The Associated Press State & Local Wire



October 30, 1998, Friday, AM cycle

Company offers ghostbusting, paranormal works to clients



By JR ROSS, Associated Press Writer
SOUTH BEND, Ind.

Don't call Christine Kaminsky a psychic - she considers it a little demeaning.

"We like to call ourselves clairvoyants just because the 'Psychic Friends Network' has destroyed the name, and we don't want to be in the fortune telling business," she said.

Kaminsky prefers paranormal investigator. Ghostbuster for short.

But that's not all she does as the vice president of One Star In Site Inc., a South Bend-area business that specializes in the unusual. There's also spiritual cleansings, medical intuition, psychic investigation and business advice - all for $ 90 to $ 135 an hour.

"There's so many variables in our business that the insurance companies didn't want to touch us," said Caleb Storms, the One Star in Site president. "If we go into a house for a haunting and things start flying around the room, it's going to be difficult to file the claim."

Storms and Kaminsky said business - cleansing buildings of negative energy, counseling area businesses and doing two to three ghostbustings a month - has done well since opening almost a year ago.

The two friends who met four years ago after discovering they had similar powers with the paranormal say they make a decent living dealing with the dead. They even have a page on the World Wide Web advertising their services at www.onestar-insite.com.

"The response we've gotten is a lot better than we thought," said Storms, who sometimes lists intuitive counselor as his job title on tax forms. "People have been actually kind and very welcoming."

Both said they had similar experiences in discovering their "powers."

Storms first noticed something special after his older sister died when he was 5 years old. He said her spirit paid him visits until he was about 10, when he began to shut out his powers because he realized others didn't share his capabilities. Storms said he later turned to alcohol and drugs until a near-fatal overdose when he was 17 or 18 that landed him in rehab and got him back in touch with his powers.

Kaminsky, too, first noticed her powers as a child living in a haunted house in Cincinnati. Her parents didn't believe her tales of a piano that played by itself or a typewriters that worked with no one at the keyboard. Realizing that her powers weren't the norm with her friends and family, she shut them off until getting back in touch with them years later.

Since rediscovering their powers, both have been working with older clairvoyants to control their gift and use it productively.

"Now, it's very controlled, thank God, and it's a lot like being a stereo receiver," Storms said. "I tune into a certain frequency and listen to the signal, and from that I can see what's going to happen, what's happening and what's going to happen."

They met while Storms was working in a bookstore and began to collaborate on paranormal services before deciding to open their own business.

Since then, they've performed a variety of services, including counseling a Fort Wayne construction owner who wasn't sure the right person was managing his business.

"It helps people get into each other's heads that otherwise these conversations wouldn't take place," Kaminsky said.

Still, they have their share of doubters.

Glenn Sparks, a communications professor at Purdue University, has studied the impact of the media on beliefs in the paranormal for six years. He is associated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a group dedicated to debunking claims of paranormal activity through science and reason.

Sparks, who considers himself a skeptic, says the recent surge of interest in the paranormal is linked to the pending new millennium and a search for something spiritual to believe in.

"It's not too big of a leap from the traditional religious beliefs to other kinds of things, just in terms of saying that's possible," Sparks said. "A lot of what we have going on is an intrigue on the part of Generation Xers who have not embraced their parents' traditional religious beliefs but because of their upbringing are searching for something in spiritual realm."

That's one reason Anita from Elkhart went to One Star in Site.

After a series of delays prevented her from moving into the new house she was having built near her old house, she sought a "fresh, clean start."

She asked them to cleanse both houses of negative energy. Within two weeks, Anita said, she moved into the new house.

Though she believes having the work done breaks one of the Ten Commandments - the one prohibiting the worship of pagan gods - she's thinking about having her the new house cleansed again because workers have been in and out over the last few weeks to complete various projects.

"I was born and raised Catholic," said Anita, who didn't want her last name used. "I really have not pursued that into my adult years, not all of it, not the religious aspect of it. I believe there is a god out there, but he's not the punishing god that I was raised to believe.

"I think there's kind of a 'yeah, I want to believe (in the paranormal).' But there's a little part of me that thinks, 'yeah, you walked into the old house after you did this and it really did feel different,' and I don't know how to describe that."