Real Name: Frank Bannister

Occupation: Psychic Researcher/Architect and Contractor

Known Relatives: Debra (first wife, deceased), Lucy (second wife),

Base of Operations: Fairwater, California

First Appearance: Frighteners (1996)

History: Frank Bannister was at one time a successful contractor. After he married for the first time, he promised his wife Debra that he’d build her the home of her dreams, but demand for his work was taking its toll on him and he started drinking to handle the stress. In building the house he had promised her, he made changes in the construction that she was not pleased with, one of which concerned a basketball court where she wanted a garden. Contractor David Platz watched as they left the barely started house in his car while in a heated argument…

Several hours later, Frank and Debra had not returned on schedule. Police found his car had rolled off a sharp curve off Holloway Road, and Debra had been thrown almost fifteen yards and killed on impact. The number 13 was inexplicably carved into her head. Frank was found wandering in a daze almost a mile away with no memory of what had happened. Police could find not enough evidence to fine him for the death of his wife and there was no way to tell how much he had been drinking at the time of the accident.

Bannister somehow realized that a blow to his head from the accident had been given the ability to see ghosts. Probably the first “pure” psychic (as opposed to psychics who can only sense ghosts), he started using his new talent to conduct investigations into the supernatural. Some of his critics called him a hoaxer who preyed on the gullibility of others. Even if he had at some point degraded to that point, Bannister utilized a number of spirit guides consisting of The Judge, an old lawman from the Old West, Stuart, a student killed at Berkley during a tragic hazing accident in the 1950s and Cyrus, an African-American playboy who had died in the Seventies. Most of the spirits that Bannister encountered turned out to be individuals trying to get in contact with loved ones right after death. In 1996, Bannister learned that an epidemic of unexplained deaths in Fairwater were being caused by Patricia Ann Bradley. The girlfriend of executed serial killer Johnny Bartlett, she reportedly started taking her instructions from him through an Ouija board after being released from prison. Bannister met his second wife, Dr. Lucy Lynskey through this case as he laid Bartlett’s spirit to rest. Bradley apparently had a heart attack in Fairwater Sanitarium where she and Bartlett had carried out their massacre several years before. Bannister claimed that she had been taking orders from Johnny’s ghost, but the public version is that the strenuous activity she was going through to make it look like Johnny was back was too much for her heart and it gave out. Today, Frank and Lucy live quietly outside Fairwater. He still engages in haunted house investigations from time to time when he is not trying to renew his success as an architect.

Powers/Abilities: Frank Bannister possesses the ability to sense psychic and paranormal phenomenon although his abilities are much more intense than most psychics. While most conventional psychics can only sense and perceive messages from the astral forms of the dead (ghosts), Frank can actually see ghosts in a immaterial and incorporeal state resembling the way they appeared in life (although some ghosts tend to “deteriorate” into more vaporous desiccated forms and states decades and centuries after death). Frank’s link to these sprits is intense enough that he can simultaneously converse and interact with them as living persons. He can also perceive the place memories left behind by living beings on places and objects. These memories occur around him as non-interactive events uninhibited by his presence and even become intense even to block him from perceiving sounds and sights from the physical world. In this state, Frank often physically finds himself in the past and can move about undetected around the forms and states he is detecting. Frank can also sense and perceive astral points or “gateways” to the next plane of existence (“the afterlife”) as shafts of light from out of time and space. These apertures usually appear in locations of intense positive energy, like churches and chapels. He has also had limited experience in astral projection (“out-of-body-experiences”).

Comments: In the movie based on the investigation, Michael J. Fox and Trini Alvarado portrayed Bannister and Dr. Lynsky.