Leave Your Ghost Hunting Equipment 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 I've come up with along the way, even a windchime! Still, I really enjoying just putting it all away and ghost hunting without tools. I learn more those hours than hours of yanking out tool after tool and chasing things around a site to “capture it," and then missing it as I'm busy being completely distracted. Try driving a car and talking on a cell phone while changing the radio station and see if you do any of those three things well... You can so easily miss critical and subtle changes around you.

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? Consider this: 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 in 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.

Ultimately, we have no way to prove spikes in EMF means ghosts are near, nor do we have photographic or audio proof that stands up to skeptic's scrutiny, so ultimately what gets you excited about hunting isn't capturing phenomena, it's experiencing it. Every time you have such an encounter you want to rush back out like a little kid cause during the in between time you will talk yourself out of it or talk it down. Then, you go back out again and and go "holy shit!" and you're excited all over again.

Some people spend their entire vacation photographing and posing the family and miss the entire experience. The same goes for ghost hunting. Enjoy. Do at least one night without the batteries, bags, lights, and nightvision. I promise you will get a LOT more out of the experience.

(I'm going to start telling you when and what comes on next on the blog... at 3 pm (EST) today, there will be a post up about "Pre-Hunt Rituals")

Comments

  1. so I'm sitting here
    reading your post,
    eating my breakfast toast, as the TV news is on, thinking...
    does this woman EVER sleep?

    I could NEVER sit for 3 hours with out anything to do...
    no internet?
    No book?
    Not even painting?
    No nothin'....I'd go crazy thinking of all the things that I needed to be doing...
    Sadly, I think the ghosts are going to have come looking for me.

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  2. The ghost I had in my house would always come out when I had the vacuum on for some reason. Other than that, I would only see it when I wasn't looking for it.

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  3. Cindi;
    Yeah, it's a challenge. You fight your mind wandering the most because you start making out grocery lists and thinking about what you have to do tomorrow. Anyone who knows me, knows that me sitting still is a big joke. I'm as spastic as you get. I also humor myself easily. I will burst into laughter for what appears to be no reason, but I'm actually recalling something funny or imaging something funny happening. I am a one-woman show that way. You do a life review a lot during that time, kind of checking up on your own status in your life. Sure, you can't shut the mind up, but it's amazing how after a time, you desperately listen for any trace of a sound or light just so there is a sign of life. That's when you're in the zone.

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  4. It only came out when you had the vacuum on? That must have really sucked... hee hee You are onto something that is interesting. Like the old watched pot that won't boil, it seems that when you are most relaxed and distracted, it'll show itself. I found most times that if I was just sitting quietly and not moving around a lot or if I went into a room all of a sudden, those two instances I had my best chance of running into something. It's as if spirits share the house with us and can be taken by surprise, as well...

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  5. Perhaps we should give this a try on our next adventure at the San Carlos hotel. I would like see if I can pick up anything from the various known haunted areas of the place. Also, I take lots of photos when on vacation, but I do take time to enjoy the scenery or place I am at before moving on. I agree with you about enjoying the experience, I always do.

    Looking forward to ghost hunting!

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  6. Julie;
    Seriously, on the basement tour where the indian well is, I'd love to dowse and have a little time to just sit and be there, but I know they'll push us onward because it's an unsafe location--when it was a school long ago, a few boys drown in it. It also is the cavernous place where they have the washer/dryer rooms for the hotel so it's noisy as they do sheets and such. Hotel rooms aren't bad for visual, suck for sound--you will hear all kinds of stuff from other rooms, especially if the other hunters have rooms near us. Oh yeah, they let me choose what floor we wanted to be on and I picked the floor where the rooftop pool is. It seems to be an active floor and, hey, it's near the pool and you know I want a moonlight swim around the highrises at night...(oh and my customary champagne before the hunt)

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  7. As someone that takes an excessive amount of photos, I can attest that sometimes you just have to put the equipment away and accept that you won't be getting a shot of that Greatest Moment Ever. Instead you will just have to experience it.

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  8. Pangs;
    Yeah, you know, I've lost a ton of family members and friends (over 2 dozen) and one thing I've learned about life is you can't find them in a photo or an object. That's funny to say because people tell me that with psychometric abilities, I should want to keep every object owned by my loved ones. I don't. I like one object that I think of them when I see it and has strong sentimental associations. Like my dad. He had a letter opener given to him by his workers and it had Viking ships and Vikings etched into it. He loved the thing. It held importance on his desk as he was from Norway and a gift that says "I get it, you're proud to be of Viking heritage and you are leader of men" was really special to him. So, I kept dad's letter opener. He can't be found in any other object he possessed. The photos are the same. I look at the photos and go "Oh yes, that's when we built the treefort" but the real memories are building the treefort and using it to spy on folks, not the posing for the picture. So, although I can remember what my brother looked like at the time we built the treefort, the photo offers me none of the memories. Those are my own. So, as long as I have my mind still working--they are alive; not in photos or objects. So, one representative photo is great. Anymore and you're wasting the memories that carry the real value... Jeez, Pangs, I sure wish I could meet you. There's something about you that is very familiar, as if I know you from the past. I don't get that sense very often. We must have some common point somewhere back in our histories...

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  9. I think most investigators are far too dependent on equipment. All hail the vigil.

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  10. Merricat;
    You're right. We think we can tackle everything nowadays with technology. We forget the human interface--which is really the critical part.

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