Penny Blood Horror and Cult Entertainment Magazine issue #9

The Paranormal Show: Do You Believe?

By: Greg Dalgetty

In addition to organizing Zombie Walks, Thea Munster channels spirits in The Paranormal Show.

The live stage performance is a showcase of clairvoyance, transference, retrocognition and psychokenesis - with a seance and a few sideshow acts thrown in for good measure. Scott McClelland, The Paranormal Show's creator and master of ceremonies, handpicked Munster to perform as a medium in the show. He describes her as a "sensitive".

" A sensitive in the medium world is a person who becomes very aware of the energy around her, which makes her very prone to psychic attacks of spectral creatures and beings," McClelland told Penny Blood.

Munster says she has been a clairsentient - someone with a heightened sense of the paranormal - all of her life.

"It;s always are part of who I am," she said. "I didn't know I was different from anyone else until I was in my 20's."

She became aware of her unique capabilities after experiencing a series of premonitions that preceded the deaths of friends and family members. Years passed before she learned to embrace her ability, which she now calls a gift.

"I would always see it as something bad," she said, "But when I started opening myself up to it ... I started to see other things, too. I became really sensitive."

Sensitive may be an understatement. McClelland believes that Munster has the ability to channel energy from other dimensions.

"Quantum physics states that we don't just live on the third dimension; there are many other dimensions coinciding with our own. Thea seems to be capable of drawing things from some of these dimensions, which is where we get some of the activity from. It's not ghosts all of the time, it's actual sentient energy from another dimensional plane."

But The Paranormal Show is not limited to the supernatural, McClelland swallows razorblades as part of the performance. He even lifts a bucket of rocks using a sharkhook that he pierces through his tongue.

"Not many people these days have taken what we're doing and placed it on a stage in such a manner," McClelland said. "We're not only doing paranormal experiments, but also integrating some of the more esoteric sideshow feats that the East Indian Sufis would have done, such as the bed of nails or the iron tongue."

In the show Munster has the unenviable task of lying on a bed of nails with a thirty-five pound cinder block balanced on her stomach. The feat is made all the more excrutiating when McClelland smashes the cinder block with a sledgehammer, leaving Munster with perforations all over her back after every performance.

"It's painful, but I have a really high threshold for pain," she said. "That's why I am heavily tattooed; I can displace the pain."

The Paranormal Show also features an extraordinary performance of the Davenport Brother's Spirit Cabinet, in which Munster makes objects levitate and musical instruments play by themselves - all while bound to a chair at center stage. She says its an honour to be performing the nineteenth century spiritualists feat.

"(The Spirit Cabinet) was such a big piece of that century. People were so shocked that they would faint when they saw it," she said. "When Scott said I would be doing it I was stunned, because no-one even knows what it is anymore. A couple of people have redone versions of it ... but this is it in the traditional sense, with the actual things that would be used at the time."