The paranormal has always been one of Chad Calek’s interests.

“Instead of going to spring break, I was going to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium or the Villisca Axe Murder House. I was going to all these haunted places to investigate them,” he said.

More than 200 students, faculty and visitors gathered on Friday to hear Calek speak in the Frank G. Pogue Student Center’s Multipurpose Room. Calek spoke about his purported encouters with ghosts and showed footage he and his team recorded for the television show “Paranormal State.”

In “Good vs. Evil” – Calek’s first episode on the show – Chip Coffey, a psychic, and Ryan Buell, one of the directors, told Calek there was a demon in the basement and suggested he check it out.

While sitting on a chair in the middle of the basement, an ominous growl came out of the darkness.

Calek radioed upstairs and asked if anyone else had heard it. “Yeah, man, [we] heard it,” they replid.

The growl came again and Calek told the team upstairs, “There’s something down here, bro.”

“People ask me how I could just sit there and listen to the growling without moving.”

Calek laughed as he described the situation to the audience.

“Well, the truth is, the growling came from between me and the stairway out… If that thing had come from behind me, I would’ve been flying through that door like a pissed off Sasquatch!”

Calek has been investigating such phenomena since the age of 12, when his family was torn apart by paranormal attacks.

His parents and siblings had told him they had been experiencing things, but Calek had seen and felt nothing.

Calek said he would shout into the air to provoke the ghosts to show themselves when the family wasn’t there; he wanted to be a believer and not think that his family was crazy.