You may recognize him from the television show Paranormal Cops or from his group Chicago Paranormal Detectives. Ron Fabiani is a real police sergeant in Chicagoland and as you will see, uses that expertise, along with his team, in paranormal investigations. What you may not know but will find out below is what a talented musician he (and Austin Weinstock) are. Ron was gracious enough to talk with us and answer a few questions.
Ghost Eyes: As a paranormal investigator, what would you wish every team would do?
Ron: I wish there would be consistency and I wish we could have a standard to measure what a right or wrong approach is but reality is there is no way to police that. There is no way to enforce that since this is not a paid profession, since there is no licensing, since there is no certification, sadly this day will never come. It would be nice but that would be like a pipe dream.
Ghost Eyes: What technique do you use in the field that yields you the best results?
Ron: I think across the board and I don’t know, but I will tell you that for all of us the most common thing we get is EVP’s. There may be some unique things that we do differently not necessarily in relation to EVP’s but a lot of things and again there is no right or wrong answer. There is no right or wrong approach. I think what gets us the most interesting responses is an intelligent reaction to an EMF detector, not the spikes at random.
Ghost Eyes: How has “Paranormal Cops” affected your paranormal life?
Ron: Having the TV series has made us have to well; we have always screened people carefully who have requested investigations, and because of the TV show we have had to even up that a bit more and really take it to the extreme. We have to establish that we have legitimate complainants who are requesting investigations versus a dyer restaurant trying to capitalize off the fact that we were there. So we have a couple different techniques that we employ in an attempt to ensure we have legitimate people contacting us who have a legitimate cause for contacting us. If I hang up with someone on the phone when I talk to them, as soon as I hang up I call the local cops and ask them how familiar they are with this person. If they go “Oh Jez, that’s crazy Mary we’re at her house once a week”, then we’re not going there.
Ghost Eyes: That’s a good idea:
Ron: Yea, cause you see most groups are stuck at an opportunity to investigate a place, we’re the complete opposite. You have to convince us why we have to come there. We don’t go knocking on the door asking permission to come there; we don’t care if you don’t care. If you need us you have to meet our criteria.
Ghost Eyes: A lot of people miss this point. I’m not just going to come out because someone says “Ghost”
Ron: Most of the groups are made up, and I am not saying there is anything wrong with this, but most of your groups are made up of thrill seekers who are looking for self-gratification. They are serious, they want answers, they want this, it’s about them. Whereas for us, there is a group of us that come out just like the police department, if there is a need for us to come out, you tell me what that need is. We don’t go up to a random house and knock on the door as cops and say “Hey, do you need police services?” People would look at you like your nuts. If people need us they call 911. This is the exact same thing. If you need us call us but we don’t go and randomly seek out or solicit places to investigate.
Ghost Eyes: How much fun is “Open Key”?
Ron: It’s fun but I want to say it is much deeper than that, of course it’s fun but our lyrics to the songs that we write are from our own personal lives. Things we’ve experienced, things we have suffered, tragedies, good things, fun things, and there are some paranormal based lyrics. There are a lot of songs we write that have double meanings. We have a song “Over You” and the first lyrics are “I’m tired of you only needing me when things aren’t right.” Well, that can be applied to a relationship that can be applied to a policeman because no one calls us when everything is OK; they only call us when they have a problem. The Open Key thing is fun, it started out because I got in a car crash while I was at work and I injured myself. I was off for a while and Austin would come over to my house, he saw I had a guitar in the corner and he played guitar, and he said hey let’s do something, let’s get this together. I hadn’t had an interest like this in music for many many years and we just started collaborating and coming up with different things and lyrics and it’s kinda exploded for us. It seems to have touched a lot of people’s lives, we have a song called “Final Call” which is about fallen policemen and it surprisingly on the internet has had an amazing reach. It has blown up across the globe actually and it has been accepted as the international police anthem by numerous police officer memorial foundations and things like that.
Ghost Eyes: How has all your paranormal experiences changed the way you look at life and death?
Ron: Well I will tell you that I got into this as far as conducting formal investigations back in 2003, after the experience that caused me to form the group. Since then it has caused me to rethink everything I thought I knew. In many ways it has made me think about religious things. In many ways it has made me less fearful of the unknown but I’m no closer to knowing exactly what is going on than anybody else is.
Part Two of this interview will be posted later this week. In it you will find out what Mr. Fabiani thinks is the biggest problem in the paranormal community and how it is an easy fix.
Mary
on Apr 11th, 2012
@ 9:21 am:
I had hoped when I found this show, that it would continue on and on. It was the only serious one without all the hype. What better people to look into this than people already trained in investigation. One has to be courageous to do this and these people certainly are, or wouldn’t go to work each day. Yet they were smart enough each session to start in prayer as this is a subject you do not want to tangle with without this. We all like to believe in an afterlife but are terrified to look into it while alive. This is sure strange to me. The Catholic church is the only one church that tries to help in this matter and is spread so thin that it needs competent help. This is a subject that has made many innocent people’s lives miserable and needs to be looked into. What on earth happened that this series would be canceled????????