For the past seven years, Shooting Star Casino in Mahnomen, Minnesota, has been hosting the spooky and mysterious at their annual ParaCon.

Comprised of three days worth of events, speakers, booths and a plethora of other activities, guests at ParaCon can interact with the other side — and some living people, too.

This year, ParaCon featured a few major speakers: Chad Coleman of AMC’s “The Walking Dead;” Jason and Samantha Hawes, Steve Gonsalves, Dave Tango and Grant Wilson of “Ghost Hunters;” Tory Belleci of “MythBusters.”

Other speakers included Chris Smith and Scott Porter of “Haunted Towns,” the Klinge Brothers from “Ghost Lab,” Midwest Paranormal Files and Johnsdale Paranormal.

“I had been watching all these guys for years,” Bob Stevens, entertainment manager for Shooting Star, said. “When Bill Marsh, who’s our general manager now, he first came to work for us as our marketing manager. One of the first things, he came to me and asked would I be interested in putting together some kind of paranormal convention? I jumped at it of course and took it on from there.”

“When we first started, it was relatively small,” Jamie Monson, advertising manager for Shooting Star Casino said. “It was just in one small part of our event center. Now it takes up (the) entire event center. It’s just grown and grown over the years.”

Monson took us (me and a photographer, Emily Kautzman) around the event center, showing us the different booths and presenters of ParaCon.

The whole range of the paranormal were in attendance: some booths housed mediums helping others speak to the dead while others read tarot cards to willing participants. Crystals, sage and other items were for sale at every corner. There were also Sasquatch hunters (SquatcHers), a cryptozoologist (Loren Coleman) and a UFO expert (Travis Walton).

Local paranormal groups were also in attendance, like Twin Cities Paranormal Society, Anoka Paranormal Investigations and Supernatural Investigators of Minnesota.

Included in the local businesses was The Palmer House, a hotel in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, that is rumored to be haunted by multiple entities.

“When we bought the Palmer House, neither one of us was from Sauk Centre,” Kelley Freese, co-owner of the Palmer House, said. “We lived there for nine years. In all the nine years, nothing. We were actually looking at it for awhile. We bought it. We spent several months doing work that needed to be done. TLC and some really hearty, heavy-duty cleaning. There were things that were happening then that I couldn’t explain. One day, probably not more than a month than we’d reopened. One of the locals was in for lunch and she said, ‘How’s it going, Kelley?’ I made some flippant comment about something having happened, or something I couldn’t explain. And she went, ‘Well, it’s haunted.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ and she said, ‘Palmer House is haunted. Everybody knows that.'”

She said of her ghostly guests: “The bottom line is, who knows? I just like to go, imagine all the possibilities.”

Freese’s story wasn’t the only spooky story at the event.

Grant Wilson, of “Ghost Hunters” fame, explained the the beginnings of “Ghost Hunters” and why he began investigating the paranormal:

“Ghosts made sense to me, the way I was raised,” Wilson explained. “I believed we had a spirit in us, we died, that spirit left. Some of them stuck around.”

He continued, “It wasn’t until I was 15 that weird stuff started happening. Weird encounters that I couldn’t fit into any basket in my brain. Because I didn’t know what it was, I was trying to research and I wasn’t getting answers. I started talking to other people, very casually, like, ‘Hey, anything weird happening around here?’ I found that almost everybody had some interaction. People were afraid to live in their own homes. I had done so much research, I realized if I exchanged comfort and information with someone, they would allow me exposure to the paranormal in their house so I could experience it firsthand.”

If ParaCon is any example, Wilson’s testament to the number of people who experience the paranormal is strikingly true: ParaCon was packed with paranormal purveyors and people who wanted answers about the strange things happening in their lives.

While Shooting Star hopes to continue to provide an open discussion of otherworldly experiences, they explained as the event grows, their space gets smaller.

“Our biggest problem is space,” said Stevens. “We have in the past done a lot of vendors in the hallways. We might have to go back to some of that, because we’re completely full. And we’ve had vendors looking to come. It’s just going to get bigger.”

ParaCon is usually in early October, before Halloween. Updates can be found on the Shooting Star Casino website and on their Facebook page.