T-R PHOTOS BY TREVOR BABCOCK — Bodeen the Bigfoot was out and about the Midwest Annual Paranormal Festival in Marshalltown, taking pictures with guests and entertaining attendees.

Greeted by a sign of Bigfoot shaking hands with a green alien, hundreds flocked to Riverview Park over the weekend for three days filled with healing and tales of the other side.

The Midwest Annual Paranormal Festival in Marshalltown showcased paranormal investigators, psychic mediums, healers, holistic alternatives and people sharing their personal experiences of strange encounters. Visitors moved throughout the park to speak personally with dozens of notable members of the paranormal community.

“Paranormal just plainly means anything outside of what we think of as normal,” Author Frank Bennett said. “A lot of things when you think about it fall into that category, things that have nothing to do with ghosts. If we don’t know it and understand it, it’s outside the norm, and just because ghosts and demons seem to fall into that category, it’s a part of the game.”

Bennett spoke at the event detailing his alleged encounters with the paranormal. In the 1980s, he said he witnessed an appearance of a humanoid creature known as the Aberdeen Wildman on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

“I caught it staring at me,” Bennett said. “I didn’t confront it, but when I made a challenging move, it went crazy and bizarre and I watched it do things humans can’t do. I watched it make a vertical leap more than 15 feet straight into the trees overhead. There’s nothing in nature capable of that. It scurried up about 60 feet and was going through the trees screaming and hollering like an ape.”

Shamanic healer Holly Mullins performs a tarot card reading for attendees of the Midwest Annual Paranormal Festival.

Since then, Bennett said he has encountered more creatures and entities, but has also examined more than 1,000 encounters with the paranormal reported by others.

“I’m looking for what they have in common and what I found is amazing, how common and alike they all are, which is very suspicious to me,” he said.

Paranormal investigator with 20 years of experience, Ami Green, heard from a wide variety of people with different paranormal backgrounds at the event, such as those with alien encounters, cryptid creatures and ghosts.

“It’s just really interesting to hear all kinds of backgrounds, we can exchange ideas and exchange stories, and that’s been my favorite part so far,” Green said.

Paranormal investigator and founder of All Out Paranormal Rex Nielson said the paranormal community is like a family, and loves seeing familiar faces at the festival while sharing stories with new faces.

Psychic medium Greg Moorman reads palm energy at the Midwest Annual Paranormal Festival.

He said the purpose of his investigations are to find proof of the afterlife and spirits, attempting to make contact and learn of their stories.

Nielson doesn’t like to provoke during his investigations, stating, “ghosts are people too.” Throughout his investigations, he said less than one percent of the spirits he claims to have encountered are malevolent.

A frequent question he is asked throughout his decade of experience is what location has been his favorite to investigate.

“It’s like asking a parent, ‘do you like your son more or your daughter more?’ It’s a question I can’t fully answer. Each place holds something different for me,” Nielson said.

While the event had many paranormal encounters, the festival also had plenty of space for healing. Palm reading, mediums, aura photography and card readers were seen throughout the event with attendees.

Hundreds of attendees came to Riverview Park from Friday through Sunday for the Midwest Annual Paranormal Festival keeping vendors busy throughout the weekend.

Shamanic healer Holly Mullins said she read tarot cards for over a hundred people by Saturday afternoon. She said her goal is to help enlighten other people by connecting with others through her cards, which are supposed to show what others need to know in their life immediately.

Her partner, Dallas Adams, said the experiences with visitors makes the event worth it.

“The genuine human connection that you get with these people, that they get what we’re talking about or it resonates with their soul, that to me is why we do what we do,” Adams said.

While meeting lots of open-minded individuals, they both said they also met their fair share of skeptics, which is to be expected.

“Everybody should have a healthy amount of skepticism, but they should not rule out anybody,” Mullins said.

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Contact Trevor Babcock at 641-753-6611 or

tbabcock@timesrepublican.com.