By the time Dustin Pari steps into the Friends Room at the Newport Public Library on the evening of Monday, October 19, he will have spent the better part of a month living out of a suitcase in the service of Halloween. The Newport stop is the first date on a late-October run that takes him from Rhode Island up through Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire, and back down again, delivering a different lecture almost every night through the holiday itself. On the 19th the topic is "Halloween: A Haunted History," a program for adults that begins at 6 p.m. and runs until 7:30.
The library's own description sets the tone with a knowing wink: "Ah, Halloween. Autumnal breezes, crisp leaves, and pumpkin flavored everything! What is it about this time of year that is so enchanting, so mystifying?" Pari's answer, per the listing, is to shed "some light on the spooky shadows of Halloween history and traditions." And then the line that matters most to anyone who has seen him on television: "Ghost stories? Oh yeah, he has some of those too."
The event is for adults 18 and over and is held in the Friends Room, the library's meeting space at 300 Spring Street. The library asks attendees to register in advance through its online events calendar. Pari's own tour schedule points readers to the same library registration page, and his presentations typically run about an hour of multimedia material followed by a Q&A, for roughly 90 minutes total.
For the uninitiated, Pari is a Rhode Island story in his own right. He grew up in Providence, the son of a truck driver and, in his own words on his website, "one of the last all-american housewives." He ditched his bowl cut for his trademark spiky hair around fifth grade, bounced around local state and community colleges before earning a degree in multimedia production, and worked for CBS and FOX news locally for years before moving into healthcare. He now works as a surgical anesthesia assistant, and Syfy's own bio describes him as the COO of a New England-based surgical practice.
The paranormal came for him early. As a child he encountered what he describes as a shadow figure in his childhood home, and the experience sent him looking for explanations. He began researching New England's paranormal stories and legends, and he was watching Ghost Hunters -- the Syfy series built around Rhode Island's own The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS -- when he decided he wanted in. A few emails and meetings later, he was on the show. He became a familiar face on Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International, with appearances on Destination Truth, and picked up the nickname "Paranormal Rockstar" from an interviewer along the way.
The travel that followed is the raw material behind his lectures. His bio counts 27 countries across six continents in pursuit of answers, and he has been an invited guest lecturer at many of the largest paranormal and spiritual conferences and conventions in the country. He has been interviewed by Anderson Cooper and has done radio shows and podcasts around the globe. He has written two books on his findings and his approach to the paranormal, plus three more collecting stories from life on the road, and two motivational books, with two more in the works.
He is also, by all accounts, funny about it. His material leans on what the library describes as a "strange and slightly offbeat sense of humor" that balances the light and dark sides of the subject. A Rhode Island Monthly profile captured the register well: at the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, when a spirit box allegedly blurted out "I'M A DEMON" and the room gasped, Pari rolled his eyes and told it to stop playing around. The same profile asked him for the scariest thing that ever happened to him, and he offered Castle Houska in Europe, where he found himself alone on the top floor with a dark shadow staring him down from a far corner. It lingered motionless for ten or fifteen minutes, he said, before darting across the back wall and out the window.
That combination -- genuine curiosity, a willingness to be spooked, and an unwillingness to take himself too seriously -- is roughly the brand. His website's homepage greets visitors with a short creed: "We are spirits going through a human experience. We are not from here. We do not stay here. Whilst we are here, we should look after one another." His sign-off is "Be Brave - Be Kind - Never Give Up." He also works as a motivational speaker and as a mental health and suicide awareness advocate, and gives Christian lectures; his holiday-themed motivational talks, built around Christmas television classics, have their own following.
The setting suits the subject better than a hotel conference room might. The Newport Public Library was chartered by the state in 1869 and opened on May 4, 1870, as the People's Free Library, formed from the combined holdings of the Newport Free Library and Townsend's curated collection, with Elma M. Dame as its first librarian. It has been at 300 Spring Street ever since, and today serves a city of roughly 24,700 people with a collection of some 145,000 volumes and annual circulation north of 222,000 items. A free public lecture on the history of Halloween, in a building that has been collecting the region's stories for more than 150 years, is a fitting pairing.
And Newport is a good place to tell ghost stories. The city's colonial streets, its old wharves and its long memory for shipwrecks, sea captains and Gilded Age fortunes have made it a fixture of New England ghost lore, the sort of place where a lecture on Halloween traditions lands differently than it would in a strip-mall conference center. Pari's program promises to trace where the holiday's customs actually come from -- the history behind the pumpkins and the costumes -- before turning to the tales themselves.
For anyone who wants the full 90 minutes, the practical details are simple. The program runs Monday, October 19, 2026, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the Friends Room at the Newport Public Library, 300 Spring Street, Newport. It is intended for adults 18 and older, and registration is required through the library's events calendar. The library can be reached at 401-847-8720. Seats are not ticketed, but the registration requirement means the room will be filled by people who planned ahead -- which, for a lecture about things that go bump in the night, seems only sensible.