Ghost Hunter and, or Skeptic. How “Complicated” Became My Most Honest Story

There’s a moment that happens to me more than I expected.

Someone hears my name, Cody Polston, and they assume they already know what I believe.

They expect me to be one thing: the “ghost hunter” who chases apparitions, speaks with confidence about spirits, and collects “evidence” like it’s a science lab. Or they expect me to be another thing: a straightforward skeptic who treats every haunting as a trick of perception, hoax, or psychological error.

And then they meet the part that makes people say, “Wait… that’s complicated.”

Because I’ve been both.

People keep asking me to explain myself, and I get why. For nearly forty years I’ve been introduced, in the same week sometimes, as “New Mexico’s premier ghost hunter” and as “the guy who debunks ghost stories.” I founded a paranormal investigation group. I lead a haunted trolley tour every summer and fall. I’ve written books full of spine-tingling ghost stories, and I’ve also written books that pick those same kinds of stories apart. If you’ve only seen one slice of that, I probably look inconsistent, or worse, like I’m saying whatever sells tickets. I want to lay out the whole picture, because the truth isn’t a contradiction. It’s just more complicated than a soundbite allows.

Where it started: five airmen and an argument that never got resolved

The Southwest Ghost Hunters was formed in 1985 by five airmen serving overseas in the United States Air Force. Two were very skeptical, two were hardcore believers, and somewhere in between was me, I became the group’s president. The name came simply from the fact that all our hometowns were in the Southwest.

That mixed roster wasn’t an accident. The idea of the group was to use those different viewpoints, skeptic and believer, to investigate haunted places from a perspective that could lead to an unbiased conclusion. We even split our own vocabulary to keep the distinction honest: the believers became the “ghost hunters,” while the skeptics became the “investigators,” because we never believed ghost hunting and investigation were the same thing, and the different terms marked two different methodologies.

I was one of the skeptics. I was also, by election, the person who had to speak for the whole organization, believers and skeptics alike. SGHA grew into a group that conducted investigations across six states, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and California, and by the mid-1990s, it had reached a maximum of fifty members spread across five teams in five states. Running something that size meant representing a lot of viewpoints I didn’t personally hold, every single day, in public.

That tension showed up early and often. In a 2002 talk to New Mexicans for Science and Reason, my colleague Bob Carter explained that the group was interested in finding out what causes ghostly visions, even when there’s a mundane explanation, and one avenue we looked at was whether visions of specters might be caused by abnormal electromagnetic fields, an idea associated with the researcher Michael Persinger. I told that same audience that photographs alone can’t prove a haunting, since even negatives can be manipulated, and I explained that our bylaws barred us from using psychics in investigations, on the reasoning that you can’t use one unproven paranormal claim to validate another. That rule, incidentally, earned us criticism from other ghost-hunting groups that routinely used psychics.

The Persinger connection is worth a beat, because it’s a good example of what “skeptical investigation” actually looked like for us, not dismissal, but a search for a prosaic mechanism. Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Ontario, spent decades on the theory that pulsed magnetic fields, imperceptible on a conscious level, could make people feel a “presence” in a room by triggering unusual activity in the brain’s temporal lobes, and that exposure to certain weak magnetic field patterns for 15 to 30 minutes could create the sensation of an invisible presence. In one investigation, he and a colleague looked into a teenager who reported nocturnal visits from what she believed was the Holy Spirit, and found she slept about ten inches from an electric clock producing electromagnetic pulses similar to waveforms known to trigger seizures, when the clock was removed, the visions stopped. The theory has real critics too: researchers at Uppsala University said they couldn’t reproduce Persinger’s results and attributed the effect largely to suggestibility. That back-and-forth, a plausible mechanism, real experiments, real pushback, is exactly the kind of terrain SGHA tried to work in. Not “ghosts are real” or “ghosts are fake,” but “here’s a testable reason someone might feel what they felt.”

The president’s dilemma: representing a coin from only one side

Here’s the part that confuses people most. As SGHA’s elected president, my job was to represent both halves of the organization, the believers and the skeptics, equally and fairly. But when a TV producer or a radio host calls in the week before Halloween, they are not calling to book a nuanced conversation about confirmation bias and temporal-lobe stimulation. They’re calling for a ghost story. So the interview questions I got, especially the seasonal ones, leaned almost entirely toward the believer side of the house: what have you seen, what’s the scariest place you’ve investigated, do you believe in ghosts.

I answered those questions honestly, as president of a group that included true believers whose experiences I wasn’t there to invalidate on camera. But if you only ever caught me in that context, a five-minute Halloween radio spot, you’d have no idea that the same guy was, at the very same time, the one arguing in front of skeptics that photos are worthless as evidence and psychics don’t belong anywhere near a serious investigation. Two honest halves of one job, and most people only ever met one of them. I had to let both sides feel heard. And I had to keep a community functioning even when Halloween enthusiasm and critical thinking collided. If you’ve ever worked with divided groups, at a school, a volunteer organization, a workplace, you know the challenge: leadership isn’t just saying what you think. It’s handling the way other people hear you.

Old Town, ghost tours, and the parts nobody kept

In 1998 I started what became the Ghost Tour in Old Town Albuquerque, and I ran it through 2006. I built it deliberately with skeptical material woven through the scary stories, not to ruin the fun, but because I wanted people leaving with something to think about, not just something to be scared by. I haven’t run those tours since 2006, and what exists under that name today is, frankly, a shadow of what I built. The skeptical seams I wrote in on purpose have been stripped out, and newer stories have been added whose authenticity I genuinely doubt.

I understand why. Old Town’s haunted reputation is now a well-documented part of Albuquerque’s tourism identity, and it long predates any tour of mine. Old Town has been the center of Albuquerque community life since the city was founded in 1706 by Spanish governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdez, and it was also home to Albuquerque’s first red-light district in the 1880s, complete with brothels and wine rooms, which is where stories like that of “Scarlet”, first reported to me around 1999, come from. There’s a lot of real, documented history to draw on there, which is exactly why I built the original tour around it in the first place.  I’ve always preferred ghost stories with some historical significance, because a good ghost story preserves a little piece of local history. Once I stepped away, other operators kept the “haunted Old Town” brand going, understandably, but without the skeptical throughline that was the whole point of my version.

Writing for an audience, without lying to them

While I was running the tours, I was also publishing books of New Mexico ghost stories, Ghosts of Old Town Albuquerque, Haunted Tombstone, Wicked Albuquerque, Haunted Albuquerque, and others. I’ve written roughly a dozen books on history and the paranormal at this point. Readers picking up a book called Ghosts of Old Town Albuquerque aren’t looking for a term paper on parapsychology or skepticism; they want tales of these specters wandering the shadows, told with some atmosphere. I understood that audience, so I kept the skepticism turned down in those books. I didn’t delete it, but I didn’t lead with it either. That’s not dishonesty; it’s knowing what a reader picked the book up for and giving it to them, while still leaving the door open for the more careful reader who wants to notice the caveats.

Closing SGHA, and starting to say the quiet part out loud

SGHA shut down in 2015, after three decades of operation. In the years after, I shifted toward writing books that flipped the earlier formula: instead of ghost stories with skepticism kept quiet, I wrote skepticism with the stories kept front and center , New Mexico’s Most Haunted: Exposed and Texas’ Most Haunted Exposed, both built around trying to actually explain the famous haunted locations in those states rather than just retelling the legends.

First: for a lot of people, it’s simply entertainment, and that’s completely fine. Someone once put it to me this way, and I’ve never found a better summary: you can watch A Nightmare on Elm Street, enjoy it, get legitimately scared by it, and still know perfectly well that Freddy Krueger isn’t real. A ghost tour, a scary book, a haunted-house documentary, these can all be enjoyed exactly the same way. Wanting to be entertained by a good ghost story isn’t a failure of critical thinking any more than watching a slasher movie is.

Second: belief genuinely shapes perception, and that’s not a metaphor. The probability that someone will encounter a ghost depends heavily on their belief system, a person who believes in ghosts is more likely to interpret an ambiguous experience as a ghost, while a skeptical person confronted with the same stimulus is more likely to interpret it differently. In the field of parapsychology, when someone reports seeing a ghost, in a real sense that experience is happening in the eye of the witness rather than being straightforwardly “out there” in the environment, a framing that traces back to parapsychologist G.N.M. Tyrrell’s mid-20th-century idea of ghosts as an “external agency” experienced through perception. That’s not an insult to believers. It’s a description of how perception works for all of us, skeptics included. It just means two people can stand in the exact same hallway, have the exact same ambiguous sensory input, and walk away with genuinely different, and genuinely honest, accounts of what happened.

That has a direct, practical consequence for anyone trying to do this work seriously: confirmation bias is the single biggest weakness ghost hunters face. I’ve watched it happen to my own team members, in places as ordinary as a single dim light at the bottom of a staircase. Once you expect something to be there, ambiguous sensory noise gets sorted into “evidence” without anyone intending to lie or fool themselves. Understanding that isn’t cynicism, it’s the whole reason SGHA insisted on structured methodology and a ban on psychics in the first place.

Third, and this is the one that actually changed how I do this work: playing the “skeptical debunker” role only ever reaches other skeptics. If your public posture toward believers is to challenge their belief system head-on, you don’t change many minds, you mostly just talk past them, because you’re arguing with someone whose underlying perception of the event is, again, genuinely different from yours. It preaches to the choir and closes doors with everyone else.

Why I chose to be the friendly ghost hunter instead

So I made a deliberate choice. Rather than positioning myself as the skeptic standing outside the community pointing out what’s wrong with it, I decided there was more good to be done as the experienced, approachable ghost hunter that believers could actually come to with questions, someone who wouldn’t laugh them off, wouldn’t mock the experience, and could gently nudge them toward more rigorous, more skeptical ways of thinking about what happened to them, without attacking the belief system that got them in the door in the first place.

That’s a slower, quieter kind of skepticism. It doesn’t show up as a mic-drop moment in a Halloween radio interview. It shows up in a conversation after a tour stop, when someone tells you what they experienced at a place like the Painted Lady Bed & Brew or the old Church Street Café, and instead of either “yes, definitely a ghost” or “no, you’re wrong,” you can walk through what else it might have been, the very human tendency to fill in ambiguous sound with meaning, while still taking their experience seriously as something real that happened to them, even if the cause wasn’t paranormal.

That’s also, honestly, the same instinct that built SGHA in 1985. A president who had to give equal voice to both the believers and the skeptics in his own organization was never going to be well-served by picking a side publicly. The lesson just took a few more decades, a shut-down organization, two “Exposed” books, and a lot of Halloween interviews to fully sink in.

Where I am now: Albucreepy, and staying available

Today, the vehicle for that approach is Albucreepy, my current Ghosts and Gravestones trolley tour through Albuquerque, along with the events and talks I do year-round, not just in October. A reporter who rode along in 2024 described me calling myself a “skeptical believer,” which is about as tidy a summary as I’ve managed to land on. As I told her, I don’t assume every ghost story is true, but I’ve spent nearly forty years visiting the Southwest’s purportedly haunted places, combining the tales they hold with my own research as an amateur historian. However, I’ve learned enough to know a lot of them are just ghost stories, yet some of them really do have genuine mysteries to them. You can only take the explaining so far before you hit a brick wall, and you just can’t go any further.

That’s the honest state of things. Some stops on the tour have a documented historical event behind them and nothing more mysterious than good storytelling. A few genuinely don’t have a tidy explanation, and I say so. I still show up every October and answer the believer-leaning questions on the radio, because those conversations matter to the people asking them, and I’d rather be in the room, gently steering, than not be there at all.

So if you’ve met me at a book signing, on a trolley, in a magazine spread of “Albuquerque’s scariest places,” or in a skeptics’ society newsletter picking apart an EMF reading or a photo, you’ve met the same person, just at a different point along the same approach. Ghost hunter and investigator was never really a contradiction inside SGHA. It isn’t one for me now, either.

Sources referenced:

• SGHA official history — sgha.net
• New Mexicans for Science & Reason, “Hunting for Ghosts” talk recap, 2002
• Albuquerque Journal, “Ghosts of the past: Albuquerque is full of haunting tales and spectral sites”
• The Paper., interview via abq.news
• Santa Fe New Mexican, “Albuquerque paranormal investigator uses ghost hunting as a history lesson,” 2024
• KRQE digital release, Old Town/Downtown ghost stories feature
• Daily Lobo, “A spirited night at Painted Lady Bed & Brew,” Oct. 2024
• Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research), “Electromagnetism and Paranormal Phenomena”
• Scientific American, “Ghost Lusters: If You Want to See a Specter Badly Enough, Will You?”
• LiveScience, “Science of the Paranormal: Can You Trust Your Own Mind?”