Paranormal legend Brad Steiger has passed away at the age of 82.
Steiger, both a radio and podcast host and writer, investigated, talked and wrote about a plethora of interesting paranormal topics.
He was widely known and respected in the paranormal world and had many fans. Steiger died on May 6th, 2018, at the Muse Norris Hospice Inpatient Unit in Iowa.
If follows another major loss in the paranormal community back in April, when Art Bell, the founder of paranormal radio/podcast show Coast to Coast AM, passed away.
Steiger was born Eugene E. Olson and was a Lutheran farmboy from Iowa. That all changed when he had a near-death experience at the age of 11. The experience really rocked his world, changing his religious views, career ambitions, and his life in general.
Instead of pursuing farming, he went to college. He taught high school English for a bit, and later journalism and creative writing at his Alma Mater.
Somewhere during that time, he wrote a book and got it published, giving him a foothold into the industry. He left his job shortly after that and began writing full time.
Steiger’s first paranormal book was Ghosts, Ghouls and Other Peculiar People, which he published in 1965. He had a newspaper column called the Strange World of Brad Steiger in the early 1970s.
Over the course of his career, he wrote at least 2,000 paranormal articles and 175 books that he either authored or co-authored. (He was so good at writing that he said he wrote his first book at age seven!) He was also frequently a guest on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Steiger once revealed how his pen name was suggested to him by a woman he met, who said it referred to “one who guides others to higher awareness”.
She likely translated it from Dutch, in which the word “Steiger” translates to “scaffolding”.
The name was apt because, for decades, Brad Steiger has been guiding and inspiring paranormal writers (like me) and expanding the minds of anyone who would listen to him or read his works.
He will be sorely missed, not just by his massive family (Wife, two sons, three daughters and 10 grandkids!), but by all of the lives he touched with his works.
The paranormal is just part of the world we all share but do not fully comprehend. ~Brad Steiger