By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Your dog suddenly stops in the middle of the hallway, stares at an empty corner, and begins to growl at nothing you can see or hear. Your cat sits at the entrance to a room and refuses to cross the threshold, watching something invisible with focused attention. If you have lived with animals, you have probably experienced some version of this. And if you have any interest in the paranormal, you have almost certainly asked the same

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor At two in the morning, someone types a question into a search engine that they might not ask out loud in daylight. "Do ghosts have unfinished business?" It is a question that comes up in paranormal investigation in different forms. Sometimes a client describes a presence that seems connected to a specific room, a specific corner, or even a specific object. Sometimes there is simply a feeling that whoever was there has not quite lef

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor In the summer of 1982, a five-year-old girl reached her hands up toward a glowing television screen filled with static, a ghostly hand emerged to meet hers, and she said "They're here" in a quiet singsong voice. American audiences decided they were afraid of television static, and they never quite recovered. Poltergeist gave people a picture of what a haunting is supposed to look like. The distressed family in the ordinary suburban

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor My daughter used to wake me up by standing next to my bed and staring at me until I opened my eyes. If you have seen Signs, you know exactly the image that brings to mind. Signs is on my Halloween movie list because it belongs there. But I also have a personal connection to this film that goes deeper than the subject matter, and I think that connection is worth sharing before we get to the crop circles. Because Signs is not really

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor I looked at my client across the farmhouse kitchen and said, with complete confidence, "We are going to Six Sense this." She stared at me. "What does that mean?" "We are going to talk to it," I said. "I will be right there with you. We acknowledge what is here, we tell it this is your home now, we ask for mutual respect. Just like the movie." She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very sincerely, that I had been wonderful to wo

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor It has happened more than once. I will be in the middle of a paranormal investigation or leading a group through a reportedly haunted location, doing what I do, taking readings, asking questions, keeping the energy of the room steady, and someone will pull me aside afterward and say some version of the same thing. "You know who you remind me of? Egon Spengler." I take that as a compliment every time. Egon is, after all, the methodi

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Welcome back to Speaking Paranormal. Years ago, long before I investigated anything, I worked as a host at a funeral home. There was a young man whose brother had died suddenly at work, and who had been the one to find him. He was standing in line waiting to go into the visitation when he came over to me, and he was in shock, though I am not sure he knew it yet. He told me he had not said a word to his family since finding his brot

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor You have just moved in. The boxes are still stacked in the hallway. The furniture is not quite where it belongs yet. The kitchen smells like someone else's cooking, and the walls hold the particular quiet of a space that does not yet recognize you. And then, at two in the morning, you hear something. It could be anything. A creak from the floorboards above you. A sound from the basement that you cannot immediately place. Something

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Welcome back to Speaking Paranormal. If you missed Part One of Speaking Paranormal, you can read it here before diving into today's discussion of the tools and methods that make responsible investigation possible. In Part One, we explored the language investigators use when asking whether something is trying to communicate. EVP, intelligent response, residual haunting. Those terms all circle the same fundamental question: is there

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor First things first. I didn't mean to ghost you. The last several weeks have been consumed by one of life's bigger transitions. After moving into my new home in Pewaukee and getting everything unpacked, blogging had to take a temporary back seat. I am finally settled in, and I have been thinking about what I wanted to write first. The answer came to me surprisingly quickly. Let's talk about a language that every paranormal investiga

A true story from my years working at a funeral home By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Before I became The Paranormal Professor, before the investigations and the keynotes and the book, I worked at a funeral home. I was a host, which meant I held doors open, shook hands, made grieving families feel welcome, and occasionally drove a van to pick up the deceased from airports and transfer facilities across the region. I loved that job. The people I worked with were am

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor I do not tell this story to frighten anyone. I tell it because it is the most important lesson I have learned in fifteen years of paranormal investigation, and I learned it the hard way, in an abandoned cemetery outside Portage, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2011. For a long time I believed that being a good investigator meant knowing how to investigate locations. I knew how to research a site, read its history, document its conditio

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor There is a particular feeling that comes over me when I walk into a room full of people who take these questions seriously. Not the performative version of taking them seriously, the television version with night vision cameras and dramatic music and someone whispering into the darkness. I mean the real version. People who have spent years, sometimes decades, studying, investigating, writing, creating, and thinking carefully about

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor I had just finished speaking. The room had been engaged, the questions were thoughtful, and I was settling into that quiet satisfaction that follows a presentation that lands the way you hoped it would. Then a man approached me, and what he asked stopped me in my tracks. He had heard, he said, that most of the people building artificial intelligence largely do not believe that human beings have souls. He had been sitting with that

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Every few years, someone asks me a version of the same question. "What if ghosts aren't ghosts?" Sometimes they ask if spirits are energy. Sometimes they ask if they are echoes from the past, impressions left in a location the way a voice leaves a vibration in the air. Occasionally someone will ask whether paranormal experiences are actually glimpses into another dimension entirely. And that last version of the question almost alwa

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor The call I received was not unusual by the standards of my work. A man with a large rural property wanted someone to come out and assess what he believed was a supernatural presence on his land. What was unusual was the specificity of his claim. He did not believe he had a ghost. He believed he had a skinwalker, and he believed it was tormenting his dog. I drove out to his property with an open mind, which is the only way I know ho

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Most people encounter ectoplasm for the first time through a 1984 comedy. The image is difficult to shake: Slimer leaving a trail of luminescent green across a hotel hallway, Bill Murray wearing it on his face. The word itself has become shorthand for the cartoonish version of the paranormal, something sticky and fluorescent and safely fictional. But the actual history of ectoplasm is far stranger than anything Hollywood invented,

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor Three in the morning is the hour people mention without thinking. Equipment behaves strangely. Witnesses report an oppressive heaviness in the air. Some people wake from a dead sleep for no apparent reason and find themselves unable to shake the feeling that something in the room has shifted. For decades, paranormal researchers and folklore enthusiasts alike have pointed to 3 A.M. as the witching hour, the moment when the veil betw

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor It started with an email. Most of my research normally does. The subject line was careful, the kind of careful that tells you someone has been rewriting it for a while before finally deciding to send it. She introduced herself briefly, said she had found my website, and asked if I handled cases of a sensitive nature. That word—sensitive—stayed with me. I wrote back and asked if she would be willing to speak by phone. I have always

By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor I remember the sound before anything else. It wasn't something you could place right away. Not a plane, not a storm, not anything familiar. Just a low, steady rhythm moving through the air that made people stop what they were doing and step outside without really knowing why. And when they did, they looked up. Lights were moving across the sky, not scattered, not drifting, but in a formation that didn't belong to anything we were u