The Insider

Call him a ghostbuster, a psychic, a snake-oil salesman. Jeffrey Seelman doesn’t mind.

“I want people to be skeptical,” he says. “I am a skeptic.”

Seelman, a Milwaukee native, is one of many paranormal specialists in town offering solutions to everything from ghost infestations to queries about your love life. Milwaukee, it seems, is a veritable ghost town.

“Milwaukee can be considered among the most haunted cities in the Midwest,” Seelman claims. “There is no shortage of haunted buildings.”

Seelman specializes in spiritual and emotional clearings of homes, businesses and individuals – in short, exorcisms.

In spite of the stigma associated with the practice – including the 2003 death of an 8-year-old boy with autism during an exorcism on the city’s Northwest Side – Seelman insists the procedure is safe and bears little resemblance to the movie that made the ritual infamous. “I just don’t use the term because it turns people off,” he says.

Mary Ellen Pride, an astrologer and psychic consultant, also says business is booming. Like Seelman, she claims the ability to sense future events, which helps her (along with star charts and tarot cards) advise customers. “We are normal people,” she says of psychics. “Well, sort of normal.”

Paranormal deceit is widespread and ranges from the benevolent illusions of Uri Geller and David Copperfield to the underhanded scams of con artists, says David C. Lindberg, Hilldale Professor Emeritus at UW-Madison.

Lindberg, who taught a class called History of Pseudoscience and the Occult, says fraudulent psychics use vague generalities and their customers’ wishful thinking to trick them. In 2004, a West Bend psychic adviser convinced a client to give her more than $4,000 during a ritual to “cleanse negative energy,” according to the Associated Press. The psychic was later arrested.

Seeking paranormal answers leaves all Americans vulnerable to deception, Lindberg says. He doubts Milwaukee is any spookier than other cities, but Seelman is certain we have more ghosts begging to be busted. “This is science to me,” he says. “I just don’t believe in mumbo jumbo.”