American horror novelist Whitley Strieber’s account of an apparent “alien abduction” in Communion: A True Story (1987) was instrumental in bringing the abductee narrative into popular culture. Despite his ongoing engagement with mainstream ufology, in this article I argue that Strieber’s experiences are more representative of a broader paranormal category, here defined discursively. I first examine this claim through an assessment of Strieber’s career, particularly how his experience transformed his understanding of the nature of reality and brought him to challenge epistemic norms more broadly. Then, through ethnographic fieldwork, I consider whether this pattern repeated itself among subscribers at Strieber’s 2012 Dreamland Festival in Nashville. I find that, in many cases, the paranormal experience acted as a catalyst for a larger questioning of epistemic norms—in short, a paranormal gnosis.

The Church of Divine Revelation and the Radiant Healing Center, in St. Catharines, Ontario, proposed that mystical realities shaped bodily and mental wellness. Receiving diagnoses and medical treatments from perceived disembodied beings, congregants in the 1920s and 1930s evoked the mystical origins of alternative medicine by envisioning health as a process through which spirit, mind and body coalesced. Female participants therefore were enabled to reject the label of pathology and heal themselves through the power of their minds. Uneasy with the label of paranormal or supernormal, members viewed their interactions as fulfilling rather than violating natural laws. In the process, spirits personified what Jeffrey Kripal has called “the sacred in transit” as they moved fluidly from the metaphysical to the physical. Crossing modern boundaries between faith and secular medicine, these St. Catharines spiritualists and the phantoms they envisioned reconceived the role of spirit as intervening in physical and mental processes.

This issue of Nova Religio is devoted to “the paranormal,” focusing specifically on discourses rejected by mainstream religion and traditional science. The authors explore the historic and cultural significance of such topics as hauntings, séances, alien abductions, and more generally the concept of “paranormal” as a category of religious beliefs. These articles contribute to what may be a new focal area in the study of new and emerging religions.

Researching the paranormal frequently involves the study of how people discuss paranormal phenomena’s significance in popular culture. Using Victor Turner’s concept of the liminoid, in this article I survey The Simpsons ’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes and suggest that thinking with these episodes can help scholars re-envision the academic construction of religion and the paranormal. I will argue that scholars should collapse the distinction between “religion” and “the paranormal” in academic and popular discussions.