For quite a while now, I have been fairly interested in stories of the paranormal. To me, at least, they give the universe a sense of mystery - that there are still things out there that we can't explain. However, something that bothers me about such stories - or, rather, people's commentary on them - is the almost instinctual reaction of people claiming to represent reason to immediately dismiss whatever it is as a hoax.
These sorts of comments will regularly drag out Occam's Razor, a principle that states that, given competing theories, the simplest one is better. And of course, the thing in question being a hoax of hallucination is far simpler, and requires far less faith to believe, than the thing being true. However, this is a total misappropriation of the principle. The razor is best used as the beginning of further investigation, not as the final word. While the simplest explanation may seem the most attractive, taking it on faith is not sound, scientifically speaking. So instead of saying "This is a hoax because of Occam's Razor", people really should be saying "This could be a hoax, and because of Occam's Razor, that possibility should be investigated before jumping to more outlandish explanations". A mouthful, I know, but more technically correct.
The trouble with the paranormal is, oftentimes it can't really be repeated experimentally. So, at the end of the day, if the event can't be replicated and explained by ordinary phenomena, we're left with nothing. For some odd reason, people seem to be bothered by this. Unanswered questions are far more common than you would think in science - after all, if there were no unanswered questions, what would be the point of research? But this does not have to be the end of the investigation, necessarily. To keep going, I would propose looking at techniques used in another field that doesn't have the luxury of repeatable experiment - history.
Historians do their work by studying artifacts of the time, written accounts, etc. and drawing conclusions based on similarities found. As an obvious example, we know the Revolutionary War in all likelihood happened, because we have numerous artifacts from that time period that point to that conclusion. Sure, the whole thing could have been some kind of massive, colonial joke played on historians, but given the amount of evidence to the contrary we can conclude that it probably did actually occur.
So, why not attempt the same with paranormal accounts? Try to gather all of the facts of encounters that are not easily explainable together, document them, and try to cross-reference them with other encounters to look for similarities and agreements. In addition, one could look to folklore and myths for similarities (folklore interests me quite a bit as well), though one will have to take care to separate the described phenomena from the described being - as an example, when looking at legends about demons, the important bits will be how they manifest themselves and behave, not their origin stories.
Logically, if any sort of paranormal entity or phenomena exists, either as an actual thing or something psychological (and some have questioned where one begins and the other ends - rightly so, I think), there should be multiple witnesses with corroborating stories. Likewise, such things would probably be described in myths and folklore, though perhaps under differing names.
I really think it behooves the rational, curious people of the world to approach things with an open mind. Everything should be questioned rigorously, including our preconceived notions of what does and does not exist.
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