C Y R I L M A G A Z I N E

ST: Describe your interview process and how you choose whose stories you recount in your books.

CR: The interview process evolved into one which now follows a very specifically formulated, designed interview procedure involving multiple interviews spaced well apart so that small details can be monitored from telling to retelling, to see whether or not those details remain consistent. During that three-year foray into the world of the undead as I was researching the book, I researched close to 200 cases and could have squeezed five books out of it. However, I refused to utilize any more than 58, which is the number in "The New England Ghost Files", Out of those many, many interviews and investigations, only 58 struck me as credible enough for publication. My goal was to produce the most believable of its kind in print. Unlike most writers of this genre, I chose not to just rehash the same old ghost stories and legends that have been out there for years, but to produce an entirely new body of modern day, perspectively true folklore, ghostlore. I think I set that goal perhaps because I had reached a point of recognizing that science still has limits and in order for us to maintain a sense of awe and wonder and mystery about our universe we need a revival of the types of folklore that so wonderfully colored and textured life back in the 19th and 18th centuries. As Horatio in Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "perhaps there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy." It's about open mindedness.

ST: How do you win the confidence of those you interview and how do you separate the truth from a hoax?

CR: It's more important that those who I interview win my confidence. So important to me is the issue of perspective voracity, perspective truthfulness and believability that I have incorporated into my interviews a number of techniques which are designed to weed out those people and/or accounts that are not sincere, not truthful. People have to win my confidence during the initial contact period, which is usually done via telephone after they or someone they know has contacted me about them. It's in that initial interview that they need to win my confidence before deciding to engage in the full interview process. They do so most significantly by relating accounts to me that are entirely original, not accounts that merely replicate with a slightly new spin, what's already out there, what's already been told in other books, or in all folklore.

In addition to originality, I especially develop confidence in those who relate their accounts with a certain depth of emotion, a certain degree of affect; everything from tone of voice to statements about how the incident has affected their lives.An encounter with the supernatural is not going to be related in the same manner that one would relate or recount say, their last year's trip to Disney World. There is going to be a certain depth of emotion in their voice that can appropriate a range of emotions; from fear to excitement to confusion. A number of people who once believed they had a firm footing in rational reality suddenly having an encounter that upsets that footing a little bit. That is going to come across when they relate the account if the account is perspectively valid. How do I win the confidence of the people? I do so by letting them know that I'm not going to consider them insane. Also, I think that at this point my reputation is widely established enough by all of the mainstream media coverage we received from feature articles in the Boston Globe, to reviews in Yankee Magazine and ultimately to six articles in the various regional editions of the Providence Journal. We also received coverage with news affiliates for ABC, NBC, CBS, the Fox Network, and National Public Radio. Through all the media coverage I think I've gained a reputation as an interviewer who is sympathetic; who is not going to tag the interviewee as a lunatic. I'm also interested in allowing them to obtain a certain catharsis with some of the disturbing or unsettling emotions that they may residually have as a result of their experience; emotions that they may need to discuss, talk about with someone, yet for fear of being branded crazy they haven't or wouldn't. So, there's almost a therapeutic element there. The confidence thing goes both ways.