Ghost Hunting - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 3/6/23

forty years teaching courses on the subject. He's the Director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations, President of the Forever Family Foundation, and adjunct professor at Atlantic University, and is on the board of directors of the Rhine Research Center, where he teaches online parapsychology courses through their educational center. Currently, you can see him also in episodes of The Unexplained

or Surviving Death on Netflix. His most recent book, that he wrote with the Rich Husseck and Arnold Rudnick, is called Afterlife. Lloyd, Welcome back. I can't believe it's been four years. It hasn't been along. George. Yeah, January of twenty nineteen. You were last on Wow before the pandemic. That's amazing. Been good, been good, been very busy. You

would look like you have been my god. Well, you know, there's a lot of people who wanted online classes, and it's been really great for the Ryan Center to be able to offer the classes we have. Boy, how did you get involved in all of this in Paris psychology in general? Yeah, well, it's an interest that I had since I was a little kid. My dad worked for NBC, so I had a TV set in my room when

I was about two years old and unrestricted watching. I watched shows like Topper and One Step Beyond, you know, both of which really dealt with psychic stuff in the paranormal. And when I was probably about twelve or thirteen, thanks to the TV show Dark Shadows, I was going to the library picking up books on psychic and occult things, and lo and behold, there's science books on Paris psychology right there. So that really put me on the track, and a great track, indeed, because you're one of the

best life friend. Ryan Institute's still doing some work. Yeah, the Ryan Center is doing a bit of work. You know that it was kind of closed down a little bit. They're doing bio energy research looking at how healers and even martial artists might give off bio photons and an increasing amount of energy during the times that they're actually

doing things. And then, of course we're doing a lot more of the educational center and working on a few other projects right now, and this work here, this book called Afterlife, tell us a little bit about this. So Afterlife is the second in a series of novels. They're paranormal mystery novels. We Arnold Rudnick and Rich Hoosek, who both of whom were involved in television when I met met them, actually met Arnold first. We actually came up with the TV series concept which our frankly, our timing

was not great. We were right before the X Files, and people didn't want a paranormal show, and then the X Files came along, then they didn't want a paranormal show, another paranormal show. So eventually we decided to resurrect the characters and Rich as the main writer on the novels, and we based one of the main characters on me. Jennifer Day is loosely based on me. She's a parapsychologist, anthropologist,

college professor, and investigator and also a magician. So those are all things that I do, and then the cases that are underlying the second book not so much the first book. For the second book are actually based on my actual a couple of my actual cases. It's been a really great ride, and I'm making sure that Jennifer's

commentary is all legit parapsychology. Our other character, Nate Rainey, is a cop, was a near death experience in the first book, but he's a skeptic doesn't even buy it, even though his near death experience helps him solve his own shooting. So it's gotten to be a lot of fun and we're in the process of putting a third book together. For you, do you find that the world of parapsychology seems to be growing even more than the forty years ago that you got into this. Well, it

is growing in the general public. You know, you have the whole ghost hunting community that has arisen because of the popularity of the TV shows. People have come out of the woodwork where they're interest in that they can talk about it now, which is different than before, even though many of the investigators were out there really following

TV show protocol and not science. It's been very interesting in that way as far as the field of parasychology, it's grown a little bit because we've gotten even more international, with more folks in Brazil and a few other countries coming into the Parapsychological Association. Unfortunately, the funding has shrunk in the last forty years, and that's very difficult for the field who pulls out. There are a couple foundations

that we're putting out money. At that point in the early eighties it was McDonald Foundation, Jim McDonald's organization, and then the Fetzer Foundation was giving funds out too, and that seems to have dried up right now. The Bill Foundation is the main giver of brants, of bigger grants that are out There. Was this a Fetcher Foundation out of Michigan, Yeah, it was. Yeah. He used on some television stations and at one time on the Detroit Tiger's

baseball team. Yeah, and there's a book about his life that covers his interest in in psychic phenomena. But unfortunately the foundation has gone into a different direction, which is which does happen to funders? Fetzer remember, yeah, John Fetzer's right, Yeah, absolutely. What does parapsychology mean to you? Well, the term is about about the study of psychic phenomena, which covers extrasensory or I like to call it nonsense rey perception because

it really doesn't involve the sense at all. It's not a sixth sense, so it's esp We also look at how the mind, how consciousness directly affects the world around us. We call that psychokinesis or mind over matter. And of course one area that I'm mostly interested in is survival of consciousness beyond the death of body. So those are the areas that are covered. The field to me means it really is a field that studies things that happen with consciousness and things that make us more human or

increase our human potential in many respects. Now, there's a lot of things people can do that we're told we're not supposed to do or we can't do. We're told quite often that it's impossible for an athlete to do X, Y and z, and then until somebody breaks that record and then they have an example. Well, this is the

same kind of thing. These are all abilities or perceptional processes that we have as human beings, but too much of mainstream science, partly because the organized skeptics organizations are afraid to even touch at least in the United States. Is science doing anything like this in different approaches? You know, there is a movement in many fields of science to

try to figure out what consciousness is. Some of those consciousness researchers working everywhere from neuroscience to biology, to philosophy to physics. Some of those folks are looking at our research in our field. Many of them again, because it's academically in the United States, it's taboo to even look at anything to do with parapsychology. So they're coming around, but it's taken a while. Well, there seems to be an explosion of paranormal research groups and yeah, programs like that.

Has it grown. The number of investigative groups has definitely been growing again because of the TV shows. There are some that are very serious, which is really great. And the support for organizations like the Society for Cyclical Research, which is the oldest organization in the world that really takes a scientific approach, has been has been growing. It's

still not phenomenal, but it's been growing. What we see is that we have a lot of people who claim to be doing research or scientific investigations, and when you really look at what they're doing. They are following methods they see on TV which are created by producers more than they are by people. And they need a dramatic ending to the program. Yeah, they need drama in the

program in general. You know, some of the first seasons of ghost Hunters in Paratable State was more about the investigators than it was about the actual process of investigation or or anything like that. And the fact that they actually had it started doing things in the dark because they had Nichide camera is truly an invention of television more than anything else. And in most cases, nothing happens for a long long time, but I seem to condense

it into that thirty minute or hour show. And you kind of have to do that because we have certainly had to wait to do a stakeout to see if

anything's going to happen. But most of the time, when you do an investigation from a more scientific approach, and not every investigation really is a scientific method investigation, sometimes of applying the science we learn in parapsychology, there are things that we do with the witnesses, which who are often ignored in these shows, focusing on them because they are the ones who are having the experience, So we're in some respects setting their experience is more than the phenomena.

And in doing that, what I've certainly found in many of my coologues have found is the phenomena does kind of follow by working with the people who are first reporting it. And in the ghost investigations, what are they looking for, Lloyd, what are the investigators really trying to find? Well, we versus them, I'll tell you that we're trying to There's two things that's going on. We have most of the folks on our fields have an ethical I guess you can say an edict. We follow what is requested

of us. So the majority of people in a residence call for help or explanation, and that's what we're trying to do. The first thing we're trying to do is find for each event that is reported, we're trying to look for an explanation that is not paranormal. Try to

eliminate all of that. So we have a core of what's real, what might really be psychic, And we're trying to see if what people are experiencing, what is coming up in these cases matches the patterns, or fits the patterns, or adds to the evidence that we actually have from previous cases going back over one hundred and forty years.

The TV ghost hunter following groups, the folks who follow those shows are more about getting either an experience, which kind of makes them thrill seekers, or they're going to try to get their so called evidence. And it doesn't matter if you say that, you know, the devices don't detect ghosts. If somebody on TV says this device detect a ghost, that's what they accept. That's what it is. Yeah. I have a friend of mine who sold the house,

but he used to own Forrest Ackerman's place. Oh that's great. And Ackerman, of course is the guy who termed the phrase sci fi. But the place was haunted and they've they've had sessions there, they've had seances, they've had all kinds of things with investigators. And then then he sold it to an artist who loves it. Yeah, there was a documentary made. I think it's Paul Davis. Paul David, Yeah, yeah,

Paul David. Yeah, I've got his book also, An Atheists in Heaven about what he believes is communication was from Forest Ackerman. Really interesting situation. Where does your work go next? Well, you know, I have been both an investigator and an educator for a very very long time, and I'd like to think that I'm helping to produce the next generation

of field of good field investigators. We have a couple of certificate programs we're doing at the Rhyan Center, and you know, I'm still they may not be doing as many investigations of the pandemic kind of shut things down, Although I did have a case that we handled virtually myself and a few of my colleagues during the initial stage of the pandemic. We really don't get a lot

of cases anymore. Most of the ghost hunting groups do much better job with social media and advertising, even though their claims are kind of way out there, but because they are kind of making big claims, they get a lot of seeming cases. We end up getting sometimes the second level where the people have had the local ghost hunting groups come in and now they're freaked out because the ghost hunters freaked them out and didn't help them.

That we're coming in to go to do the opposite, to kind of figure out what's going on and help them as much as possible. I'd like to see myself and my students do a lot more my former students do a lot more investigations to pull them away from the big claiming. I guess posers in many respects. I hate to use that term, yeah, but it is true. Yeah, And I'd like to see more of them get interested.

It's just really a shame that the vast majority of people who call them those ghost centers are paranormal investigators are more about either putting out content on the web. A lot of them used to say that they were making TV pilots, and I think some of them still are claiming that, although now they're going onto YouTube. You know, they want to be famous, like the TV ghost hunters. Sure, and that's not what we care about. Generally, when people go on a ghost hunt, what are they looking for?

What do they want to find? Well, when people the folks who are going on on ghost hunts typically are going to public locations where they again are hoping to get to have an experience or get some so called evidence, which could be anything from an electronic voice phenomena type thing that they think they're getting, to unusual readings on various devices, some of which are actually legit scientific devices,

although they're not always being used properly. And then they're also trying to get other communication through things like the so called ghostbox or spirit boxes and some of these other devices. They're trying to get pictures of orbs, and all of that is I guess say evidence under their belt, although it's not good evidence. Do you believe that the ghost world is part of the dead as opposed to something else? Well, we have two different kinds of categories

of phenomena that we that sometimes get called ghosts. One are the ghost true true spirits or ghosts or what we use term as apparition, which seems to be indications that people's consciousness can survive the death of the body, and some instances they seem to stick around here besides moving on to wherever it is you go next. And there are some very good cases, certainly cases I've had are very very good that don't have another explanation at least as far as we've been able to figure out,

and that indicates that consciousness that survived death. It's one of many types of evidence that we have for that phenomena that survival exists. Hauntings are the imprints we leave impressions behind, we leave emotions behind. It seems like the environment seem records our activity, our emotions, and that's the majority of the kinds of things that people report when they say their houses are haunted, that they're picking up

something themselves. They know, everybody's a little psychic, so some people are picking up things that happen in their homes or people that were in their homes, including possibly even impressions of their own activity in the past, and that often gets mistaken as spirits, as ghosts, that's much more common.

What about things like hell those kinds of things do they exist well, Heaven and hell are religious concepts or, depending on the part of the world or culture, might be a mythological concept, and there's variations of what those things are. We in the field of parapsychology, we don't

use those terms. There doesn't seem to be really good evidence from the perspective of the people who seem to be communicating with spirits on the other side, whatever you want to call that other side, it's not a hellish landscape. It's not that. In fact, I remember one medium telling me that she when communicating with spirits, she was told that the hell that they run into is they are confronted where they're kind of a life review and all the good and bad things that they had in their lives.

And for some people that might be helped if you remembered everything you ever did, especially the bad things you did. But there's not like a place that seems to come through. And we don't really have any good evidence in the cases that have come up in the experiences people have had unless you put a religious spin on them. And then it depends on the religion that we're talking about, because the same experience could be interpreted completely differently by

people coming from different religious traditions. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more