Amy Bruni - Life with the Afterlife: 13 Truths I Learned about Ghosts

For Walt Disney, it all started with a mouse. But for me, it all started with a ghost.

When I was growing up, it was just an accepted part of life that our house in Alameda, California, was haunted. From the moment we moved into our little Craftsman bungalow, it was clear there were ghosts in the house, and my New Agey parents certainly didnt shy away from that idea. In fact, they encouraged me, my brother, and my two sisters not to be afraid of what we couldnt explain. We felt spirits in the house, and we talked about them. My mom, especially, talked about seeing a little boy running between rooms. My dad dabbled in supernatural research. To us, it didnt feel weird at all. Sometimes there are ghosts, the thinking was in our family, and sometimes theyre in our house. It was totally normal to us.

Totally normal, right?

Maybe it sounds strange now, but that thinking opened a whole world to me. I was raised to be receptive to the idea that there are things in the universe we cant easily understand, and I was never told I should be wary of them. This paved a path of weird and wonderful possibilities I never could have imagined as a carefree child of the eighties, playing outside until after dark every night in Northern California.

So the night I saw a man standing in the window, eight feet above the ground, in a place where there was nowhere to stand, and wearing a kind of clothing I had never seen before, I knew I was seeing a ghost. But I wasnt scared.

Since then, there have been many moments in my career as a paranormal investigator when I have been frightened. Sometimes, downright terrified. But not at that moment. At that moment, I saw a man who couldnt possibly be there. He wasnt a scary ghost to me. He was a person.

So I did what any normal kid would do. I ran to get my mom.

By the time we got back, he was gone. It had just been a flash, for only a moment. But I knew what Id seen. The man was wearing an old-fashioned green uniform and standing in the window, in clear view, even though that window was eight feet off the ground.

Alameda, a midsize city in the San Francisco Bay Area, has a long military history. Even now, after the base has closed, its still home to the Naval Air Museum. We learned later that our little house had been military housing, and a family whod lived there had had a son who died serving in World War II. There used to be a wraparound porch where I had seen him standing, which explains why he was visible in a window so high off the ground. When he lived there, he would have been standing on that porch.

A man who wasnt there, standing on a porch that wasnt there.

You might say my whole life has been a path leading me to professional ghost hunting.

After that day, my appetite for weird knowledge was insatiable: about the afterlife, about who that ghost might be, about anything pertaining to the supernatural and anything not easily explained. My mom, Debbie, would drop me off at the library, and I would head straight for the ghost section. I read everything I could get my hands on by Hans Holzer, the famed paranormal researcher who investigated the house from The Amityville Horror. I examined and reexamined old photos of mediums in ridiculous situations, like having ectoplasm coming out of their ears. In the eighties there was a huge interest in the unexplained and there were new books coming out faster than I could keep up with them. (Holzer himself wrote more than 120.) I devoured as much as I could, and I accepted it all as fact. Now I have a better understanding of how to determine what is credible when it comes to evidence. Back then, it never occurred to me that any of it was fake, and I loved every word of what I was reading.