National Paranormal Day

Charles Fort spent decades in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Museum, copying down reports of unexplained events from scientific journals and newspapers: rains of fish, spontaneous fires, objects in the sky, creatures that defied classification. His 1919 book, "The Book of the Damned," compiled the evidence that mainstream science rejected. He died on May 3, 1932. National Paranormal Day falls on that date.

The field Fort helped define is far from fringe. According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, 65% of Americans believe in spirits or unseen spiritual forces. A 2024 CivicScience survey found that 41% of US adults believe in ghosts specifically. Paranormal tourism alone is a $32.76 billion global market.

The modern fascination with the paranormal traces to a specific night in 1848. In Hydesville, New York, Maggie and Kate Fox claimed to communicate with the spirit of a dead man through a series of rapping sounds. The demonstration attracted crowds. Within months, public séances were drawing audiences across the northeastern United States. The Spiritualism movement that followed attracted millions of adherents, produced professional mediums, and generated intense debate about whether the dead could communicate with the living.

Maggie Fox confessed in 1888 that the rapping had been a trick, produced by cracking her toe joints. She recanted the confession the following year. By then, it didn't matter. Spiritualism had already changed the culture.

The academic turn

In 1882, a group of Cambridge-educated academics founded the Society for Psychical Research in London, the first organization dedicated to investigating psychic phenomena using scientific methods. The SPR studied telepathy, mesmerism, mediumship, apparitions, and haunted houses. Its founding members included Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney.

In 1930, J.B. Rhine brought the inquiry to the American university system. At Duke University, he founded the Parapsychology Laboratory and developed the Zener card test: a deck of 25 cards with five symbols (circle, cross, wavy lines, square, star), used to test whether subjects could identify hidden cards at rates exceeding chance. Rhine published his findings in "Extra Sensory Perception" in 1934. His work was controversial but brought laboratory controls to a field that had relied on anecdote and séance.

Charles Fort and the catalogue of the unexplained

Between these developments, Charles Fort was compiling something different. Fort was not an investigator in the traditional sense. He was a researcher who spent decades in the New York Public Library and the British Museum, copying down reports from scientific journals of events that didn't fit accepted explanations: rains of frogs, unidentified objects in the sky, spontaneous combustion, creatures that appeared and vanished. His 1919 book "The Book of the Damned" presented this catalogue of rejected data.

Fort died on May 3, 1932. The term "Fortean" — describing any unexplained or anomalous phenomenon — derives from his name. The Fortean Society, founded in his honor, continues today.

Ghost hunting goes mainstream

The 21st century brought paranormal investigation to mass audiences through television. "Ghost Hunters," premiering on Syfy in 2004, followed plumbers Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson investigating reportedly haunted locations with EMF meters and infrared cameras. The show ran for 11 seasons and normalized a hobbyist approach to ghost hunting that had previously existed only in small communities.

The economic impact is measurable. Paranormal tourism reached $32.76 billion globally in 2025. Ghost tours contribute up to 20% of local tourism revenue in cities like Salem, Massachusetts, and Savannah, Georgia. Over 1,200 haunted attractions operate in the United States, generating more than $500 million annually.