Ghosts, Shamans, and Paranormal Adventures with Charles Rosenay and Thomas Gormley

In this episode of Closer to Venus, host Johnny Burke interviews Charles Rosenay, a producer of paranormal conventions, and Thomas Gormley, an experienced paranormal investigator and shaman. Charles shares how his passion for horror evolved into organizing Para Conn and other paranormal events. Thomas explains his lifelong empathic abilities and how his mentorship by Ed and Lorraine Warren led him to become a shaman. They discuss their various events, investigate paranormal activity during ghost tours, and elaborate on true ghost stories. They also provide insights into the nature of spirits and the importance of having the right intent in paranormal investigations.

00:00 Introduction to The Showman and the Shaman

00:37 Charles' Journey into the Paranormal02:18 Thomas' Empathic Abilities and Shamanic Calling

04:49 Paranormal Investigations and True Ghost Stories15:12 Para Conn and Other Paranormal Events

17:58 Insights on Spirits and Shamanism

Transcript

Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I'm Johnny Burke, and today's guests are Charles Rosenay and Thomas Gormley, also known as The Showman and the Shaman. Charles is one of the producers of Para Conn, Connecticut’s original and premier paranormal convention, while Thomas has 40 plus years’ experience in paranormal investigations as well as true crimes. In this episode, we'll discuss their events, which are many,and their experiences. Gentlemen, welcome to the program.

Charles Rosenay: Thank you for having us.

Johnny Burke: The paranormal, what got you guys into this in the first place? Charles, let's start with you.

Charles Rosenay: I got into it tangentially because I've always been a horror guy. I loved everything that was adjacent to paranormal,  horror movies, monster stuff. I do Dracula tours to Transylvania, and I've always been what they call a monster kid. Grew up building the models, reading the famous monsters of Filmland magazine, watching every possible movie.

While I was running a haunted attraction in Connecticut, someone came up and suggested the possibilities of doing a paranormal convention, and I thought it was a great idea, jumped on it, and we're talking now five, 10 years. I've been so immersed in the paranormal that that went from a single paranormal convention in Connecticut to onethat we do together in Salem, Massachusetts.

Thomas and I dothe Connecticut one. We also do paranormal investigations every other month, and I've become this person who just loves everything connected with paranormal events.

Johnny Burke: \And you're a big horror guy too. I have to ask, since I'm a music guy myself, were you ever a fan of White Zombie? Because apparently Rob Zombie is like a super horror fan. He has an entire room in one of his houses, which is all comics and horror stuff.

Charles Rosenay: He's a fan first, and I love that. Well, Johnny, what it is, is tI have two worlds. I have a music world and the horror world, the music world, I produce Beatle conventions, and I do the Beatle tours to England every summer. Published a magazine on the Beatles for 20 years, and then there's the horror, the horror end of things, which includes the paranormal and those drag tours to Transylvania that we do every year, plus ghost tours to England. It’s really ridiculous how many things we do.

Johnny Burke: That all sounds very cool, especially the ghost tours. So, Thomas, how did you become interested in this? 

Thomas Gormley: it's been around me my whole life. I have empathic abilities. I didn't know I had them,until I had a chance meeting with Lorraine Warren and Ed Warren,back when I was a young teenager. They helped me get in touch with what I was, and they were mentors. There were building blocks for me to develop my own skills in the paranormal.

From then until now, I've done over a thousand home cases and garnered those skills to the point where I became a shaman. And you can't just become a shaman 'cause you want to, it’s a spiritual calling.  It knocks on the door. It's one of those knocks on your head;’ Hey, McFly, wake up.’

And you have to finally make that decision to wake up.I'm grateful that I did, because it's helped me in a lot of things. It's helped me heal a lot of people.It's helped me be able to communicate with the living and the dead and help them heal with any paranormal issues or the ability to help them pass on to the other side if they need assistance. 

Johnny Burke: Thomas, you being of the empathic ilk, would you consider yourself a medium or is that a description that you kind of shy away from?

Thomas Gormley: I do that sort of thing. Mine is more geared towards the home case, or when Charles and I are doing investigations I will communicate either, I could pick up on stuff, communicate, use equipment where voices come through and just guide and help the spirits.

I know Charles has witnessed that a couple times and that’s made his hair go up! It's been fun, but I pick up on things here and there.

Johnny Burke: It's not like you're all non-empaths or non-experiencers. You have that ability. So I imagine with the paranormal investigations with both of you that's like an extra edge and I think it gives you more credibility, doesn't it?

Charles Rosenay: I think what gives us credibility  is so much of our intent.There's so many out there that make a big deal of their powers, their sixth sense. I mean, we want more people to have experiences. If we do a place that we think has haunted or has spirits ,we're hosting it and we're the ones presenting it, and we're the ones making sure everyone has a good time and a great experience, but we want them to have that experience that's more important to us than for us to come up with results.

Johnny Burke: Okay. In your book, Charles, True Ghost Stories of Connecticut, it's a collection of true stories, right? Paranormal investigators, psychics, mediums, ghost hunters.  How did that come into fruition?

Charles Rosenay: It came about at the first convention that I produced, and I'm walking around the room, we've got these people who have been in this paranormal field, they've been psychics for years, for all their lives. And I'm thinking, wait, there's all these books out on haunted locations in different places, whether it's Connecticut or San Diego, you name it.

But none of those had stories of what happened to us, what happened to everyday people in those locations.You could read the history; you could read where it's located. And that was my goal.I saw that there were no such books out there, and that's a book I would want to read.

So I asked everyone. I went, I would say, Johnny Burke, what is the, ugh. Oh my god, how did, I can't even believe this happened to me’ story that you could share with me. I didn't want them to embellish it. I didn't want to make it more Ooh, spooky. I wanted the truth. I'll edit it. I'll make sure the grammar's right. I’ll add a photo and you know what? 30 plus chapters in this book blow people away. We're working on the second volume of it. If anyone wants to contribute. Www. paranormal connecticut.com. And the book's done great. I sell it at the conventions. We do a lot of library appearances, and I'm very proud of it.

Johnny Burke: That sounds great, and it is a very good point about the experience of the people that are the home. So can you guys give me an example of an investigationfrom the viewpoint of the people that were living in the house?

Thomas Gormley:. Probably, one of the biggest ones just for people that had experiences was we were at a Masonic lodge andback in the day, they didn't want women in there.

We had twoladies,that are very well versed in the paranormal. They were talking out to the spirits, and I think one of the spirit's male became angry that they were there. And one of the ladies was scratched pretty severely. Just out of nowhere I just started feeling burning. I had to help her later on overcome that,  with some shamanic healingto make sure she didn't go home with anything is, which we do for everybody that comes to our events to keep 'em safe. [

They had contacted a woman that couldn't find her children, so I helped them. So it was almost like a teaching moment to help them how to communicate, and I helped them with their energy and my energy together. We helped that woman get in contact with her children again to be able to move on to the next plane. 

And this is the stuff that happens, but on top of that, with the same angry spirit, there's a thingthat I do where I go and it's called an Estes method, where I have headphones on like this.I'm kind of blindfolded and I'm just listening to white noise and radio signals coming through what's called an SB-7 Spirit box. I can't hear what they're saying, so they ask questions, and I just say what comes through. And I answered a lot of their questions, but all of a sudden I started to feel like I was angry.

 I was channeling the angry spirit, and Charles was taking pictures all at the same time, and out of one of the 25 pictures he took of me, my face was morphed, my beard was gone.My hair was longer. So it was almost like I became this spirit at that moment. It was coming into me, and I was channeling.

So people witnessed all this,Charles also got a picture of this crazy looking shadow figure in a room where nobody was in, and there's no way light got in there to. We tried everything to try and recreate it andyeah, it was pretty mind-blowing place, but those are the experience people have when they come on these events with us. You never know what you're going to get, but this also helped the people at the Masonic Lodge understand what's there and to know how to control and not let it get out of control.

Charles Rosenay: I want to add that when he was under this method. He was breathing normally and then, I was worried actually, and pulled him out of whatever this was that he was in. I'd never seen this done with someone who has, for lack of a better word, the intuition to be able to do such a practice.

And we did. the gal that he mentioned, now in retrospect, she wears that as a badge of honor and we asked her to write a chapter on it for our book, and she has, but at the time it definitely shook her up.

Johnny Burke: What you just described, what Thomas went through sounds a lot like physical mediumship. 

Thomas Gormley: It's called channeling.  Channeling is when you open yourself up and let something come through to use you as a conduit to speak through to other people. It's not safe for normal people to do. Let's just put it that way. I just have the ability to be able to ground myself and keep things. Only crazy weirdos like me could do stuff like that.

Charles Rosenay: Not normal people. 

Thomas Gormley: Yeah. 

Johnny Burke: You mentioned something during the story about the Masonic Lodge, the Angry Spirit. Would you say that is an earthbound spirit? An earthbound ghost? 

Thomas Gormley: Well, it could be the energy of the Masonic Lodge coming through. There's so many guesses about it and nobody really knows. Is it a spirit that's stuck? Or is it a spirit that could come and go, that it's already passed onto a plane, but it's just still being protective over the lodge. We’re never going to know, we're not a hundred percent right or wrong about the paranormal. 

After experience of years,I would really say it's a spirit that comes and goes to keep the Masonic Lodge protected and keep that oath that person kept in life.

Johnny Burke: So it's possible for these spirits to travel back and forth between the earth plane andthe astral or whatever you want to call that space, which of course I've never been there. At least not that I remember, but that sounds like what you're trying to describe

Thomas Gormley: Yeah. In theory, everything's theory. None of us know exactly, but you know, as mediums do when they speak to the dead, it’s sometimes their spirit guides are speaking to the other side and getting messages to bring back. So it's almost like a handoff, like a relay. You as the conduit is like picking up the phone; you never know who's going to be on the other end of the line, and you just give the message. 

Some people could see spirit. Some people could hear. Some people could get smells. I get smells a lot. I know my mom's around. I know my grandparents are around. I know my other grandmother's around 'cause there's distinct smells that they put into my mind or into my senses to let me know they're there. That happens with a lot of different people.They're clairaudient. There's all these different clairs that you might have andto be able to see like clairvoyant or anything like that. There's all different stuff that puts everything into a hole for that type of six sense.  

Johnny Burke: Okay. Now the shamanism-how you became a shaman. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that happened and when it happened? 

Thomas Gormley: it's been around me my whole life. You get the calling and as you start leveling up in life you become more and more aware. It’s sometime called the Shaman Sickness where I’ve gone through a lot of stuff in my life. I've made some bad decisions and unhealthy things and all that, and     it keeps calling you. Like I said, it knocks on the door. You're, you're meant to do something else. And it took other shamans to make me realize that came into my life over the years of being in the paranormal. Andit comes to the training and all that, but I'm not your normal shaman. There’s so many different kinds. People automatically think it's Indians. It's not. The word Shaman started in Russia. So that's where the word comes from. 

Peru. It's a big area for shamanism, but most people that are of Indian descent here, they don't like being called shamans. They're healers, they're medicine men, medicine woman. That’s what it is. So people get the wrong idea of what it is. It's all it is; somebody with knowledge that's able to communicate and go back and forth into the spirit world sometimes using different ways of doing it, of meditation or some people like to use, drugs that are  hopefully illegal in some countries.

but for me, I'm able to get there with meditation. I'm able to put myself in what's called theta wave, where I open myself up and it's almost like that dream sense where you're about to fall asleep and wake up. And sometimes it happens naturally. I could be sitting in my chair about to fall asleep, and I watched spirits walk through my door. They want to communicate, they need help. They just walk right off the street into my house, and I've seen them, and I usually have good boundaries to talk to Spirit. I let 'em know at this time of the day, you know, if you want to talk, we'll talk any other time. I'm not available. Yeah. 

Johnny Burke: So Charles, tell me about what it's like to work with Thomas. Hence his shamanic empathic abilities and how it really contributes to the work that you guys do.

Charles Rosenay: Well, when we started this concept of the shaman and the showman, I was the non-believer. I was the skeptic. I was the one who would roll his eyes and scoff at stuff, and then I would be told, take a picture in that corner. Who knows what will come out. Just take pictures.

And I take a ton of pictures, and in one of these pictures it's like two specters are crossing in front of a balcony. And then I take pictures of a balcony at an old opera house and there's this doorway where only light is coming through in all the pictures. And in  one picture there's a shadow figure.

That's my talent is that I'm able to take pictures and get great resultstime after time, Thomas shows me that these things are soevidently correct.

We a paranormal investigation in a home, it was a three-floor home. They also had an outdoor place that we all examined, and we weren't getting a heck of a lot of results. We went to the first floor. Okay. Real spooky. Nice, second floor. All right. On the third floor was the children's room of some sort. And he's using one of these meters and one of these devices and all of a sudden clear as day the voice says, "Thomas," and I'm, whoa! Just to hear that blows my mind. So it's  the affirmation of that over and over so that I'm at the point where now everything we go on. I’m expecting unbelievable results because we've never failed on anything we've done.

When people come along to an investigation, a ghost hunt with us, they want results. You know, if you have a good time, that's great. You have a good dinner, first grade or an orientation, learn how to use equipment all great. But when you get stuff that happens, well then, then you know, it's made the whole evening worthwhile. 

Johnny Burke: Okay. All right. Now you both promote Para Conn right? And there are several other events you're involved with; the Salem Paranormal and Horror Convention and also the Connecticut Witch Festival and Drac Tours as well. So did Paraconn come first or not necessarily? 

Charles Rosenay: The DRAC Tours came first, which is dractours.com, and we do the trip to Transylvania Romania every year. The Ghost tours were kind of a sister event from that.This next year in 2026, we're going to England to the most haunted locations in England, and that's ghosttour.com.

The order of events was then the Paranormal Convention in Connecticut, which this year is our fifth annual, and it's a combined paranormal convention and True Crimes conference.We’ve branched out even more. It's the first time we're having live music. First time we're having tattoo artists, first time we're having a celebrity, we have Butch Patrick, Eddie Munster coming.

And that begat the Salem Paranormal Convention. 'cause it really wasn't a world class type of event in that area, and it needed it so badly. So we do that every year at Salem State University. And that's salemparacon.org.We were having that in November, and then the Connecticut Witch Festival started last year because there was nothing happening that would honor the memory of these falsely accused people who were considered witches and Connecticut happened long before Salem did. You know? So, we felt that was so needed, and we do that now every summer in Hartford, Connecticut. And that'sin August.

But the Paraconn, which is coming up July 12th and 13th, is very special for the aforementioned reasons, but also because the first night on that Saturday, when it ends at six o'clock, we're not ending the events.

We are then continuing on at seven o'clock to doa paranormal investigation, a ghost hunt of an Elks Club in the nearby area of Waterbury, Connecticut. And we just hoping we're going to have similar results as we did when we did a Masonic Hall. Along with Thomas and myself, we've got Johnny Zaffis, who was the godfather of the paranormal, he was the nephew of the Warrens and he hosted the show Haunted Collector. Some of Thomas's other teammates in this paranormal field are going to be there, and a lot of people are signing on to be part of it. 

So we've got the convention each day till six, Saturday and the Sunday. Then we have the after event, the after con, we call it a haunting in Waterbury. It just is endless stuff.When we finish these, we've got more events coming up literally every month or every other month, and the people are just really having a great time and enjoying it and getting amazing results.

Johnny Burke: I'd be interested to hear  about the kind of energy either one of you picked up, at let's say, the witch festival. You had to be able to pick up something, right?

Thomas Gormley: We were on Pratt Street in Hartford. I think, it's just the energy of the people there, per se. But the Lauren history of Hartford. Is if you go to the old state building that wasn't there back in the 16 hundreds when these trials were going on, that's where the gallows were, where most of these people accused of witchcraft were, needlessly hung. So that's nearby in the city. The first person put to death  in the new world basically was Alice Young. She was out of Windsor. And, a lot of it occurred in Weathersfield, Connecticut. But there's nothing in Connecticut.

It's not like Salem. I know Salem is more of that commercial. But the ancestors of the men and women here in Connecticut are very protective of their ancestors, and I don't blame them. They worked really hard to get them exonerated after 300 and some odd years. But we want people to know we call it the Connecticut Witch Festival, but that brings people in so we could educate them about that part of our history. And not to repeat it again, \

Charles Rosenay: Everything we do is educational and entertainment. I'm an entertainer. I'm the showman, so I want people to walk away, hey, that was fun. But Thomas wants them to walk away with an experience and with an education. And that goes across the board with the paranormal,  with the witch festival, with everything we do.

And I don't know if we really answered your question about feeling stuff but  it's odd because it's an outdoor event. It's during the day, there's music, there's vendors. It doesn't lend itself to that kind ofinterpretation as far as getting results.

Johnny Burke: If there was a particular energy that came up, it wouldn't be the first time I've heard that, because I remember one speaker in particular where she was touring a haunted place and there were some mean spirits that showed up, and I don't really like talking about it because it's creepy. I know it exists, but I don't want to give it any more energy than they're already given, if that makes any sense. 

Charles Rosenay: That's great. That's makes total sense. Great. Great point. Yes. 

Thomas Gormley: Yeah, you're right, Johnny. BecauseI tell Charles all the time, there's been cases I've had that have been of high profile and owe it to my clients that I worked with and to myself and just anything out there, anything that was malevolent, you never want to bring it up. You don't talk about it. 'cause if you give it energy, it could come back. I tell my clients all the time not to give it energy anymore. And that's where people make the mistake. Everybody wants to say everything's a demon. It's not. And even if it was, you shouldn't be talking about it anymore. You're giving it power again. That's what it wants. So, we got to keep people educated to know that

Johnny Burke: It's a really good point because any medium, psychics or empathsalways have protection rituals. Speaking of psychics and mediums, what are some of the highlights?

Thomas Gormley: Oh, I got tons of them, so we could go on and on. I think a lot of the highlights are just my time with Charles and being able to be amongst patrons and all these events and all the people that we meet. Even the people that aren't alive anymore that we meet. Charles and I know the story of the Trolley Museum and our friend Billy the spirit. 

Thefirst night he came through, wanted to go to college. But for some reason he didn't. The next night when we went back to the Trolley Museum, we like to do two nights to get different types of energy and make sure everybody gets an opportunity. So, Billy came through again and we're using  devices.

Devices were going crazy, and people were starting to feel some really heavy energy and had to sit down.I contacted Billy again, but this time I picked up video in my head. It looked like World War II. So I said to Billy, “Billy, if you went off to World War II, did you die?And he died, he didn't get to go to college. So I told Billy, “ Billy you going off to war and dying for our country is college. “As soon as I said that, you could feel a rush of energy go up the trolley. All the instrumentation went to zero.

It looked like Billy made the decision to move on 'cause his question was answered. That was pretty profound. Nobody on the trolley talked for like 15 minutes. They were trying to get their jaws up off the ground.I had one woman come up to me and said,”I've been in the paranormal for 30 years and I've seen a lot of stuff says I've never seen that happen.” 

Johnny Burke: So that could be an exampleof aiding a spirit to move on towards the light.

Charles Rosenay: He made it happen. He found that missing element in what this spirit needed to cross over. And when he said, you went to college, you served the army, you fought for our country, you gave your life. For us. 

Johnny Burke: Good example. Anything else we need to know about the spirit world and ghosts and things that go bump in the night?

Thomas Gormley: Anybody in this field, they're just afraid of us as we are of them most of the time. So I know people freak out when they hear things. Don't freak out, be curious- see what's going on, make sure it's something actually going on. But anytime I walk into a place, I go in with the greatest intent. What you put in is what you're going to get out. If you go in, guns blazing and all that,  you're probably going to get guns back.

 So that's why we teach people those types of things. They're just like us. They just don't have the meat suit anymore.They still have in theory, a consciousness, and they still have that, you know, that back and forth.

If they were a jerk in life, they're probably still a jerk. Doesn't mean they're a demon; it just means they're a jerk. Serial killers die too. You could run into those, and you never know what you're dealing with. That's why you have to have that experience and that ability to discern what you're dealing with and to be able to go from that. 

Johnny Burke: The intent is I think, as important as anything else. A lot of intuitives, empaths, whatever you wanna call them, will say, I only want those of the highest light. And everyone else is not welcome, or some kind of permutation of that.

So I think we got a pretty good idea of what, your people that come to your events are going to expect; it's gonna be educational. It's going to be fun. Uh, they're probably going to learn some things that they never even thought of as well.

Charles Rosenay: Definitely, and they'll be able to get readings, the vendors, every imaginable reader is going to be there and healer. So in addition to being able to buy the merch, being able to meet the guests, get autographs,they'll be able to sit down and  whether it's a tarot card, whether it's palm reading, whether it's reading bones, they're all going to be there,

Johnny Burke: Okay. And the next event you have coming up is  next month, it's July. 

Charles Rosenay: July 11th and 12th. And it's ParaConn.org. And that's everything you want to know will be on that website.