Supernatural Skills

Director of Advancement and Online MBA Graduate Katie Jo Glesing Shifts Between Worlds of Higher Education and Paranormal Research

College of Business Director of Advancement Katie Jo Glesing is well-known to colleagues for her spirit – both on and off the University of Louisville campus. With positive energy and a nearly spooky ability to connect with community leaders and College alumni, she is a valuable asset to the College, UofL, and the greater Louisville business and paranormal communities. We spoke with Glesing about her experiences as she balances dual roles in the fields of higher education and paranormal edutainment.

College of Business: How did you first develop an interest in business administration and organizational management?

Katie Jo Glesing: My interest in business administration and organizational management came from volunteering and working at several nonprofits. My undergraduate degree was in communications, but I quickly realized how important it was going to be to have more business experience and education with opportunities that began presenting themselves to me.

College of Business: Why did you decide to earn an MBA?

Katie Jo Glesing: Initially, I was scared to pursue an MBA. I needed quite a bit of tutoring in my undergraduate days with math and statistics courses. I began working in the graduate programs office with students seeking internships in 2021. After a few semesters of taking one-off, fun courses and supportive encouragement from the leadership of the College, I took the leap and started my MBA journey in the Online MBA (OMBA) program. 

College of Business: What has your professional journey looked like, and why did you make the decision to work in higher education?

Katie Jo Glesing: My journey has truly been a career jungle gym. Professionally, I started working in my freshman year of college to afford tuition, but I would volunteer where my passions were to keep my spirit up. I worked for a nonprofit mortuary school and volunteered for nine years with Wildlife in Need, Inc. (as featured on Netflix’s “Tiger King”) doing exotic and native animal caretaking, training, and rehab and release prior to the filming of the docuseries. I was [also] a Senior District Executive for the local Boy Scouts of America for several years and worked a side hustle for an academic paranormal research institute. Now I’m the Director of Development at the College of Business, and it’s such an exciting role! As an extrovert, this is the perfect place for me to have landed. I was often working 70-hour weeks between a full-time role and volunteering where I was passionate. The thing that drew me to higher education and academia was the opportunity to combine my worlds. I loved the opportunity to learn and take classes that I couldn’t take in my undergrad, dive deeper into research, and really love the atmosphere of working on a university campus.

College of Business: How did you first develop an interest in the paranormal, and what led you into the field of paranormal research?

Katie Jo Glesing: Well, luckily, I had some weird, wonderful parents. My mom is heavily into family genealogy, and we would walk around in cemeteries looking for family members before Friday night football games in the fall. We started watching TV shows like “Ghost Hunters,” “Paranormal State,” and other documentary-style paranormal entertainment. In my undergraduate days, I needed six upper-level psychology credits in research. It just so happened that my university was offering a parapsychology (paranormal psychology) course. It was half in-class learning and half traveling the east coast of the US, learning about academic research and cultural aspects of that field. 

College of Business: How has your interest in the paranormal evolved over time?

Katie Jo Glesing: The professors who taught the parapsychology course were also doing legitimate, IRB-approved research in the field. We got to go on several ghost hunts in the course, where we turned haunted locations into lab-quality research spaces. I was invited to participate in a séance study hosted in the basement of the IU Southeast labs. We got some really compelling data, and my interest exploded. From there, I bonded with the professors and jumped into the deep end with the nonprofit they formed. I became a board member and one of the major data collectors for that institute. The institute didn’t really focus on sharing what we did with the public, and while we were sitting in dark rooms talking to the air 98% of the time, the 2% where we got tangible, frightening, and incredible activity is what kept me going.

College of Business: As part of your Cardinal Choice assignment for your Online MBA program, you chose to focus on the paranormal. Share with us what this project was about, along with your goals for this project.

Katie Jo Glesing: The paranormal field gets shoved in the back corners of academia. Researchers tend to stray away from the field for fear of it impacting their academic integrity, despite several journals and credible research papers that showcase how legitimate of a field it is. For my MBA, I chose to focus on the industry of paranormal edutainment. We have massive economic evidence that paranormal tourism can completely change a town. For example, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a sleepy town with roughly 6,000 people. They host the Mothman Festival each year, bring in 15,000 people and completely stimulate their local economy. Jobs are created, less people have to move away to afford to live, and the hospitality sector spikes. My goal in this project was to show that regardless of personal beliefs about the paranormal, it certainly does impact us all, even if we aren’t aware of it. Here in Louisville, we have Waverly Hills Sanatorium. People travel from all over the world to experience one single night in that location. They eat at Louisville restaurants, stay in Louisville hotels, and often participate in other activities when they are finished at Waverly. The interconnectedness fascinates me.

College of Business: How did the knowledge you gained from that assignment aid your professional growth in the field of paranormal research?

Katie Jo Glesing: This project snowballed so quickly, and so much happened at about the same time. Academia and entertainment don’t typically show up at the same time in this field. One of our first assignments was to interview a professional in the field. I chose a local podcast host who was working on a couple of documentaries on the paranormal – one in particular on psychic vampirism. We went and investigated my team’s favorite research gathering locations together for an episode of their TV series. After the interview and investigation together, she invited me to be a production assistant for five days in northern Ohio at Michelle Belanger’s haunted AirBNB to work on this series called “New Blood.” The ask was essentially, do you want to spend five nights in a haunted location with people who identify as vampires? So, of course, I said yes, put in my PTO request, and went. I had already been teaching Ghost Hunting 101 courses, started my nonprofit, Boo812, in between filming, and had around 10 research articles under the name of the nonprofit research institute I worked for, so they ended up bringing me into the cast of the show as an on-screen paranormal investigator. After that, I was invited to speak at conventions, on several podcasts, and on more TV series. As I moved forward in the project, I posted it online to my Instagram and Facebook accounts. It garnered quite a bit of attention from other larger paranormal personalities. 

College of Business: How did you use AI to aid you in developing your Cardinal Choice assignment on this topic?

Katie Jo Glesing: AI was instrumental. Honestly, ChatGPT was one of my favorite parts of this assignment. In the second to last semester, I took an AI course with Daniel Johnsen. In that class, I had the opportunity to pitch some ideas to him for an assignment using AI. I used AI audio software to track electronic voice phenomena (EVP). We uploaded several EVP-suspected clips, uploaded our investigator’s voices, and told the AI program to scan for voices or noises that were not produced by natural environmental sounds of the voices of our investigators. With some fine-tuning, I really think AI could benefit the field in terms of evidence collection for hobbyists or academics. I’m still using AI for image generation and have a project in collaboration with the Teaching Innovation Learning Lab (TILL) here in UofL’s library as a passion project post-MBA. 

College of Business: How has earning your MBA allowed you to bring a sense of legitimacy to what some might consider an area of fringe science?

Katie Jo Glesing: Money talks. Facts talk. Economic impact talks. You don’t have to believe in the Flatwoods Monster to know that the Flatwoods Monster brings thousands of curious visitors to its tiny town. I was invited to speak on paranormal edutainment’s economic impact at Scarefest on October 19^th in Lexington, Kentucky, and I had the pleasure of interviewing the organizer of Scarefest about their 2023 numbers. They had 20,000 [attendees] per day for four days in Lexington. This year, they brought in 40,000 people. During the project, Kentucky’s tourism department brought in a new campaign called “Kentucky After Dark,” where you get a paranormal passport and collect stamps from paranormal-related attractions across Kentucky for prizes. It works. We are now the only state with such a program, and leaning into it is proving to be very beneficial, especially in combination with the film incentives Kentucky offers.

College of Business: How are you bringing your knowledge of the paranormal to UofL, and how have you seen the sharing of that information impact UofL students, faculty, and staff?

Katie Jo Glesing: Eventually, I would love to teach an undergraduate paranormal course like the one I had the pleasure of taking. In the meantime, I’m the chair of the Women’s Network Employee Resource Group. We offered a Creepy Campus Tour for faculty and staff in 2023 that was highly successful. This year, that [event] has grown to several different Creepy Campus Tours.

College of Business: What paranormal-related projects have you developed? Of those projects, which has been the most important to you and why?

Katie Jo Glesing: Since starting the OMBA, I started my paranormal history and culture nonprofit, Boo812. We hosted a paranormal convention called Boofest in August 2024 that brought in 150 people in person and another 100 online, including some international viewers. Aside from the podcasts, TV series, and conventions I’ve been involved with, my personal passion project right now involves virtual reality. We also heavily discuss ethics in the paranormal field. Thousands of dollars have gone to people who profited off a false narrative.

College of Business: What paranormal projects are on the horizon for you?

Katie Jo Glesing: With the help of the TILL in the UofL Ekstrom Library, we are partnering with the archives to move the Creepy Campus Tour into an extended virtual reality (VR) format. My vision is to allow VR historical and haunted tours. Using AI in conjunction with VR, we would also be able to use archival photos and videos to recreate some of our historical campus figures. We could use our historical figures and tell the stories of the reports we have from faculty, staff, and students to make for an immersive experience. I will also have an episode of the locally filmed TV series “Haunted Discoveries,” dedicated to my personal experience, coming out in the fall of 2025.

College of Business: How can people learn more about your work with the paranormal?

Katie Jo Glesing: If you shoot me an email to Katie.Glesing@louisville.edu or submit a contact form to our nonprofit www.boo812.org, I’ll reach back out to you. I’m happy to speak to anyone on this topic! We also have an Instagram for Boo812 @ Boo_812_502. 

If you’re like Katie Jo and are interested in earning your MBA to further your non-profit organization but need the flexibility of an online program, see how our Online MBA might be the right fit for you. https://louisville.edu/online/programs/masters/master-of-business-administration/?utm_source=cob-website-referral/

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