ABSTRACT
The paranormal is part of mainstream popular culture. The front cover of Take a Break’s Fate and Fortune uses a pun on ‘girl’s night out’ as a playful reference to Halloween attractions. Readers can hold a dinner for the dead, visit a haunted house, predict the future, cast a spell, meditate and make a jack-o’-lantern. Have a ‘ghouls night out’ and explore your dark side. According to the Economist Halloween could be the new Christmas, with record sales in ghost products and haunted happenings. Halloween is part of paranormal trends. Polls around the world indicate 50 per cent of people in these countries hold at least one paranormal belief. In such an environment it is open season on ghostly matters. Resurgence in paranormal beliefs gives momentum to a range of representations of ghosts, supernaturalism, angels, and fringe science, across multimedia environments. In popular culture, paranormal attitudes and beliefs are being transformed into lifestyle choices. Spirits are becoming a way of life. As paranormal ideas and beliefs become part of popular culture they change
meaning. The extraordinary transforms into something more ordinary. A wide definition of the paranormal includes eclectic beliefs and practices, from spirits and vampires, to angels and aliens. People don’t have to be religious to believe in spirits, nor do they need to know about science to explore altered states of consciousness. Cultural practices loosely associated with the paranormal range from media and communication, to tourism, leisure, health and well being, psychology and self-help. Professionals within psychic and paranormal industries are not only mediums or clairvoyants, but people whisperers, angel communicators, reality adjustors. One of the implications from this transformation of meaning is that what people think of as paranormal is changing, and what they understand as a paranormal experience is open to multiple interpretations.
