The Loveliest Dead (18 page)

Since Saturday, Lily had learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about Arthur and Mavis Bingham. The problem was, she believed very little of it. It seemed the only people providing information about the Binghams were the Binghams themselves, or their students. Their “students” were anyone who had attended any of their many lectures at colleges and churches around the country, or had taken any of their classes in demonology, the dangers of witchcraft, the evil truth about the Ouija board, or half a dozen other subjects they taught at their Phoenix Society of Paranormal Research in Phoenix, Arizona.
 

Arthur and Mavis had been born and raised in smalltown Wisconsin, where they were married in 1956. They left the cold winters behind six years later and moved to Phoenix, where they founded the society in 1962. Mavis was, according to their bio, a renowned clairvoyant whose abilities had been tested and well-documented at Arizona State University in Phoenix under the supervision of Dr. Melvin Roberts. That documentation, however, was not provided in any of the books or articles. Lily had made some phone calls to the university. An especially friendly and chatty woman in Records had told her that Dr. Roberts hadn’t been there since 1969, when his Parapsychology Department was discontinued after an embarassing scandal. One of the three female students Dr. Roberts had been sleeping with at the time had found out about the other two and, as revenge, had revealed to the university’s administration that Dr. Roberts had doctored the results of much of his research.
 

Lily noticed that the bios in later editions of the Binghams’s books did not mention Dr. Roberts, but still claimed that Mavis’s psychic abilities had been tested and documented by Arizona State University. But because the Parapsychology Department had been shut down nearly four decades earlier, there was no record of those tests, and no such documentation existed. Even if it did, it would be suspect because of Dr. Roberts’s record of cooking his books.
 

By all accounts, the Binghams were very kind and grandparently, and expert storytellers. Lily had seen them on TV talk shows in the past and was familiar with their pleasant, folksy manner. But poring over their books reminded her of why she’d decided not to carry any of them in the store.
 

Early in their paranormal career, the Binghams had investigated haunted houses and claimed to send confused, earthbound spirits on their way. Then something changed in 1973. Suddenly, their investigations began to uncover demonic infestations. Instead of guiding the spirits of the dead to the next plane of existence, the Binghams, devout Catholics, started bringing in a priest to exorcise houses, and sometimes the residents. Instead of ghostly apparitions and eerie sounds, their books began to provide lurid descriptions of families being menaced by demons from Hell. In each case they investigated, people were being anally raped by Satan’s minions. It happened so regularly that Lily began to wonder if the Binghams were projecting some of their own hang-ups onto their work.
 

Lily found it more than coincidental that in 1973 the movie
The Exorcist
was burning up the box office and demon possession was all the rage. It was obvious to her that the Binghams realized no one was interested in things that go bump in the night anymore, so they changed their act to keep up with the times. In doing so, they had become religious crusaders, and with each new book, they became more intolerant of other beliefs, and even of those who simply disagreed with them. That was why Lily had stopped carrying their books—it was one thing to update the act and still expect to be taken seriously, but the Binghams had become ultrareligious and used their beliefs as an excuse to behave hatefully toward others, and Lily would not condone that with commerce.
 

In 1975, the Binghams had hit it big with
The Loweryville Possession
. Their book told the story of a house in Kentucky that had been built on the site where a Satanic cult used to perform ritual human sacrifices (although how they knew that Lily was unable to determine). The house allegedly became possessed by demons as a result. The family that lived there was reportedly tormented by evil forces—the mother and teenage son were repeatedly anally raped by what the Binghams called “invisible demons”—until Arthur and Mavis became involved and brought in their priest, Father Malcolm, who exorcised the house. The book was a bestseller and became a financially, if not critically, successful movie that spawned a couple of sequels. It put the Binghams on the map.
 

In 1981, the family, no longer living in the same house, or in the same state—they had moved to Florida the year the movie was released—publicly admitted that the whole thing had been a hoax. They had made it all up to see if they could make any money. Although they hadn’t gotten rich, they’d made a nice sum from the book and movie and had put their two children through college. When confronted with this, the Binghams had suggested that perhaps there was some mental illness in the family, because Arthur and Mavis had witnessed the exorcism and had felt the demonic power in the house themselves, so they
knew
it was real. The demonic activity had been so intense, they claimed, Arthur had suffered a heart attack. They still lectured about the Loweryville, Kentucky, investigation, and people still came to hear about it, twenty-two years after the family involved had publicly admitted it was a hoax.
 

None of the Binghams’s earlier books had sold as well as
The Loweryville Possession—one, The Demon of Battle Creek
, was adapted into an awful made-for-cable movie that no one watched—but they maintained a popularity that baffled Lily. You couldn’t throw a rock in the paranormal world without hitting the Binghams—they were everywhere, and their handprints were on everything. But they had plenty of detractors. The Binghams were not very popular in paranormal circles, because they continued to be intolerant of anyone who did not agree with them to the letter. Arthur and Mavis, backed by scripture and their Catholicism, were on the side of God, so disagreement with them meant disagreement with the Almighty, and they had no qualms about pointing that out.
 

The most critical article Claudia had found on the Binghams was not nearly as critical as it seemed to want to be. It was a piece called “Hunting Demons” on the Web site of the Southwestern Skeptical Society, written by Donald Penner. The article read as if it were unfinished, or severely truncated. It revealed little she didn’t already know, but it had a lot of attitude, as if it were an expose.
 

Lily browsed around the Web site and learned that Penner was also the site’s administrator, the editor of the newsletter
The Southwest Skeptical
, and the society’s president. The society was based in Tucson, where it had been arching a skeptical brow since 1976, but had members all over North America.
 

The contact information for the Southwestern Skeptical Society included a phone number. Lily could e-mail Donald Penner and wait for his response, but she preferred a conversation—she could get a lot from a person’s voice.
 

Lily expected a receptionist, but the phone was answered by Penner himself. He sounded as if he’d been sleeping. She told him she owned a bookstore and was considering arranging a signing with Arthur and Mavis Bingham, but she wanted to know more about them first, and had read the article about them on the Southwestern Skeptical Society Web site.
 

“Oh, that,” Penner said.

“It’s a fine article, but I got the feeling it was incomplete. No offense, but—”

“Don’t worry, none taken. In fact, that’s very observant of you.” He was soft-spoken and talked slowly. “That article caused a lot of trouble. Well, not the article you read, but the one I originally wrote. It was an expose. But the Binghams filed a civil suit for libel. There really wasn’t anything libelous in the article—I backed up every word I wrote with solid facts. But that wasn’t the point of the suit. They just wanted to tie us up in court. They knew we couldn’t afford it. We don’t have the kind of money they do.”
 

“They’re wealthy, then?”

“They’re very popular on the lecture circuit, and that’s some fat money. Not to mention the royalties from their books and that awful movie.”
 

“Which one?”

“Well, both of them, I guess.”

“So you caved on the article?”

“Had to. I trimmed the article, they withdrew the suit. I’ve been railing on the Binghams for years, but nobody’s listening. People enjoy their ghost stories.”
 

“But they’re not ghost stories anymore. They’re all about sodomizing demons.”

“Ever since
The Exorcist
came out.”
 

Lily smiled. “You noticed that, too?”

“Yeah. All of a sudden, everybody’s got horny demons in their woodwork.”

“What was in your original article?”

Penner took a deep breath and let it out in a weary sigh. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Start at the beginning. How did they get into this stuff?”

“Arthur. He was booted out of the Army in 1953 on a Section 8—mental illness. Arthur’s had a problem with that all his life, and all his life, he’s had this obsession with ghosts. Ever since he was a little kid.”
 

“What kind of mental illness?” Lily asked.

“Judging by the hospitals he’s been in, I suspect some form of schizophrenia.”

“How did they meet?”

“During one of Arthur’s stays in a mental hospital,” Penner said. “Mavis was doing some volunteer work for the church. There’s some evidence that Mavis exhibited genuine psychic ability early in her life, but once she hooked up with Arthur, she became little more than a performer. Arthur looked her up after he got out of the hospital, and they hit it off. Apparently, Arthur witnessed something that convinced him Mavis was psychic, and suddenly, they were inseparable. They were both devout Catholics, and they both had an interest in the supernatural. They were married only a few months later.”
 

“How romantic,” Lily said. “When did they start their shtick?”

“Almost immediately. Fortunately, Mavis came from money, because Arthur had a hard time holding down a job. They traveled around visiting houses that were reputedly haunted, and Mavis would
read
the house, then Arthur would draw it. Apparently, Arthur had taken up drawing during one of his hospital stays, and he started drawing these intricate pictures of houses that were said to be haunted.”
 

“What did Mavis’s reading prove?”

“She would declare the house haunted, then communicate with the spirits there. Pretty soon, they were popping up in all the paranormal circles and people were starting to notice them. Arthur’s drawings were actually pretty good, and a small press publisher compiled them in a book, which had some success.”
 

As she listened, Lily sipped her coffee and nibbled her Danish. She asked, “Were they so rigidly religious back then? Were they as harsh with people who disagreed with them as they are now?”
 

“They weren’t important enough to disagree with yet. In fact, they’ve
never
been what you could call important in the field. They’ve made such a nuisance of themselves over the years, people are forced to have an opinion. But back then, they were nobody. They finally found a friend of a friend who was complaining of odd things happening in his house, and that became their first real case. Arthur wrote everything down, but he was terrible at it, so they found a writer. Have you read their books?”
 

“Some of them.”

“Have you noticed anything about their writers?”

‘‘Only that their names appear on the cover in very tiny letters beneath Arthur’s and Mavis’s.”

“Yeah,” Penner said, “the less attention drawn to the writers, the better for them. The authors of all their books have been low-rent horror novelists. There’s one in particular—Joe Lockwood, who wrote
A Demonic Darkness
—who’s happy to tell his Arthur and Mavis story to anyone who’ll listen. The book was about a possessed teenager. Lockwood met with the family, but they couldn’t keep their stories straight. He went to Arthur with the problem, and Arthur said, ‘Oh, they’re crazy.
All
the people who come to us are crazy. Why do you think they come to us? You write scary stories—just make it up and make it scary.’ Lockwood has a piece about it on his Web site.”
 

“And they haven’t sued him?” Lily asked.

“I think they’re afraid to. The guy’s a hack, nobody knows him from Adam. If they sued him, suddenly he’d be getting a lot of attention that he isn’t getting now. Lockwood says the family the Binghams were dealing with needed help, but the kind Arthur and Mavis couldn’t provide. He saw evidence of alcoholism, drug use, possibly even abuse. But the Binghams weren’t concerned about that, even when he tried to point it out to them. All they cared about was the book. And, of course, a possible movie deal. I talked to a few of the other writers who’ve worked with the Binghams, and it seems at least a few of the families they’ve dealt with have had similar problems—alcohol and drug abuse, possible child and/or spousal abuse. Vulnerable people who need professional help, not a couple of frauds like Arthur and Mavis.”
 

Lily was not surprised to learn the cynical truth about the Binghams—she had always suspected it—but she was disturbed that they would prey on such troubled families. “What about that priest who hangs out with them?”