A fish taco sounds like something you might have for dinner, but actually it's something that might have you for dinner instead. It's not a food — it's a vampire!

Actually, the vampire's name is spelled pishtaco, though it is pronounced "fish taco." The pishtaco (el nacaj) originates in the folklore of the Andes Mountains in Peru. It is a male demon that feeds off the fat and blood of young children. It appears as a tall white man wearing a long white coat.

That leprechauns became so well known outside of Ireland is a bit of a mystery, as they're not all that central to Irish mythology. In modern times, they're described as small men with red hair and green outfits, cheerfully guarding a pot of gold and awfully fond of either alcohol or breakfast cereal, depending on who you're asking. In fact, there's much more to these wee folk than rainbows and Lucky Charms.

The cobblers of Faerie, leprechauns are solitary male fairies who typically go about their daily work of making shoes in forest hollows and fairy circles or among the hills and hedges of the Irish countryside, although they were once known to "adopt" a human family and live in their home. Throughout history, they're identified as tricksters fond of pulling pranks on humans. But they're also reported to be reclusive and lightning fast, only spotted by chance; they're supposedly unable to escape if being watched, but are very good at making people look away.

If you took all the skeptics in the world and piled them up in a big giant heap, James Randi would be at the top. Everyone associated with the paranormal in some way has probably heard of James Randi, a stage magician and author who is now best known for his foundation's Million Dollar Challenge. The James Randi Educational Foundation is offering a prize of one million dollars to anyone who can demonstrate evidence of the paranormal.

On its surface, the challenge may sound easy, especially to those with paranormal experience. Find James Randi, demonstrate your ability, and ask for a check, right? Wrong.

Mediums, clairvoyants and healers have gathered at Spook Hill every summer for 106 seasons for their own version of sleepaway camp. At the Wonewoc Spiritualist Camp in Wisconsin, one of 13 across the country, campgoers take workshops and classes on topics like past-life regression and seeing auras — a far cry from the typical camp classes of whitewater rafting and canoing. Campers also take advantage of ice cream socials, campfires and cheap camp lodging.

Is vampirism a condition that exists outside of folklore and film? Are there real living people who psychically feed on human life force — or even on blood? What is the source of these supernatural hungers? The Atlanta Vampire Alliance has the answers. Formed in 2005, the AVA is a research group devoted to the modern condition of vampirism — but Dracula would never recognize these vampires as kin. The vampires of the AVA are living human beings, often psychic, who have a need for the life force of others, and they have come together as a group to study and better understand that need.

If you're a fan of horror/thriller/scifi/fantasy films, you can feast on the cream of the indy crop at the seventh annual Shriekfest Film Festival October 4-7 in Los Angeles.

Among the must-sees are Christopher Marquette in a special sneak preview of The Day the Dead Weren't Dead, Judd Nelson and Robert Wagner in Netherbeast Incorporated, Kevin Sorbo in Something Beneath, and David Morse and John C. McGinley in A.W.O.L.

The festival features 44 features and short films and 32 screenplays. Awards will be given in 15 categories, including one for best filmmaker under the age of 18. Finalists are announced on shriekfest.com.

All screenings will be in the fabulous Chaplin Theatre at Raleigh Studios, 5300 Melrose Ave. in Hollywood. After checking out the films, fans can rock on at parties. Check out the Shriekfest website for ticket, schedule and party information. Tickets, at $8 per film, go on sale until September 29.

The festival is directed by Denise Gossett and Todd Beeson. "Paranormal State," a new series debuting in December on A&E, is a sponsor.

You can't ask much more from a haunted location than an abandoned former psychiatric hospital built right on top of a Confederate cemetery. Jefferson Davis Hospital was built in Houston, Texas in 1924, despite the objections of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who wanted the Confederate cemetery to remain undisturbed. To appease the Daughters, the hospital was named for the former president of the Confederacy, and the hospital's basement was built aboveground to minimize damage to the graves. But Jefferson Davis Hospital was only a hospital for 14 years; when a newer hospital was built in 1937, the old building fell into disrepair. Over the years it served as a juvenile detention center, a psychiatric ward, a VD clinic and a medical records storage facility. Eventually, it was abandoned.

It happens to everyone: you put an object down or put it away, only to discover later that it has mysteriously vanished. You search everywhere but it is nowhere to be found. Then later you find it, but in a different and often unusual location. The wallet you set down on a bedroom dresser shows up in the middle of your living room floor.

Imagination or forgetfulness? In paranormal research, it's a genuine unexplained phenomenon called "jotts" or "just one of those things."

Jotts have been studied and cataloged for years by Mary Rose Barrington of the Society for Psychical Research in London. Barrington coined the term "jotts" and divided them into types.

If you call your local police department to report a UFO sighting, it is likely you'll be referred elsewhere after your report is taken. It's not that they won't believe you (although they might not) — it's just that you'll be taken much more seriously by this other place. Plus your report will be added to an accessible database of UFO sightings based on factors like date, state and shape of object. Originally based in Seattle, Washington, The National UFO Reporting Center, now located in Davenport, Washington is run by a man of the same name, Peter Davenport since 1994.

Davenport's interest in UFO phenomenon was prompted at a young age by a personal sighting over St. Louis municipal airport during the summer of 1954. He investigated his first case in 1965. Recent, well-known cases investigated by NUFORC include the Pheonix UFO Incident of 1997 and the O'Hare International Airport UFO Incident of 2006.

Orb photos. They are trotted out on nearly every paranormal site as proof that ghosts exist. These mostly transluscent spheres of light appear singly or in swarms, and according the some paranormal investigators, each orb is photographic evidence of the presence of a ghost.

Where ghost hunters are concerned, orbs are like a religion. There are those who fervently believe that every single orb in a photo is actually a ghost, smiling pretty for the camera. On the other side are the disbelievers, and they are just as staunch. The disbelievers argue that orbs are nothing but motes in the camera's eye, flecks of moisture or bits of dust.

EMF meters seem to be the standard tech for professional and amateur ghost hunters. But what do these devices actually do?

The experts at Ghost Gadgets provide an exhaustive explanation of EMF meters for their readers. Typical EMF meters are "AC EMF Meters" and measure changing magnetic fields. Electromagnetic fields can range from 0 hertz and up, varying as you reach the different fields of UV light, x-rays and beyond. Most AC EMF meters are sensitive to frequencies of 30-10,000 hertz. The tool is made of a coil connected to an amplifier; a changing magnetic field will cause a tiny AC voltage to flow through the coil. The voltage is amplified to create an analog signal, which is sent through filters and shot back out as a reading in milliGauss (mG) or other units.

When it comes to discovering the world of the supernatural, John Zaffis (pictured, right, with Paranormal State's Ryan Buell) is a name you should remember. Zaffis, an author, paranormal investigator and demonologist, has been exploring the realm of the paranormal for over 30 years. His aunt and uncle, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are most famous for the Amityville House investigation (Ed passed away in 2006). After working with the Warrens, Zaffis became not only interested in ghosts but in demonology: the study of demonic entities, possession and the practice of exorcism. Anyone who has ever spoken with a demonologist or someone who knows the field understands how frightening the topic can be. Zaffis deals with cases that span many cultures. Therefore, when it comes to demonic studies, Zaffis is one the field's leading members. That's no small feat.

Shouldn't that be UFOs? Maybe — if we were talking about Roswell, New Mexico. However, in Roswell, Georgia, ghosts are the paranormal phenomenon of choice and the members of the Roswell Ghost Tour will happily tell you all about the spectral residents of their town.

Located just north of Atlanta, Roswell is a quaint little city with a lot of history. Overlooking the town from the highest vantage point is the serene and majestic Barrington Hall, considered to be one of the best examples of Greek revival architecture in the United States. Another fine ante-bellum edifice is Bulloch Hall, a building that was once home to Mittie Bulloch, the mother of 26th President Teddy Roosevelt.

If you share the same womb with another person, it's quite likely that you'll feel more connected to that person than you do to other people. But does that connection exist beyond a shared womb and upbringing? Much has been made of twin telepathy — the idea that, because twins share a womb, they also share a psychic connection.

Quite a bit of anecdotal evidence can be found to support this idea. A mother of identical twin boys claims that each of her children knows what the other is doing:

We all know that, thanks to Bram Stoker, the bloody Count Dracula swept into our popular imagination just a little over a century ago. But vampires were a subject of fiction and myth long before Dracula came onto the scene. Writers like Lord Byron, Joseph LeFanu, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge had all turned their pens to the vampire tale at least once. Their writing, in turn, was inspired by vampire epidemics reported throughout Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But how old are vampires really? Our modern image of the vampire owes a great deal to the vampires of Eastern Europe, but the concept of vampires may be far older than the risen corpses that stalked about the Transylvanian countryside. Even the Bible seems to have one or two vampire-like creatures lurking within its pages. Proverbs 30:14-16 tells of a race of people "whose teeth are swords, whose fangs are knives." They prey upon the needy and the poor, and they are compared to the "aluka," a type of horse-leech. These biblical bloodsuckers are most likely meant to be a metaphor for mean-spirited and predatory people, but the passage in Proverbs seems to present them quite seriously. Considering that the Nephilim mentioned briefly in Genesis were also said to drink blood, vampires may be a far older — and stranger — breed of beings than we give them credit for.

The Bermuda Triangle is well known to us here in the Western Hemisphere, but over in the Eastern Hemisphere there's a similar area of Pacific Ocean known as the Dragon's Triangle. The region starts from western Japan and runs to a point in the ocean at approximately 145 degrees east latitude, then turns west-southwest to the islands of Guam and Yap, then west to Taiwan and back up to Japan to the north-northeast. Like the Bermuda Triangle, the region is known for ship and airplane disappearances, freak storms, misbehaving instruments and other unusual activity — even UFOs.

Selling a house? If your home is one filled with creaks and yowls that you've long chalked up to ghosts, realtors and industry experts advise full disclosure. That's right — in this instance, you're actually encouraged to talk about the paranormal. And if you don't? You could be subject to lawsuits.

This advice stems from a law in California and other states stating residents must disclose deaths that occurred up to three years before the sale. According to the Realty Times, many realty associations go a step further and advise agents and residents to disclose any deaths known in the house, no matter how long ago they occurred. There's a famous case that realtors take to heart. Helen Ackley, a woman in Nyack, NY, actively promoted her Victorian mansion as a home for poltergeists and ghosts dating back to the Revolutionary War. When the Stambovsky family bought the house (evidently without doing their research) they demanded their money back after the first night of haunting. Turns out Ackley told everyone in the community and in the greater media world about her house being haunted, but not the new buyers. The court sided with the Stambovskys. They noted that the matter of haunting, while public, had not been officially disclosed to the buyers. "As a matter of law," they said, "the house is haunted."

Mothman — a huge gray-black humanoid creature with wings and glowing red eyes — terrorized an area around Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966-67 and became the stuff of movies in The Mothman Prophecies, based on the book by the same title by paranormal journalist John Keel. Explanations for this creature have ranged from barn owls and cranes to ultraterrestrials, mysterious beings thought to come from other dimensions. But there's another — and scary — possibility.

What if Mothman is really an extraterrestrial — or something created by ETs as a scout and spy? The idea has merit, and it may explain a lot of other bizarre things that happened during the famous wave of sightings in the '60s. And by the way, Mothman is still out there — sightings continue to this day, though not with the intensity of the '60s wave.

Every year since the 2002 release of the movie The Mothman Prophecies, loosely based on John Keel's 1975 book, the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia hosts The Mothman Festival, in honor of the area's creepy past.

Here's the story: Over a hundred sightings occurred from November of 1966 until December of 1967 in Point Pleasant and surrounding areas. These sightings often included encounters with a large winged creature and/or UFOs, while others claimed to have had encounters with men in black. Descriptions of the Mothman commonly included these details:
• 7 feet tall or more
• winged beast/bird/humanoid
• intense red eyes
• silent but quick flight pattern
• hypnotic abilities

In 1842, P.T. Barnum told the press that he'd found, and would exhibit, a mermaid. According to Barnum, a man named Dr. J. Griffin had arrived in New York with a real mermaid he'd discovered near the Feejee Islands. Since Barnum had informed the press in advance, crowds of people came to the exhibit to take a look at the real live mermaid. What they saw was nothing like the beautiful half-woman, half-fish creatures they'd heard about. What they saw wasn't even alive. The Feejee Mermaid was nothing more than the top half of a mummified monkey sewn onto the tail of a fish.

In fact, "Dr. J. Griffin" was Levi Lyman, Barnum's accomplice in the deception. Dr. Griffin even gave a lecture about the veracity of mermaids at the exhibit. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, Griffin claimed that "mermaids must be real since all things on land have their counterpart in the ocean — sea-horses, sea-lions, sea-dogs, etc. So therefore, we should assume there are also sea-humans!" Despite the obvious hoax, throngs of people kept coming to the exhibit.

Michelle Belanger

Michelle Belanger is an energy worker best known for her expertise on psychic vampirism. She has published numerous articles on magick and psychic experiences, and she has appeared on the History Channel, WE!, A&E and Britain's XTYV, as well as numerous radio shows. With an eclectic background that includes shamanism, psychic development, Tibetan Buddhism, and Jungian psychology, Michelle often takes a syncretic and integrative approach to magick and psychic phenomenon, blending ideas and techniques from many times and cultures.

Michelle is a talented singer-songwriter as well as a prolific author, working with both the dark metal band URN and the Gothic duo Nox Arcana. Michelle's major written works include the best-selling Psychic Vampire Codex (Weiser, 2004), Psychic Dreamwalking (Weiser 2006), The Psychic Energy Codex (Weiser 2007), and Vampires in Their Own Words. More information can be found at michellebelanger.com.

Ryan Buell