Inspired by the 1984 "Ghostbusters" film, Ciarán O'Keeffe became a parapsychologist - aka a real-life ghostbuster.
"My first ghost hunt was at a pig farm believed to have been burned down by a demonic spirit. I was about six or seven-years-old, living in Norfolk, and I had heard stories that the building had caught fire because of an evil force," O'Keeffe told The Guardian. "One night I had a sleep over at a friend's house and went over there to investigate, expecting to find ghosts. Instead, we ended up disturbing a wasps' nest and had to run home with stings all over us."
O'Keeffe's fascination for ghost stories transformed into his career path at Washington College (a liberal arts school), where he completed an honors thesis on paranormal experiences alongside in a representative from the Institute of Parapsychology (now called the Rhine Research Center), according to his website.
In college O'Keefe studied various fields of psychology including investigative psychology, practitioners (mostly psychics and mediums) who claim paranormal ability, hypnotism, and the psychology of fraud.
O'Keefe is a scientist who studies ghosts, which at times is a conflict of interest for him and other parapsychologists.
"As a scientist, you always go in a little bit biased, expecting there to be a natural explanation," O'Keefe told The Guardian. "But there are probably only 50 or 60 parapsychologists in the world today and only a handful of those specialize in haunting experiences. If you get us together in a pub, even though we are skeptical, after a few drinks we will all say: 'What if we were the one to capture that ghost?' That's what keeps me going."
He said that "what if" factor is what keeps him motivated to continue studying supernatural life.
"The more I learned about parapsychology and critical thinking, the more I started to explore alternative explanations for what was going on. It was still exciting and addictive," O'Keeffe told The Guardian.
Being that "Ghostbusters" was written by a spiritualist [Dan Aykroyd], perhaps the film that inspired O'Keefe to get on the phone and call Columbia University (where "Ghostbusters" took place) was written all along to drive society's curiosity of the supernatural.
