Ghost World

Paul Eno doesn’t believe in ghosts per se; he ascribes to a multiverse theory where the deceased thrive in parallel universes.

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Paul Eno is getting that tingle.  After thirty-five years as one of New England’s most active ghost hunters, he’s come to recognize the sensation. He feels prickliness on his skin, and hairs are standing up on the back of his head. “I’m open to it because of my past experience,” he says. “There are times I walk into a house and I just feel dizzy, or like I have bugs crawling up my arms.”

It could be a real Rod Serling moment, if only this guy looked a tiny bit fretful. Relaxing in the parlor of Hearthside, the stately stone mansion on Lincoln’s Great Road, the fifty-four-year-old Woonsocket resident sounds as though he’s hobnobbing with friends at a cocktail party. And he avoids saying the word “ghost,” as if he might offend someone with an ethnic slur. When he talks about the entities he senses, he uses the word “people.”

“You can go all through this house and feel other people,” he says. “And not because of anything bad that might have happened here. These are people going about their lives. What I do is try to enjoy it. I want to know who they are, and what they’re doing. That to me is what it’s all about.”

That’s when it becomes clear what this guy is up to. He wants to chuck one of Rhode Island’s great institutions—its ghost lore.

Ask people in the Ocean State if they know any spooky stories, and you’ll hear so many you’ll wonder how anybody sleeps at night. Mysterious laughter and disembodied voices reportedly echo through an old Coventry firehouse where town residents gathered for weddings and dances a century ago. School kids studying at Cumberland Public Library—once part of a monastery—say they’ve seen a figure in a monk’s cloak browsing amongst the stacks. In Foster, some claim they’ve been roused from their slumber by clanging noises in the night. They blame the ghost of a mill watchman who summoned employees to work by ringing a bell—until the morning he hanged himself from the rope.

To Eno, it’s all so much twaddle. Never mind that he claims to bump into apparitions and transparent figures at almost every turn. To him, they’re something entirely different. “I do believe in ghosts,” he says. “But not as spirits of the dead or leftover pieces of people. And I don’t believe these people would be hanging around their graves—they’d have better things to do.”

Eno has poked though hundreds of haunted homes in his career as a paranormal investigator. He never charged until recently, when a flood of calls from outside New England prompted him to ask for travel expenses. What money he makes as a ghost hunter comes from speaking fees and his writing. Eno has devised his own theory about the phantom figures he’s met: they live and breathe, but somewhere else. He believes in a “multiverse,” a vast collection of parallel worlds that exist alongside our own. People we know to be dead in our world may live on in others, and those of us alive and kicking here may be deceased elsewhere. Sometimes, according to his theory, those other worlds and our own intersect, and when they do, things can go bump in the night.

“If you hear Aunt Jane skipping down the stairs two weeks after her funeral, it’s not necessarily the spirit of Aunt Jane,” Eno says. “It could be Aunt Jane alive, two years earlier.”

Eno is quick to admit he didn’t invent the idea of parallel worlds. A Princeton physicist first suggested the multiverse concept some fifty years ago to plug a hole in quantum theory. Back then most scientists tried to ignore the proposal, but over the past few decades it has gained wider acceptance. Eno picked it up in a college philosophy course.


It’s not an easy notion to grasp, but over the past few years Eno has found his audience steadily growing. He’s written several books expounding his theory, all published by his family’s company, New River Press. The latest, Turning Home: God, Ghosts & Human Destiny, has hit the Amazon bestseller list twice. He’s signed on with a California publicist, who has him traveling the country for speaking engagements and investigations. In July, he addressed the national conference of Mensa. And he’s become an occasional guest on Art Bell’s syndicated late night talk fest “Coast to Coast,” which—with up to 30 million listeners—boasts the largest audience of any radio show in the United States.