Fisher, Rick

RickFisher (1954– ) Paranormal investigator and founder of the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania. Rick Fisher’s interests and research span a range of phenomena and subjects not limited to Ghosts and Hauntings, among them Bigfoot, UFOs, mysterious places, and mysterious creatures.

Fisher was born on July 29, 1954, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children, two boys and a girl. At age seven, he had an experience with a ghost that changed his life. He and his family were staying at the home of his grandparents. One night he woke up in the middle of the night and saw a man standing in the hallway. In the dim light, he thought it was his grandfather, who was alive.

The next morning, he asked his grandmother why Pap was in the hallway at night, only to be told that his grandfather had been working and out of the house. Fisher saw the figure again in the same place in the middle of the night. His grandmother told him he was seeing things that weren’t there. By this time, Fisher was afraid of the house and did not want to go into it alone. He saw the figure again. He knew he was seeing a ghost, but he didn’t know who it was.

The experience ignited a passionate interest to learn everything he could about the paranormal. He read everything he could find. More than 40 years later, his sister acknowledged seeing the same figure. His aunt also saw the man and thought it was the ghost of Fisher’s greatgrandfather who he had never met.

Fisher joined the U.S. Army, working in demolitions. He was discharged in 1975 and returned to Pennsylvania to work. He studied martial arts, earning a black belt in karate, and also learned Reiki, becoming a Reiki Master and teacher. He lives in Columbia, Pennsylvania, and has two children, a son born in 1980 and a daughter born in 1982.

In 1997, Fisher founded the Pennsylvania Ghost Hunters Society. He changed the name to the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania in 2001 to reflect the broad interests of its members. As the owner and operator of Fisher Productions, he organizes an annual conference, hosts a regular haunted workshop, and publishes the Paranormal Pennsylvania magazine, formerly in hard print and now in electronic format. He has conducted hundreds of investigations, not only of haunted places but in search of Bigfoot and thunderbirds, and to mysterious places such as the stone chambers of Putnam County, New York. He has conducted a long investigation into an alleged UFO crash that occurred in a silt pond in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1974. His first book, Ghosts of the River Towns, about hauntings in Lancaster County, was published in 2006.

Fisher is founder, executive director, and curator of the National Museum of Mysteries and Research Center, a nonprofit organization that eventually will have its own quarters for display of artifacts related to paranormal cases and “history’s mysteries.”

He teaches classes on paranormal investigating at a local community college. In addition, he has done extensive lecturing and work with the media. In 2004, Fisher received a Special Achievement Award in Paranormal Research at the Eastern Regional Paranormal Conference.

Some of Fisher’s most notable work has been in Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); he is known for the unusual numbers of voices he obtains with recorders. Not all of them seem to be related to ghosts and hauntings, but may be the voices of living people, or those from different periods in time. As of 2006, he was working on a new hypothesis to explain EVP, which is not electromagnetic in nature. Fisher has placed an electromagnetic field meter (EMF) between two microphones and has recorded EVP without the EMF meter registering anything.

The most unusual experience Fisher has had does not involve a ghost, but a sighting of a mysterious creature walking along a highway. In February 2002, he was driving along Route 23 toward Marietta, Pennsylvania, at about 6 A.M. when he spied a peculiar thing walking at the side of the road. It was dark and hairy, about five feet tall and impossibly thin. It had long arms with hands that fell below the knees. It was swinging its arms as it walked, seemingly oblivious of the car behind it. Fisher slowed down to watch it and then braked the car. As soon as he braked, the creature turned and looked him in the eye. Its eyes were yellow. Then it abruptly vanished. Fisher was so shaken that he was sleepless for two nights.

Several months later, Fisher met a man who told him that he had seen a stick figure walking along the road about two miles from Fisher’s sighting. The man, who saw it with other witnesses, had the sighting at about the same time in the morning in 2000. In 2004, Fisher learned of a similar sighting in Indiana by a youth and two adults. When noticed, the stick creature walked off the road into a snow-covered field and vanished. It left no tracks behind. Fisher has not been able to determine the nature of the creature or whether it has any connection to Bigfoot, a much larger creature.

FURTHER READING:

• Website of the Paranormal Society of Pennsylvania. URL: https://www.paranormalpa.com. Downloaded October 19, 2006.

SOURCE:

The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits– Written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley – September 1, 2007