Former firefighters host weekly paranormal show

It’s a topic rarely broached in most households, but a local paranormal group is up late on Saturdays talking it to death.

From their Cape Coral studio, Ian Hickin, the show’s creator, and Bob Kelly, his co-host, both members of the Florida Paranormal Research Group, discuss all aspects of hauntings, ghosts, UFOs and every out-of-this-world topic you can think of during their weekly Web show.

Now, after four years, the show has celebrated its 200th episode, which was on St. Patrick’s Day.

Hickin and Kelly, both former firefighters with the Bayshore Fire Department, said it’s their deep passion for the subject matter that keeps them coming back week after week.

Both said that devotion originated with paranormal experiences of their own.

In one such experience, Hickin said he performed CPR on a woman with no vital signs and she later came back and described her out-of-body experience to him in vivid detail.



“She knew what truck we were in, she knew we were wearing different color uniforms,” he said. “At no time in my presence was she alive.”

“Once you have an experience like that, you know that it’s true and you want everyone else to know that it’s true,” he said.

For Kelly, it was when he moved to a new apartment in downtown Fort Myers and saw a woman dressed all in red, except for black stockings. So he told his neighbors about the apparition.

“They said, ‘Oh, that’s so and so, who lived in that apartment,’” he said. “She had passed away about two weeks before I even moved in. I was like holy smokes, you know.”

The group also conducts its own investigations around the state, which range from UFO lookouts to home and business paranormal readings. They’ve performed two in the Cape within the past year and are doing preliminary work on another potential investigation in the city.

“They have a bunch of different types of activity going on,” Kelly said about the home in question. “Cellphones being turned on when they’re turned off. They had stuff being knocked off and out in the middle of the floor.”


Hickin said many of the investigations are even streamed live during their weekly show, allowing the 300 to 500 — on average — who watch the show to go along for the ride.

“It’s really cool,” he said. “It really gives the people an opportunity to investigate at home.”

They bring along a bevy of technology to document the entire process, including several cameras and high-definition audio recorders to pick up any voices not audible to the human ear.

And if it turns out a home has a paranormal issue, the tenants are presented with a number of options on how to proceed. Often, the best course of action is to call in another local squad of “haunting resolutionists” known as the Fire and ICE Paranormal Investigators of Florida, Hickin said.

“We may come and investigate your home and tell you what you have, but that doesn’t fix anything,” he said.

While Cape Coral isn’t quite as haunted as a place like St. Augustine, the crew is still on the search for more case investigators, he said.

In the meantime, others interested in the group’s endeavors can log in to the show and get an earful of what often can’t been seen with the naked eye.

The only topic they tend to stay away from, Hickin said, is government conspiracies.

“We really did go to the moon. George Bush didn’t bring down the buildings in New York,” he said. “We stick more to the ghosts and hauntings.”

via news-press.com