Charles Crooks (he/him)
Age: 40
City: Bellingham
Lived here for: 14 years
Originally from: Federal Way
Notable: Operator of recently launched Bellingham Ghost Tours, a local psychic
What does it mean to be psychic? How do you know?
I started off as a kid super interested in ghosts, witches, supernatural, paranormal everything. Once we were living in the Cleveland suburbs around high school, I started to see a ghost cat in our house. There was no rhyme or reason we should have had one there — we never had a cat. But I would see it dart from room to room to room and out of the corner of my eye, and even one day, I was home alone and I felt something rub up against my legs … That was the first real experience, and it set me on this path. From there, I dabbled in ghost hunting.
As I got more into ghost hunting, I started to get a bit more into the psychic side of things, and realized I was sensing a little bit more beyond myself.
How did you get started with Bellingham Ghost Tours?
I just started in May, and those got started because the Good Time Girls got a lot of questions about ghosts on their tours. They’re more on the history side of things, and they wanted someone to be able to talk about the ghosts and there wasn’t anyone doing it, so we decided to make it happen.
How does being a psychic play into your ghost tours?
I share some of my psychic experiences and my regular investigative experiences because as I approach ghosts in this tour, I try to keep it as realistic and as grounded as possible.
Psychic impressions are not fact, and a lot of what we perceive with ghosts are not fact either, so we have to keep that in mind as we have these experiences.
Being a psychic is obviously not a hard science. How do you respond to people who don’t believe?
People can believe if they want because we all believe based on our own experiences. For me, I’ve sought out these things where I’ve had a lot more experience than someone who is a bit more skeptical or someone who hasn’t gone through that. All I ask is that people just be open to different possibilities because you never know what could happen.
Do you have a favorite ghost story to tell about Bellingham?
I do — it’s one from Fairhaven and started off in the Waldron Building. We started off investigating the Waldron Building — we were doing the investigations for the book ‘Haunted Fairhaven’ — and during that time I felt something that was like blowing in my ear. It even kind of progressed to a touching on my ear, and in pictures there were orbs around my head. I was like ‘Well, here’s what’s going on and what I’m feeling,’ and one of the mediums said she felt it’s a lady of the night, and she liked me … I didn’t think much of it. But every time I came back to Fairhaven, I would feel her right there with me … I finally had to set some boundaries and was like, ‘Hey, thank you, I appreciate the advances but this is not my style,’ and I was never bothered again after that.
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