Bianca Evans fills a jar containing a kangaroo specimen with alcohol at the Oregon Ghost Conference in Seaside on March 22.

Paranormal enthusiasts from around the region gathered at the Seaside Civic and Convention Center for the 12th annual Oregon Ghost Conference from March 22 to March 24. The event celebrates the supernatural, the spooky and the strange.

Rows of booths displaying macabre art, jewelry and tarot cards transformed the space, with signs advertising everything from protective charms to psychic connections. In the next room, paranormal podcasters, authors and investigators swapped scary stories.

“I’ve been into the paranormal my whole life,” said Mariah Hassler, assistant director of Big River Paranormal.

Big River Paranormal operates in the Pacific Northwest as a branch of the Atlantic Paranormal Society, known as TAPS, a national organization dedicated to investigating reports of paranormal activity.

“It’s a lot different than in the TV shows, for sure,” she said. “It’s a lot quieter — a lot of the time we’re able to come in and find those logical explanations for the experiences people are having. So we’ll come in and we’ll do an interview with our client and get to know where the hotspots are and the history of the house.

“Then we’ll get the equipment set up and we’ll start with your basic questions, the ones you always expect: ‘What’s your name?’ ‘What’s your favorite color?’ That kind of thing. And then we just go into basic conversation, because a lot of times they’ll just join into the conversation.”

Hassler said she’s seen interest in the paranormal become more accepted, drawing more people to the culture and the conference.

“I think the stigma is starting to go away a little bit, and people are able to kind of deep dive and try to learn about it more and more,” she added.

In the last few years, podcasts have become a popular and accessible medium for people to get an introduction to and learn more about paranormal phenomena.

Across the aisle, Joss Rose and his wife, Monique, described their show, “Fright Life.” While they’ve always been fans of the paranormal, their interest in podcasting began during a long road trip while they were searching for something to listen to.

“We couldn’t find one that resonated quite right with us,” he said. “So we decided to make our own paranormal podcast, and we’ve been cranking out episodes ever since … Podcasts are really cool because you’re allowed to put a lot of your personality into them.

“We just want to share spooky stories with people. There’s a lot of history in the paranormal, and there’s a lot of information out there. So our goal is to take in as much information as we can, try and find as much truth in it as we can, and boil that down to a 45-minute episode that’s kind of spooky and funny and presented in a way that hopefully people will enjoy 10 years from now.”

Victoria Miles, who came from Salem to promote her shop, Who Would Want That, believes in a healthy balance between the scary and the silly.

She sells everything from goat’s milk soap to soy candles and strange earrings, with an emphasis on “campiness.”

“I think making it kind of tongue-in-cheek kind of eases people into conversations about the paranormal and makes them feel a little bit more comfortable,” Miles said. “So instead of going into it with a very serious lens, it’s almost like an icebreaker.”

Several conference attendees and presenters said they had experienced paranormal occurrences as children, and didn’t have the space or resources to discuss or learn more about the phenomena then.

“Now, fast-forward to today, you have ghost conferences, you have media presence, you have television that is really opening up the conversation about ghosts,” Breannan Matris, the author of “The Nature of Ghosts,” told the audience. “And that’s really exciting for somebody like me, who took a lot of time to catch up on what’s going on.

“So the momentum is moving forward to more openness and more positivity towards ghosts.”