BU students learn about paranormal activity wrote:Wednesday, November 15, 2006

By Mónica Ortiz Uribe

Tribune-Herald staff writer

The night was dark, desolate, the air still as death, and floating above the Old Alton bridge was a ghostly orange cloud — potential proof of the paranormal realm.

All in a day’s work for Rick Moran and his clan of real-life ghost busters, who Tuesday visited a Baylor University class that is studying “extreme deviants.”

Moran is currently researching a supposedly haunted bridge in Denton County.

“I don’t really believe in the paranormal,” said senior Mark Bowden, one of a few skeptics in the class. “It can’t be proven, I guess.”

Moran, a former New York City police officer and freelance journalist, used to be a skeptic himself. That is, until his first encounter with the inexplicable.

While working on an article about a haunted building at New York University, Moran asked aloud for the ghost to come down and say hello.

Not 10 seconds later, a portrait of the alleged ghost in life came crashing down from a wall, breaking into hundreds of pieces on the floor, he told the class.

From that moment, he learned to “stop ticking off the ghosts,” he said

Moran heads the Association for the Study of Unexplained Phenomenon, a group of volunteer researchers whose name is self-explanatory.

A stretch from the norm

Christopher Bader, assistant professor for the Baylor Department of Sociology, said he wanted to create a fun class that would open students’ minds to belief systems that are a stretch from the norm.

Bader was one of the authors of “American Piety in the 21st Century,” a Baylor study published this year on where Americans stand on religion.

This is the first time the class is being offered, and students have studied social and behavioral deviants in sexuality, the workplace and not-so-strange situations such as riding on a plane and eating.

On the first day of class, he presented students with a case of cannibalism in Germany in which the victim willingly participated.

That got their attention, Bader said.

Moran told Bader’s students in a dimly lit classroom about his experience researching the Mothman prophecies in Pleasant Point, W.Va., where residents claimed to have seen an 8-foot flying creature with blood-red eyes and mothlike wings.

Moran said a scene in a movie based on the Mothman was taken directly from his own experience when he and his family received eerie phone calls from an unknown source.

“I think it’s interesting to learn all the different beliefs people have and sometimes have to keep to themselves because the conventions of society,” sociology major Erin Mason said.

“I don’t doubt (unexplained phenomenon) happen.”

Moran hopes his research won’t be considered far-fetched and outlandish in the future, and that someday someone will find a way to explain all of the evidence he and his team have collected.

“I’m naturally a very curious person,” he said.

“I’m looking for answers.”

Out-of-this-world response to online ghost hunt wrote:Australian paranormal investigators on Thursday claimed an out-of-this-world response to a global ghost hunt to expand an eerie but under-explored body of knowledge.

Tapping into an explosion of interest in phenomena that defy scientific explanation, researchers from Australia's Monash University set up an online survey to assess their impact on individuals and society.

About 2 000 people had made contact via the internet since the survey began six weeks ago, with 96% claiming to have had at least one brush with the paranormal, study supervisor Beverley Jane told Agence France-Presse.

"By paranormal we mean those events that cannot be explained using the current laws of science," said Rosemary Breen, who will use the results as part of an academic study into supernatural occurrences.

"[The paranormal] is now considered mainstream and part of everyday contemporary life for many people."

The exercise seeks to gauge the frequency, effect and age of onset of unexplained phenomena such as premonitions, out-of-body and near-death episodes, telepathy and apparitions.

Results to date showed 70% of respondents believed an unexplained event changed their lives, mostly in a positive way.

About 70% also claimed to have seen, heard or been touched by animal or person that wasn't there, 80% reported having had a premonition, and almost 50% recalled a previous life.

"The respondents are sincere and they want to report what they have experienced," Jane said.

She said she was amazed by the strong response on such a sensitive subject, and put this down the spectral study's virtual nature.

"People can do it in the privacy of their homes instead of in front of the researcher, so they can answer honestly," she said.

While the survey was anonymous, some people later sent e-mails with their contact details, Jane said.

She denied the study sought to assess respondents' mental health, but said it did offer people the chance to tell somebody about experiences they would normally keep to themselves.