When I was a freshman in high school Ghost Hunters premiered on SyFy. Until then I had not been exposed to the more methodical approach to the paranormal. I grew up on ghost stories and some of those stories included people who would chase them down. Ghost Hunters introduced me to what at the time I considered a more realistic and logical approach to the paranormal. I couldn’t resist the urge to try and be a part of that world.

Throughout high school and my early college years there were sporadic attempts to integrate ghost hunting into my life. There were two attempts to form a ghost hunting group with some of my friends. Neither attempt went very far. Cases and investigations were few and far between. After the first couple of investigations my first lesson was ghost hunting is actually quite boring. Working to keep yourself under control, not freaking out over every little thing your nights become less being chased by scary ghosts and more like this:

“Dude what was that?”

Friend looks around.

“Car just drove by. Its lights came through the window.”

“Oh, I’ll make a note of it so we know what it is on our cameras. Want some more coffee?”

Not to say there weren’t fun and exciting times. There were experiences that I would say were legitimate paranormal experiences. Unfortunately these experiences are barely supported by pictures, video, and audio. They are even less supported by the other supposed evidences of ghost hunting. As I thought more and more about this conflict between my own experiences and legitimate evidence I learned my second lesson.

I came to realize that in ghost hunting/paranormal investigating there are an unbelievable amount of assumptions made. A lot of ghost hunters can be hesitant about commenting on the exact nature of ghosts but they will have no issue with saying EMF fluctuations, radiation, temperature drops, etc. are evidence of ghosts. But why? When did anyone ever capture a ghost and discover that they affect the environment this way? And even if some did, by what mechanism and why? At the same time I was asking myself these questions I also learned there was a lack of knowledge in how to properly measure and interpret these various pieces of evidence in the community. Even more so there was frighteningly lack of knowledge on how various elements of the environment influenced the readings. Ghost hunting teams were inadequately trained to tackle the subject of their research. I learned and decided I should approach the paranormal more like psychology, trying to understand the paranormal as a living relationship with human beings. I become less concerned with finding hard evidence to prove the existence of ghosts and more with how the dead affected the living.

I still believe in ghosts and all manner of strange things. I just don’t think we are at a point conceptually and technologically to approach the supernatural world the way ghost hunters attempt to. About half way through college due to various factors the ghost hunting group my friends and I tried to form fell apart. Since then I have had little desire to try and form such a group again. The closest I came was shortly after I graduated college I was approached by someone I had gone on a hunt with. He wanted my help in putting together a more rigorous and scientific ghost hunting group. Unfortunately he got laid off from his job shortly after approaching me and had to back out to deal with his employment and financial issues.

Does this mean I’ll never ghost hunt again? I’m not done. If anyone were to ever ask me to go on a ghost hunt I’d be there right away with a camera and an audio recorder. I’m never too far from the supernatural. I still experience it regularly through private spiritual/occult practices. Through ghost hunting I learned to be less concerned with finding hard scientific evidence for such things and more how the subjective experiences affect and influence the living. I realized we didn’t know enough about what were researching and we probably didn’t have the technology to properly investigate it. But that doesn’t mean such things aren’t still affecting people. Some hauntings cause people to live in dread. I learned that what is really important is how the living and the dead relate to each other.