Read Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown Online
Authors: Stefan Petrucha,Ryan Buell
Paranormal State: My Journey into the Unknown
MY JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
PARANORMAL
STATE
RYAN BUELL
AND STEFAN PETRUCHA
This book is dedicated to all members of my family and friends that supported me and my unusual obsession in to the unknown all these years:
To Mom (Shelly), Herb, and Dad (Tim): Thank you for your love and support.
To Grammer, to whom I promised at a young age that I would dedicate my first book.
To Gramma and Grampa Buell: All those years of watching
Scooby-Doo!
undoubtedly had an effect.
To Christina, for being my first paranormal partner in crime.
To Lorraine Warren, for being an inspirational mentor.
To Penn State: Thank you for tolerating my weirdness.
To Josh, Heather, Katrina, and all members of PRS, past and present, for supporting me and helping me along this quest. To Eilfie and Serg: Thank you for being by my side, both through the good times and bad.
To Helen Isenberg, for helping me realize my strengths.
And lastly, to all those who have had experiences with the supernatural and felt alone, this book is for you.
Contents
Chapter 3 - The Storm Before the Storm
Chapter 5 - Finding My Footing in a Rocking Boat
Chapter 7 - The Best-Laid Plans
Chapter 8 - If Only They All Went Like This
Chapter 9 - The Client That Haunted the Ghosts
Chapter 10 - Bored Until the Ghosts Show Up
Chapter 11 - Our First Controversy
Chapter 12 - Demons Inside and Out
Chapter 13 - Blindsided in Elizabethtown
Chapter 17 - We Find Something
Chapter 19 - Out of the Shadows and Into the Limelight
Chapter 20 - Sickness and Suicide
Chapter 22 - In the End, to Honor the Dead
Some journeys change you as you walk them. After taking the first several steps, you can never return to the person you once were. Ryan Buell’s journey started when he was a child. He was the victim of a persistent and malevolent haunting, but when he reached out for help, no one believed him. He felt abandoned, alone, and ignored. Some people would use such an experience as an excuse to become bitter and angry as they grow into adulthood. Others would use it as a reason to resent their parents as well as the society that taught those parents that things such as ghosts could not exist.
But Ryan Buell is not like most people.
He endured his experience, and as he grew older, he transformed his fear into inspiration. He sought answers and he sought allies. More than that, he worked to establish a way to reach out to people in similar situations, to offer them help and support. That work ultimately led him to found the Paranormal Research Society at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. You probably know PRS best as the team of young investigators featured on A&E’s hit,
Paranormal State.
I first met members of the Paranormal Research Society in 2006 at their annual event, UNIV-CON. UNIV-CON is one of the largest paranormal conventions in the country, and it attracts high-profile people from every aspect of the community. It was one of Ryan’s ongoing projects, bringing people from the paranormal community together to dialogue, share ideas, and learn from one another.
Back then, I wasn’t what you’d call high profile, at least not as far as paranormal circles were concerned. In the nineties, I’d done work as a paranormal investigator off and on, but my real focus was psychic development and energy work. I had several books out, and was best known for my work on psychic vampires. As it turned out, PRS’s resident occult expert, Eilfie Music, and tech specialist, Josh Light, were both fans of my writing. I’m not sure which of them was responsible for convincing Ryan that I should give a presentation at UNIV-CON. I’m just glad that they did. It allowed me to meet Ryan and his amazing team.
During that first year of our association, my interactions with Ryan were minimal. To be honest, I was a little ambivalent about meeting him. I’d heard that he was a devout Catholic, and I really wasn’t sure how he’d react to someone like me. Aside from my involvement with psychic vampirism, I’m also a practicing pagan. Neither were widely accepted topics within the paranormal community, so I decided it would be safer to lie low than run afoul of someone else’s sincerely held beliefs. I shouldn’t have worried. Ryan’s approach to religion and the paranormal is one of open-minded tolerance. Of course, the fact that Ryan had two openly pagan members on his team, Eilfie and Josh, should have been a tip-off.
In fact, promoting tolerance was one of the points of UNIV-CON. Ryan had a vision about the future of paranormal research. In order to gain acceptance and understanding for the paranormal, he felt it was necessary for those interested in studying it to accept and understand one another first.
The year 2006 was especially huge for the Paranormal Research Society, not simply because of UNIV-CON’s massive success but also because it was the year that A&E came to the convention to lay the groundwork for
Paranormal State.
I had no idea about that when I showed up, and I’m not even sure it sunk into my head by the end of the convention. Because we had been working in parallel communities that rarely converged, I hadn’t even heard of the Paranormal Research Society. Heck, I was just tickled that this huge paranormal convention was being held—and accepted—at a major college.