SUNIL KUMAR. THIRTY-FIVE. HE/THEY. PARAPSYCHOLOGIST.
STATISTICS.
Name: Sunil Kumar.
Nickname(s): Sunny, Nyl.
Age: Thirty-five years old.
Gender/Pronouns: Male, he/they.
Sexuality: Bisexual, biromantic.
Hometown: Gravesend, England.
Current Location: Gastown, Vancouver.
Occupation(s): Parapsychologist.
Traits: Affable, well-intentioned, chaotic, naive.
BIOGRAPHY.
Trigger Warnings: Mentions of death + the paranormal.
Parapsychologist and denouncer of fraudulent spiritualist mediums, Sunil Kumar has carved a reputation for himself in the world of Hauntology as a tenacious investigator of psychical phenomena. He’s perhaps best-known for his work exposing fake, money-grabbing ‘mediums’, as well as being an active member of London’s Society for Psychical Research, an organisation set up in 1882 to examine purported paranormal activity. Initially sent to Vancouver for research purposes on behalf of the SPR, a year has now passed and Sunil is no closer to finishing the job. It’s the longest stint of fieldwork he’s ever known and, since arriving, he’s branched out his work and helps residents with domestic poltergeist problems to keep himself occupied. He’s made a temporary home in Vancouver, having initially fallen in love with its ambience and rich history – perfect for a parapsychologist – and the ghosts have always felt remarkably loud there.
Despite building a career on exposing the living who pretend they can communicate with the dead, he simultaneously believes the thread between the two is gossamer-thin. It’s always been about ghosts for Sunil. He was an honorary ghost himself, long before he took up investigating them. An only child, his father - a sweet-tempered man with dirt perpetually beneath his nails – was the local gravedigger in their sleepy English town, while his mother, the taller and bolder of the two, worked in a funeral parlour, having emigrated to England from India before he was born. Sunil’s earliest memories were of traipsing between moss-ridden headstones and overgrown bramble after his father, or otherwise tucked away in the corner of his mother’s parlour while she worked. The dead were his babysitters, his confidants, friends to an otherwise friendless child. Macabre, perhaps, but he never once felt frightened in their presence. (The living, on the other hand, terrified him.) One could argue that the fascination with ghosts came from feeling like an outlier himself, growing up in a predominately white -- and not always the friendliest -- town. Spectres lived on the fringes of society, often forgotten or dismissed. Sunil could relate to that struggle.
In a small town where nothing happened, the inhabitants had to find things to occupy themselves. Hauntings were a popular invention back in the day, and the locals would all try and outdo one another in an attempt to see who could spin the tallest tale. If one person had witnessed a teacup soaring across their living room, someone else would’ve seen an entire tea set be propelled by their far more superior poltergeist. The stories would snowball, escalate, become increasingly improbable. It always fascinated Sunil; not the validity of these claims, which often lacked a good deal of credibility, but the reasoning behind them. Were hauntings always the product of small-town boredom? Did they always have a gossipy, mayfly lifespan, or could ghosts actually exist?
His childhood heroes were never the same footballers or pop stars as his peers, but rather parapsychologists such as Nandor Fodor and Harry Price. Sunil shared Fodor’s pioneering theory that ‘poltergeists were external manifestations of conflicts within the subconscious mind, rather than autonomous entities with minds of their own.’ Fodor suggested poltergeist disturbances were caused by humans suffering from some form of emotional stress; the ghosts came from within them. They were somehow both the haunted and the one orchestrating the haunting, truthful and fraudulent all at once.
He built upon this theory, studied Psychology for an extended period, and ultimately joined the SPR at twenty-four as an investigator, where he’s worked ever since. When people encounter unexplained phenomena, they contact the SPR, and investigators like Sunil are sent out to do exactly that: investigate. Shed some light. It’s an unusual career, he’d be the first to admit it, but it’s all he knows how to do. Even now, the dead remain his closest friends and, despite coming face-to-face with more hoaxes than seemingly real hauntings, he still believes in their existence.
SUMMARY: Sunil is a professional investigator of paranormal activity, who hails from England but has been living in Vancouver for one year. They were initially sent by their employer to do some research on purported hauntings in the area, but ended up having to stick around longer than intended. To keep himself occupied alongside his research, he started helping locals with supposed poltergeist disturbances.
EXTRA INFO.
Sunny is currently living in a tiny and terribly cluttered apartment in Gastown. His time in Vancouver was only ever meant to be temporary, strictly for work purposes, so they never made it into a real home. After living in the apartment for a year, there’s little pieces of them -- precarious stacks of work documents, ghost-hunting equipment, haunted memorabilia, etc -- but it’s still clear that there’s not much personal attachment.
They wear glasses and their eyesight is awful without them. However, because of their accident-prone nature, his glasses always get broken so they are clumsily sellotaped together.
They are very sociable but have a tendency to ramble or talk exclusively about their interests (they will happily talk about ghosts, in particular, forever.)
WANTED CONNECTIONS.
Friendships, positive influences, negative influences, people he’s helped with suspected poltergeist problems, blind dates, paranormal naysayers/those who challenge sunil’s job and way of thinking, ghost-hunting buddies/people who love attending all of the same spooky things as sunny (ghost-tours, haunted houses, cemetery jaunts, etc), chosen family, mutual crushes, one-sided crushes, friends with benefits, rivals, neighbours + more to be added!
