Ciarán O'Keeffe

Ciarán O'Keeffe

BORN21 March 1971, Norwich, Norfolk, England

OCCUPATIONPsychologist, parapsychologist, academic

KNOWN FORMost Haunted, Uncanny, Buckinghamshire New University

STATUSLiving

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Ciarán James O'Keeffe (born 21 March 1971) is a British Chartered Psychologist and academic, holding dual English and Swiss nationality, who investigates paranormal claims from a sceptical perspective. He is best known for his role as the resident sceptical investigator on Most Haunted, and more recently for appearances on the BBC's Uncanny. Rather than simply debunking, his published research asks broader questions — why people report uncanny experiences, how environments shape those interpretations, and what ethical duties investigators owe to the witnesses they study. He has said he approaches haunting experiences by examining both "the role of the mind" and "the role of the environment," and the complex interplay between the two.

Early life

O'Keeffe was born in Norwich to a Swiss mother and an Irish father, and grew up in Norfolk, Somerset, and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. As a boy he read Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft, M. R. James, and Stephen King, but has said it was specifically the 1984 film Ghostbusters that cemented his interest and set him on a path toward becoming a parapsychologist. A trained classical pianist from age four (Grade 8), he studied conducting and arranging alongside psychology and music at Washington College in Maryland between 1990 and 1994, completing a music thesis and performance on 20th-century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, and playing in a jazz quartet in Washington, D.C. during the same period. While studying in the United States he became a voracious reader of parapsychology literature and spent much of his time at the Institute of Parapsychology in North Carolina — the successor to J. B. Rhine's original Duke University laboratory, and often considered the starting point of the field in the 1930s.

Academic career

O'Keeffe completed an MSc in investigative psychology at the University of Liverpool (1997–98), before earning his PhD in psychology at the University of Hertfordshire between 1999 and 2005, supervised jointly by Richard Wiseman and Professor Julia Buckroyd, with a thesis titled "Assessing the content of advice given by practitioners claiming a paranormal ability." His external examiners were Professor Chris French of Goldsmiths, University of London — founder of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit — and Dr Victoria Murphy of the University of Oxford.

He lectured in forensic psychology, research methods, and criminology at Liverpool Hope University from 2003 to 2006, held research associate posts at the Université de Paris 8 (2006–07) and the Université de Toulouse (from 2007), and worked as a temporary online tutor at the University of Derby (2009–10), before joining Buckinghamshire New University as senior lecturer in October 2011. By 2019 he had become Associate Head of School at Bucks, responsible for Psychology, Sports Science, Social Sciences, Education, and Sports Therapy, and remains programme leader for its BSc (Hons) Criminological Psychology and BSc (Hons) Psychology & Criminology degrees, drawing on his own professional background in forensic psychology, including risk assessment of violent young offenders and investigative psychology consultancy; he is also an anti-FGM campaigner and restorative justice advocate. He is currently Associate Dean of Education for the College of Health & Society at Buckinghamshire New University. In October 2009, he founded and became director of the School of Parapsychology, an online provider of courses in critical thinking and parapsychology. He is a member of the Society for Psychical Research, an advisor to The Ghost Club, and a reviewer for the Journal of Parapsychology, the European Journal of Parapsychology, and the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

Hampton Court Palace investigation

O'Keeffe was part of an academic team, working alongside Wiseman, that investigated Hampton Court Palace — reputed to be one of the most haunted locations in England — to test three competing explanations for reported hauntings there: prior belief in ghosts, suggestion, and magnetic fields. More than 600 members of the public took part, completing questionnaires on their belief in ghosts before being given either a positive or negative "suggestion" about recent unusual activity at the palace and encouraged to walk its rooms reporting anything they experienced. The study found reported experiences were significantly associated with both prior belief and the suggestion given beforehand, and the data offered some support for a relationship between local magnetic field variation and where experiences were reported.

Other research

Beyond hauntings and mediumship, O'Keeffe's research and public work has spanned a considerably wider range of subjects, including psychic criminology and psychic detectives, UFOs and alien abduction claims, and what he terms "Christian" or "religious" parapsychology — exorcism, possession, miracles, and stigmata. His early published work included a study of hindsight bias in shooting incidents (2006), an analysis of "rhetoric in psychic detection" (2000), and a study of the subjective effects of infrasound on audiences in a live concert setting at London's Royal Festival Hall (2004). He has also written on spiritualism and mediumship for the Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2013), took part in an exorcism "training day," and served as a consultant on lie detection and hostage-negotiation simulation for the 2001 film Spy Game. He also advised actor Andrew Lincoln — later known for The Walking Dead — on the daily working life of a paranormal investigator, ahead of Lincoln's lead role in the ITV supernatural drama Afterlife.

Environmental correlates of hauntings

In 2020, O'Keeffe and colleagues published a comprehensive review updating earlier 2001 work on the environmental correlates of poltergeist and haunting experiences, examining 66 studies across two decades of research. The review identified six recurring environmental variables proposed to contribute to haunting reports — embedded static cues, lighting levels, air quality, temperature, infrasound, and electromagnetic fields — but concluded that none of these, alone or combined, offered convincing explanatory power on their own, pointing instead toward more holistic explanations such as "simulation theory" as a more productive way to understand reported hauntings.

"Ghostwatch Revisited"

In a 2012 article marking its twentieth anniversary, O'Keeffe examined the notorious 1992 BBC broadcast Ghostwatch, a scripted drama presented as a live investigation that caused significant public panic and was linked to a viewer's death by suicide. Sceptic Susan Blackmore, quoted in the piece, criticised the programme for treating its audience unfairly and failing to give adequate warning of its content. O'Keeffe concluded that the extreme viewer reactions stemmed from the programme's departure from established horror-genre convention — where the instability caused by a paranormal threat is eventually resolved — since Ghostwatch instead sustained its threat continuously throughout.

Quantifying ghostly encounters

In a wide-ranging review with co-authors, O'Keeffe helped identify 28 core experiences commonly reported across haunting and poltergeist cases, spanning both subjective experiences typical of hauntings and the more physical, objective manifestations typical of poltergeist-type disturbances, aiming to give future investigators a more standardised framework than existing case studies, surveys, and field research had provided.

Ethical guidelines for haunting investigations

In a 2007 paper co-authored with Ian Baker, O'Keeffe set out ethical guidelines for haunting investigations, prompted by the rapid growth of amateur and professional ghost-hunting activity and the absence of any governing body for the field. The guidelines address informed consent and confidentiality, offer methodological advice on interviewing and overnight location investigations, and examine the pastoral responsibilities an investigator owes to witnesses, including when to refer them to other professional support.

Testing mediums

In a 2005 paper with Richard Wiseman, O'Keeffe reported a double-blind test of mediumship designed to eliminate flaws identified in earlier research — sensory leakage, overly general statements, and non-blind judging. Five mediums each gave a reading to a sitter unknown to them, located in a separate room; sitters were then given the resulting statements, broken apart and mixed with material from other sittings, and asked to identify which applied to them. The ratings did not reach statistical significance. A later 2020 review by researcher Patrizio Tressoldi, examining more recent and methodologically rigorous mediumship tests generally, reported finding highly significant evidence for anomalous information transfer — a conclusion in tension with O'Keeffe and Wiseman's own earlier null result.

"Haunted People Syndrome"

O'Keeffe and co-authors have also explored whether a distinct "Haunted People Syndrome" (HP-S) exists — a pattern of recurrent, systematic anomalous perceptions that, depending on the person's interpretive framework, might be understood as spirits and hauntings, or might instead take the form of perceived gang-stalking or surveillance. Rating published gang-stalking accounts against a standard measure of haunt-type anomalies, the researchers found significant overlap between the two categories of experience, consistent with a single underlying HP-S construct.

Television work

O'Keeffe's route onto Most Haunted began indirectly: while working at a university in Liverpool, his colleague Dr Matthew Smith was providing the show's end-of-episode parapsychological analysis, and O'Keeffe occasionally substituted for him. When Yvette Fielding and Karl Beattie asked whether either academic would join the show full-time, Smith — whose research focus lay elsewhere in parapsychology — declined, and O'Keeffe, whose own specialism was hauntings and mediumship, eventually agreed after what he has described as "months of cajoling and persuading."

In 2005, he devised a test in which he fed Derek Acorah fabricated background details about entirely fictitious spirit entities — "Kreed Kafer" and "Rik Eedles," anagrams of "Derek Faker" and "Derek Lies" — before an investigation. Acorah went on to describe contact with them on camera as though they were real, and O'Keeffe's exposure of the test became one of the best-known moments in British paranormal television. O'Keeffe later said he had been misquoted in press coverage of the incident, clarifying that his test had been aimed specifically at Acorah rather than at the programme or its wider team.

O'Keeffe has also provided a sceptical voice on Jane Goldman Investigates and, more recently, the BBC podcast and television series Uncanny, now in its second series on BBC Two. His research and television work has been featured across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Living TV, Yesterday, the Travel Channel, and Discovery, and reported on in The Psychologist, The Times, The Independent, and New Scientist.

Across his investigative career, O'Keeffe has examined more than 2,000 reportedly haunted locations, including Oxford Castle Unlocked (which he first investigated in 2000, before its redevelopment, and has returned to many times since), Eastern State Penitentiary and the West Virginia State Penitentiary in the United States, and the Real Mary King's Close in Edinburgh. With his wife, he investigated Second World War bunkers on the Channel Islands for the online series Ghostlands.

Books

O'Keeffe co-authored Ghost Hunters: A Guide to Investigating the Paranormal (2006) with Yvette Fielding, published by Hodder & Stoughton, drawing on cases from their own investigations alongside a broader guide to hauntings, orbs, and poltergeists. The pair also co-authored In Search of the Supernatural (2008), also with Hodder & Stoughton, investigating paranormal sightings across the UK and abroad, including the tunnels beneath Liverpool and the Devil's Arse cavern in the Peak District. Separately, O'Keeffe co-authored The Great Paranormal Clash (2008) with stage psychic Billy Roberts, published by Apex Publishing and structured as an exchange of opposing perspectives between the two, and is a contributing co-author of Ghosted!: Exploring the Haunting Reality of Paranormal Encounters (2021), published by McFarland.

See also

• Most Haunted
• Derek Acorah
• Yvette Fielding
• Karl Beattie
• Richard Wiseman
• Chris French
• Ghostwatch
• Andrew Lincoln
• Afterlife (TV series)
• Ghost Hunters: A Guide to Investigating the Paranormal
• In Search of the Supernatural
• The Great Paranormal Clash
• Anomalistic Psychology
• Society for Psychical Research
• J. B. Rhine

External links

• Psi Encyclopedia — Ciarán O'Keeffe
• Academia.edu — Ciarán O'Keeffe