Leave your ghost hunting tools at home!



Admittedly, my ghost hunting kit includes everything from camcorder and digital camera to voice recorder, EMF meter, KII meter, pendulum, dowsing rods, thermometer, and other strange and unusual items. Still, I could put it all away and ghost hunt without tools. In fact, I really enjoy when I do that. I learn more those hours than hours of yanking out tool after tool and chasing things around a site to “capture it.”

Women know this one. When you chase men, you can’t find a good one. The moment you’re in a happy relationship, men start to come to you. Well, ghosts are kinda the same way…
Ghost hunt without tools? How do you get evidence? Any film I take, any EVPs I capture, and photos I take, any video with shadows moving can all be disputed as explainable or hoaxes. So, what is truly the use of trying to gather proof? To prove to whom? If you want to prove to yourself—you go without the equipment. Just you and a flashlight and maybe some mace—just in case humans are afoot. And, always, bring a friend. Don’t go alone.

Everyone should go on a ghost hunt without tools at least once. You need to have the chance to become one with an environment without a task. It’s truly a zen-like experience. We are a task-oriented society. We think that we should be on the cell phone while driving, on the computer while watching TV and watching TV while eating supper. We are so out of touch with our own senses and instincts that should we ghost hunt while juggling lots of tools, we will surely miss everything and be completely unreliable at noticing when things do happen. In fact, the best things I’ve ever come across, I had no camera at hand, no tool in my palm, wasn’t measuring a blasted thing. I was simply sitting there in the dark, long hours in the same place, letting it get used to me.

Our six senses are still our best tools. There is nothing that makes your vision more acute than sitting the dark, nothing that makes your hearing more sharp than when you’re in a quiet resting building, and nothing that makes your skin more sensitive to temperature changes than no air-conditioning or heating or open windows. Your body gives you lots of signals that can make you a wonderful ghost hunting tool.

The most common sensations people report:

Thick heavy air
Off balance
Lightheaded
Nauseous
Goosebumps/chills
Scalp tingling
Headache
Sudden anger/sadness/rage/doom

There are a huge variety of theories and also “old world” ways of explaining why we feel these sensations. Some will tell you the air gets cold because ghosts suck the energy out of the environment and leave behind cold. Hmm… I must have missed that day in science class. There are lots of explanations for the air feeling “thick or heavy” and feeling off balance and lightheaded and headachy, but my first instinct is a change in barometric pressure. Some will say it’s EMF changes, but honestly we live in a world chock full of high EMF levels from our computer screen to our big-screen TV to our alarm clock and we’re not freaking out around that. We have a very high threshold. Goosebumps and chills thrill me the most when they happen out of the blue. If you hear something and then get them, it could be an instinctive reaction to hearing something unseen, but if you get a piloerection (goosebumps) with no instigation, something truly has gotten near. The sudden onset of emotion that makes no sense in the situation, such as walking through a room and stop in the corner and feel overwhelming depression and hopelessness can be accredited to your sixth sense. Yes, we all absolutely have that sense, it's only at times like this that you take note of it.

People ask me often times, how do I find the ghosts? Well, I’ll give you a little tip. Have you ever walked through your house and forgotten why you went into a room—what you were supposed to get? You stand there and have a sense of reflecting back to where you were, what you were thinking, and what this room was supposed to hold within it. If you walk through a supposedly haunted location and you suddenly stop and feel sort of lost as if you didn’t know what you were about to do—you just found the hot spot. You'll know because your mind will start sifting as if you're trying to lock onto a thought-that's a psychic moment.

If you don’t have access to a haunted place but want to get in touch with those senses, turn out the lights, turn off the devices, and be alone in your home for a good 3 hours at least. It’s a hard task, you learn a lot about yourself, but you also learn to pick up clues from the environment. This is really critical for ghost hunting. You have to be okay with being alone, being bored, sitting there, waiting, listening, with nothing to do. If you still want to ghost hunt and you’re okay with your body and your thoughts without distraction, you’ll be an excellent ghost hunter. And, after sitting there so long, you'll be a good debunker, as well. You will definitely see faint things and hear lots of sounds.

Comments

  1. I was very glad to be able to see you put this theory to work while at the Pioneer Cemetery. I really feel that humans are the best berometers because we know when something isn't right with our bodies. Sitting in pitch black and silence, our senses pick up all kinds of things. Many times we see the personal experiences of the ghost hunters are far more active than any of the the evidence they collect to back it up.

    I'm still stoaked about finding Emma's grave the way I did along with my teammate. Our spiritual energy was strong that night.

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  2. It's so true. No matter how much proof you gather there will still people who won't believe, so if your evidence is only for yourself why not leave it all behind. Some of my strongest evidence of hauntings comes from within me. I do like the pictures, but everything else is really just icing!

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  3. It's great to see others who understand what I'm talking about. The moments that make us want to ghost hunt more, seek answers, and go to more historic spots in the night are those things that happened when we weren't expecting it, weren't holding out our recorders and instruments of trade, but were completely unsuspecting and then--wham!

    Julie; That feeling I described where you walk around and stop and you don't know why you stopped--that was the feeling that had you stop at Emma's grave. Crazy, huh?

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  4. Great post. Whether it's ghosts or other heavy weirdness, there's just something...primal about going in "naked" (so to speak) as opposed to gearing up like James Bond.
    I believe there's an intelligence (and a damned tricky one at that) behind so many phenomena. If you go in like gangbusters with all your toys, sometimes "it" refuses to cooperate. If it knows you're not going to "catch" anything, it's sometimes more apt to come out and play.
    I can't tell you how many times that strange cat, big bird, or light in the sky has disappeared in the brief time it took to run inside & grab the camera!

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  5. Burt;
    You're totally right. Every time I've experienced phenomenon, I was completely relaxed, not expecting it, just turned my head and -- wham! When we were on our ghost hunt last Saturday, we did a controlled EVP session for a half hour. No movement, no sounds, just people calling out questions and begging the dang spirits to tap on the wall. The whole time, I sensed something hiding upstairs. It wasn't about to come out. Had I gone up there alone, I feel like I would have encountered it. Only problem was the guardians of the place wouldn't let us upstairs. If I could have gone, I would have gone without any equipment--just me--all vulnerable. Works every time--like human bait.

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  6. This was another great one Autumnforest!!
    I think you are right on track with how out of touch we are with our senses.
    I wonder if we use about five percent of our natural senses compared to people even one or two hundred years ago-much less way back in antiquity.
    The comments were great as always too--Jessica's comment was really on target as far as certain skeptics go-on any given paranormal topic- no proof will ever be enough-none-so us people that believe in these things (although we may not know all of the whys or hows) should just stop worrying about it!!
    sorry I am so behind on yours (and every other blog my friends have -been feeling real exhausted lately-but I go thru this now and then and dont think it will last) thanks also for your support with my attempts at writing-best to you and yours as always!!

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  7. Hey Dev;
    You take care of yourself. Don't expect you to run reading marathons. I can't wait to read what you come up with next.

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