Introducing the “International Society for Paranormal Research”

For my Soulbank readers, I am pleased to report the creation of my new research and investigation project, the “International Society for Paranormal Research”, or the ISPR. Soulbank will continue to be the official blog site for this society, and I will soon start up the social media machine.

The ISPR was born out of a deep, existential crisis. Allow me to elaborate. As many of you know, I was very active in the Southern California paranormal ‘scene’, for lack of a better word, that used to meet fairly regularly on the Queen Mary in Long Beach. There were a great number of “ghost hunting” groups at the time (2008 to 2013 or so), and the popularity of the paranormal shows on television was at an all-time high. It was during this time that I started the Paranormal Housewives (still ongoing–check out paranormalhousewives.com and our FB page), an all-female group of investigators with a very diverse background, brought together by a common interest in all things mysterious and unexplained. We helped families with hauntings, we investigated countless sites of historical and paranormal interest, and we landed on television more than once. We appeared on the Ricky Lake show (https://www.tvguide.com/tvshows/the-ricki-lake-show/episode-38-season-1/a-ricki-halloween/381207/), Ghost Adventures before we formed the group (https://www.travelchannel.com/shows/ghost-adventures/episodes/linda-vista-hospital), we recorded a sizzle reel for our own reality show and were “shopped” to multiple networks, we gave countless interviews, appeared on the local news, landed an article in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/tn-cpt-1028-paranormal-20111027-story.html) and other newspapers, and so on and so forth. In other words, we were almost famous.

It was the “almost” that was our near undoing. High hopes for a reality show were dashed. The requests for interviews and television appearances faded, along with the popularity of the entire genre of the paranormal. Teams dissolved all around the state. We stopped meeting at the Queen Mary. With the pandemic, it no longer made sense to get together in enclosed spaces and huddle together seeking spirits. There were other issues, as well: teams are hard to maintain. Establishing common goals and guidelines was difficult; expectations, hopes, and dreams were not always easy to reconcile. And then, of course, there was the thorny issue of the “evidence”. It wasn’t clear that we had convinced anyone about the existence of the afterlife, in spite of the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours we spent reviewing our audio for EVP. We sifted through video, audio, photographs, and documented our impressions and experiences as we all discovered newly acquired clairvoyant and psychic skills. I wrote hundreds of pages about our experiences, presented our data, and waited for the public to be as excited as we were. That rarely, if ever, happened. I used to post our best EVP begging for public commentary, and nobody listened or commented. That used to keep me up at night. My disappointment convinced me to give up. However . . .

Paranormal research is a passion. You don’t engage in it to convince skeptics, to be on television, to make a ton of money, to find fame online, or to rub elbows with the VIP of the paranormal community; but I am proud of what the Paranormal Housewives accomplished, and it was often thrilling and exciting, especially because it seemed that the general public was truly fascinated by what we did. It wasn’t the public that lost interest; the media did. I’m not sure we knew how to recover from that. The truth is, paranormal research of any kind–whether the classic “ghost hunting” version, the traditional seance and medium modality, or the intellectual investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, is often work done alone, without accolades, without fame, without media interest. What I finally understood is this: that is just fine. I don’t care if the general public doesn’t review my ‘data’, or whether or not anyone in the entertainment industry finds my work interesting enough to create a show around. I don’t mind that most of the time, an investigation might simply be three or four people with a shared need to explore the non-material worlds that surround us.

What do I care about? The community of people who find this work fascinating, compelling, and endlessly mysterious. I care about the investigative process, the sifting of data, the interpretation of audio, video, the information from our various devices, and our experiences. I care about our impressions, our feelings, our instincts, as much as I care about the hard evidence; it’s all part of creating a larger picture, a weaving together of different strands of information that leads to conclusions and to truths that are larger than anything the laboratory can prove. I care about research, about our forefathers and mothers who engaged in this work; I care about our history, our collective past, and how we wish to create the future as investigators. This is about the search; our common desire as paranormal researchers to go beyond the superficially obvious and to penetrate the veil. There are far more questions than we have answers for. This journey will take our entire lifetime, and perhaps far more than one.

Now I can introduce the International Society for Paranormal Research. Our mission statement:

The ISPR is an open organization dedicated to investigating and presenting evidence for all aspects of the “paranormal”, including, but not limited to: all manifestations of human consciousness in post-material form; alleged hauntings of homes and sites; poltergeist activity; the work of mediums, psychics, clairvoyants and empaths; anomalous experiences that include UFO activity or any other unusual or unprecedented event, sighting, or manifestation. We are:

• Open to all amateur and professional investigators who wish to contribute their data and conclusions for review;
• A forum for investigators and researchers to share their research and data, but also a site for meaningful conversations among investigators regarding methodology, personal experiences, concerns, and questions;
• International in scope, since we are all interconnected more now than ever, and paranormal phenomena is not restricted to one, particular country;
• Non profit, with no financial or professional interests that would interfere with our primary mission;
• Not a ‘team’ of investigators, but may announce investigations and/or invite participants.

Are you interested in working with me on this project? I will announce here the social media sites and the eventual website for the ISPR. Let me know if you have evidence that you would like to share with us. I am excited to get back into the game and start the search again.

As always,

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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True Paranormal Experience or Work of Creative Imagination? You Decide!

(from The Weather Channel)

The following story is from my book, True and Imagined Stories of the Paranormal: Can You Tell the Difference? Every now and then, I plan to upload to this site a selection of true and imagined stories of the paranormal, and the readers will decide whether or not the events described happened in reality or only in my creative imagination. By “true,” I mean that I have as faithfully as possible recreated events that actually happened to me or come from a reliable and vetted source. Stories that I created may have true elements or make reference to some true events, but are mostly fictional in nature. The purpose of the book is to show the reader what characterizes real experiences, versus the stereotypes and assumptions about what the paranormal is: false stories will be entertaining, yet misleading.

Here is the first story. Did this really happen? You tell me!

“We had entered the old State Hospital countless times before; sometimes, we trespassed. Other times, as my lawyer husband admonished me, it was blatant breaking and entering, a far more serious infraction. On this particular evening, a side door to one of the enormous wings was open. There was no sign telling us not to enter; there was no picking of locks; there was nothing to do but push the door open and feel that cool air envelop us with the peculiar odor of the old hospital: slightly antiseptic with undertones of dust, mold and animal feces. It was the smell that defined the place; should I live a 150 years, I would never forget that odd combination of old hospital and decay.

Marcy, Kathy and I were seasoned investigators at this point in our lives. We had dedicated the last 12 years to the dogged pursuit of ghosts, demons, shadow people, spirits of unknown provenance, and anything else that tapped on walls, knocked things over, or whispered strange words into our recorders. These hallways, nurses stations, common areas, patient rooms and storage areas were so familiar as to be like a second home of sorts, and yet, there was never a moment where I wasn’t aware of the presence of something, watching us, following our movements, aware of our wanderings and whispered conversations.

We ended up in a very dark hallway in the middle of a large unit. I was never sure which unit served what purpose. Some of them had multiple uses over the decades, and others had never strayed from their original function as giant warehouses for the insane, the disabled, the outcasts, the drug addicts, or even the unfortunate immigrant or divorcee whose husband had declared her neurotic. The units that had been abandoned when the hospital closed in 1997 were the most ‘atmospheric’, retaining a heaviness and despair from hundreds, if not thousands, of confused, unhappy, frightened patients, many of whom are still wandering the streets of the local communities. There were many deaths in those buildings. There was state sanctioned torture in the name of psychiatry. And yes, there were people happy to be there that were protected and well treated. It was a complex mixture of emotions that left its mark in the very walls of the units, a permanent recording of human trauma and fear that replays itself endlessly. I don’t think peace or happiness are trapped in homes or buildings; those emotions go with you to the next life.

In the middle of this dismally dark hallway, Marcy stops and sets up various devices. The devices record anomalies, strange words, and changes in EMF and temperature. This is to be expected, of course, in a place like this. As a group, however, we have grown weary of our typical questions (‘can you hear me?’ ‘What year is it’?) and requests (‘tap three times if you can see me’, ‘knock on the walls,’ ‘make a noise so that we know where you are’), so we decide that we are going to take a different approach. Marcy asks it the thing in the hallway would like to play a game. This always makes me nervous, because I rarely sense the presence of children, and she frequently does. Not only does this mean we are attuned to different energies, it implies for me that she is opening up her tender heart to a child spirit that, for me, is a dirty, crazy old man who feels an attraction to her that is not at all innocent. I am scared, and Marcy is excited. I ‘see’ this energy in the hallway as someone who is toying with us. Yes, he taps on the walls, and yes, he has made some indistinct noise that raises my blood pressure; but, I don’t think that this is cooperation or sincere interest. This is his opportunity to lure us into an unhealthy interaction that will make me sick later. “Let’s play hide and seek!” Marcy cries out into the black hallway; “I’m going to hide and you’re going to find me!” Or, “you’re going to hide, and I’m going to find you!” I wasn’t paying much attention to the specifics of the rules, because the game unnerved me.

So Marcy hides behind a wall near a nurses’ station. She counts to ten. All I am aware of is my nausea and my fear, because it feels more and more obvious to me that this entity, this energy, or whatever it is, will not play any game without exacting a price. Shortly after Marcy says “ten,” there is an astonishingly clear noise: it’s a shower curtain being pulled aside on a metal bar. I know that sound, because we had been in one of the old, turquoise bathrooms before we started to investigate. The bathtub–suspiciously clean after all these decades–had a metal bar around the top where the shower curtain hung from shower curtain roller rings. They looked like this:

The curtain itself was open when we first entered the bathroom. After we heard the distinctive noise of the shower curtain opening–which is the noise that the roller rings make when moving across a metal shower rod–we ran back to that bathroom in a state of total shock, only to notice that the shower curtain was now drawn around the bathtub. Someone had moved it. Someone was hiding from Marcy, just as she had requested.

After the initial excitement wore off, we of course wanted to replay the recording of the voice. We heard it, clear as day. And then, something happened that I find mysterious, a quite frequent phenomenon: when we attempted to clip and send the file with the sound, we could no longer clearly hear it. We assume that it’s about compressing the file and sending it to an email address that degrades the quality of the audio. However, there is something more at work here. Countless EVP (electronic voice phenomena) degrades over time even when you listen to the same clip on the same computer using the same software. A voice that the entire team heard clearly the first few times it is played begins a slow and inexorable transformation over time until doubt creeps in about its veracity or intelligibility, and even the best EVP can end up as mere question marks.

We exited the building and wandered around the overgrown courtyards, following the trails of decay and entropy. I had that feeling again that we had been manipulated or simply drained by something that was intelligent enough to play a game. I felt that he was an older man who was stuck in Camarillo for crimes of a sexual, deviant nature. He was not someone who could be rehabilitated or released. He was thrilled that three women were paying attention to him and affording him the opportunity to interact with us, and yet his intention was dark. What would he have done in this afterlife state, this life of a fragmented consciousness, this self expression as instinct and pure id? All he could do, I think, was to trick us and invade our awareness, knowing as he did that we wanted contact, any contact. Once he was in our minds, in our consciousness, he could play there.

Ghosts require energy and an audience that is eager to connect. No matter who they are, they can suck the life force right out of you, as if you were a living battery. I’m not sure that Marcy agreed with me regarding the identity of this entity, and Kathy liked to keep a critical distance from such inquiries and identifications, because once you formulate an image of who is responsible for noises and feelings, you have strayed into the territory of mediums and channelers, and Kathy is comfortable with neither. It is probably folly to attempt to identify the spirit that has entered your space, unless you have a strong, instinctual response to their energy. I have certain physical responses to children, to teenagers, to men and women, and especially to creepy sociopaths. I can sense that presence from a mile away in either the living or the dead.

The next day, I had a headache, extreme fatigue, and slight vertigo. I was just sick enough to know that I had run into someone from whom I would have run like mad, had I met him in the flesh. This observation always begs the question: why do we want contact with someone in spirit who we would avoid at all costs in the flesh? Of course, one often doesn’t know who you have come into contact with until it’s too late, after you’ve engaged him. It’s a little like carrying on an intimate conversation with someone in a dark room who can disguise their voice and speaks in riddles. It’s a dangerous practice, one fueled by endless curiosity and the thrill of the hunt.

The problem with that is that we–the ones who seek out such contact–are the ones who are captured in the end. We end up in cages of confusion and partial answers, speculations and strange emotions, wondering if someone we couldn’t see might have taken up residence in an abandoned and dark corner of our souls.”

Was this a story based on true events? Or is this a cleverly crafted ghost story designed to sound true? You be the judge.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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Another Attack on Parapsychology: “Psychology Today” Debunks All Ghost Sightings Throughout Recorded History !!!

Every now and then, I like to dust off my critical mind and find an article that–yet again!–seeks to describe all paranormal phenomena as a by product of brain functions, ‘stress’, or some other physical or psychological glitch in the system. The latest assault on the paranormal comes from this source, which you are welcome to read in its entirety should you feel inspired: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/201507/why-some-people-see-ghosts-and-other-apparitions

Here is a quote that I find interesting yet dismaying: “A recent study by Kirsten Barnes and Nicholas Gibson (2013) explored the differences between individuals who have never had a paranormal experience and those who have. They confirmed that experiences of supernatural phenomena are most likely to occur in threatening or ambiguous environments, and they also found that those who had paranormal experiences scored higher on scales measuring empathy and a tendency to become deeply absorbed in one’s own subjective experience.”

One of the most common assumptions of scientists and psychologists when dealing with anomalous experiences is that the environment or the brain itself PRODUCES the paranormal experience. There are so many variations on this assumption: blind spots create the effect of seeing something out of the corner of your eye; variations in the electromagnetic field produce the feeling of a presence or being watched; variations in infrasound create feelings of doom or dread; sleep paralysis and the hypnagogic state bring our dreams into reality; or environmental contaminants make us hallucinate. The article under discussion here states that both stressful and boring environments create the necessary conditions for the brain to hallucinate ghosts. If you are a sensitive person, an empath, or simply prone to self analysis, your brain will supply you with visions. The problem with this hypothesis should be fairly clear, but allow me to break down my objections:

1. Instead of assuming that conditions and brain states CREATE the paranormal experience, it is more likely that the proper CONDITIONS lead to the ability to perceive non-ordinary realities and presences. You can study the brains of meditators and mystics and exclaim that the changes you see in their brains have created their visions, or you can conclude that the changes in their brains are the result of sustained and focused connection with “God” or the world of spirit. The brain changes are the result of their spiritual practices, not the cause.
2. The same can be said for people who enter trance states, ingest psychedelic substances, engage in intense religious rituals, or in any other way alter their consciousness with the express intent to contact the world of spirit. Yes, the brain changes in response to the substance, activity or intention of the participant in any kind of ritual, because the brain is accommodating and facilitating the connection, not creating it.
3. This does not mean that you can’t genuinely hallucinate while under the influence of drugs, carbon monoxide, or some other physical agent. What’s the difference? In genuine cases of spiritual contact, there is logic, emotional impact, a sense of the divine, a coherent story, or the fulfillment of one’s deepest intentions. There is, in other words, a sense of the holy or sacred that accompanies one’s vision, a transcendence that serves to elevate the experience to another level of reality and often ends up changing the life of the person who has witnessed or sensed the presence. I have, unfortunately, endured an episode of carbon monoxide poisoning when I was a teenager in Spain–I woke up disoriented, confused, and seeing strange things. I knew immediately that this was not ‘paranormal’, but something that was sickening me in body and mind. I have also had multiple surgeries where I struggled through the effects of anesthesia and other drugs, and it was always clear that those effects were not at all supernatural due to their chaotic and irrational nature. There is simply no way to compare the effects of drugs and poison to a true, spiritual experience that leaves you in awe.
4. And, finally, to reduce spiritual experiences to brain effects or environmental stresses completely ignores centuries of human experiences of the holy and the uncanny. If you reduce the power of religion to, for example, the stress Jesus felt while wandering through the desert, you have denied the most powerful aspect of humanity: our ability to connect to higher realities and transmit those messages to others.

Our brains serve as a sort of ‘reducing valve’ for an overwhelming amount of information that we cannot possibly process in its entirety. This quote from Aldous Huxley is quite famous in certain spiritual circles:

“Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. […]

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.” https://www.ianmack.com/aldous-huxley-dont-mistake-the-trickle-for-ultimate-reality/

And yes, Huxley wrote this after his experiments with mescaline; and yet, think about it: there is infinitely more information ‘out there’ than we are able to process. If some event, circumstance, drug, or stressor hampers the brain’s ability to filter out the greater reality, extra information can sneak past the gates and flood us with ‘paranormal’ experiences: messages from the gods or from God, spirit contact, or the ability to perceive what is normally blocked from view. How do we know what is ‘real’ and what is the result of a brain on overload? “By their fruits you shall know them”: this refers to false prophets, but it could easily refer to false messages or hallucinations. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit; likewise, true spiritual contact, ‘real’ paranormal experiences, are life changing and profound.

I have not mentioned the fact that documented and verifiable paranormal experiences are abundant and well researched. The Society for Psychical Research, for example, has published volumes of excellent evidence for the existence of ‘ghosts’, telepathy, near death experiences, mediumship, out of body experiences, and so much more. The SPR has been around since 1882 and included some of the most prominent and respected scientists of their time. Their work continues today. Gary Schwartz in the Department of Psychology at the University of Arizona has carried out fascinating experiments in afterlife communication. I could go on and on, but the point is: before one decides what is ‘science’ and what is not, you must do your research. There are centuries of evidence that spiritual energy is real and communicates with us on a regular basis. You don’t need to be an empath to receive these communications, but you do need to allow that such experiences are possible; if you block the full range of human consciousness with your materialism in the name of science, you lose the most profound aspect of our humanity: our connection to spirit.

The end of the article offers advice for the psychologist faced with the patient reporting paranormal contact:

“There are really only three possibilities:

1. The event really happened, just as the person has reported.
2. The person believes that the event has really happened, but it has not.
3. The person is fabricating a story for some reason.”

I am not entirely sure how the psychologist would know that the event has not really happened, in the case of the second scenario. I would recommend option number 1, assuming that there is no serious mental illness present (although, some argue that schizophrenia, for example, is simply a case of a reducing valve that does not work well and allows too much information in without context or intention).

In the end, we simply cannot assume that we have access to the full display of reality that the Universe contains. Some of our brains are more plastic, more open, than others, for a multitude of reasons. Why not treat those people for whom the larger realities intrude as wise instead of crazy? Why not see what doors open for psychology and science when this extra information flows through freely, without judgment or skepticism? And, of course, why not educate yourselves in the rich history of the ‘paranormal’ and realize that the science is, actually, already settled?

—Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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Do You Need a F$%&*$ Degree to Be a Paranormal Expert?

Is this shameless self promotion on my part, bragging about my degree? Well, sure it is! I worked my ass off to get this PhD, and I’m damn proud of it. Why post this now? There are some articles circulating on social media sites debating whether or not one needs ‘fancy letters’ after one’s name in order to be a published expert on the paranormal. Before I go any further, my degree is not in the ‘paranormal’ because, as I will elucidate, there ARE NO DEGREES IN THE PARANORMAL. My degree is in Spanish literature, culture and language with a minor in Portuguese. My degree, however, did prepare me to conduct research into survival of consciousness, but first things first.

1) There are no ‘experts’ on the paranormal. What makes an expert? Usually a degree in your field (yup, those fancy letters again), articles in peer reviewed journals, the respect of your colleagues, and a solid reputation in academic or institutional circles. In other words, a community of your peers decides whether or not you’re an expert. The study of the paranormal at the moment lacks a rigorous curriculum of study with experts in the field. There is no formal degree in the paranormal. The closest you can get is the University of Arizona, the University of Virginia and the University of Edinburgh. Those universities have “divisions,” usually housed within the Psychology Department, that explore such anomalies as ESP, transpersonal awareness, survival of consciousness, the study of mediumship and reincarnation. You can’t obtain a “degree” in the paranormal; you have to get the PhD within the department of psychology or psychiatry first, and that requires taking a ton of basic, academic courses in the discipline. You are not, when you graduate, an “expert” in the paranormal, but a trained psychologist whose research interests delve into the so-called ‘paranormal.’

2) You can be well respected in paranormal community outside of higher education, but you give something up. What do you give up? The respect of academia and the larger culture, which still recognizes education and degrees as necessary for expertise in a subject. Are there idiotic professors with fancy letters after their name? OF COURSE. There are people who can find ways to earn a PhD without any original or interesting thinking on their part. It is entirely possible to spend several years slavishly imitating whatever your professors tell you just so you can get that degree, and once you have it, you can endlessly repeat what others have told you and never really accomplish anything of value. That is true in every, single profession. Letters after your name do not make you talented, original or your work worth reading. But it does mean this: You worked hard for something you wanted. You took years’ worth of courses, you read hundreds of books, you wrote countless papers, your had to research your topic at 3:00 AM in the all-night section of your university library, you gave up your social life while you studied for oral comprehensive exams, you almost passed out from exhaustion writing your 500 page dissertation . . . I could go on and on. If you received your PhD from a legitimate institution of higher learning, then there were blood, sweat and tears involved.

3) Any degree from a college or university should mean that you know how to conduct research and think critically. THIS IS IMPORTANT. Since there is no formal degree in parapsychology that I am aware of, there is a HUGE benefit to a BA, MA and/or PhD in another field. You learn how to approach a topic critically and you understand what is necessary to conduct formal research. You read and read and read and read and read everything you can get your hands on. You know all about the Society for Psychical Research and can name most of the founding members. You are a member of the ASPR. There are many things you can do right now to improve your level of expertise in the paranormal, with or without a degree. If you want to take your education into your own hands, go for it. However, if you are not actively conducting research and reading the ‘paranormal canon’ of great works, then you will end up going in circles with the weirdness of what you’re experiencing on investigations. You need a theory. In order to come up with a theory, or various theories, you need to educate yourself first.

4) Look, nobody needs a degree to investigate a haunted site. I get that. Nobody needs to read in order to collect a million audio clips. Nobody needs to study the history of a place or catch up on quantum theory in order to do a Ghost Box session. Here is the problem with all this investigating without studying: you will amass hundreds, thousands, of audio clips, photos, video clips and so on without any kind of supporting theory to explain it. You will end up a collector of random bits of information without telling your audience what it might mean on a larger, philosophical level. You need History, Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and the Humanities to understand the enormity of what you are stumbling across in the dark. It’s important what you are all doing; IT IS TOO IMPORTANT TO DO AS A HOBBY. You need commitment, you need to read, you need to think. I don’t care if you have a fancy degree, but you do need an education.

I do care that you find answers for us all, answers that are not repetitive, vainglorious or frivolous. Dive down into the meaning of the mystery, however you can, and share what you find with the rest of us.

That’s what truly matters.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD
Yale University, 1992

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