Why am I into this paranormal shit, anyway?

I’m a scientist. Like, that’s my job. I have a Ph.D. and everything. So people in my “real life” are surprised when I talk about how I like ghost hunting and cryptids. I’m a scientist, how can I believe in ghosts? I’m a scientist, how can I entertain the idea of mothman?

Years ago, I heard about some grad students in STEM who joined the university paranormal club because they felt that ghost hunting was essentially the opposite of research. This was before I myself really got into the paranormal, but I understood the sentiment immediately.

In the sciences, you don’t rely on instincts or intuition. You carefully control your experiments, you verify the accuracy of your results six ways to Sunday, and you are careful when writing up your findings not to overstate their significance or their implications. (Or, at least, good scientists do this. I have nothing nice to say about the scientists who don’t.) As you progress in your field you do begin to develop an instinct, based upon thousands of hours of reading papers and listening to seminars and conducting your own research. But it’s not inherent to humanity, it’s very much learned.

The first time I went “real” ghost hunting, one of our guides told us to take photos in threes, and that if a phenomenon like a shadow or an orb showed up in one of the three photos but not the others, that meant it was a “real” phenomenon. I refrained from pointing out that this is literally the opposite of how replicated experiments are supposed to work, because I was a guest in this situation, and a newbie, and I didn’t want to be a know-it-all jerk.

I still don’t buy the photo thing. It’s fine.

I’ve been interested in the paranormal from a young age (blame Catholicism and those Time-Life Unsolved Mysteries books), but from my late teens to my late twenties I was quite sure I was too smart for it. I was a Young Scientist, and I didn’t have time for such things as ghosts and bigfoot and cartomancy. (I was also a bit of an asshole atheist, and who’s surprised.) I still loved fantasy fiction, magical realism, all that, but it was fiction. In reality the universe was a cold, uncaring place.

But then my dad died, out of the blue. And then, about a year later, covid hit. And for 2019 into 2020 into beyond it became apparent that not believing in anything except the cold uncaring universe was not going to work for me long-term. Not if I wanted to have a long-term. In the worst depths of my grief I had a conversation with my spouse where I quite frankly laid out that we are all just bags of cells and our emotions are just chemical reactions (including love) and we will all die and be forgotten so there’s not much point to anything at all. He still brings that conversation up occasionally, because it shook him up, hearing that his partner didn’t really believe in love, that she was just killing time until the sweet release of death.

Eventually I felt better enough to start grasping at coping mechanisms. Eventually I felt better enough to reconsider just killing time until the sweet release of death. I started reading some about how humans need ritual, how we tend to reinvent the wheel of deities and ceremonies and holidays over and over and over again. I started reading up on paganism, and found there just enough structure to keep me occupied without having to wake up early on Sundays or denounce my bodily autonomy. Most pagans are pretty chill, all things considered, and the nature worship appeals to me. (I am, after all, a biologist.)

And with the onset of covid, I was antsy and bored. When I am antsy and bored, I start poking metaphorical bears. Why not paranormal metaphorical bears? I can poke those bears in my house, my neighborhood. I can poke those bears more-or-less for free. And paranormal research links up nicely with paganism, something I was already doing.

Both paganism and paranormal research also lined up with another personal goal of mine: to get in touch with my emotions. I’ve done a hell of a job over the course of my life of packing my emotions down far enough that I rarely have to confront them, and by mid-2019 it was catching up to me in the form of health problems. I’m still working on this. My spouse thinks I’ve gotten better at feeling my feelings over the last few years, but it’s hard for me to tell. Regardless, when you’re trying to contact spirits, deities, read tarot, meditate effectively, what have you, you need to be in touch with your own emotions. I’m pretty sure you can’t tap into your intuition without tapping into your feelings, and I say that because if there was a way to do so I would have done it by now. So if I want the intuition to connect with the other side, I need to be in touch with my feelings.

So if the null hypothesis is correct, if ghosts aren’t real, if we’re alone in the universe, if there is no spiritual energy, no higher beings — at least I improved myself. If there is something else at work, whether it’s simply common hallucinations of the human brain or actual external forces at work, that’s pretty damn cool. That’s worth exploring.

When people ask me if I actually believe in ghosts, I give them the X-Files line: “I want to believe.” It’s the truth! I’ve never had a convincing experience of paranormal phenomena, but I would love to find it. I am open to receiving it. I don’t know if I’m as credulous as most other paranormal researchers, but I don’t plan on changing that.

It’s only just in the past six months or so that I’ve started to feel comfortable calling myself a paranormal researcher. I don’t know that much, but I know enough that I no longer qualify as a normie. I’ve been studying this shit recreationally for almost five years. I’ve been on a few ghost hunts. I’ve been on several ghost tours. I’m starting to rack up a good number of opinions and hypotheses of my own. And it’s fun! This is a fun weird hobby to have. It’s a fun way to learn the history of a place and a fun excuse to stay up late and snoop around with my friends. So I’m gonna keep poking this bear, and my plan is to write more about on this here blog.