The first 3 episodes of True Haunting are centered around Erie Hall in Geneseo College, located in upstate New York. It was September 3, 1984, when Chris DiCesare was dropped off there by his dad, Vito DiCesare. There, he instantly made a bunch of friends: Craig Norris, Linda Kalasinski, Jeff Ungar, Paul, and more. Chris was an avid runner, and he wanted to go to the Olympics. But one fine day, he started getting haunted by some unseen entity that kept calling out his name. Things kept getting worse for him, but the first time he addressed that he was being haunted was when he saw this indescribable shape inside his room, causing him to bolt over to Jeff’s room and ask for help. Chris’ situation worsened when Ed and Lorraine Warren—yes, the real-life couple that solved real-life hauntings whose fictional versions were the basis for The Conjuring franchise—visited Geneseo and Lorraine refused to shake hands with Chris. Why, though? Was there an actual ghost that was following Chris, or was this whole incident a sign of his deteriorating mental health? Well, it seemed like a severe case of homesickness until Chris’s roommate, Paul, also saw the entity. Did that confirm that ghosts are real? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Chris Became The “Ghost Boy”
So, after the incident with the ghost, Paul moved back in with his parents. But the fact that Paul had seen the same shape that Chris had been seeing all this while sort of cemented the notion that it wasn’t just his mind that was playing tricks on him. Maybe there was something supernatural haunting them. Now, Chris wanted to leave too, but he didn’t want to disappoint his dad. Hence, he stayed on campus and tried his best to strike some kind of balance between sports and studies. Instead of sleeping in his room, because that’s where the hauntings were happening, Chris slept in places that he deemed relatively “safer.” Jeff was so concerned about Chris’ well-being that he began his own investigation into the matter.
Since Jeff was a budding photographer, he gravitated towards the method of spirit photography, which involved taking pictures of the place that was haunted in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the entity in question on film. He convinced Chris to come back to his room, invite the entity for a chat, and then took pictures in that moment. When Jeff developed the photo, he surmised that the paranormal being that was after Chris looked like a skeleton. Since that was a bit embarrassing, Chris asked Jeff to not share those pics with anyone else. But Jeff blurted all of it out to Linda and her friends. Eventually, word spread around the college that Chris was haunted, and he was dubbed the “Ghost Boy.” This worsened Chris’s mental health, and that was when Linda sort of came to his rescue, as she really empathized with his situation. Eventually, Jeff made amends and apologized to Chris about his irresponsible behavior.
Chris Confided in Father Manning
During one of their conversations after repairing their friendship, Chris actually gave the entity a name: Tommy. Then they decided to record every minute aspect of every encounter with Tommy. And in addition to that, Jeff again convinced Chris to come back to the dorm room, even though Craig was strictly against it. Predictably enough, Chris suffered one of his now infamous hauntings while sleeping, and he woke up kicking and screaming. The same happened the next night, the night after that, and these “visits” from Tommy kept occurring until Chris became so sleep-deprived he couldn’t differentiate between reality and dreams.
As a result, Chris’s academics and his interest in sports deteriorated. Finally, he turned to Father Charles Manning, who was the resident religious representative on the campus, because when there’s something inexplicable happening, usually people gravitate towards religion to get some kind of an answer. Once Manning was sure that Chris wasn’t on drugs or a wino, he decided to pay Chris’ dorm a visit. He performed a kind of ritual from the Pastoral Care of the Sick, and he felt that the cold that had become a permanent resident in that room had left and the atmosphere of the place warmed up. That did calm down Chris a lot, but the “truth of the matter” was that Manning had felt the presence of that entity, and he knew that it wouldn’t leave easily. He did share that piece of information with Chris because he knew that it’d scare him; at least with the false notion that Tommy was gone, he’d enjoy a few days of solace. To be fair, things did get better for Chris. However, one night, when Beth, one of Linda’s close friends, was haunted by the entity, and during the winter break, the janitor saw the ghost as well, Chris realized that this brief period of happiness was just an illusion.
Chris Asked Vito for Help
Chris’ theory was that after the mini-exorcism that was performed in his room, the ghost that was only focused on him was lashing out at everyone else around him. Which basically meant that the rumor that Erie Hall was haunted began to spread like wildfire. Linda, who had already been traumatized by the death of 2 girls on July 4, thought that she was being stalked by the entity. The day she made a huge hullabaloo about it, Jeff rushed into her room to do some spirit photography and spotted nothing. Initially, I thought that the hand reaching out to her was supposed to be the spirit, but it was either Chris or someone else. Linda said that she couldn’t look at those photos because it reminded her of that moment something unseen touched her without her consent, I suppose. Coming back to Chris himself, the spirit made direct contact when he was taking a shower and left three marks on his back.
Jeff claimed that there was no way he could have done that to himself. And also, this meant that the haunting of this entity was entering its peak. So, left with no other options, Chris called up his dad for help, and he showed up at Geneseo College almost immediately. The first thing that Vito did was ensure that his son got a good night’s sleep because it was evident that Chris was sleep deprived. Hence, while Vito stood guard, Chris snored away. When Vito didn’t notice anything particularly eerie about the dorm, he assumed that this whole ghost situation was a figment of Chris’s imagination or a heightened form of rumor-mongering. But as the night grew longer, even Vito began feeling the presence of something supernatural. The following day, neither of them addressed the elephant in the room, but Chris knew that something had gone down while he was asleep, because of which Vito wasn’t as confident about tackling this scenario as he had seemed a while ago. In an attempt to shake away their fears, the father-son duo went for a run, and that’s when they found a plaque that said “Parker Boyd Memorial.”
Thomas Boyd Was Vanquished
After Vito left, Chris and Jeff looked into Parker Boyd and found out that a major chunk of the American Revolutionary War had been fought on the land where their college stood. As per Jeff’s analysis, the plaque was dedicated to 2 soldiers who had died there: Sgt. Michael Parker and Lt. Thomas Boyd. Yes, it was a major coincidence that the guy who had supposedly died near the college was called Thomas and Chris had dubbed the spirit Tommy. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that Thomas had been instructed to conduct a recon of a Native American tribe who were located just outside of Geneseo. Thomas and his group were ambushed by the Native Americans, and Thomas himself was singled out and brutally tortured.
Now, the tree that he was tied to whilst being tortured, uninventively named the Torture Tree, was on Chris’s usual running route. Hence, Jeff and Chris theorized that, after all these years, Thomas was reaching out to Chris for absolution. Based on that theory, Jeff and Chris decided to reach out to Thomas and record their conversation. To us normies, the sound captured on the recording will seem like noise. But geniuses like Chris and Jeff heard Thomas saying, “Please help me.” Prompted by Craig to “confront one’s demons head-on,” Chris ran into the woods, stood in front of the Torture Tree, and summoned Thomas. As per Chris, Thomas appeared before him, and he told the dude to stop his hauntings. 10 seconds after that, Thomas was gone. Then, college came to an end. Everybody drifted apart. Dreams weren’t fulfilled. Life went on.
Chris Was Connected To Thomas
At the end of True Haunting episode 3, Vito’s wife, Patricia Hubley, discovered a chapter in Journals of the Military Expedition of Major General John Sullivan Against the Six Nations of Indians in 1779 that made it clear that, although it seemed like Thomas latching on to Chris was a bit random, it was actually destiny. Apparently, one of Patricia’s ancestors, Adam Hubley, who was also Chris’s ancestor, had discovered Thomas’ body. Since they didn’t do anything to ensure that Thomas’ spirit achieved peace in the afterlife, he grabbed on to Chris and tormented him until he told him to go away. Which brings us to the main question: was there actually a ghost in Erie Hall? Despite watching countless horror movies and TV shows and being a fan of narratives that have ghosts in them, I can confidently say that there wasn’t any ghost. It’s possible that, as a kid, Chris had read the aforementioned book, or maybe somebody had read it to him. As he grew up, he forgot about it. When he got to Geneseo, he remembered bits and pieces of that book, and he cooked up this story that he was being haunted by the ghost of the person whose body had been discovered by his ancestors.
As for the rest of the people, I don’t think they were ever haunted. They wanted to be a part of this Netflix show. Hence, they claimed they had also seen Thomas’s ghost to get a hefty check. The showrunners initially tried to get into whether or not all these kids were suffering from some kind of mental health issues. But by the end, they totally abandoned that subject and only focused on the supernatural explanation for this whole Thomas Boyd incident, which in this day and age seems pretty irresponsible. We are supposed to progress as a species, and if we begin associating everything with ghosts and dissuade people from getting psychiatric help, then we are doomed. Also, what’s the learning lesson that I am supposed to get from the hauntings of a dead soldier who colonized the land of Native Americans? Am I supposed to empathize with Thomas Boyd and think that he should have deserved better? Moreover, why didn’t Thomas’ haunting spark some kind of introspection within Chris, or anyone that was haunted by Thomas, about their supposed colonial origins?
Where Is Chris DiCesare Now?
If this was a proper (fictional) movie made by a proper director with some kind of moral compass, I’m sure Thomas would have been portrayed as the villain that he was when he was alive, and after the exorcism of his spirit, the victims of Thomas’ hauntings would have started giving reparations to the Native American community for their ancestors’ crimes against humanity. Instead, here we have a feckless “true” story about a haunting that’s been used for the past decade or so by Chris to catapult himself to fame by appearing on Netflix, CITA Ventures, Please Talk with Me, SYFY, and the Travel Channel. As per Chris’s Facebook profile, he has dubbed himself the Erie Hall Ghost Boy and the Ghost Boy of Geneseo. He currently lives in New Windsor in New York. He has 2 children. After completing his education at Geneseo, he went on to attain a Master of Arts degree, with a major in Social Studies, from Walden University, and a Special Education degree from Manhattanville University. And, based on his latest post on this topic, he hopes that this documentary series will change his life (again).
This just reeks of desperation. I mean, if something happened to you in the ‘80s, and you are dragging it all the way to 2025 without offering any kind of nuanced perspective of what that haunting meant, then I have to say there’s something off about it. I mean, even a layman like me can see that there’s a lesson to be learned about colonizing Native Americans and violently taking their land. And it’s so odd that that’s a topic that’s not touched upon at all. Instead, the torture that Thomas Boyd suffered became the main focus of the docuseries? Why did he suffer that torture? Why did he want absolution from a guy whose ancestors had found his body? I’m sure that there’s no way to make sense out of all this, which is exactly why it can be milked for a few more decades. I mean, Chris himself admitted that Erie Hall is his greatest achievement, and he’d never like to leave it in the rearview mirror. Why would he when every few years someone turns this hollow narrative into a documentary, right?
