Ryan Straub is a Missouri paranormal investigator who has investigated hundreds of locations and led several investigative teams, and also is a member of Springfield-based Heartland Paranormal Research Organization. The Helpful Haunt spoke with him to find out about his approach to the paranormal, his own experiences with investigating haunted locations, and his advice for aspiring paranormal investigators.
The Helpful Haunt: What is your background in paranormal investigation?
Ryan Straub: I’ve always been interested in the paranormal, started out fairly young. I was born in 1984, the whole Ghostbusters year. In high school, I got into a car wreck and was literally dead for about a minute and a half to two minutes. That got me pondering, am I doing the right thing in life? Every philosophical concept came to my mind at that point. I began studying religion, and religion led to cultural beliefs and lore. When I was in high school, my senior year, my psychology teacher knew my interest and decided to push me in the direction of the paranormal by trying to jump cultural belief backgrounds into more of the faith-based religions. I started looking into those and realized that a lot of the stories between religions were similar; you know the whole concept of Jesus, the concept of other gods. I began to delve deeper, and during this time I realized that every particular religion has some type of ghost or some type of spirit that they try to interact with, some type of spiritual world. And from that point on I began to do more of the investigative side of things by trying to bridge the gap between my investigation and religion and science.
THH: You’re currently involved with an investigative group, could you tell me about that?
RS: I started a group in 2000, and that group is based off of several areas. I have a group in Chicago, I have a group in Boise, Idaho, I have one in Virginia, and the one here in Missouri. I recently joined Jerri’s [Irby] group to help her with more of the spiritual side of investigation. I don’t try to plug spirituality everywhere I go. If I see something happen, I want to prove it’s scientifically possible beforehand. In order for us in the field to be taken seriously, we have to. I like to remain scientific, unless I find something that’s less concrete than science can explain, then that’s when I bring in the spiritual aspect of things.
THH: As an investigator, how do you prepare for an investigation:
RS: I like to have my own research, however, I went to college for criminal psychological profiling and I currently work for a police department, so I like to interview the people who are involved and work backwards from there. If they give you a claim, it’s easier to substantiate those claims with history than bringing them evidence and having them say, “Oh, that happened to me as well.” It’s easier for me to see the bigger picture and have some sort of validity by working backwards.
After the initial interview, that’s when I really start researching the background. Most people like to get history first, and that’s fine, but it seems counterproductive in my experience.
THH: What steps are involved in the investigation process at a location?
RS: I come from a cop background, so my process on-site is that I like to look at the scene first and how it interacts with the claims people are having. For example, when I worked a case one time, a person was having a lot of electrical problems like lights flashing on and off, and they were big into the paranormal, so they decided they would bring in an EMF detector and see if there were any fluctuations when these activities were happening. There were fluctuations when the TV would go on and off, but what we found out was that coaxial cables were producing an electromagnetic field. So, it was happening, and they used tools to try to put the pieces together, but didn’t look any further. When I come to an investigation, my thing is to try to find the pieces that people aren’t seeing because it’s just one of those things that people overlook when they’re being faced with something that could potentially be paranormal.
THH: About how many locations have you investigated?
RS: Probably over six hundred. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I try to investigate as many as I can.
THH: Are there any locations that stand out as your favorite or most interesting?
RS: There was a little cemetery called Hazel Ridge north of Brunswick, Missouri, and this is going to sound weird, but the environment changes. The first time I went down there, I had my group with me, and there was this huge tree. It was big enough that I could not put my arms around it; it was just very, very big. There were a bunch of tombstones next to it, and we did our initial investigation in the daylight to get familiar with the area. We left for about an hour to get food and came back and that tree was not there. It was not there. When we went back over the footage we had taken from before, you can plainly see the tree. It had not been cut down, there was just nothing. We decided we were going to do more of these investigations, and what happened is there was a path that you could drive around the entire perimeter of the cemetery. We went down there the next time, and there was a big tombstone, and we’re thinking, we could not have driven around that tombstone the previous time. It’s an interesting place. We were talking to another group about this one time, and they wanted proof, so they asked us to sit and draw a map of the area, and we did. Our maps were about 98% accurate compared to each other’s, some thought a tree was a little farther over or something. We went down there, and not one of our maps matched the area. It was completely different.
THH: Do you tend to investigate more public locations or residential locations?
RS: I do a lot of residential. I know a lot of paranormal investigators like to get out to the big-name places that people know about, like Waverly Hills. That’s good and fun, but I like to go to places that are based more in myth and lore; the ones people don’t necessarily know about except the people who live in the area. I’ve worked a lot of residential cases, and a lot of those are very interesting. I worked a case one time where the guy who just moved into a house and knew the family [who had lived there] beforehand—it was a really small town. What had happened one night was there was an electrical fire and the house burned down and killed everybody in the house. They cleared the land out and built new houses on it. About two years after he had moved into the place, he started having these horrible dreams about fires—I mean, arson, people burning the house down. He called us in because he wanted to do a cleansing and do something to get rid of these dreams. We did the cleansings and I went home that day, and at the time I was living in a two-floor apartment and I was thinking, what would I do if this place caught on fire, how would I handle it? I went to sleep, and when I woke up that next morning, the smoke alarm downstairs was going off and just blaring. I got up and could smell smoke, so I ran downstairs and didn’t see any fire. I went outside of the apartment complex and there was nothing going on. I came back inside and it didn’t smell like anything burning, the smoke detector wasn’t going off, but I called my wife and was talking to her about it and telling her what happened, and she says, “That couldn’t happen, there are no batteries in that smoke detector.” I took the smoke detector down, and sure enough, there were no batteries in it. But as for residential cases, I do a lot of those.
THH: How do you discover those cases, do you get referrals?
RS: I’ve had a lot of other groups call and ask for us to come out, because one of the things I like to specialize in is the spiritual aspect, and a lot of groups are more scientific. When that need arises, they tend to look for people who are into that kind of thing. I’ve had referrals, I’ve had people contact me directly, a little bit of both.
THH: Are there any locations in Springfield or the Ozarks that you would like to investigate but haven’t gotten to yet?
RS: The Ozark Hellhound. I’ve heard of it and think it’s interesting. I like cryptozoology, so I would like to get a team together to do some sort of hunt on that. And of course there’s always Bigfoot down there. I’d love to find Bigfoot just to prove he’s real.
THH: Do you have any advice for those hoping to get involved in paranormal investigation?
RS: When you start investigating, the most important thing you can take with you is your head and a pad of paper. Any piece of equipment used in paranormal research was not created for paranormal research. It’s hard to find a piece of equipment to quantify something we haven’t found a definite way to quantify. The EMF detector is a perfect example. It’s a theory that ghosts or spirits give off some sort of electromagnetic field or disturbance, but we have no solid proof that they do that. Equipment is fantastic and it helps collect evidence you have already, but there’s no need to go out and spend $60,000 on equipment when as long as you use your head and a pen and paper to write down history and make connections, that’s going to be just as good as trying to find some piece of equipment or randomly take pictures. You just need a level head and the ability to backtrack.
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