Previous: The Lassiter Hotel Footage, Part 3
So, America's Most Haunted. Those of you who are familiar with the 2017 reboot are probably aware of its various controversies-- how their episode on Lovecraft had them consult a scholar with ties to the KKK, how a member of their camera crew nearly died from the bends after their attempt at an underwater seance went awry, and how they attempted to fulfill a Make-A-Wish Foundation request posthumously by contacting the spirit of a deceased fan. Robin McGuire, the current showrunner, as well as host Xander Banks, have been raked over the coals by people far more erudite than I. We aren't here to discuss the current incarnation of AMH.
Instead, we're talking about the version of America's Most Haunted that aired from 2006 to 2011, hosted by and ran by Daniel Fox (B. 1980). Fox was a genuine paranormal researcher, a visionary, an accredited exorcist… and a member of the Institute. He specialized in media that recorded spiritual phenomena.
In 2011, the Nova Network had him film a series of episodes themed around "Ghosts of the Jersey Shore". It was a gimmick, to be sure; one proposed episode would have had them attempt to contact the spirit of a deceased mobster (later found to have faked his own death to hide in Italy). Another episode had Nicole "Snooki" LaVelle accompanying the crew as they filmed in the Resorts Casino Hotel in Atlantic City.
Fox was incredibly reluctant to film at the Lassiter; he had personally cataloged the Molnar footage back in 2000, and knew about the Videophobes within. On top of that, the hotel was suffering from black mold infestation, making it unsafe to be in without protective equipment. However, the Nova Network had already bought the rights to film in the hotel from Cape May's government, and they refused to let Fox back out.
Fox had access to the Institute's resources including its more esoteric implements. If he had to film the Lassiter, he was going to do it with our equipment. He was going to attempt to defuse the Lassiter.
Part 4: America's Most Haunted, Season 6, Episode 5, Grand Alexandria
Fox always preferred to record with commercially-available cameras-- specifically, they used Toshiba Camileo X200s (Toshiba was a sponsor of Nova Network in the late 2000s and early 2010s). It gave America's Most Haunted a distinctive look, compared to its contemporaries, even if the X200s had an abysmal 45-minute battery life; Fox was able to use batteries modified by members of the Institute to extend this to three hours. Fox wanted to encourage amateur paranormal investigators by using affordable equipment to record the show.
So it was understandably alarming to both the crew of AMH and Nova Network executives when he unveiled the cameras they were going to use in the Lassiter. High-end Canon Vixia HF200s, priced at almost $4000 at release. Indeed, the first thing we hear when Fox turns on the camera is:
"What the fuck, Dan?"
The woman speaking comes into view. Jasmine Sheridan, age 29, stares past the camera and at the man holding it, wind blowing auburn hair into her face. "Dan, does the network know you blew the budget on new cameras?"
"I didn't blow anything," Daniel explains, turning the camera to himself. They're outside in downtown Cape May, in a small shopping district. He's recording B-roll. "Friend loaned me this equipment."
"Same friend who keeps on sending you creepy video tapes?"
"Actually, yes." The camera is jostled as Fox inspects something on it. "Okay, good."
"Do I want to know what that is?" Jasmine has a wary note in her voice.
"Just a microphone."
"It looks like a goddamn grenade launcher."
"It's not." Fox resumes filming. "Come on, we have a meeting with the historical society in half an hour."
Fox continues to record b-roll, the attachment on his camera drawing odd looks from passersby. Eventually, they make their way into Cape May's historical society. The most relevant detail comes from a snippet of conversation between Fox and Joanna Michelson, head of the society.
"Do you believe it's haunted?" Fox asks.
"No, but I think it's cursed. Ricky Lassiter bought so many things from Egypt, one of the things he bought is bound to be cursed."
"Didn't he collect books?" Jasmine asks. "I've heard of cursed mummies, but I don't think some paper is going to cause too much harm."
"Do you know what happened to his collection?" Fox sits up a bit straighter.
"As far as I know, it got sold off in an estate sale. Don't know where it's ended up."
"Curious." Fox reclines in his seat, satisfied by the answer.
***
"Why does Dan have a grenade launcher on his camera?"
A few hours later, the crew of AMH convenes outside the hotel. Speaking now is Robin McGuire (yes, the same Robin McGuire acting as showrunner on the current iteration of AMH), whose eyes goggle at the camera.
"It's a microphone." Dan sighs. "Rob, you have the gear?"
"Right here h-- right here." You can tell that Robin has to catch himself from saying "hon". Though not known publicly at the time, McGuire and Fox were in a relationship, something that had to be kept off-camera. Fox describes their current relationship as "Someone made of salt trying to hug a person with open wounds for the better part of a decade."
Robin holds up respirators, full-body clean suits, and large, thick dowel rods pointed at one end. "What's with the sticks?" Robin asks.
"To make sure that the floor is safe to walk on. God knows what the mold's doing on the inside."
"He's got a point," Jasmine admits. "Give one to Monica, maybe she can use it for dowsing."
"That's not how that works and you know it!" The last member of the team, thirty-two-year-old spiritual medium Monica Morse, speaks from off-camera. She steps into view, face briefly hidden behind a set of beaded dreadlocks before she parts them, revealing an exasperated expression on her face. “Seriously, what’s with the new gear?”
“Friend loaned it to me. Network’s already cleared it for this one episode.” Paper is shuffled around. “Okay, yeah… from the top?”
From here, they start going through their lines, briefly explaining the history of the Grand Alexandria/Lassiter, including the disappearances, the propensity for recorded (or unrecordable) anomalies, and then, Fox says: “Anyone want to back out?”
There’s confusion among his crew; this isn’t part of the script. Robin shakes his head, while Jasmine says, “I haven't seen you this freaked since we investigated the McCormick house.”
“Yeah, well. Just avoid recording anything in the lobby, okay?”
***
Jasmine is left outside in the van to monitor the rest of the team. B-Roll is shot in the lobby, but the crew is silent until they leave it and proceed to the second floor. Fox turns the camera towards his crew; all of them are wearing respirators and coveralls. He presses down onto the floorboards, making sure they don’t give before stepping forward. “I know our usual MO is to split up,” he says, “But we can do that in post. Just make sure a couple of us stay off-camera at a time.”
“Christ, Dan.” Robin sighs. “What’s gotten into you? Lassiter had mob ties, the disappearances were probably just witnesses he needed to make vanish.”
(He’s not wrong; Richard Lassiter’s son was allegedly put into Witness Security after testifying against several members of the New Jersey mafia.)
"It's not that," Fox lies. "This place is infested with mold. I'd rather not have anyone fall through the floor and get hurt."
As if to demonstrate his point, the next several minutes of footage are spent maneuvering around a hole in the floor large enough to swallow any one of them. Eventually, they reach the first room they're intending to Investigate: Room 29.
"Okay. This room reportedly had more people die in it than anywhere else in the hotel." Fox's tone of voice changes as he slips into his "professional ghost hunter" mode. "Monica, are you sensing anything?"
(Room 29 is located directly below Room 38 from the Molnar footage, and should have been where Tiffany Molnar landed when she fell through the bed.)
"Hold on a sec." Monica sits in the center of the room, cross-legged as she focuses on a point in the middle distance. "Hard to concentrate with the damn mask on." She looks at Fox, "Will you watch where you're pointing that? It's breaking my concentration."
"It's just a microphone," Fox sighs. "Just tell me when you feel--"
A low, rumbling bellow suddenly permeates through the building. Morse stands abruptly. "What was that?"
"Sounded almost like something fell." Robin groans. "Are you kidding me? Does the Network's insurance even cover this?"
Jasmine's panicked voice comes over their radios. "Guys, what room are you in?"
"What?" Fox goes to the window of Room 28, shining a light down into the parking lot, illuminating the van. "Can you see us?"
"There is something else in there with you. It's on the fourth floor."
"Something else?" Robin grimaces. "What do you mean?"
"There was a massive fucking shadow on the building, bleeding through the windows!"
"Bleeding?” Fox asks. “Or running, like water?"
“Who cares?! Get out of there!”
“That’s not in the script,” Robin mutters. The camera turns to him. “What the fuck is happening? There’s nothing about shadows in the script. What the fuck?”
“Get out,” Fox says. “I need to take care of this.”
“Take care of-- Dan, is this some kind of joke?” Fox muscles past Robin and heads to the stairway. “Dan? Dan!”
“I’m coming with you.” Monica follows after Fox. He tries to protest, but she just gives him a steely look that says ‘I’m in this with you.’
“Monica, this isn’t a ghost,” he tries to explain. “It’s--”
“One of your side projects? I’m not stupid, Dan. I saw the footage you tried to hide from the Juniper Theater.”
“Then you know how dangerous this is.”
“And I also know that you’ve been trying to learn Greek for the last month for some reason. I know Greek! Let me help.”
“I--”
“Oh, mou éphayes ta aftiá.”(Translation: “You’re talking too much”.) Where are we headed?”
“Room 47, Fourth Floor.” The camera is jostled as Fox removes the attachment to it, and it’s here that we see it clearly for the first time. It does, indeed, look like the barrel of a grenade launcher, being a long and hollow-looking tube with what appears to be a stock attached to the end. “I need you to read something once we get up there.”
“Fourth floor? Where the shadows are?” Monica follows after him up the stairs.
“They’re not shadows.”
They pause when they reach the fourth floor so that Daniel can record something. Through the door, they see what appears to be water flooding the entire floor, constantly flowing out of Room 47, but never seeming to fill the room. “Hold onto something,” Daniel says as he opens the door.
Inexplicably, water does not come flowing out as the door opens, instead staying as a semi-liquid wall. Daniel prods it with the tube, and some of it appears to be sucked in. The same bellowing is heard once again. Fox opens the tube at one end and withdraws a folded piece of paper, handing it to Morse. “Can you read this?”
Morse takes it and scans the paper. “Yeah. Yeah, easy enough. What do you want me to do with it?”
“Say it out loud as we walk through. It should protect us.”
They begin wading through chest-high water. Monica begins chanting, in Greek: “Chaíre paníschyre Tyfón, férnontas tou télous, theoktoní, vasiliá ton kataigídon Chaíre ekeínon pou eínai thamménos káto apó to Sfyrílato tou Ifaístou, anávontas ti flóga tou. Dóxa ston Tyfón[indistinct]”(Translation: “Hail mighty Typhon, bringer of the end, god-slayer, king of storms Hail he who is buried beneath the Forge of Hephaestus, kindling its flame. Glory to Typhon”). The chant continues as they make their way to Room 47, water being siphoned into the tube. “Dan, what’s in that?”
“Long story, keep chanting!” They make their way into Room 47, and find themselves facing an aperture with a mirror-like texture. Steam is emerging from it, and the water around it is seething; this only increases in intensity as the camera turns on it.
“Dan, what the fuck--” Morse begins.
“It’s real.” Fox laughs. “Holy shit, it’s an actual portal to the Bibliotheke. If only I could… no, bad idea.” Fox hands the camera off to Morse. “Keep it up with the chant, I need to make sure that this gets recorded.”
“O-okay.” Monica’s hands shake slightly as she holds the camera. “It’s cold…”
Fox opens the tube, revealing a piece of papyrus within; water is drawn up towards it as he unravels it. “Typhon!” He yells. “I am a librarian, a keeper of knowledge! Thy tale has been let loose on this world unjustly! I know your pain, and I know what you are trying to hold back! Come forth! Come home!”
The water is drawn towards the papyrus, little by little, and the paper sucks it up like a sponge, but seems to be undamaged. “That’s good,” Fox grins. “Come home, Typhon, come home.”
Morse focuses the camera on the parchment. “Dan, what the hell is happening?”
“I’m just putting a story back where it belongs.”
Over the course of five minutes, all of the water on the fourth floor is drawn into the parchment. The portal that Fox observed closes as the water retreats, and by the time the water is around his ankles, it’s almost completely closed.
And then, disaster strikes.
A gout of flame emerges from the portal, hitting Fox in the face. He falls in the water face-first, and it’s thankfully extinguished, but not before the left side of his face is burned. Skin has already started to slough off from the heat, and Monica screams for Dan to wake up. The portal is still open, ever so slightly, and flame is coming from it, boiling off the remaining water in the room.
“Dan, we have to go.” She starts dragging him out of the room as it begins to burn. “Dan, come on, wake up. Dan!” She focuses the camera on his face--
And it’s at this point, for approximately sixty seconds, that the footage becomes unsafe to watch. While no fatalities have been attributed to this part of the Lassiter Hotel Footage, first-degree burns have been reported, as well as paper and other flammable objects, such as clothing and paper, spontaneously combusting in its vicinity.
The moment passes as we see Monica take up the scroll. The water has almost completely vaporized, leaving clouds of steam in its wake. “--get out of here,” Fox is heard panting. “The scroll, what does it say?”
Monica begins to read it. “It’s… it’s something about the myth of… Dan, what the fuck is--”
“What does it say? Does it say where it belongs?”
Monica looks over the papyrus. “...Uh. First floor atrium, Bibliotheke.”
Fox is heard sighing, and then groaning in relief. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
“Your face--” Monica tries to turn the camera to him.
“Don’t! I’m… it’s not safe anymore. Please.”
Fox’s hand obscures the camera. At this point in the recording, there is a surge of heat, and then, the recording ends.
Supplemental
Humans can become Videophobic anomalies as well.
Due to his injuries sustained in the Lassiter Hotel, Daniel Fox’s face is actively unsafe to record. Physical photographs of him burn upon development, digital photography can cause devices to overheat and brick themselves. This effect is lessened if his face is at least partially obscured; he’s been wearing a face mask continually since 2011 to alleviate the effect.
America’s Most Haunted was canceled due to ‘catastrophic injuries’ sustained during the expedition into the Lassiter. The footage was intended to be destroyed, but as is often the case with anomalous media, the film was braced and, for all intents and purposes, indestructible. Fox sued Nova Network for damages, alleging that the network knew the Lassiter was unsafe to film in, but he was forced to do it by their contract. They settled out of court for a handsome sum, and Fox was able to obtain the footage.
The Lassiter itself was destroyed in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy; the rotting structure crumbled under the storm surge. In its place, a small shopping center was built, and to date, no further anomalies have been reported-- except for the fact that the shopping center spends an inordinate amount of money on mold removal.
The papyrus that Fox contained the entity in is still in the possession of the Institute. As previously stated, it is a piece of the Greek Magical Papyri, dedicated to the myth of Typhon; however, in contrast to typical depictions of the entity, Typhon is portrayed as an embodiment of the ocean itself, living water, a flood meant to drown Olympus itself. It is an unorthodox portrayal, but a valuable one, and it is one of the oldest examples of a braced piece of media we possess.
The entity which inhabited the Lassiter has been absorbed by the Papyrus, and is, for the Institute’s purposes, neutralized. However, the document itself can’t be stored conventionally; our archivists have had to use an aquarium to contain it, due to the sheer amount of water it produces. Thankfully, it hasn’t outgrown the ten-gallon tank we use.
None of the disappearances at the Lassiter have been solved, and I doubt they ever will be. That said, some… odd news has come about since my last entry, one that I had to revise this piece to accommodate.
After reading the description of the Molnar footage, a woman from Akron, Ohio reached out to me. She claims that she has been having dreams about events that roughly correspond to the Molnar footage since she was eight years old and adopted by her foster family, who found her at the side of the road, wearing pajamas and begging for her mother. Having talked with her over Zoom, she does bear a striking resemblance to Tiffany Molnar’s age-progression photos. She has sent away her DNA for testing at a lab with ties to the Institute.
And at the end of the day? None of this makes any fucking sense.
New Jersey has come up a few times over the course of what I’ve shared on this blog. We originally thought that the Lassiter was a locus point for it, a sort of magnet for strange occurrences or maybe even a gathering place for anomalous entities. But the Lassiter was destroyed, the primary entity within it contained, and yet there are still dozens of pieces of Forbidden Media connected to New Jersey.
The Papyrus had no ties to Ohio, so how on earth did she end up there in 1998? If this woman is Tiffany Molnar, how did she end up there? And what force made it impossible to record people within the Lassiter’s Lobby?
There are few things that keep me up at night. The Lassiter is one of them. If anyone has any information about this place, I beg you, reach out, tell us something. Anything.
For the time being… The Institute’s head is advising me to take a break, reconnect with my family. It is almost Thanksgiving, after all. I’ll see you on the other side.
