Believer

James “D” Darnell is a fourth-generation Renoite. He co-hosts a radio show with his partner, Zoe Ztarr. exploring the “paranormal and beyond.” It airs from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., Monday through Friday, on the America Matters website. An archive of previous shows can be found at americamatters.us.

What’s the name of the show?

The name of the show is “Spend the Night with Z.” … [Ztarr]’s my girl. She’s a metaphysicist. She works with the stones, the healing, the good spells. Knows everything you can do about mixing herbs together to put in a candle.

So, she’s a witch?

Yeah [laughs]! I was going to say that. … [The show] is “paranormal and beyond,” so we’ve been covering many different topics. We’ve been at it a little more than a month, and we’ve been getting wonderful response from people out there listening—even from out of the country. For not being at it that long, we’re getting a good response from people wanting to be on the show. … They want to talk about who they are and whatnot, and get involved with the paranormal. We even have a gentleman that lost a bunch of weight that we’re putting on there because Fridays we do the mind and spirit. … Things like that, that’s where the “beyond” comes in. We don’t just limit ourselves to the Art Bell thing. We have a different approach. We don’t have book writers on, and, “Tell us about your book, Bob.” We’re not that type of a paranormal show. We’re a lighter show. We laugh. We have fun. … We’re certified paranormal investigators, if you will. We have a business called Parormal Extraction.

So, you’re a Ghostbuster, and she’s a witch?

Nice little irony there of some sort. So, we do that. We go cleanse people’s homes. Lately, we haven’t done much because we’ve been doing this show. … We just go in and cleanse. Sometimes, I take measurements, but we just go in to cleanse, to show these people how to help themselves instead of entertain the ghosts. Maybe help it to move—help the entity to move on.

If I said, “I’m skeptical, and I don’t believe in ghosts,” what would you tell me?

I’d say that’s absolutely within your rights. … We have our Paranormal Extraction shirts and on our car we have magnets, and people come up to us, and they want to spill their guts about their story, because if they tell it to someone else they might just think they’re crazy. What we get more often than not is somebody coming up, telling us their story, and then they want our business card, and sometimes we get work—but you know how that goes. But most of the time, people just want to talk to somebody that they trust. But I never close the door on somebody that says they don’t believe it, because maybe they just haven’t met somebody or been in a situation that would change their mind. Skeptics are what drive us in this subculture of the paranormal.

Oh, because people are looking for someone who believes?

Yes, and a lot of them want help. We don’t even charge that much money. We charge $100, which is nothing. … Zoe is an empath and a pretty good psychic. She can feel things, where some other people can’t, and she can explain it to you, and she can tell you what’s going on. … She’s the one who feels stuff. I’m the one who comes in and says, “No, that’s just your hot water heater. You don’t have any ghosts. I’ll show you what’s making that rattling.” … What I believe is that you can’t destroy energy. It just changes its shape. But what gets me is that it’s so intelligent. It has an intelligence sometimes. It messes with people.