Ambler Campus, Temple University

By all appearances, John Zaffis could be your high school chemistry teacher or a history professor from the local college.

A bespectacled gentleman with an inquisitive face, salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a suit jacket and tie, it would seem Zaffis would be more at home behind a desk or his nose firmly planted in some old tome. Looks are, as Zaffis well knows, often deceiving.

For more than 30 years, Zaffis has made his life’s work out of the horrifying — experiences that most people would seek to avoid. Haunted houses, ghosts, poltergeists, and demon possession are his stock in trade and he has investigated thousands of nightmarish incidents throughout the world.

On Thursday, October 29, Zaffis will bring his extensive experience with the paranormal to the Ambler campus for a special lecture — which will include hundreds of slides and artifacts from his research — at 1 p.m. in Bright Hall Lounge. This event is free and open to the public.

For Zaffis, his entry into otherworldly phenomena, as is often the case, started with a personal experience.

“When I was 16-years-old, an apparition appeared at the foot of my bed. It was my grandfather who had recently passed away,” said Zaffis, 47, who has appeared several times on the Discovery Channel. “That was the first moment I thought ‘Hey, there’s something to this.’ Prior to that I didn’t really believe in the paranormal. I started visiting haunted locations when I was about 19 or 20 and worked with my aunt and uncle (famed ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren) for quite a few years.”

According to Zaffis, his firsthand experiences began with poltergeists and ghosts, incidents that only fueled his desire to “understand all aspects of this work.”

“Often with poltergeist activity, it is centered around a child or teen, possibly someone who has experienced trauma or mental illness,” he said. “Today we believe in psychokinetic energy. These troubled individuals are able to tap into that. I believe there is something else that comes into play as well, energy fields that we are just beginning to understand.”

Zaffis said there are several types of poltergeists from the typical incidents where furniture and objects are thrown about to fire poltergeists — spot fires erupt — and water poltergeists “where it literally rains inside the house.”

“I worked on an incident of a water poltergeist for the first time about 10 years ago and I’m working on another at this very moment in the New England area involving a young boy,” he said. “My involvement in these types of incidents led me to begin studying cases of possession and exorcism, witnessing and taking part in exorcisms with Roman Catholic priests, monks, Buddhists, rabbis, and ministers — it is more typical than anyone would imagine.”

In cases involving demonic forces, Zaffis said, he seeks to “rule out the medical” explanation, such as mental illness, before exploring the paranormal. To him, Ouija boards, tarot cards, books of purported magic aren’t mass produced parlor games or simple flights of fancy — they are doors that, once opened, can be very difficult to close.

“Whether opened willingly or unwillingly, darkness will find these doors into our world. Many people don’t think the danger is real, but there can be dire consequences,” he said firmly. “The incidents that follow can start with something simple — scratching sounds in the walls — and slowly escalate to physical manifestations into our world, possibly even possession in extreme cases.”

After more than 30 years exploring the darkest corners of our world, Zaffis is certainly not immune to the terror paranormal events can instill. There remains one incident in particular — a haunted funeral parlor — that he didn’t speak about for years and is still reticent to discuss.

“This was a place where a great deal of haunted activity had been reported and we were involved in a detailed examination of what was taking place. I had gotten up and walked into the hallway and looked up at the top of the stairs; I began to smell something like rotting meat, which was all over this area and it was unbearable,” said Zaffis, recalling the ordeal. “As I continued to look up the grand staircase, I started to see something begin to form and slowly descend the staircase — transparent and horribly ugly with dark, inset eyes. It had come to the last step and it said to me ‘Do you know what they did to us, do you know?’ That was enough for me.”

According to Zaffis, demons will often take a form designed to scare you, “and in this case, it did an excellent job.”

“It nearly knocked me right out of the work. There is a point where you accept the fact that certain things will happen, it’s the chance you take,” he said. “In this case, however, I felt I was truly in danger. I was not prepared for it and I wasn’t expecting it. The worst part was the fear I had for my family — what if this manifested at my house?”

Zaffis’ house, however, has an assortment of interesting apparitions all its own, a museum of artifacts he has collected during his research. A sword connected to satanic rituals and appearances of otherworldly hooded figures; a robe linked to a sinister past; a grandfather clock that unpleasantly lived up to its name, and, of course, “Mr. Sinister,” a statue inhabited by a dark spirit. They are all part of Zaffis’ menagerie, which can be visited online at www.johnzaffisparanormalmuseum.com. Information about other incidents he has researched, such as “The Haunting in Connecticut,” which was made into a film in 2009, and his book, Shadows of the Dark, is also available at the website.

Zaffis believes that about 80 percent of the population has had some sort of paranormal experience that they chose to either accept of deny, the most common being the ghostly appearance of a deceased relative.

“The way I view it today is that for the true skeptic, there will never be enough evidence to make them believe. For the believer there is already an overabundance of evidence,” he said. “I know these incidents take place, I’m simply trying to understand them. I am more focused on trying to help the people and families who are terrorized by these incidents than trying to prove that the paranormal exists.”

For more information on John Zaffis’ lecture appearance at Temple University Ambler, contact the Office of Student Life at 267-468-8425.