Overview

Kerry Gaynor’s career centered on field investigation of spontaneous case phenomena rather than laboratory experimentation. Working under Thelma Moss at UCLA, Gaynor developed expertise in on-site investigation of reported hauntings and poltergeist activity.^[1]

Life and career

Gaynor became one of Dr. Thelma Moss’s principal field investigators at the UCLA Parapsychology Lab during the 1970s.^[1] Moss, a former actress and scriptwriter who earned her PhD at UCLA in 1966, trained Gaynor in on-site investigation of spontaneous case phenomena.^[1] Under her direction, Gaynor investigated nearly 500 reportedly haunted locations around the Los Angeles area.^[1]

Gaynor’s investigative work focused on spontaneous case phenomena — reports of hauntings, poltergeist activity, and other anomalous experiences occurring outside controlled laboratory settings.^[1]

Second career: hypnotherapy

Gaynor graduated from UCLA with high honors in philosophy in 1975 and went on to build a second career as a Los Angeles hypnotherapist.^[2] Inspired by a guest hypnotist’s demonstration in a college laboratory, he apprenticed with a Los Angeles hypnotist, earned certification from the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners, and was registered in the state of California as a certified hypnotist and hypnotherapist.^[6] He also studied under the hypnotherapy pioneer Gil Boyne.^[2] In 1979 he opened a private practice in Santa Monica built around a self-created method for ending addiction, with a particular focus on helping people quit smoking.^[6]

Over more than four decades Gaynor refined the Kerry Gaynor Method, a hypnosis-based program for quitting smoking, vaping, and other nicotine use.^[2] His hypnotherapy clients have included the actors Martin Sheen and Aaron Eckhart,^[5] and Matthew Perry was among the celebrities who publicly credited the method.^[1] In 2024 he appeared on the Netflix talk show John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A., recalling his UCLA-era investigations.^[5]

Research

The Doris Bither case

In August 1974, Doris Bither sought help from Dr. Thelma Moss’s UCLA parapsychology lab, describing paranormal phenomena occurring in her Culver City home.^[1] Gaynor took part in the field investigation from its first visit on August 22, 1974, returning to the residence repeatedly over a ten-week period.^[1]

Gaynor concluded that the source of the phenomena was Doris Bither herself, not the house — a determination based on the observation that activity followed her when she moved out.^[1] This agent-centered interpretation became a defining feature of Gaynor’s investigative approach to apparent poltergeist cases.^[1]

The photographic evidence and its reception

During the 1974 UCLA investigation, Bither was photographed with Polaroid and 35 mm cameras; several frames recorded bright, arc-like streaks of light above her. One of these “arc of light” images was published by Adrian Vance, West Coast editor of Popular Photography, in the magazine’s May 1976 issue.^[3]

The photographs have not been independently corroborated as anomalous. A 2021 Skeptical Inquirer examination by Kenny Biddle found that the flash had been used inconsistently between the “entity” frames and the control frame, undermining any direct comparison, and concluded that the arcs are most consistent with a thin object — such as a strand of hair near the lens — rendered as an overexposed, out-of-focus streak, rather than evidence of an external presence.^[4]

Later investigations

Beyond the UCLA-era fieldwork, Gaynor continued investigating reported hauntings; in the 1990s he examined the reportedly haunted Sallie House for the television series Sightings.^[1]

Influence and reception

Gaynor was among the most active and well-known ghost hunters in Los Angeles during the 1970s, and his field investigations with the UCLA lab team became a media sensation of the era.^[1]

The Bither case inspired Frank De Felitta’s 1978 book The Entity and the 1982 film of the same name starring Barbara Hershey.^[1] The case became one of the most widely known poltergeist investigations of the 1970s and established a cultural template for dramatized portrayals of spontaneous case fieldwork.^[1]

Gaynor’s agent-centered approach contributed to the modern spontaneous-case investigation tradition’s emphasis on identifying psychological and social factors in reported hauntings.^[1]