 Our guest today folks is Brandy Stark. Brandy is a professor at SPC, an artist and a paranormal investigator. What happened here folks is that one of our taggers out of New York decided that they wanted to hire her to figure out why the market never goes down. Only kidding folks, okay? Brandy has been investigating paranormal experiences in St. Petersburg, Florida since 1997. Initially she started Spirits of St. Pete as a hobby, but guess what? It grew into a group of five folks that have done dozens of investigations and guess what? We're going to find out what's going on. Brandy, welcome to TFNN. Thank you so much. Oh, it's been a day. It's been a day trying to get hooked up with us, right? You must be paranormal, man. Right? So first, tell us exactly what paranormal means. Paranormal and supernatural kind of are somewhat interchangeable, but we're dealing with what are called liminal state beings. So things that are in between worlds. And primarily my group focuses obviously on ghosts or spirits. So it's been fun. And so talk to us about what you've discovered and how, and just exactly, you know, like, yeah, tell us what you've discovered and where the thought process is here. Paranormal investigation is kind of an interesting thing. And as an academic formerly of SPPC, I'm teaching part-time right now at State College, Florida, but it is, it's a difficult line to walk because essentially paranormal investigation is still a pseudoscience. It's getting better, but it's really fooled by entertainment and television. Although there is, you know, a little bit more of the engineering and the scientific that's looking into it. But what I discovered throughout all my years of both academic and paranormal investigation is that ghosts, basically the ghost story is from all space and all time back to the epic of Gilgamesh all the way through today. And I really thought I'd only be doing this for about five years. And it turns out, you know, here I am 24 years later and we're still finding ghosts. So it's really exciting. No, hey, listen, man, I think anyone that has, you know, some kind of open mind, there's certain things that happen that there are no doubt that it's like, okay, what is that all about? There's no doubt about that. So let me ask you something. When you say between lives, so is it, is it not necessarily your thought process, but a paranormal thought process that you have like other people right here, like we have a life like I'm looking right here, but but there's someone else that's right here. Is it like a couple different worlds? Now, that's going to depend on your belief system in your background. But the theory is that and I go to kind of the Joseph Campbell, even though he's kind of a pop culture guy. Okay, talks about there's two realms, the natural down here and the supernatural here. Yeah. And the states are with the two connect. And what I found over the years is that invariably, everybody has something strange that has happened to them that they can't explain. It usually does deal with family or death of some sort. Yeah, something will happening right after. So that's kind of that liminal connection. Now, if you're Buddhist, yes. The idea is that all of these realms coexist, including the realm of the hungry ghosts. Okay, we're moving through ghosts all the time, which is kind of fun. That's wild. Because you know, it's interesting what you just said there, right? Like when death does come, what I've found is this is like, okay, so it seems to me that we're here alive. You have death here. You have to you have to have something so you're not scared the whole freaking time that okay, I'm going to die. There's got to be something else if this is it, right? Yeah, you know, so that I can understand that that whole concept. Okay, because guess what, I think I want to be running around saying, Oh, no, that's all we're going to do is die, right? You know, so a bomber. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that would be there. And like kind of what you just brought up, whether it would be you know, people, even the animals, I've done myself, you know, after someone's gone, I'm saying, Oh, I think I think they're they're saying hi to me. And then even headwise, it might be my own head, but I say, Oh, I feel better now. Right. Even Freud, I mean, if you go back to Mania at Moncalia and my Latin is terrible. But if you go to Freud, he even talks about ghosts as projection of our own minds that that it's internalized grief that's kind of creating this. So absolutely. And I think that's where paranormal investigation gets to be interesting, because we do try to correlate history. So I've got historians, offsite historians that will try to do research. Yeah. I've got some folks that are sensitive. They're not exactly mediums, but they think they can pick up and sense what's going on. Yes. And equipment. And in the past year, we started working with the SLS kinetic camera, which kind of was popularized granted by television. But it's given us a few interesting results and, you know, kind of working through any false positives. We're still experimenting a bit with it, but it's kind of neat when you can actually get that verification. And that's what I always love. Yeah. Now, when you just mentioned Joseph Campbell, is that the guy that like this is a long time ago, had the radio program? Yes. And he was he used to travel and he wrote hero with a thousand faces. So he came up with something called monomyth, which is the theory of the hero's journey. And that's kind of one of his big pushes out there. But he does talk about the natural and the supernatural worlds in the in between states. And one of my degrees is actually in religious studies. So I've got three masters and a PhD, believe it or not, even with the blue hair. But I'm also an artist. So we're doing it looks awesome, man. I mean, woman, it does. I love that guy, Campbell. I haven't listened to him a long time. And folks, I'm telling you, Google it. He has that his the way he speaks is very self empowering. I think I mean, and it's direct. Yeah. We'll use him for my classes as kind of an introduction to religious ideals. So, you know, when you start kind of looking at this idea of the two realms and then something in between, and we do find it culturally, you know, China has the yin and yang, the idea that these two connect at the yin and yang lines. And, you know, I mean, you just you find it everywhere. And it's really, really very fascinating. And admittedly, I have to say, you know, once I pass on, I think I have a list of places that I'd like to go. Yeah. I want to check out Rome again. And some friends I'd like to visit just to say hey. And then I guess we'll see what happens after that. So do you figure are you going to try to program yourself before the fact? Yes, I think I will try to work with these ideas. We'll see if it works. Listen, I do that. I program myself every day and I've done it for a long time. And I have programmed myself exactly to talking about it. And I know it's far out. But guess what, folks? It doesn't matter how far out it is. None of us know. So why not do it? Right? I mean, even Socrates said, you know, if you're dead, and you simply sleep, then great. You know, I mean, it's not to plan ahead. And then you have something called Pascal's wager, Pascal's wager, which basically says, you know, is it better to do it? Even if it might not exist. And the answer ultimately is, is yes, because if it doesn't, it won't matter anyway. I know. That's what's so cool about it, though, right? That's fun. Absolutely. And it is very unpredictable. There's no laboratory settings. We're not finding a lot of parapsychologists these days. And academics are kind of slowly kind of starting to get into this. When I started, it was before the TV shows. And I was a young professor at the time. And, you know, I was teaching religion. Yeah, I had students who saw me on an interview for one of our local news channels. And the next class period, they came in, and they said, we know what religion you are. And I'm like, what's that? And they said, you're an occultist. I love it. I don't control them. That is so good. Well, listen, Brandi, this has been absolutely awesome. Really appreciate it. The website folks is the spirits of stp.com. You can check her out on Facebook, Spirits of St. Pete. This has been a pleasure. You have a great one, safe one. We look forward to having you on again.