Nerding Day: The Dwelling

Prepare your souls, hot dog readers, for we embark on a harrowing tale of ghosts and demons. But this is no ordinary ghost and demon story. We will not be cowering! We will not run! No, we will face them head on until they are banished to Hell! Sometimes. We might run. There will be a little bit of cowering. You know what? They can stay here if they want.

The Dwelling: A Dark Entity is the 2015 autobiographical story of Jereme Leonard, the worst paranormal investigator to ever do it. And I say that knowing there is probably no such a thing as a good ghost hunter. I mean, so far, they're all 0/10. But no one has lost so many fights so quickly to air and dark corners than Jereme. He once lost a fight so hard to an empty basement he had to go to the hospital, and that's a true story, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start his book about another true story, of his real battle against a demon, with one strange caveat:

I'm not sure if Jereme accidentally left in the default boilerplate to avoid ghost libel, or if this is some kind of confession. But generally, when it's a book about you and the actual things you did, you don't tell readers you made it all up. Maybe he added this after he realized the only thing he did in his autobiography was run away from ghost fights to cry in his truck, but that's a spoiler. I'm getting ahead of myself again.

When you "battle" against "demons" there is going to be some strong language. Jereme grappled with the idea of using naughty words, the same way a braver ghost hunter might grapple with ghosts. He ultimately decided to include the fucks and shits to help us "understand what a demon is and how one operates." Don't worry, though. It's not as shocking as you might think since it's exactly, almost suspiciously exactly, like the popular film The Exorcist.

Jereme's paranormal journey begins in 2008, and like all people who choose ghost hunting as a profession, his life was in a great place. Here's how he opens his book:

Okay, you get it. Things weren't going well for Jereme. He was aggressively divorced, and majestically emo. This would have been a poetry book or a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign if he hadn't gotten invited to a ghost hunt by his cousin. And it was there his flair for emotional outbursts and natural pussiness gave him a new purpose. Let's take a look at how he handled his first ghost hunt:

So his cousin asked him to go into the bathroom to check for ghosts. First things first, he got so caught up in metaphor he described walking into the depths of an endless black ocean. Next, he asked if there were any ghosts. "Tap tap tap," the ghosts said, or maybe the plumbing. Jereme responded by fleeing in sheer panic, right past the woman who hired his cousin to catch her ghosts. Everyone laughed at him. He had found a way to fail ridiculously at a ridiculous thing with no fail condition. No one will ever be worse at anything. He had found his calling.

Now a battle-hardened ghost hunter, and having literally nothing else in his life, Jereme was allowed to investigate a nearby demon. He knew from the one time he ran from a bathroom it would probably take more than his courage alone to fight a demon, so he looked them up. What he learned shocked him.

According to Jereme's phone, demons are fallen "angels," which are a type of man bird. They have powers and can take over a person like in Hollywood movies such as The Exorcist. He was afraid, but didn't think it sounded dangerous. Plus, he was excited because it sounded dangerous. Jereme's book is self-published. Speaking of, I found this book because Jereme was my favorite cast member on a Netflix miniseries called 28 Days Haunted. It is a ludicrously fake show where nerds stay in three different haunted houses for a month because sleepovers help penetrate the membrane between realms.

We did a podcast about it, but real quick: Jereme screamed at a bookcase, got very scared, and then spent most of the month grouchy and sleepy because of ghosts. And I should tell you about his God Helmet. The God Helmet is exactly what you're picturing, and it does exactly what you think. If you're still confused, I'll let the 28 Days Haunted graphics department explain it:

GOD HELMET. What ghost could withstand it? What bully could resist it!? God Helmet was built to magnify the user's natural psychic abilities, only it exists here in real life and an adult man put it on his head where we could see him.

It did not go well.

Jereme soon learned there are some ghosts not meant to be amplified by hat. I didn't add these subtitles. These are the things Jereme actually said from within the awesome might of the God Helmet.

Jereme barely had time to shriek into the God Helmet before he begged for someone, anyone to pull it off his head.

This insult is going to belittle me as much as it belittles Jereme, but this looks like The Blob trying to work Cerebro on Dazzler's roller skates. And it did him no good. Even armed with God Helmet, Jereme was instantly TKOed by his own imagination, and I can't express how much it didn't help the ghost investigation.

Like, this dumb asshole almost died and all he did was feed the local ghosts raw helmet energy.

It was pretty serious. The show had to cut away from his panic attack to title cards. So anyway, that's how I learned about Jereme Leonard. Let's get back to his book.

Sorry, one more thing: they weren't being cute. This man went to the hospital. The whole point of the show was to stay in ghost quarantine for 28 days and he lost a fight to a ghost so hard he had to leave for the emergency room. Okay, back to the book.

Sorry again, but doctors couldn't figure out what happened. I imagine he told them he put on God Helmet and was finished by the vengeful spirit of a 19th century murderer in the first round, but I guess they didn't believe him, or didn't know how to test for it. Okay, let's continue the book.

Wait, wait, one last thing. The show's editor fucking hated Jereme and cut to this shot of him having a sad cheeseburger and pop after the hospital. Jereme does not respond to defeat with a training montage. He refills his Cherry Pepsi, gets more cranky, and walks enlarged-heart-first into the nearest ghost. And it's this professionalism that got him invited to investigate his first demonic haunting in Mount Hermon, Louisiana, years before this show aired.

The scariness began after a woman named Joy went on a haunted plantation tour. Taunting the tormented spirits of dead slaves was meant to be a fun weekend for Joy and her friends, but this time she brought something back with her. It was an evil ghost of a slavemaster named The Boss, who was also an incubus demon, who also controlled tornados. Jereme leapt into action, getting very scared and not having any idea what was going on.

Normally it would be weird to describe the feelings of your first demonic possession like "a diabetic in a candy store," but let's not play games. Jereme has some health problems. If you turn on the captioning of his Netflix show it describes him as "man with diabetes crying inside Professor X's hat." There's no delicate way to put it. He looks like Kirby swallowed diabetes and gained the power of diabetes. This man is currently 0-and-1 against the supernatural and he's waddling in to battle a demon immune to both "non-denominational church group" and "psychic medium." Lady, Jereme is one spooky thump away from adding another ghost to your house.

And sure enough, Jereme freaks the fuck out the moment he runs into a shape.

I mentioned earlier how there's no real fail condition for this type of thing. But certainly, one of the last things you want to hear from your paranormal investigator is, "FUCKING FUCK WHAT THE FUCK I THINK I SAW A GHOST; ARE FUCKING GHOSTS REAL!? RUN, JUST RUN! FORGET HER!" And yet it's the only thing Jereme has ever said and will ever say when he sees a ghost.

I bet the fun thing about being a ghost hunter is how you can do whatever you want. You can tell a demon to go back to Hell, and he has to do it. What's his other option? Suddenly existing? Good luck, butthole. So it was psychologically revealing that in his wildest fantasies, Jereme got very scared and then left Joy to die. It was also weird how he started writing erotic fan fiction between the ghost and Joy's kids. This could have been anything, Jereme. Anything other than this.

Jereme is a natural storyteller. He starts the paragraph with what seems to be the worst possible thing– a child molesting demon. But he raises the stakes even higher when he says, "Some of her ghost pictures seem sort of fake." I hate to break kayfabe again, but even these people know it's fake, right? Like, if you really thought a sex monster was loose in a child's room, you wouldn't be roasting her mom's photography skills. You'd be thinking, "She needs a brave man like me in her life! To fight it!" Wait, never mind, that's exactly what Jereme was thinking.

So Joy's children do have a father. A different author may even call such a person "Joy's current husband," but for some reason Jereme doesn't like to think of him this way. In any case, this "father still in the family unit" had nothing to offer Joy when it came to battling demons. Some hero had to "enter the war zone" for her. For her kids. That hero was Jereme. Maybe next week. Or in a month or two, there's no need to rush these things. So many weeks later Jereme returned for a night investigation.

Jereme woke up Joy's sleeping child by sneaking into her room and bullying the air near her bed. And when she woke up to say, "ThE MeAn MaN's OuTsiDe," even he knew this was fucked up. He completely forgot about the fight he was having with the ghost and realized it's weird to be a stranger in a child's room at night. But he did very quickly remember the ghost, and holy shit, did I say g-g-ghost!? Let's cry and get the hell out of here!

So Jereme cried and got the hell out of there, leaving Joy to die again. "See you next weekend," the helpful demon hunter told the woman after doing fucking nothing. Again.

While they were getting the hell out of there, Jereme told his partner, "Let's get the hell out of here!" Unfortunately, the demon followed them into the truck and made their door locks go up and down. "Aiiiieeee," said Jereme. Absolutely nothing, did Jereme. Every chapter of the book ends like this, by the way. Jereme has never met a strange situation he didn't solve with a heart attack as far from it as possible.

Armed with nothing better to do and no one in his life, Jereme returned to Joy's home again to once again battle her demon.

"Do you know you are a sick pervert!" Jereme screamed at his imagination. "Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" it replied. And good for him! He was going "toe to toe" with a demon and not even crying. With his electronic recordings and this argument, Jereme had proof of a world beyond ours– a dark, hidden evil only he can defeat! There was only one problem, though. Two years before this, Joy wrote her own book about her haunted house. And she didn't seem to think this was as profound.

In his first demonic debate, Jereme shrieked out a draw against one of Satan's top molesters, and the woman he was there to rescue called it "nothing earth-shattering." It had to have hurt, and I know he read it, because all he did was add tears to it and call it his autobiography. Anyway, time to end the chapter. Let's do nothing of significance, quietly weep, and leave this poor woman to die.

This moment where Joy stood outside, yearning for Jereme to stay wasn't in her book. In fact, Jereme only appeared on three pages of her book. Jereme thinks he's a lone warrior in a battle for Joy's soul, but from her point of view, he was one of many excitable nerds who came to her haunted house to believe any goddamn thing she made up.

Joy told anyone who would listen about her demon, who had now stolen power from so many paranormal investigators it had gained the ability to scratch her and the children. This meant she had physical proof of his manifestation! And yet according to Jereme's book, she still couldn't find help. "Maybe you should stop showing me every blemish on your shirtless daughters," said more than one pastor to Joy.

Jereme didn't go back to the haunted house for a while, but he still called her when he wanted to hear the sound of her demon telling him to fuck himself.

The writing in this section is strange as shit. People don't normally express their feelings by describing what they look like in the third person. And did he say the words "I drawled" in the middle of a sentence? Like he told the woman, "Yeah, I drawled." It feels fake even for the man fighting a sex demon every 7th weekend. What's going on here?

Oh. Oh no, I see what happened. This is a conversation Joy and the demon had with her husband and Jereme rewrote it to be about him. Here's how the conversation originally appeared in Joy's book, Out of the Darkness:

So not only was Joy's children's father -her husband you might say- still in the family unit, he was fighting the demon out of his piss-soaked wife with his Bible powers! He's a full-blown exorcist! So to be clear: Jereme did a couple forgettable walkthroughs of this woman's haunted house, claimed her life story as his own, and rewrote her husband to be him.

Speaking of Joy's life story, she does not give a shit. If she feels like she's losing her audience, she will make up a story about being pulled into Satanic virgin sex rituals. Jereme might have some questions about her ghost photos, but he believed every word of this:

You might be thinking this story doesn't add up. How did these Satanists know Joy was a virgin? You fool. You forgot about the psychic-like abilities given to all Hondurans who dabble in the occult.

They just "knew." Or rather, their psychic-like abilities called a familiar spirit just "knew." The point is, Joy told this sensitive, traumatic story to a man she met three times and described in her book as "his blonde partner" because Jereme isn't even the main character in his own ghost hunting squad.

Once Jereme heard this story (read it in Joy's bullshit book), it gave him all kinds of ideas. Getting a stick put in her butt while she was a virgin gave the demon "legal right" to her! This seemed complicated, so for the second time in his life, this seasoned demon hunter looked up "demon" on the Internet.

When his "research" led him to no answers, Jereme blindly speculated that the demon who owns Joy also gets partial ownership of her first born, by law of menstrual butt stick? Why not. The thing you have to remember is demons network.

This never comes up again, so I don't know why Jereme brought it up or why I clipped it. Maybe to distract you from this unexpected twist:

Joy, the woman inviting any strange men into her home to yell at her kid's sex ghost, was committed to a psychiatric facility. This is tough because even if she gets a doctor who believes in demons it's still fucking crazy to put Jereme in charge of fighting one. Don't worry, though! She is soon diagnosed as "not crazy" and released.

Upon her release, she calls Jereme over to repeat a conversation she originally had with her husband, only now with Jereme's name pasted in.

Knowing he's the only one who can help, Jereme takes in this woman's suffering and thinks, "I guess she'll die." Then he gives some gum to her kids and leaves her to do that. "I'm so lucky I'm not her," thinks the demon hunter, once again crying as he leaves.

Joy spends a few more weeks not dying, so Jereme comes back for another investigation. It goes about the same.

The demon was starting to win their arguments. "The children are MINE!" it told Jereme, who responded by getting quietly nauseous. "You're a fucking pig!" it told Jereme, who responded by leaving to go sit in his truck. "Oink, oink!" it told Jereme who turned on the air conditioner because it was hot. I think it was around this part of the writing process where Jereme realized he wasn't coming across well. He decided to have the demon pick on someone else.

Some minister showed up, who was kind of a dick according to Joy, and got completely laid out by a ghost tackle. "Don't ever call me again!" he screamed before driving away. So, okay, maybe Jereme is a crybaby and a coward. An idiot and a liar, sure. His insides hemorrhage when he touches cyberhats, fine. But there's no turn coming. Jereme tried to come up with an exorcist more pathetic than him and fucked that up too.

Joy is now being fully possessed by the demon, by the way.

"Oh no, I can feel the entity trying to get in through my back! Hurry with the blessed oil, arrgh, too late!" Joy told all the nearby men at her Beginner's Learn To Talk Like a Final Fantasy NPC class. This is a miserable effort, Joy. If I was an exorcist and you said this shit to me I would throw you in the trash. Demon or no, you're garbage. Joy deserves to spend her possession getting cried at by a morbidly obese divorcée with a mind helmet allergy.

According to Joy's book, Jereme wasn't here for this event, but Jereme claims, yeah he was, and her demon somehow knew the other kids called him "Fat Day." But what the fuck kind of name is that? Did his bullies translate their taunts into Italian and then back into English? "There's something in here with me! H-help me, Je-- I will never give up this vessel, DJ Jazzham Jereme! Or shall I speak to you as you're known on Playstation, xX_MuffSlayer6_Xx!? Ha ha ha!!!"

I don't know how she did it, but I'm starting to like Joy. She is drinking hard, watching night porn, fucking her contractors… she knows how to party. But it's kind of weird she confessed her adultery to Jereme, who she considered to be the partner of some guy who did an electronic ectoplasm scan of her kitchen a couple times. Did she really do this?

No, of course not. During the retelling of this story, Jereme accidentally made himself Joy's husband again.

Back to the main plot– the demon started texting people from Joy's phone in Portuguese! I'm not sure why since it was either a Honduran sex demon or a Louisiana plantation owner ghost who has been speaking English for about 300 straight hauntings, but it doesn't matter because Jereme gets distracted with more demon property law.

So in a moment of weakness Joy agrees to let the demon "take possession of her body at will for strength," and in exchange it would stop licking her daughter. According to Jereme's research, this made her the devil's property even more than the time she became the devil's property when the Honduran cult put a stick in her butt. Jereme says, "She was the devil's property and embarrassed to admit to admit it," which I think is a great way to explain to explain it. As you can imagine to imagine it, the possessions were now out of control.

"Her demon is grabbing neckties, everyone take off your neckties!" shouted the quick-thinking pastor according to an eyewitness account.  This pastor had already learned the hard way that the only way to win a necktie fight is to not play necktie fight. I love the earnest stupidity of this story. It's like a kung fu scene being filmed as the CSI team arrives to investigate a movie set. It's how you would fight Bubble Man after your Necktie Beam bounced off him.

However you want to describe it, Joy's life was in disarray.

Jereme, for whatever reason, wanted to describe it like a diabetic having to do diabetes stuff. I think you'll like Joy's description more.

Having a haunted house can be stressful. What's a good way to describe it? Oh, I know: people in Joy's bathtub had to constantly dodge a massive swinging ghost dick.

Hold on, what the fuck? We're in Chapter Twenty and selling the house was an option this goddamn whole time!? After all these ghost hunts and exorcisms and deals with the literal devil, this woman just fucking leaves? I'm so pissed off right now.

So the saga of Jereme's first demonic possession comes to an end. He lost several fights to it, cried after each one, never accomplished anything by any stretch of the imagination, wrote self-insert fanfiction about his client's marriage, and like they did throughout the entire book, things sort of just resolved themselves while he wasn't around. But Jereme seems to be learning there are no rules. With the power of storytelling he can steal a wife, but he can also steal… a demon. Oh no, oh jeez, it looks like after Joy moved out, the Boss decided to haunt Jereme.

Things really couldn't have gone worse. He made a fool of himself and came back with a demon. Joy's house painter was better at his job than Jereme. But now filled with ghost and armed with the confidence of a man who has screwed up everything in his life, Jereme starts his own paranormal investigation team with his girlfriend, his girlfriend's daughter, and his girlfriend's daughter's boyfriend. It rules. If you can't enjoy this man starting a ghost hunting business called Ghostquest, you can join Joy's house painter in Hell.

The nice thing about having a ghost inside you is that no matter where you go, it counts as a haunted house. "That's the, stop calling me a fat pig, that's the Ghostquest guarantee! I feel sick, I need to cry. Which, I'm sorry, but that's the other Ghostquest guarantee."

The other nice thing about having a ghost inside you is that it's not a big deal. None of this is real, so you can forget about it and do other stuff like Joy did the whole time Jereme was fighting and researching her demon. Still, he figures he should wrap things up. He goes back to Joy's old place, no longer haunted, and calls her to tell her he hasn't figured out shit. It never mattered anyway. Then he cries, of course, and leaves the ghost there. Do you know what this means? It fucking means the only thing this ghost hunter successfully did in the entire book was re-haunt a house.

No, Jereme. But you were one of the best.

With ghost hunting losing its allure, Jereme is back to having only despair. He contemplates the nature of true evil. And you know what bothers Jereme about evil? Satan keeps doing the same thing. Butt sticks. Bathtub dicks. Making ghost hunters run away. Jereme wishes everyone could be smart, like the Bible. He's really going through something, you guys, but … I don't know, maybe he's also onto something?

Jereme ends the book with a little bit of hypothetical reader mail. People wonder about the time he drove away seven times, stalked the ghost's victim, waited for the situation to resolve itself, accidentally got haunted, and put the ghost back. 'How are you so successful?' they all ask. And then he has the balls to tell us the process is something "the common person doesn't understand." Bitch, we watched you Google "demon" for the first time one demon hunt ago. The same demon hunt you lost in varied and spectacular ways! There does not exist a person worse at this than you. The only difference between you and the little girl being haunted was that she cried less than you.

Speaking of hauntings, oh yeah, the haunting. Jereme finally realizes he left a devil at that place. Time to come out of retirement for one last hunt.

Wait, never mind. After thinking about it a little, Jereme decided the demon maybe left? For Hell, he guesses? A satisfying end to his most dangerous opponent! And only opponent, unless you count the noisy bathroom pipes! To put it in another way, it's like a diabetic being so fucking terrible at hunting ghosts.

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