Like an obstinate daemon whose hellfire spirit will just not quit, “Australia’s only paranormal conference” Paracon has resolved to return for its third iteration, this year taking place over a weekend in May at Maitland Gaol and boasting a roster of speakers guaranteed to do almost nothing to assuage your slightly irrational fears of Ouija boards and wheat fields.
Noted lecturers slated to appear at Paracon III include – but are not strictly limited to – Dr Ciaran O’Keeffe from UK TV’s Most Haunted, and Ben Hansen from the SyFy channel’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files. Speakers who haven’t appeared on TV but are nonetheless experts in their respective fields run the gamut from Ouija board historians, mediums and UFO researchers to published crop circle phenomenon authors and representatives from the Australian Close Encounter Research Network. Activities scheduled for the two day conference also include workshops on topics like Yowies: What’s up with those guys?, triggers in consciousness, readings (of the psychic and medium kind), and panels on time travel, crop circles, investigative psychology methods in haunting, the interplay of media and technology on belief, and something called Ouijastitions – Ouija Through The Ages.
If you had tentative plans to spend the second weekend of May (the 10th and 11th) in gaol, you might as well learn something practical other than how to fashion a rudimentary shiv out of items stolen from commissary or how to undermine established hierarchies of power from within.
You can find out a lot more information about Paracon here.
Speaking of terrifying things that won’t die.
