s own ontological positioning. Despite, as noted above, the team being flexible in expectations of what may happen—they are open to the possibility of a paranormal experience and then they are, in their understanding, met with one—they still find those experiences weird. The paranormal is just that, para normal. I suggest the paranormal may be similar to the way Valerie Olson refers to outer space, namely as an extreme environment. Such extremity requires precise and redundant attention through systems, for Olson, but for the Hellier team, [page 27] the extreme will always be weird, always be unexpected and para normal, read here as beyond normal. That beyond invokes what Debbora Battaglia calls “galaxies of discourse” that enable anthropologists to query “how we relate magic, science, and religion in contemporary practice and, often to actors unaware of this, in terms of recalling the science spirituality of times putatively more mystical" (2).
As with astronauts and outer space, the extremity of the paranormal never fades, regardless of how many experiences the Hellier team have or cases they investigate. The Hellier team in fact notes that the more research they do, the weirder the case gets. This, for Dana, means they are “in the shit.” Extremity works in this way, pushing humans to their limits in ways that challenge the very contours of what it means to be human. Whether one believes in the paranormal or not does not displace the paranormal as extreme, as a fundamental way to challenge humanness. The task for paranormal investigators, however, is to, like astronauts, learn to operate and work in that and amongst that extremity, to find a new ontological ground on which to stand.
Conclusion: Anthropology and High Strangeness
In 1979, astronomer and UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek introduced the “Strangeness Rating” for specifically UFO encounters. In particular, this rating measures “the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common sense terms” (Hynek in Hunter 6). Paranormal experiences, including UFOs, would thus rate high on Hynek’s Strangeness Rating system because, supposedly, it “is difficult to explain in common sense terms.” Others have since expanded on Hynek’s system, and “[m]ore recent writings from the popular paranormal field have also begun to highlight the high strangeness that permeates other areas of the paranormal, such as in the case of Bigfoot encounters, and other cyptozoological interactions, which [page 28] often cannot be adequately distinguished from accounts of poltergeist, fairy and UFO experiences” (Hunter 7).
If we consider strangeness as analogous or comparative to the weird and eerie, then we are again highlighting moments, places, and experiences when and where things are wrong, when they are somehow out of place or even out of time. The observation of a UFO in the sky at night—taken here as quite literally a flying object that the witness cannot identify—is demonstrative of this weird and eerie feeling and experience insofar as the inability to identify the flying object makes it, for the witness, unclassifiable and quite possibly wrong. High strangeness works conceptually in a similar fashion, for even if we momentarily sidestep the ranking of strangeness, the very invocation of the strange, akin to Roitman’s use of crisis, describes a moment when expectations fail, when they are not met or even exploded.
The team of Hellier continuously invoke the notion of “high strangeness” to categorize the paranormal experiences that they have, the synchronicities that they encounter, and the research that they do. In other words, high strangeness is the designation that they give to the events taking place around and between them, while also denoting a general invocation of the paranormal. The experiences and the narrativization of the experiences resonate with one another, invoking Lepselter, tapping into this broader high strangeness that works to enjoin these events together as significant and meaningful. Indeed, the connections that the Hellier team make, not limited to the synchronicities they claim to experience, are not meant to scientifically prove the existence of the paranormal as much as they are to bear witness to anomalous and weird happenings and occurrences.
The Hellier team is respectful of the individual’s experience, not unlike an anthropologist, and works to piece experiences together into some semblance of a story that can be told. That the team deals in the realm of high strangeness is itself meaningful, but so are the ways the team makes con-[page 29]nections and creates meaning in that realm, for these methods are not necessarily limited to paranormal research and investigation. Jackson is quite explicit that the coincidence is ripe for interpretive methods and attention to the meanings produced therein, for when people ascribe the nomenclature of coincidence to a series of parallel events, they are likewise inscribing those events with meaning. The content of that meaning—its interpretation—is, as Jackson reminds us, dependent on the lived experience and surrounding context of the individuals involved.
Attention to meaningful connections, or synchronicities, is not only a job for paranormal researchers and investigators, but anthropologists as well. When we interrogate and interpret expressed synchronicities—not necessarily classified by us, though the line is surely gray—we are engaging in a fundamental meaning-making process for those experiencing and invoking the synchronicity. And when considered in the realm of the paranormal and high strangeness, anthropologists are similarly interpreting the weirdness and eeriness of the synchronicity itself: not only that seemingly acausal parallel events take place, but the ways those occurrences make one feel, anthropologist included. Indeed, as I argued above, to interpret the weirdness within synchronicities enables anthropologists in particular to comprehend how people find meaning within strange and para normal experiences. To be “in the shit,” as Dana would phrase it, requires not a suspension of disbelief or scientific method, but to query what it means for interlocutors, and people more generally, to make meaning out of the seeming randomness of events. It is to dive deep into the possibility of the weird and the currents of high strangeness, pushing anthropology, like the astronaut, to new heights, new limits, and to the extreme.
Notes
1. While the second season significantly expands in scope to include more locations, more experiments, more research, and a much larger interconnected case of “high strange-[page 30]ness” and what they call “the phenomena”—though it is not clear to viewers or to the investigators themselves what is the phenomena, and that seems to be beside the point—the first season is more self-contained and replete with invocations of synchronicity and the weird.
2. This notion of ghost is a rather western conception, as it is linked to the paranormal in American society and culture.
3. A similar explanation is given in season two with regard to the inclusion of an additional team member, that he was “meant” to be part of the case given the synchronicities surrounding that additional team members and the Hellier case.
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Timothy Gitzen is an assistant professor of anthropology at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Unscripting the Present: The Security Panic of Queer Youth Sexuality (SUNY Press, 2025), in addition to numerous articles and book chapters that range from folklore, queer theory, and popular culture to security studies, ethnography, and science and technology studies.
MLA citation (print):
Timothy Gitzen, Timothy. "Creatures of the High Strangeness: On Synchronicity and the Weird." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 2026, pp. 7-33.