Joe Nickell is dead. He passed away Tuesday March 4th, 2025, aged 80. During his life, Joe had more adventures and investigated more mysteries than most avid readers will encounter in a stack of their favourite books. How do you summarise a life like Joe’s? Well, in one sense, we don’t have to rely on obituary as biography because his frequent articles and books have done that work, and in his own hand. If you’ve never heard of Joe nor his contributions to the literature of scientific investigation of the paranormal and supernatural, then you find here but a signpost to further reading.
But solving mysteries was just one chapter in the anthology of Joe’s life. No, that’s not an ill-chosen word. Most people see their lives as a biography in progress, a single narrative with the hero version of ourselves as the main character. Joe, on the other hand, took on the challenge of reinventing himself so many times that he came to refer to these episodes as his “personas.”
There is Joe, the 1960s civil rights activist who marched with Dr King and canvassed the hostile segregationist South to help register black voters. Then there’s Joe, the young entrepreneur son of a Kentucky postmaster who learned the trade of sign-painting and used those skills his whole life to find work and create art between various jobs and yet more personas. There was Joe, the private investigator who went undercover to break up crime rings and solve cases that would make great true-crime fodder. Don’t forget about Joe, the noted poet who once participated in a slam with notable members of the Beat Generation. Joe Nickell was present when the hippies tried to levitate the pentagon. And we mustn’t forget Joe, the documents expert who used his forgery detection skills to find a Nazi hiding from justice. And can you hear that boardwalk patter? That’s Joe, the street magician and conjuror plying his trade to lure you into a museum of magic using the verbal tricks of the trade he learned from his friends in the travelling carnival circuit. Oh – and over there in tweed? Why that’s Dr Joe Nickell, should you find him in the guise of English professor. And of course Joe Nickell could tell you about more of his exploits over an expertly made mint julep, since he was also a Kentucky Colonel who literally wrote the book on that cocktail.Â
All of that is before we get to his work on miracles, ghosts, monsters, and flying saucers. Joe probably did more than anyone to let us in on the “secret” that the shroud of Turin is a 13th century fraud and could never have been the burial cloth of Jesus. With nothing more powerful than a pen, Joe defeated countless beasts and creatures and found time after time that sincere witnesses may have very well seen real things – but the right circumstances can turn the mundane and the natural into the liminal and mysterious.
Joe slept in haunted houses. He camped in monster territory. He faced cursed objects and holy relics with the most powerful spell known to secular inquiry, the two word invocation that all purveyors of the implausible dread: “Prove it.“
Joe didn’t believe in any gods or afterlife, but didn’t call himself an “atheist.” He preferred to say he was a secular humanist which, if the inquirer didn’t understand, he would define as “an atheist with a heart.” And that’s how I knew him to be.
I believe I met Joe for the first time in 2009 when he was at DragonCon. He was used to meeting lots of people, being in crowds, talking to large audiences, getting on TV shows, consulting with movie people – but when we met and I told him I was also interested in solving mysteries he only ever treated me as an equal and welcomed me to the calling.Â
Joe’s stance was akin to what Karen Stollznow and I have taken to calling “a presumption of sincerity.” When someone is willing to share their weird or mysterious encounter, we take them seriously and try to understand and listen – and until we run into something that suggests insincerity or lies, we continue to focus on the claims, not the character of the claimant. I think Joe also took this tack when he met potential fellow investigators. He would treat you as a serious colleague until you demonstrated otherwise.
I don’t know how many investigators Joe took under his wing or collaborated with as trusted colleagues, but it was a lot. I know he worked with Hayley Stevens, Robert Bartholemew, Steven Novella, Jim McGaha, Robert Sheaffer, Massimo Polidoro, and I’m sure many, many others. I know he spoke about collaborating with James Randi and other founding members of CSICOP. He venerated his own mentor and fellow Kentuckian Robert A. Baker, and the magician and author Melbourne Christopher – yet he still took time to help younger investigators just getting started with their own inquiries into paranormal mysteries.
Joe was as complicated as his many personas suggest. While he could be a tremendous friend, he also could be a bit prickly and his opinion of your merit might fade quickly if you disagreed with him without a strong and cogent argument. And as he got older, he worried too much about people scooping his latest cases. That was unfortunate, because the reality is that there might not be a bustling stable of future scientific researchers into such mysteries. I would be more optimistic about the future if there were a bigger skilled and competent coterie of investigators trying to out-sleuth each other in their relentless drive to track down real explanations for mysteries, but this is a peculiar and rare avocation (Joe’s word).
Why didn’t Joe ever use the Internet? He wasn’t unfamiliar with computers and would use them in his research – yet he wrote his cases up in longhand and had a typist prepare them. He would correspond via letters, and he would use a phone – but he wouldn’t own a mobile or smart-phone and he saw such devices as more distraction than useful extension of his capabilities. I recall one time a notable colleague shared a story about pestering Joe to use a computer to speed up their collaborative process, and Joe pushed back by saying he’d written more than 25 published books without a computer, “and how many have YOU written?” That person has gone on to have their own books published, but it was the kind of retort Joe would use; one that both shuts down the argument while also making a strong suggestion of its own.
Even in the last few weeks of his life Joe was in a race to try and finish as much as he could of his remaining projects. He was an utter realist about the brevity of life and wanted to squeeze out everything he could from it.
Joe went undercover to spot trickery at Spiritualist camps. He snuck “tears” and “blood” from holy relics to have them analysed. He was adept at subterfuge and prestidigitation. Yet what he really wanted was for people to be able to enjoy mysteries but not be duped by the dubious. He kept Occam’s Razor at the ready for any epistemological street fight. He was inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but saw the life of Conan Doyle as an object lesson that being clever could still end with your being duped by the biggest trickster of all – the true Moriarty of mystery – one’s own fallible mind and faulty perception.Â
I was lucky to have known Joe. He went from being a TV face to a notable colleague to a trusted friend. In the decade and a half that we knew each other he was never anything but supportive and helpful, and he was generous and wise with the advice he dispensed. Typically when Joe called it would take an hour to have our conversation. Rare was the call that lasted less than 30 minutes. But last week Joe sounded very tired and told me he needed to rest. Over the weekend I worried, and was relieved when I reached him on Monday.
“Get some rest, Joe. Get well. You’ve still got a lot of work to do,” I told him.
He sounded winded and said he was going to watch MSNBC and try to get his energy back. A neighbour came to the door while we were talking and I could overhear them tell Joe they were thinking about him and worried that he might fall in the ice trying to get his newspaper. When Joe came back to the phone he told me how much he appreciated good neighbours. I told him that I wished I lived closer so I could check in on him myself. Could I send something his way? Did he need any groceries or anything?
The very suggestion that Joe might be getting frail kicked him back into one of his very best personas: the old investigator with one more case to solve… When he stopped speaking of his immediate health and turned back to his latest investigation – a mystery he dared not share with me because it hadn’t been published yet – there was my old friend again. The man who re-created the Nazca lines, who made the shroud of Bing Crosby on TV, the man who didn’t believe in miracles, but believed in his fellow man… there was my Joe again.
“Joe, I just want you to know that I appreciate you as a friend, as a mentor, and as an incredible mind. The world needs voices like yours and I’m honoured to have helped in some small way to share your work,” I said. I had no premonition that he was dying – just a lot of worry given his age and health.Â
He thanked me. I thanked him. We said our goodbyes. Now he’s taken on his final persona in our relationship – Joe Nickell, the friendly skeptical ghost who will haunt me with his wisdom and his adventures for the rest of my own life.
