By: Cody Sharpe
Trust me, the irony is not lost on me, a cis-gendered male, writing about how males dominate the paranormal community. I am using my platform to share the stories of those that deserve to be at the forefront of the community. Writing for Paranormality Magazine, I have the privilege and honor of writing for a female owned company. These stories in this article here are part of a series of strong lead women in the paranormal community and their positive attitudes to bringing change to the community.
For my first interview for this series, I found myself driving 45 minutes from my house to meet up with this paranormal investigator at an antique shop in North Manchester, Indiana. It was a very warm Saturday afternoon in the beginning of June, while on my drive, I did however drive right through a much needed thunderstorm full of rain, hail, and wind. For you readers at home, this was foreshadowing for the night ahead. I pulled up to this very cute antique shop which used to house the local Order of Knights of Pythias. I walk into the shop and I am greeted by the owner of The Shabby Owl and her husband. My interviewee had not arrived yet and in the meantime I was given a nice tour of the building, including the upstairs, where the owners are fixing it up to turn into a spooky AirBnb, I will cover that more in another article. While we were talking in comes my interviewee.
This was the first time that I had met Skye Bowerman in person, I had followed her for awhile on social media and we had carried a few conversations through Facebook Messenger. Her investigation partner, Brad, was downstairs and he was going to join Skye in the interview. We sat in the middle of the old ballroom on the second floor at an old table with items that the owners had found in the building. Skye has been a paranormal investigator for over 10 years now, she was fascinated by Ghost Adventures, and felt that she could do that as well. She started by going to a local cemetery and then met her co-investigator Brad and joined him at Thornhaven Manor in Central Indiana. I have now had the pleasure of investigating with her on multiple occasions at the Shabby Owl and let me tell you, she is no joke!
While both of the investigations that I have now joined Skye on have been at The Shabby Owl with one planned in October at the Indiana State Sanatorium, I have really got a feel for how she handles spirits and how the spirits handle her. The first time that I was at The Shabby Owl, the spirits and activity followed her around. Literally at one point she had went downstairs to let someone into the bathroom on the first floor, all the activity stopped upstairs. The cat balls, the music boxes, the trip wires, everything just stopped having interaction with us until she came back upstairs. The main spirit that she has found in there is Sarah, a younger woman that means no harm but does like to play jokes on people and touch them. While investigating the basement of The Shabby Owl, I was touched on my buttocks as I was sitting down in a chair.
There is also a dark spirit at The Shabby Owl that is more aggressive and has an attitude, Skye does not put up with it and will regularly put it in it’s place. I was doing a solo session in the upstairs closet when something was really oppressive, Skye wasted no time telling it to be nice and after that, things calmed down. That wasn’t before the spirit box said my name and I was grabbed a few times. Skye has quite the following on Facebook with also 5,000 followers, Skye’s Catacomb regularly has live streams where people are asking her questions and fawning over the locations that Skye gets to investigate. One of those followers actually is a psychic herself and has just recently joined the paranormal community. I was lucky enough to sit down with Cassie Eckhoff.
Cassie is a 28 year single mom from Missouri that has quite a few experiences in the paranormal. She grew up watching scary movies and Ghost Adventures, which really set off her interest in the paranormal. Most of the experiences that she has had are clairvoyance, she was about 9 years old she had her first experience with the paranormal, she was with her family one day and she came inside while the rest of her family was outside and she saw a shadow walk through her house. She thought it was her little but when he walks in a few minutes later, she was like “Hey were you just in here, what’s going on?” That was the first time she saw something physically, she used to have bad dreams as a kid. She didn’t realize that she her dreams were actually visions and if she can connect to the spirit, the spirits have been able to share with her the parts of the life that they want her to relate to. She went on to say that sometimes she can actually smell the spirits, she has smelled cologne, cigarette smoke, and stuff like that. She has had spirits come to her wanting to share their message.
Cassie has experiences everywhere, it doesn’t have to be deemed to have a negative experience to have a spirit reach out to her. She has had experiences while in the car or at the grocery store. I asked her if she ever experienced this at work, she said she has felt stuff but she has to be opened up to it for spirits to contact her. She didn’t used to set boundaries and there were nights where she didn’t get any sleep because spirits would just keep contacting her. Her and her daughter love to explore graveyards, Cassie really finds peace in them where she can communicate with lost souls. Cassie currently doesn’t have a paranormal team that she investigates with but does plan to travel to Indiana where Skye and I are from to investigate with us at Indiana State Sanatorium.
Now I had the pleasure of sitting down with another group, an all female group from North Carolina. CrossroadxParanormal is made up of 3 sisters, Mariah (cofounder), Makayla (cofounder), and Mady with their mom Monica formed this team. Ever since Mariah was little she was into watching Ghost Hunters, every Saturday she made her dad watch it. Her family used to watch Ghost Hunters with Mariah on and off and then 3 years ago her dad passed away unexpectedly. This is when Mariah started seeing him in her dreams and was actually communicating with him. Mariah told her mom about it and her mom was like “You know, let’s go all in, if you want to do this. If you want to make a big thing, you know we support you 100%.” So her sisters and mom got onboard, this is how they started, they have been doing in since September 2022, they started by posting videos on their TikTok of their investigations and one night they went to bed and woke up to 16,000 followers.
Earlier this year, their followers encouraged them to start their Youtube in March and now they are just shy of 400 followers, all built organically. Mariah started having a POV camera to catch their reactions when they see stuff and they actually captured a shadow figure while they were at Sweet Springs Sanatorium. Speaking of Sweet Springs, this was their most intense investigation. There was a spirit that wanted them out of there, it literally ran them out of the building. Makayla said, “We have never feared for our own safety when it came to spirits but that place made us fear for our physical safety!” Mariah said that they even got their money’s worth at Sweet Springs.
I asked Mariah what sets her group apart from these major paranormal teams. Mariah said that “People watch these shows, we try to tell people that these shows are for entertainment purposes only, these shows have to get the ratings. The adult attention span is 7 to 11 seconds so they have to keep you in that whole time so they can get ratings because that’s how they keep their show. Raw paranormal investigations, sometimes you are sitting in an abandoned building for 8 hours and you only get about 45 minutes of decent activity. You don’t see that part. So they are more of a raw paranormal investigation. They are not Zak Bagans or even Project Fear where they have to entertain, people have to entertain to keep their ratings. We are just showing the proof that we have, here is our proof, you try to debunk it, try to do whatever you want with it, this is what we got. What you see is what you get!”
I asked the group if they have ever had anything follow them home. Makayla and Mady both had experiences where something did follow them how. Mady was woken up in the middle of the night by something knocking on her bedroom door and Makayla the same investigation had something knock on her front door which is not accessible due to construction of her front porch. Makayla said, “ You can’t do it and expect nothing will ever follow you home.” Mariah said, “If you go looking for it, you will eventually find it, and don’t be surprised when you do find it.”
Mariah went on to talk about how their followers are very active when they do investigations, they have plenty of people in their lives, they have friends that text them wishing them luck or be safe on the investigations. Their community is what has helped them build what they have now. They are always pushing to add more and want to answer the questions to the unknown. Mariah said, “ You have to be consistent with what you do, that’s how we gained it with people’s trust, we tell people ‘hey we are going here’ so we go there, ‘hey we are going live’ we go live. They want to see the spirit box, I’m not a fan of the spirit box but they like it so I do it.” While in the middle of talking about this, literally there was a single knock on their door where they were doing the interview. Their work follows them home with them.
All three of these interviews, have shown me something amazing, with the odds stacked against them, they push through and provide amazing content for their followers, they don’t hype things up, and they go in earning the trust of not only their fans but the spirits that they interact with. These are the type of people that I want to be the face of the paranormal community. I have a young daughter that I know will be just as interested in the paranormal community as I am and I want her to have strong female leads in this community that she can look up to and say “I want to be like them!” These women go into these locations, fearless and determined to make a lasting imprint in the community. Let me tell you, they already have. Building communities from nothing to where they are now, is extremely hard and impressive.
If you wanna follow these amazing people, Skye can be found, on social media as Skye’s Catacomb. Cassie currently is in the process of building her social media, and you can find CrossroadxParanormal on Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
