The Jedi Teachings of Master Joe Nickell

As I've mentioned before, I'm very interested in learning how to become a paranormal investigator of the scientific kind. So to that end I attended a Joe Nickell workshop at TAM7. Mr. Nickell is in his fourth decade of investigating mysteries. He is the only salaried paranormal investigator in the world. Sadly, he declined my offer to serve as his apprentice citing a lack of funds to pay me with but I would gladly do it for free if I could find a way to get to New York. I would love to tag along with him to even just one of his investigations.

I learned much from his workshop and took away many things to mull over. Mr. Nickell investigates with the goal of solving the mystery. This is in contrast to those he calls mystery mongers who try to find "evidence" to support their pre-existing notions such as those on the television show "Paranormal State" which I discussed in an earlier post. He talked about a case he solved early on. That of Mackenzie House in Toronto, Ontario. This house is reputed to be one of the most haunted locations in Canada. Why it still is considered as such is odd since Joe Nickell discovered the cause of the "haunting" and it wasn't ghosts. Some strange occurrences in the house included footsteps on the stairs when the house was empty and the doors were locked, the long dormant printing press in the basement was heard clanking and clicking and the resident saw the figure of a man at the foot of her bed. How does one explain these bizarre goings on? Mr. Nickell asked those attending the workshop if anyone would be interested in knowing that there is a publishing company next door to the house. The room buzzed with ah-has and hands went up in the air. It is then that Mr. Nickell suggested two things. The first being "think slower". Skeptics are prone to jumping to conclusions that point to an obvious answer to what may be causing a certain phenomena. How to remedy this? The second suggestion of course, which was go to the site to carry out a thorough investigation. This revealed that the publishing company next door actually had no printing presses. So much for that explanation and it really highlights the think slower advice.

So how do we proceed from here? To make a long story short, it turns out that Mackenzie House has another house next door attached directly to it. The stairwell in this neighboring house was right on the other side of the wall from the Mackenzie House stairwell. Perhaps you could quite clearly hear when the neighbors are walking up and down the stairs. So Mr. Nickell went next door and spoke with the caretaker there who had been chuckling to himself for the last ten years. He knew perfectly well that his and his family's movements were causing all the alarm next door. They also had carts with metal garbage cans that when pulled along the concrete basement floor sounded suspiciously like a printing press clanking merrily away. It's not that he was perpetrating some sort of elaborate hoax but he just didn't feel that it was his place to rain on their parade. Mr. Nickell asked him if anyone else had been by and the caretaker informed him that no one had ever been next door to enquire. Ever! Of course the mystery mongers are never convinced. It's impossible to know, they say, that every time footsteps were heard on the stairs that someone was walking up or down the stairs next door. Oh dear.

How to explain the man at the foot of the bed? People can have something called a waking dream. There are two types of waking dreams: The hypnagogic state which is the state between being awake and falling asleep. The hypnopompic state which is the transition state of semiconciousness between sleeping and waking. Both of these states can cause visual and auditory hallucination for some people. In some cases there is sleep paralysis which, while in one the states above, you feel paralysed. This is a good reason for many people feeling as though they have been abducted by aliens. I have had both a hypnopompic and sleep paralysis experience myself. I'll tell you about them sometime. So can this be an explanation to the ghostly figure? Likely, but that brings me to another thing Mr. Nickell talked about.

Occam's Razor. A term every skeptic is familiar with. This is just a fancy way of saying that when looking for an explanation for something unexplained, we should look at the explanation that makes the least assumptions. Put it this way, when you wake up and see a figure standing in your room it could either be you having a vivid waking dream or there is actually a dead person's spirit standing there with nothing better to do then to hang out and watch you sleep. Which one makes the least assumptions? Think about it.

Now that I've talked that story to death, there are two more things that stand out from the workshop. People make logical fallacies all the time and as skeptics, we must be aware of them and avoid them ourselves. One of the fallacies that believers fall into all the time without realizing it is "ad ignorantium" or "argument from ignorance". This just boils down to someone saying "I DON'T know what is was so therefore I DO know what it was." Make sense? Good. This also ties into the burden of proof that I talked about in a previous post as well. Another thing Mr. Nickell warned about was to be careful of not shifting the burden of proof. Proving the claim lies with the person making the claim. Period.

The last thing that I found very important was a lesson that many hard headed skeptics fail at. Most people who believe that their house is haunted or that they've seen a lake monster or believe in psychics, aren't crazy, drunk or lying. They are usually normal, intelligent people who are victims of hack shows like "Ghost Hunters", "Paranormal State" or "Psychic Detectives." We must be respectful and courteous at all times. Restraint from rash judgments and conclusions is of the utmost importance when dealing with things that are often very emotional and deeply affect the people involved. I believe I already practice this but it is something that I will keep at the forefront.

Mr. Nickell also shared the fact that he has made many mistakes over the years and that sort of scares me. I hate making mistakes, as I'm sure everyone does, but it would be more difficult with the high stakes involved and the mystery mongers waiting to tear you apart. I guess mistakes are inevitable and all one can do is learn from them.

I asked Mr. Nickell how one gets started with a career in paranormal investigating and he said to read his books. While this may sound like a cheesy pitch I actually agreed with that before I even met him. So I bought two books at TAM and intend to start there. Wish me luck.