We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michael Richey. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michael below.
Michael, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about one of the craziest things you’ve experienced in your journey so far.
Most of the things you experience while investigating the paranormal are personal. Feeling the hairs on your arm stand up, a sudden cold chill, or seeing shadows from the corners of your eyes. Having a collective experience where two or more people experience the same thing outside of their own bodies is a rare event. I’ve experienced a few of these events in a collective setting, but nothing has come close to the one I had with a group of twelve strangers at the Indiana State Sanatorium located in Rockville, IN.
On August 2023, my team and I were invited out as guest investigators to ISS CON, a convention held on site by the owners. This place was notorious for patient deaths, murders, suicides and rampant patient abuse when it was a psychiatric care facility as well as a retirement home. The history on this place is dense and very dark, and leaves no room to speculate the reason for its haunting.
Each guest investigator/team was divided up into smaller groups and spread around the property to investigate. The place is 120,000 square feet, with additional buildings spread around so it was fairly easy to break everyone up without worrying about interference from each other.
The group, my team and I consisted of 12 people total and we were given the fifth floor of the hospital to investigate. This is considered to be one of the most active spots on the property, with reports of apparitions, voices, physical attacks and even a “humanoid-like” apparition that runs on all fours at violent speeds up all five flights of stairs at you while you’re in the stairwells alone. Despite knowing this, nothing could have prepared me for what my group and I would actually experience that night.
Floors two through five are all identical to each other and were used as living quarters for patients while the hospital was in operation. Each stairwell sits on opposite ends of a long corridor with doors on either side about five to six feet apart. In the center was a day room, with some leftover furniture from the hospital. It was a very basic layout. If you stand in the center of the dayroom and look to your left or right you can see down the entire corridor where the patient rooms reside. You don’t have a lot of options for entering or exiting without being seen by someone. This small detail is important for later.
The sun has started to set by now and the room grows darker by the minute. Twelve of us are crowded in a half cut semi-circle in the dayroom, surrounded by the faint red glow of a few REM Pod lights and the occasional green and yellow flash of a K2 meter acknowledging an EMF spike. By the time we finish setting out the rest of our equipment and introducing ourselves to the spirits, the sun has set and the whole floor is now dark and silent. The center red REM Pod light is rather dim, but it provided enough light to make out the shape of everyone in the room.
Four people are standing at the threshold of the east wing corridor, seven of us are inside the dayroom and one guests has now begun wandering down the east corridor with their video camera in hopes to capture evidence. As time goes on, people begin to see, hear and feel things around them. Shadows begin to dance around the group and surprise us. Devices begin responding to our questions. Our group is very invested in what’s going on around us, so much so that we lost track of time and began to hear the east wing stairwell door open. Someone who was here for the con was coming up to check out the fifth floor.
It turns out we had been up there for nearly an hour, but it only felt like a few minutes. Time moves in a very strange way in this place. This gentleman walks in with this bright flashlight and sees us all crowded around equipment in the dayroom and quickly turns his light off, followed with a quiet “sorry” as he begins to merge into our group. I’m currently standing in the center of the dayroom facing the east corridor, which opens up to about a 10 by 12 foot threshold. There are maybe six or seven people standing in front of me at this time, and I can account for everyone in our group minus the one who is at the end of the hall filming.
Just beyond this threshold that I’m facing sits two REM Pods that are five feet apart, which created a fairly bright red glow in the entrance to the corridor, or at least enough for me to make out features of the people standing closest to them. I see this man walk up to our group, and he’s a middle aged man with long hair in a ponytail, glasses and stubble. He peeks into the dayroom just beyond that threshold to get a glimpse of everyone in our group before letting us know the free-roam has begun and then ducks off into the first room to the left of the threshold. Shortly after that, I see what I assume to be his friend or partner come in behind him.
She’s a blonde woman, with straight, platinum blonde hair parted in the center that rests on her shoulders and she’s wearing a white v-neck shirt. Her hair was covering most of her face so I couldn’t make out any features but her hair was very blonde, almost white. She walked within view of the group, just beyond the threshold, head held down looking around the floor as if to avoid stepping on any of our equipment. She pauses and looks down at the REM Pod, standing directly over top of this device for at least two or three seconds. Without looking up at all, she ducks off into the left room behind the man she came in with and I don’t see her again. My friend who had attended the con as a VIP guest looked at me and asked “did you see that?” and I replied “what, that guys girlfriend that came in? What about it?”. She replied “Huh. Nevermind, then” and we moved on from the subject. It wasn’t a second thought.
Just before the man and his friend leave I see his light cut on at the end of the east corridor and hear the stairwell door open. It’s now a dark, quiet floor again, save the faint red glow of the REM Pod lights. A few moments pass and I hear the guest down the hall yell “did anyone see where that woman went? The one that came in with that guy a few minutes ago?” and my blood went ice cold. We all started frantically looking around at each other and nodded in agreement as I ask “did you see her? You saw her right?” Every person on that floor watched this woman walk in. Some were a foot or two away from her. They could’ve reached out and touched her.
I watched her walk into this room and walk out, so clearly that my brain did not register for a split second that the person wasn’t really there. The guest at the end of the hallway where the man entered, watched two people walk in, but only one left. We searched every room and called out to her, but she wasn’t there. There was physically no way for her to get passed our group without someone seeing her.
At this point we’re mixed with confusion, slight panic and joy. Did we all just see the same thing? Down to the shirt she was wearing? As were discussing this, the man that had initially came up returned to inform our entire group that he attended the convention alone, without a spouse or friend and came up to the 5th floor alone when he ran into our group.
To this day, I have never seen an apparition so clearly as I did that night. I don’t know many people who can say they’ve had a collective experience with that many people in the room to confirm what actually happened.
Michael, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I first started exploring the paranormal and content creation back in the summer of 2020. Prior to starting all of this I was a IT Technician and focused mainly on hardware and network infrastructure for small businesses. When the world went into lockdown my business was shut down and I was left with a lot of free time like everyone else, so I began exploring old hobbies as a way to pass the time. I was always enthusiastic about photography but never fully dove into the medium growing up, so I decided to give it another try and fell in love with it.
The paranormal didn’t come until after a profound experience in an abandoned asylum in my home state. I was initially exploring it for photos, but it had other plans in mind for me! That experience led to learning how to create videos and all the other bits and pieces that make up branding and social media content. You could say Charm City Paranormal was an accident, because prior to that experience in the asylum, I had no interest in the paranormal. That place has since become a staple investigation on my YouTube channel and the reason why I continued doing this long after the buzz of finding a new hobby wore off.
Creating meaningful, engaging work is important to me and my goal when investigating is to bring my community authentic content. I wouldn’t have started any of this if it weren’t for my initial experience back in 2020 and I wouldn’t continue to seek validation through my experiences if it weren’t for that day. When I first started making videos I noticed a real lack of engaging paranormal content that wasn’t exaggerated. It’s either incredibly sensationalized and overhyped to the point that you know its fake, or the genuine content is very slow, drawn out and not engaging enough to sit through. There wasn’t a lot of content out there in the middle of those two options. Engaging, visually appealing and authentic. That’s where I found my footing.
I’m certainly not the first to do it, but the response of my work has been incredible, humbling and life changing. It caught the eye of some really amazing people who believe in my work and one day I woke up to eight million views on TikTok and fifty thousand subscribers on YouTube in a month. Not only was I able to create the videos I wanted to see, but it resonated with millions of people around the world. At that point I knew I wanted to shift careers and go from IT to full time content creation centered around history and the paranormal.
I do my best to present this stuff in a way that’s engaging and digestible to almost anyone. I love history and art, and this medium combines the two to give me the opportunity to share amazing stories, rich history and truly life changing experiences in the most authentic way possible. I’m endlessly fascinated by the stories and experiences these places share and for us personally, they present themselves to us in a way that requires no sensationalism or exaggerated theatrics to keep your attention. I think that speaks for itself.
Rather it be a hidden fascination or a deep seated connection, the paranormal is something I think anyone can explore and engage with and I hope my work is a testament to that. I hope I continue to inspire others to pick up a camera, explore that old abandoned house in their town for ghosts, or dive deeper into their own mortality and spirituality with the work I’m presenting.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Authenticity, engagement and consistency are some of the most important things to consider when building a brand or community. I worked on this project obsessively for two years before I saw any success from it. While that is an incredibly short time to be where I’m at, I was also putting in 12-16 hour days on the computer editing or learning, marketing Charm City Paranormal, networking or looking for new ways to expand my reach. There were times I wouldn’t take a day off for weeks until I’d crash and sleep for a day, only to wake back up after a 14 hour sleep and get back to work for a few more weeks. When you truly love what you do it doesn’t feel like work and this hasn’t felt like it in nearly four years. My lifechanging experience in that asylum fueled a passion that gave me an insatiable desire to create meaningful content, which led me to where I’m at now. By staying focused on the work I wanted to create, remaining as consistent as possible and presenting my work authentically, I was able to foster a community into what it is today.
Define a short and long term goal before you begin and remind yourself often why you started. Don’t deviate from that path unless its absolutely necessary and only when the newly presented path offers something better than what you originally set out for.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Overall, I want people to comes to terms with the inevitability of death and find peace with it all through the engaging, authentic paranormal media I hope to create that not only catches your attention, but makes you question things you thought you knew about life after death.
Contact Info:
- Website: charmcityparanormal.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjWrQ_xM1BR/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charmcityparanormal/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CharmParanormal
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzX8ZXTY0uyE-LmIte7N64g
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@charmcityparanormal?lang=en
Image Credits
Charm City Paranormal