Thunder Bay convention puts the supernatural in the spotlight

Ghosts, Sasquatch, unidentified aerial phenomena — a convention taking place in Thunder Bay next month has all the paranormal bases covered.

The first-ever Lake Superior Paranormal Convention kicks off on Oct. 4. 

"I think it's going to be awesome," said Gail Willis, convention organizer and member of Thunder Bay ghost hunting group Lucky Paranormal.

"We're super excited about doing it," she said. "It really is for people who love the paranormal, are interested in the paranormal, might have stories to share. And this will be like a safe space, and an open place, for people to share their stories, talk about UFOs, Sasquatch, spirits, and any of their experiences."

"And also for skeptics, too."

Science writer Chris Rutkowski, known as "Canada's UFO guy" will be one of the speakers.

"I've been at this for quite some time," he said in an interview with CBC News. "Back in the 1970s, I was taking my astronomy degree at University of Manitoba, and there had been a lot of UFOs being seen across Canada at that time, and I was curious."

"My profs didn't think much of UFOs at all, but that gave me more incentive to try and understand them a little bit more, so I started talking with people," he said. "I went to their homes out in the community and farms and other places, and found that most people were simply not making stories up. They were just seeing things that they couldn't understand, they couldn't explain. And in most cases, I could explain what people were seeing as stars and planets and planets and whatever."

"But there were a couple of cases that were very, very curious and I couldn't understand what those things were either."

Rutkowski said he was eventually asked to give a presentation on the phenomenon at his university, which led to more opportunities to write and speak about the subject.

He's since published several books - the most-recent of which is 2022's Canada's UFOs: Declassified - and will give a talk titled Canada's Unseen Skies and Thunder Bay's Unexplained UFO Mysteries at the convention.

"Things have changed to a great degree," he said. "There's a lot of scientists around the world now who are taking the subject of UAP very seriously — they don't call them UFO's because of the stigma."

"There's projects such as the Galileo project, in the United States, which is developing observatories dedicated to looking for UFOs in the sky and detecting them and in many other ways," he said. "There are scientists who are, you know, taking the subject seriously enough to write and publish papers in peer-reviewed journals."

"As long as the subject is actually what people are seeing and not necessarily the interpretation, it's all fair game. But once you start talking about whether aliens are really here, and they're walking among us and they're abducting people and they're taking him on board for flights to and from Venus and places like that, that's where you get into some difficulty, because there's no proof of that."

Meanwhile, the team of investigators of the TV show Beyond the Haunting will be holding a talk titled Breaking the Paranormal Mold.

"I think the one thing that we like to bring to the table is the fact that you don't see a lot of all-female teams in the paranormal," said team member Corine Carey. "So that's one of the first big ones."

"We've had ability since we were kids, we've had experiences that we can't explain, we've grown up trying to figure out what the heck is going on."

"Now that we're adults and we're accepting all this, and we're out there doing this and sharing our stories, we just want people to also understand that not everything's paranormal, but when there is stuff going on out there, we experience it too."

"So come talk with us, come chat with us. We want to hear your experiences."

The team will also be participating in the Saturday night ghost hunt at the museum.

"We have not been in there," Beyond the Haunting's Leanne Sallenback said. "It'll be a first-time investigation for us too."

"They're going to get all the initial and raw reactions from us, and if any spirits or ghosts want to come communicate with us, in addition to our gear, we'll also be leaning into whatever abilities are surfacing in that moment. So we hope to kind of maybe uncover something that hasn't yet been discovered."

The main convention will take place on Saturday, Oct. 5 from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Prince Arthur hotel.

In addition to the vendors, movie screenings, workshops, the convention will involve several guest speakers. They include:

• Corine Carey, Leanne Sallenback and Kelly Ireland of Beyond the Haunting Investigations and T+E Canada show History's Most Haunted;
• Six Nations Investigating Paranormal Encounters (SNIPE), of the APTN show Ghost Hunters of the Grand River;
• Psychic medium Kerrilynn Shellhorn, whose talk will cover cemetery ghost hunting;
• Author, podcaster and Ghost Adventures writer Jeff Belanger;
• Shane Pittman of Netflix's 28 Days Haunted and Discovery Channel's The Holzer Files;
• Canadian UAP researcher, author, and science journalist Chris Rutkowski;
• Sasquatch University with a talk titled Inside the World of Bigfoot: Global Theories and Encounters;
• Thunder Bay's Katherine Keeping, who will speak about Crossing Over Spirits;
• Dale Quigley and Michael John of the Paranormal Voice podcast, and 
• Spiritual medium Lorilei Potvin, who will discuss the paranormal stories of Thunder Bay and beyond.

For more information, visit lakesuperiorparacon.com.