Ghost Hunting: The Basics

     If you want to watch ghost hunting on television, you are living in a golden age. Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Ghost Mine, the list goes on and on. There's almost always a show on where people, lit by the ghastly green light of a night vision camera, run and trip through some haunted location with all sorts of esoteric paranormal equipment blinking and beeping to let us now that something is there with them. Likewise, the amateur ghost hunter can pack a bag with meters, cameras and many more expensive electronic baubles that attempt to prove the existence of spirits. There are smartphone apps that are marketed as full-featured ghost detection units. So what's useful? What works? I think there are two answers, and my feelings about this aspect of paranormal investigation may surprise you. So here we go.

A Selection of ghost hunting tools from Amazon

    The list of equipment used in a typical television ghost hunt is staggering: K2 meters, voice recorders, EMF detectors and motion detecting cameras are the old standbys. Newer innovations include the aforementioned smartphone apps and the spirit box, which supposedly allows a spirit to select words from a digital dictionary that the spirit box can then play aloud. There are a host of other devices that show up on each television spook hunt. So what's worth using? Technically, I would argue that most of this stuff is worthless junk. Personally, I think that the chance of detecting any sort of spirit with a digital device is slim to none. K2 meters, EMF detectors and spirit boxes seem to rely on  random chance more than anything. I think that cameras and voice recorders can be a valuable tool to document the investigation and to capture the human reactions to the paranormal. The iPhone apps that I've played with have meters for things like EMF detection when the iPhone clearly does not have a sensor to detect EMF.

     So, does that make this stuff completely worthless? As a technical tool, probably. But I think that there may be a deeper value to these devices, something beyond the obvious. I think that having this equipment puts us in the proper mindset to be able to notice the paranormal.  The ritual of checking batteries, flipping switches and peering through the green-tinged eyepiece immerses us in the experience. When the voice-recorder is rolling, we are quiet and still, trying not to contaminate the sound. This allows us to actually listen to the environment.  When the camera is action, we are alert and aware of everything we can see. In this way, I think that the equipment can be a useful component for the paranormal team, as long as it's not allowed to get in the way of the human experience.

     I do want to end this with the admission that I have seen good paranormal photos, and I've heard some really chilling EVPs, so I can't completely discount these tools. But the human mind is especially good at making patterns from random noise, so everything becomes suspect. Again, these new digital toys should be used to supplement the human experience of the paranormal rather than as a substitute for it. So by all means, use a camera and a digital recorder to document the moment and maybe even catch something unexplainable. Use these other tools with caution, but don't be afraid to let yourself get into the moment and more open to the supernatural.