Locals offer their take on paranormal activity

Events include ghosts, orbs, aliens, psychics, voodoo and ancient objects

Even after she woke the house with her screams, Marilyn Resnick didn't tell anyone what she had seen for fear of being sent to a mental institution. The Resnicks bought their house in Rancho Circle in 1973. It was and is an impressive place in an exclusive neighborhood. It had been owned by former Lt. Gov. Cliff Jones. President Lyndon Johnson once stayed there.

On the Resnicks' second night in the house, at around 2:30 a.m., Marilyn heard what sounded like footsteps in the attic above her bedroom. Then the burglar alarm went off. A Rancho Circle security guard and the police searched the house and found nothing.

The next night around the same time, the alarm went off again. "This time they lit up the backyard with helicopters," Resnick said. Again, there was no sign of anything amiss.

The alarm went off again the following night, and Resnick had the wiring for it inspected by her contractor. The alarm still kept going off every night. After six nights, Resnick couldn't take it anymore. She got out of her bed and screamed at the top of her lungs that she wasn't going to leave. She headed over to the master bath, where she had heard the most recent noises, and got the shock of her life.

The room was ice cold and there in the darkness she saw the luminous face of a grinning man rocking back and forth in the air. Right behind him appeared two smiling women's faces with curls on their forehead and shiny earrings "Like beams of light," Resnick said. It was at this point that she screamed.

"It was like they had been dancing above on the ceiling. Like a one two three, one two three. You could hear that up on my ceiling," she said.

PARANORMAL INTEREST COMMON IN SOUTHERN NEVADA

Although the area may be young for ancient mysteries, there is a surprising amount of interest in the paranormal in Southern Nevada.

"I think everybody has an interest in the paranormal to some extent," said George Knapp, longtime reporter at KLAS-TV, Channel 8. Knapp broke the Area 51 story 19 years ago and since that time has become in his words "a clearing house for anything paranormal in the area."

The paranormal is simply phenomena beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation, so one doesn't have to believe in the spirit world, magic or alien visitation to be fascinated by the paranormal, but it helps.

Carol Bell, a licensed psychic in Henderson, drifted into her current interest in the paranormal by accident. While taking extreme close-ups of crystals for an art project, she started to notice what she now believes are orbs and energy lines. Soon her focus shifted from the art to the study of paranormal phenomenon in photography. She showed a picture of her Labrador retriever before it died, pointing out an orb on its throat. "He died of thyroid cancer," she said.

Bell works at The Psychic Eye, 5835 S. Eastern Ave., one of dozens of businesses devoted to metaphysical, the paranormal and New Age interests in the valley. A like number of groups with interests in unusual phenomena meet in the area bookstores, libraries and coffee shops.

For five years UNLV offered a Consciousness Studies program with classes taught by near-death and life-after-death expert Ray Moody and parapsychologist Charles Tart. The program was funded by real estate developer Robert Bigalow, whose business includes properties ranging from short-term rental housing to a proposed hotel in space. Bigalow has a longtime interest in the unexplained.

"Locally, I don't think anyone has put more money into paranormal research than Bigalow," Knapp said.

Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, who was a guest lecturer at the Consciousness Studies program said, "There's a lot of interest in the subject in Las Vegas."

In spite of this, that didn't prevent the program from being canceled in 2002.

BELIEVERS ARE VARIED

Just because so many people are interested in the paranormal doesn't mean that there is any sort of consensus on the subject. In fact, it seems to be quite the opposite, noted Knapp.

"You've got the ghost people, the UFO people, the Bigfoot people, the crop circle people, and you've got subdivisions in each of those," he said. "The UFO people don't get along with the poltergeist people. The poltergeist people have no interaction or respect for the Bigfoot people. The Bigfoot people want no connection to UFOs. They think Bigfoot is strictly a flesh and blood animal that hasn't been discovered yet. Within the UFO crowd, you've got the nuts and bolts saucer people, who think these are flying saucers from other planets, and then there's the inter-dimensional people, and then there's the alien abductees who are somewhere else ... When you say paranormal, it's a big tent and everybody inside it hates everyone else inside it."

OUT OF THIS WORLD MUSEUM

Much of that big tent can be explored at the Out of This World Museum, a collection kept in a private home not far from the Winchester Community Center, devoted to a wide variety of paranormal interests. It is located in the home of curator Mike Kurban and is open to the public by appointment only.

"I don't charge people admission," said Kurban, "but if they want to make a donation to help with the carpet cleaning, that'd be great."

Kurban, who describes himself as a medium, psychic healer, radio host, improvisational performer and relationship expert among a long list of other things, has been operating the museum for 20 years, the last five in Las Vegas. Previously, his collection was located in Chicago.

"It was a lot bigger there. I don't have room to show it all here," he said.

There are quite a few curious and unusual objects in the collection, which includes Voodoo dolls, an antique Ouija board, a phrenology head, a Native American healing stick, a rare Masonic amulet and a Bible that Kurban performed marriages with during four separate appearances on "The Jerry Springer Show." The museum encompasses much of the house, including the backyard, which is decorated with golden statuary. There are exhibits on nearly every wall, including those in the bathrooms.

Much of the museum is devoted to testimonials of Kurban's prowess as a psychic healer, clippings about the museum and scores of photographs he has taken of spirits. These photos are illuminated with typed descriptions and little arrows pointing to the spirit feature. Kurban firmly believes that the spirit world is all around us. He pointed out apple trees in his yard, which he said seem to have an unnatural golden sheen to them.

"The other side isn't white like most people think," he said. "It's gold."

PSYCHIC EYE BOOK SHOPS

Robert Leysen, owner of the three Psychic Eye Book Shops in the valley, takes a more pragmatic view of the paranormal.

"I have no interest in the paranormal. I just thought it would be a good business if presented properly," he said. "Respect, yes, but involvement, no."

Apparently, the thought was correct. Leysen will be opening a fourth valley store in Henderson soon. He estimates that between his stores here and the three he operates in California, 700 to 800 psychic readings are done daily.

"Sometimes people just want to talk about their problems," said Leysen, who sees psychic readers as part armchair psychologist, part confessional and part doorway to the unknown. "I wouldn't recommend that you run your life by what a psychic tells you, but I would certainly take it as a second opinion."

SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS

As for Marilyn Resnick's late-night waltzing specters, after years of silence, she achieved some level of peace when she talked to her parish priest about the incident and he assured her that sometimes the spirits come back to deal with unfinished business.

Resnick has a theory about what she saw. Her neighbor had taken the whole bar from the Bucket of Blood Saloon in Virginia City. "He brought the spittoons, the brass rail, the whole thing, and built a building for it there in Rancho Circle," she said. "I'm positive that these had to be three people that used to be barflies there. They just had that look."

Knapp concluded that an interest in the paranormal isn't a bad thing.

"I don't think it's unhealthy for people to think about this stuff and wonder what's next and what else is out there or what our place is in the order of things," he said.

Contact Sunrise and Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.