I don鈥檛 hold onto business cards anymore. I鈥檓 rarely given business cards in the first place, these days. But I have a wooden nickel in my collection that I doubt I will ever carelessly throw out.
The round piece of wood, with a buffalo drawn on the front and contact information on the back, practically speaks. 鈥淒on鈥檛 Take Any Other WOODEN NICKEL,鈥� it boldly proclaims, tongue in cheek. It was Joe Nickell鈥檚 business card, which he would give to you after some sleight-of-hand. Magic and skepticism have, after all, often been entwined, acting as reminders of how easy it is to fool ourselves.
The skeptical community lost a giant on the 4th of March of this year. When I try to describe him, it鈥檚 hard to land on a single word. This is because Joe Nickell was a man of a thousand personas, exemplifying a life lived fully. He was a giant, yes, and a legend, and a slew of synonyms that remind you of the deep footprint he leaves in his wake, and of the mythological creatures he investigated. But in the moments I spent with him over the years, I also saw a humble and caring man. He was storytelling made flesh. He was a ghost hunter, a forensic examiner, and a writer. The layers you can peel seem never-ending: Nickell鈥檚 own lists so many, from 鈥渁ccident victim鈥� to 鈥渮ombiologist,鈥� showcasing both his talent and his tall-tale exaggerations.
Skepticism is about asking for evidence before believing something. Its practice requires a knowledge of the many ways our brain can trick us. You thought an entity kept you glued to your bed when you woke up in the middle of the night? Have you ruled out sleep paralysis, a well-known medical phenomenon? Questioning extraordinary claims is not very lucrative, yet Nickell managed to be one of the few to turn it into a full-time job, making a living as a senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in Buffalo, New York. He wrote books, gave talks, and spent his life being Dana Scully in a world full of Fox Mulders.
I met him in 2014 when he was invited by our Office to be a speaker at the Lorne Trottier public science symposium. At the time, I wasn鈥檛 working at 大发彩票平台, but I had a podcast dedicated to reason and skepticism, and Joe Nickell accepted to be interviewed for it and to discuss some of the big hauntings he had investigated in his career, either in the flesh or through extensive recordings of these cases: the Demon House of Gary, Indiana; the Enfield Poltergeist; the story popularized as The Conjuring; and a Canadian site Nickell had visited, the allegedly haunted Mackenzie House in Toronto.
The latter taught him the importance of leaving the armchair behind, when possible, and doing gumshoe reporting. Actually visiting the place of a reported haunting and speaking to the people there can conjure up a rational explanation that might not have been apparent from the often-wide-eyed media coverage of the event. It can also help you reject a pat skeptical answer. The Mackenzie House, the last home of Toronto鈥檚 first mayor, was known to have a rusty old printing press in the basement which was no longer functional but which would, allegedly, awaken in the middle of the night to produce ghostly printing noises. At the time, the presence of a printing shop next door, Macmillan Publishers, provided an easy solution. But when Nickell visited it, he learned that Macmillan had no printing press in that office. Instead, the caretaker of the Mackenzie House, who also lived next door, told Nickell that the cleanup crew used large iron-wheeled trolleys to move empty garbage cans in the basement of his house, and they dragged these trolleys across the rough floor, which produced a sound not unlike a rotary printing press, which is what people inside Mackenzie House undoubtedly heard. The rusted-over printing press in the Mackenzie House basement was actually an early flat-bed model and would not even have made that rumbling type of noise had it been possessed by a spirit.
Something Joe told me during the interview has stuck with me ever since, and it is a motto he would often repeat. 鈥淚 do not use the term 鈥榙ebunker.鈥� I understand when skeptics have sometimes called me that, in a method of being approving. And disbelievers use it as a form of contempt. And they鈥檙e both wrong, unless here鈥檚 what you mean. If you mean that Joe Nickell has investigated and debunked the following mysteries鈥擲hroud of Turin, Mackenzie House haunting, and many, many others鈥擮K, fine, then I am a debunker. But see, the problem is that it gives the impression: Nickell is going to go to that next haunting to debunk it. No, no, that鈥檚 not what I do. Here鈥檚 what I鈥檓 doing: I am going there to try to find out what exactly happened in this case, not 200 other cases; this one. I want to find out exactly what happened. If I can explain it and you believe me, then any needed debunking is taken care of itself.鈥�
We skeptics tend to listen to a far-fetched story and go into 鈥渄ebunking mode.鈥� And that鈥檚 often warranted: paranormal, supernatural, and pseudoscientific beliefs have so far not been justified by the evidence. But in so doing, we risk dismissing a phenomenon by using an explanation that simply doesn鈥檛 fit and we lose the trust of the public.
When I asked Joe how many of the hauntings he鈥檇 investigated turned out to be real, he admitted, 鈥淪omething between zero and none.鈥� We should be open-minded skeptics, true, but it doesn鈥檛 make ghosts any more real.
One of the most common pieces of advice we give to young science communicators is to avoid front-loading the work with data and graphs; use stories instead. Joe Nickell was a first-class storyteller. Even though he might have told you a tale he鈥檇 recounted dozens of times before, he made you feel like you were hearing it for the first time. When I interviewed him at the skeptical conference CSICon in 2017, I asked him a single question, and he spent the next 15 minutes telling me about the time he had investigated . He could weave intrigue into a story without resorting to magical thinking.
He is survived by sons and daughters he may not have realized he had. Every generation of skeptics is influenced by those who came before. I鈥檓 delighted to see a younger cohort of skeptics continue the work of people like Joe Nickell. For instance, there鈥檚 Kenny Biddle, whom I interviewed to get his tips on how to be a better ghost hunter. I also see more and more people joining the fight against misinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience, regardless of whether they choose to call themselves 鈥渟keptics鈥� or not: Timothy Caulfield, Andrea Love, Rina Raphael, Michael Marshall, and many, many more.
It's a Sisyphean task and progress often feels beyond reach. In his 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World, skeptic and science communicator Carl Sagan famously prophesied the outline of the world we now live in: 鈥淲hen, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what鈥檚 true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.鈥�
I will miss Joe Nickell鈥檚 candle in the dark. His yeoman鈥檚 work, as he called it, will outlive him, as will his tales.
Excerpt from Jonathan鈥檚 podcast interview with Joe Nickell in 2014
听
Joe Nickell at QED 2012. Photographer: .
