by Jason Hawes
STEP 7: CONCLUSIONS
The best way to be sure your evidence is real is to work with your team. You need people with different opinions and different sets of eyes and ears. It’s important not to count anyone out. If one person disagrees with you about the evidence, it could give you a whole new way of thinking. That’s why we discuss all the evidence with the whole team.
For example, in a T.A.P.S. investigation, we don’t conclude that an EVP is real unless the group agrees on what we hear. We listen to the information brought up by the research. We go through all the claims that we debunked. And once everyone has been heard from, we come to our conclusions. Then we decide if we have found enough evidence to say this investigation showed real paranormal activity.
Now that you have the secret tips from the Ghost Hunt team, you are ready for your first test case. Turn the page and get ready to test your ghost hunting skills.
GHOST HUNT TEST CASE
TEST YOUR GHOST HUNTING SKILLS
You are about to see how much you have learned about real ghost hunting. In the test case below, you will do your own investigation. Is there really a ghost in the basement? You will analyze the evidence and come to your own conclusions. Read each question. Decide which of the choices is the right one. Then when you are finished, compare your answers with the answers at the end of this guide. Good Luck!
It’s a late October evening. You and your best friend Tom have just finished watching the season finale of Ghost Hunters on the old TV in your basement, and you are having a discussion about the creepy things you saw on the show. Suddenly, the lights start flickering and then flash off. A second later, you both hear a low, sad moaning.
You and Tom race out of the basement and up the stairs to the kitchen. After catching your breath, you look at each other and know you have the same thought: “We need to investigate this.”
First things first. You gather the digital camera, tape recorder, walkie-talkies, flashlight, and thermometer that you have in the house and set them out on the kitchen table. This will be your central command station.
1. Now that you have everything assembled, what should you do?
a) Record the time and nature of the events
b) Start snapping pictures
c) Turn off all the lights in the house
d) Start asking the ghost questions
Tom decides it’s too scary to go back down to the basement just yet. He wants to stay in the kitchen. So you set your walkie-talkies to the same frequency, and then you head back downstairs.
2. The light switch is not working, so you turn on the flashlight. The next thing you do is…
a) Set up the tape recorder
b) Check to make sure the bulb is not burned out
c) Call Tom down and start a séance
d) Turn off the TV
After changing the light bulb, you take a look around the basement. The light switch now works perfectly, so you know it wasn’t an electrical problem. Still you feel a little strange. There’s something weird in the air. And what about the moaning sound? You think of all the places it could have come from—maybe the water heater or the window. You listen carefully for a similar sound, or a gust of wind, but there’s nothing. So you decide the next thing to do is to try to collect an EVP. You turn the lights back off and set up the tape recorder. Luckily you have an external microphone attachment, so you don’t have to worry about the internal noises of the recorder.
3. You say the date, time, and place into the recorder. What’s the next thing you say?
a) Why did you burn out the light bulb?
b) Ghost, show me another sign by moving the couch.
c) When did you die, and how did it happen?
d) Who are you?
You ask questions for about ten minutes. Although you haven’t heard any responses, you still feel something is present. Finally you say, “Show me a sign.” And right then you hear that moan again. This is pretty freaky, but you keep a cool head. The moan seems to be coming from the far wall. As you walk toward it, you get an unexpected chill in one spot. You think it might be a cold spot, so you use the walkie-talkie to ask Tom to bring the thermometer downstairs. After some convincing, he finally says OK.
When you take the temperature, you do find a drop in the reading in one spot. You measure nearby areas, and the temperature is much warmer. Tom snaps a few pictures to examine later and continues walking toward the wall to investigate the sounds.
The moaning gets even louder. You also notice some other faint noises mixed in with it. Then Tom notices an air conditioning vent. You realize that it goes straight up to the living room, and then you remember there’s a creaky door that leads to that room.
4. You set the recorder right next to the vent. What happens now is up to you. What do you do?
a) Wait to collect EVPs
b) Go up to the living room and experiment with the door to see if you can reproduce the noise
c) Take the temperature of the vent
d) Take a picture of the vent
Following some experimentation, the noise stops, and both you and Tom agree that it’s possible that the moaning was the sound of a creaking door coming through the vent. But you can’t be sure. You think it’s a good idea to take some more audio recordings and pictures of the basement. Tom then investigates the area around the cold spot more carefully. He looks for drafts or anything else that might explain the temperature difference. The temperature has gone back to normal, so Tom can’t find an answer. He definitely thinks the air conditioning vent has nothing to do with this particular phenomenon. It’s October, so the air conditioner definitely isn’t on. And if it were leaking cold air into the room, he would still feel it.
Tom feels as though all you’ve collected so far is a handful of questions. He wants more evidence, and you agree. Quickly you grab your camping compass from your backpack and walk slowly around the basement. You make sure there is nothing metal or magnetic around. First, you move along the walls, then you near the cold spot, and finally you check the middle of the room.
5. What will the compass tell you?
a) The compass will point directly to the ghost
b) The compass will point south instead of north, showing that a ghost is present
c) The compass will spin around, indicating that a spirit may be changing the electromagnetic field
d) The compass will point to the nearest graveyard
Nothing happens to the compass. No matter where you walk, it always points north. A little let down, you hand it over to Tom. He places the compass on a shelf on a wooden cabinet. The compass immediately starts spinning crazily back and forth. He calls you over to look.
“I don’t like this. Look at the needle move!” he says. “What if it’s a mean ghost?”
“Relax,” you say. You move the compass left, then right. As you move it, the needle moves in the opposite direction, toward the spot where it was spinning around. You point out to Tom that there’s an electrical outlet underneath the cabinet.
“It’s only electricity,” you say. “No ghosts in the walls here. This isn’t evidence, the compass is just reacting to the wires. I think we’ve done just about all we can here. What should we do now?”
Tom suggests interviewing your parents. Maybe they’ve experienced something similar that might help the investigation, or they might have an idea about why the light went out. You round everybody up and reconvene at the central command center. You ask questions about the building of the house, and you ask if there was ever any trouble with the wiring. Nothing comes to anyone’s mind. Tom asks about the moaning sound. No one has an answer.
Your dad brushes it off, saying your minds were playing tricks on you. But your mom seems a little less eager to dismiss what happened. She mentions a chest of old clothes that was in the basement when they moved into the house, years ago. The clothes have been down there ever since. For some reason she just never got rid of them.
You think maybe the
spirit could be attached to the clothes—that maybe when the spirit was alive, the clothes belonged to it. You and Tom go back down and check out the chest. It’s pretty close to where the cold spot was. You take a picture of the chest, which is pushed into a closet where your family’s winter coats hang. Tom makes one last attempt to get an EVP.
“Spirit, if those clothes belonged to you, please say something now.”
A few seconds later, Tom turns off the microphone. You both decide that you’ve collected enough evidence and that it’s time to draw the investigation to a close. It’s near midnight, and you need to be getting some sleep to go over the data in the morning.
When you wake up, you decide to first listen to the audio for EVPs. You listen carefully with headphones, but you don’t hear any suspicious noises, just the regular sounds of the basement… until you get to the part where Tom asks his last question. Right after Tom asks about the clothes, there’s a faint sound, sort of like the moan you heard the night before. You turn the volume all the way up and listen again. It sounds like a voice saying “my jacket.” You play the recording for Tom and ask him what he hears.
“It sounds like someone saying… something… ‘jacket,’ right?”
Since you both agree, this seems like pretty strong evidence. Now you look at the pictures. Tom looks at the picture of the chest he took right before he asked the spirit the question.
“Look at that,” he says, pointing to the middle of the picture. “Do you see that?”
To you, it looks like an image of a man sitting on top of the chest. But on closer inspection, you’re not so sure.
6. You look closely to see if the image of the man is actually folds in the coats, or just a trick of shadows. But it’s so hard to tell.Can you be sure of what you’re seeing? Should you…
a) Assume that you’re matrixing and move on
b) Take a control picture in the daylight
c) Shine a light from behind the picture—if it’s a ghost, it will glow
d) Assume that it’s real because the EVP occurred almost at the same time
In each of the images with the closet in the background, the figure of the sitting man looks a little different and twisted from picture to picture. Sometimes his “face” looks sort of lumpy, and his legs don’t really look the same. Because of the way it changes from picture to picture, you can tell that what you thought was a spirit was only folds in the hanging clothes. You were matrixing after all. But Tom points out that in a few pictures there are what appear to be light blue orbs.
7. How can you tell if an orb is real, and not dust or moisture?
1) It has a definite border
2) There was nothing shiny in the background that could reflect light
3) The color is not entirely uniform
4) All of the above
One orb image in particular has all of those qualities. Tom asks if you think maybe it was just a bug. That’s possible. But it’s pretty cold for bugs to be flying around. This could be a real orb. It would make sense. An orb is a ball of energy, and an energy fluctuation might have done something tricky with the lights. The time-code on the picture says it was taken right after you first started questioning the ghost. It was taken right in the middle of where the cold spot was. Putting all this together, you feel as though you have pretty strong evidence.
You’ve looked over all your data and you think you have a few really solid pieces of evidence. You have an EVP, a likely picture of an orb, some personal experiences, and an unexplainable cold spot. These are all strong indicators of the paranormal. Most important, you collected your evidence and reviewed it accurately. You didn’t jump to conclusions, and you thought about it all rationally.
But there’s one piece still missing.
8. What do you do with the chest of clothes?
a) Get rid of it, along with the spirit attached to it
b) Use it as a tool to communicate with the spirit
c) Forget about it and wait to see if any paranormal activity occurs again
d) Experiment with it by moving it to different locations to see if the paranormal activity will follow it
ANSWERS
Question 1: Now that you have everything assembled, what should you do?
Answer: a) Record the time and nature of the events
This will be the official start of your investigation. It will also be important for you to have this data when analyzing the evidence to see if everything adds up.
Question 2: The light switch is not working, so you turn on the flashlight. The next thing you do is…
Answer: d) Turn off the TV
This is sort of a trick question. You definitely need to check to see if the lightbulb is burned out. Just because the lights went out doesn’t mean your basement is haunted. What if there was a power surge in the neighborhood? But, before you do anything, you need to turn off the TV. The light from the TV would likely affect any pictures you take, and it could also affect the EMF.
Question 3: You say the date, time, and place into the recorder. What’s the next thing you say?
Answer: d) Who are you?
Answer b is just silly, as if turning off the lights in the first place was a sign. Answer a and answer c are too long. For the best results, keep it simple.
Question 4: You set the recorder right next to the vent. What happens now is up to you. What do you do?
Answer: b) Go up to the living room and experiment with the door to see if you can reproduce the noise
At this point you need to make sure that the moaning is not just coming from the creaky door. Don’t forget, your first objective is to debunk a haunting.
Question 5: What will the compass tell you?
Answer: c) The compass will spin around, indicating that a spirit may be manipulating the electromagnetic field
Like an EMF detector, a compass reacts to electromagnetic fields—that’s how it always points due north. Although it can’t give a precise reading, if it spins around that means something strange is happening to the electromagnetic field.
Question 6: You look closely to see if the image of the man is actually folds in the coats, or just a trick of shadows. But it’s so hard to tell. Can you be sure of what you’re seeing? Should you…
Answer: b) Take a control picture in the daylight
In this case, it’s easy to see if the picture is real or not. Matrixing a figure out of a cluttered coat closet is likely to happen, so you’ll definitely need to compare it to a picture taken in broad daylight. While it might be tempting to assume it’s real because the EVP occurred so shortly after, you cannot simply accept it as proof until you know for sure.
Question 7: How can you tell if an orb is real, and not dust or moisture?
Answer: d) All of the above
All of those qualities indicate a real orb.
Question 8: What do you do with the chest of clothes?
Answer: Any of those options are acceptable. The spirit seems not to be terribly mischievous, so it may not be necessary to get rid of the clothes. You may want to investigate further to back up the evidence you already collected.
Review: If you got the questions mostly correct, you have the right mindset to be a ghost hunter. You’ve got a calm, skeptical outlook, but you’re also ready to find evidence of the paranormal. If you got a few questions wrong, that’s OK, too. But it might be a good idea to read over the guide a few times before you investigate the famous haunted house in your neighborhood!
GLOSSARY
Anecdotal Evidence: Evidence of an event that comes from people’s stories.
Apparition: A spirit visible to live people.
Black Mass: An apparition in the form of a shadowy black mist.
Cold Spot: A specific area where the temperature is colder than the surrounding areas, or an area where the temperature suddenly drops. Many paranormal researchers believe cold spots are caused by entities drawing energy from the air, literally sucking the heat out of the air in ord
er to appear.
Demonic Haunting: One of the four types of hauntings. A demonic haunting is caused by an inhuman spirit. They can be very nasty. Fortunately, they are rare.
Digital Thermometer: A device used by paranormal investigators to detect cold spots or hot spots.
Ectoplasm: A substance that’s supposed to ooze out of mediums when they are in trances and are in touch with spirits. Almost no one believes it’s real.
EMF Detector (Electromagnetic Field Detector): A device that records the electromagnetic field of an area (the force given off by electrical charges). Paranormal investigators use it as a tool to detect spirits either disrupting or creating electromagnetic energy. One must be careful not to measure the electromagnetic fields of common electrical sources, such as outlets, televisions, or power lines, while investigating possible paranormal activity.