(Photo courtesy of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society)
Written by Colleen Bement, Editor
It’s an ongoing joke that people ask us: Do you talk to the dead? The answer is all of the time. They don’t answer, but that time they did!
Paranormal Research Experts Robert Lewis and Bryan Bonner were on hand at the Colorado Festival of Horror Sept. 15-17, 2023 to meet their fans and chat about ghosts. These experts work to help people who have been scared by unexplained occurrences in homes and businesses. With science on their side, they conduct experiments and investigate ghosts, aliens, cryptids, and all manner of bizarre claims and happenings in Colorado and beyond. They have researched and documented some of the best paranormal stories in the world. They actually work with medical doctors, psychologists, geologists, physicists, astrophysicists, and astrobiologists! They look to educate the public through humor, creativity, and compassion
Robert and Bryan premiered their new book Case Files of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society: Vol 1 at COFOH. Some of the cases are solved and others remain deep mysteries, but all are both entertaining and informative. Whether you like ghosts, aliens, monsters, history, science, or all of the above, these case files have something sure to please, and perhaps even to bring a chill to your spine. Missed your chance to pick up your copy? Fear not. Grab your volume from their website.
Colleen Bement: I’ve always been a bit skeptical of paranormal stories. Clearly the paranormal is real. How do you investigate to determine what’s real and what’s our imagination?
Robert & Bryan: It depends on what the claim is. I think the philosophy would be where to start. It’s what you just said: Skeptical but open-minded. The real sense of the word, and not the corruption that some people make it out to be. When a case is presented, let’s say it’s a ghost story, we have to say maybe there’s a ghost there, and maybe there’s not. We have go to in completely neutrally and figure it out. We’re going to look for the natural explanation. If there is one, and sometimes we find one. We have cases where we’ve been able to explain that everything was faulty plumbing or loose floorboards. There are others where we have not figured everything out and the ghost has never walked up and introduced himself so we can never say yes, that was a ghost.
CB: That would sure be helpful!
Robert & Bryan: There have been some things that we have not yet been able to explain, and we just scratch our heads and say maybe it’s something. I think that’s something that separates us from the rest of the pack. You’ve got the cynics on both sides. He either absolutely believes or absolutely doesn’t. First, they go in to prove or disprove it, which is not science, but then on top of that, we know it’s OK to stop and say I don’t know. We’ll keep investigating, and we’ll call in experts on whatever we can think of, but sometimes we just have to say I don’t know and we’ll keep trying. Hopefully, we’ll figure it out.
CB: So, you’ll tell the truth that you really don’t know?
Robert & Bryan: We’ll still repeat the ghost story because it’s part of the folklore. It’s valuable and it becomes part of the history of the location. But we’re not going to say it’s absolutely true. We’re going to say, this is the story, and here is what we’ve been able to figure out what it is or isn’t. I think it was Richard Dawkins who said it’s important to be open-minded, but not so open-minded that your brains drop out.
CB: What project do you have in the works?
Robert & Bryan: A lot of them. The big thing right now is our book is out. We’ve got the COFOH limited edition, and regular copies paperback, ebook, everywhere. Case Files of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society: Vol 1. It’s published by my publishing house which is Polymath Press. It can be found at Polymathpress.com, it’s also on Amazon, and at Barnes and Noble. It’s kind of interesting that we’ve been able to do this as a special COFOH event. Now that it’s out, we’ve got the ongoing investigations that we do, and it’s been kind of non-stop over the decades.
We have a podcast that is roughly weekly. It’s “Do You Like Scary Movies” at doyoulikescarymovies.com. I’m still flabbergasted that we got that domain. With that, we interview all aspects of the bizarre: Authors, filmmakers, actors, musicians, artists. Basically, it’s a little different from your other horror podcasts. We aren’t there just to say tell me about this movie, we’re trying to look at the background. What happened behind the scenes and what aren’t you telling people who are interested? We’re trying to get a different perspective. I’ve had a lot of people come to me say you know, I’ve listened to all of them and they say, you guys really aim at the background. We feel like we were there when they were making the movie after we listened to it. It wasn’t necessarily intentional. We were just talking to interesting people and those were the stories that we wanted to hear.
CB: What was the most haunted location that you have ever experienced?
Robert & Bryan: There are a lot that stand out for different reasons. I would say for genuine creep factor, always something bizarre happening there, there’s a place up in Evergreen called Brook Forest Inn. We’ve spent about 10-15 years going to that same location, and it never failed to pay off with something. Usually noises, which when you realize that you’re halfway up the mountainside and there’s not a lot around, and you hear people talking–just weird. Another one that would stand out would be Cheesman Park. In terms of our investigations, nothing happened. But, it’s such a rich history, and when they accidentally unearthed some of the bodies from when it was a cemetery, we caught wind of it and brought in a forensic anthropologist from a university and got to document studying some of the skeletons. So in terms of the history, that’s one of my favorites. That one’s in our book. There are photos of all of the skeletons in the book.
That’s kind of an ongoing joke that people ask us is do you talk to the dead? The answer is all of the time. They don’t answer, but that time they did. We got to work with these skeletons and figure out a little bit about who they were, a little bit of their history, and that’s unique. You don’t get to do that in the paranormal field, but we’re insane and we drag all kinds of scientific things into the paranormal that normally wouldn’t be considered part of the research. How do we get ourselves into this? More to come with that, I guess.
CB: How long have you been doing this?
Robert & Bryan: About 25 years.
CB: Let’s say someone hires you, and you show up, what are some of the first things that you do?
Robert & Bryan: It’s a case by case, but in general, ask them to keep a diary documenting when things are happening so that we have a frame of reference. Once we go in, we photograph everything. Not just the places where they say something’s happening, but everything so we have a reference of anything that might come up. We’ll use a seismometer to see if there are vibrations, electromagnetic field meters, temperature, and all the gizmos we carry around. Then it depends on what the claim is. If the claim is “sounds,” we’ll going to put more microphones in. If the claim is cold spots, we’ll put more thermometers, and work with whatever they think is happening.
CB: How can people reach you:
Robert & Bryan: Rockymountainparanormal.com has all of the information. They can hit us up on any of the social media.
Order your copy of the book. Listen to their podcasts, and tell them your ghost stories! For more information about Case Files of the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society: Vol 1.
Within these pages, you’ll learn not only the ghostly and paranormal stories but the histories of the allegedly haunted locations and the methods Rocky Mountain Paranormal uses to get to the bottom of some of the world’s strangest phenomena. Included in this volume:
- *How Rocky Mountain Paranormal involved multiple departments of the United States Federal government in a paranormal investigation
- *The haunting of an active nuclear military base
- *A paranormal investigation inside a jail
- *A paranormal investigation deep inside a cave
- *A location that is still home to thousands of unidentified human bodies—and how Rocky Mountain Paranormal worked to tell their stories
- *Colorado’s own vampire legend
- *The time one of our investigators got slapped by an unseen entity
- *The inspiration behind a classic horror movie
- *And many more!
Some of the cases are solved and others remain deep mysteries, but all are both entertaining and informative. Whether you like ghosts, aliens, monsters, history, science, or all of the above, these case files have something sure to please, and perhaps even to bring a chill to your spine.
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