COBLESKILL — Halloween season starts off early in Cobleskill. Not just at Dollar General and Walmart, but at Empty Pockets Ranch, a Haunted History Trail farm at 5172 State Route 145. For $20 per person on Saturday, September 19th, a full day of paranormal celebrities, stories, and investigations will indoctrinate those willing to attend into the world of unexplained phenomena. Lori Davis, a paranormal investigator, herself, who, with her family, owns and operates Empty Pockets Ranch with different events throughout the year, has invited an array of ghost hunters, mediums, and educators for a day-long immersion into the experiences of practitioners who connect with the spirit world. Vendors selling crystals, cards and steampunk items, as well as card readers and psychics, will begin setting up as early as 9 a.m.
At 10 a.m., the headliner for the day, Chris DiCesare, whose personal story was featured on the Netflix series, "True Haunting," will speak about the paranormal events he experienced in 1985 in his college dorm room in Erie Hall at SUNY Geneseo. After years of keeping the story private, he eventually opened up about the many traumatic events he dealt with by giving interviews and appearing in documentaries, and in 2025 he published a memoir, The Ghost Boy of Erie Hall.
After DiCesare’s presentation in the morning, PARACON attendees will have time to visit a variety of food trucks parked on the property for the lunch break before the other speakers present their own stories and answer questions in a panel discussion.
These presenters and panel members include Jack Kenna, a founder and member of more than one paranormal investigation team. Kenna is also speaker, and author who teaches classes about the paranormal at Hudson Valley Community College and Schenectady County Community College. He has written graphic novels, as well as two non-fiction books—Hauntings, Ghosts & Demons and Paranormal Research—and has appeared in several TV series about hauntings that he’s investigated.
Steve Kulls, a radio show host who researches, lectures, and has written about evidence-based Bigfoot investigations, will also be speaking and answering questions. Kulls has a website, Squatchdetective.com, as well as Squatch-D TV and Squatch-D University. His books are available on his website and Amazon.com. In addition to appearing on national and international television for close to 20 years, he is a member of a panel on the History Channel series “The Proof is Out There,” providing investigative analysis and evaluation of unexplained phenomena.
Another presenter is actress Ava Groves. In addition to appearing in several movies, Groves is known for her role as iCandy, a paranormal investigator on the Fox56 TV and CW network show, Paranormal After Party. Groves recognized her own abilities as an empath and a “conduit for spirits,” saying she discovered her ability to understand spirits and share their feelings while investigating in the field and being at numerous haunted locations.
At around 4 p.m., after audience questions have been addressed, there will be a break for attendees to go off the property for dinner prior to the on-site paranormal investigation with Unknown Paranormal Society beginning around 7 p.m. Since the investigation takes place in the woods in the dark, and sensitive topics will be discussed, for safety and other reasons, Unknown Paranormal sometimes limits participants to those over 18, but depending on the location, may allow ages 13-to-18 who are accompanied by a guardian. All participants must sign a waiver to be involved.
Participants will be broken up into three groups. Each group will investigate separately, one going into the woods surrounding the farm, and another into the barn. A third group will rotate in for the next opening at either location as another group finishes investigating it.
Why those areas? According to Davis, when they moved to the farm and prepared to turn an outer building into the shop, they found a 300-year-old headstone there with the name John Engle on it. “I think it was not the original headstone,” Davis said. “I think it was a mistake because there is one spelling that is wrong.”
From that information, Davis researched the property through county records and found that John Engle was the first owner of the farm based on a land grant in the 1700s from England’s Queen Anne. However, the barn on the property today is marked as being built in 1872.
The story connected to the event’s investigation in the woods is that Engle’s daughter moved across the road to another farm and the younger daughter went to visit her sister. While she was there, a group of natives attacked the household, killing the married daughter and her husband, while the younger daughter took off running until she got to where Central Bridge is now—about 10 miles away. “A lot of the activity we get from the woods seems to be centered around that incident,” Davis noted.
Investigators who have gone into the farm’s wooded area in the past used a “ghost box,” which purportedly picks up words and conversations from spirits. The box has emitted the words “run,” and “hide,” but also produces Spanish words. Davis wasn’t sure why Spanish words were picked up until a man from the Stone Fort came with a metal detector and found Mexican coins from the 1700s in the woods. But it is not clear if that was connected to Spanish words coming from the ghost box.
When Davis and her family purchased the farm, she found out that the seller had acquired it from a German family who had a German farmhand working for them. Long-term legends say that at some point, the German farmhand hung himself in that barn, which is why the barn is the second location for investigating paranormal activity.
Davis also allows paranormal groups to investigate the property at other times, but she requires them to sign a strict contract that bans investigators from provoking spirits, using Ouija boards, or invoking demonic spirits, among other prohibited activities.
