Having been officially investigating hauntings since the early 2000s, I can say that I find patterns in homeowners and their haunting issues. They seem to go in categories. Here's some examples -
legitimate issues
It may have taken a skeptical family some time to locate a ghost investigator, but ultimately they felt they needed to cover all the bases. The hope was an investigator would come in, study the house, listen to their issues, and give prosaic explanations for the problems.
These are really good to work with. They don't have necessarily superstitions from religious teachings that make them hysterical, they never thought they would encounter something unknown. Maybe they have kids and they want to ease their nerves. Maybe something they witnessed could not be explained away.
My usual routine with these homeowners is to see if there is a particular area in the house where activity occurs. In this case, I suggest that something that happened there in the past might have left a residue. The solution is pretty simple. Begin with light, reducing clutter, playing pleasant classical music (something that even plants react to). If it is a location where family arguments happen there, consider giving that dark area a new memory. Sit with a photo album, flip through, think of pleasant times, smile, laugh, and feel appreciation. Repeated good emotions in an area help, as do live plants, light, soft music, an open bible, photos of loved ones.
If they feel particularly nervous and afraid, I suggest my favorite tool - a spiral notebook. Keep it open with a pen in a central area, like the kitchen. Anyone who experiences a happening, writes down time, place, event, and if there were any tensions in the family or strange weather conditions. Over a few weeks, family members go from nervous to in control. They become narc's. They start to even look forward to reporting on the activity.
Here's the key, the very act of putting their intentions upon the haunting, it's as if it knows it's being watched and it quiets down. This is like the double slit experiment that proved that the photons being shot through two slits acted differently when they were being observed.
If a home can become stained from pain, anger, or trauma, it can be healed with a new layer of positivity.
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change in occupants/new home/renovations
I was probably 10 years old and growing up in a haunted Civil War hospital when I first started questioning why sometimes there was activity in the house, sometimes not.
Houses seem like they are cognizant at times. Someone moves in, someone moves out, someone visits, a family moves in, renovations begin - these changes seem to activate something in the quantum realm that either creates poltergeist activity or apparitions.
I did note as a child that my much older siblings moving away to college, relatives coming to stay for a time, someone moving back home again, seemed to cause bursts of ability to see things, hear things, feel things in the house.
The poltergeist activity I witnessed, was always related to anger, fights, repressed anger, and tension between those living in the house.
New families moving into homes and renovations seem to be a major upheavel in the milieu of the house.
Does it create new energies or pathways to deal with? Is this a feng shui issue and the energy "chi" is being dead ended, pooling in certain areas, unable to flow, causing disruption? I am a certified Feng Shui consultant and I can say that clutter, boxes, ill-defined pathways and lack of sunlight can cause some really funky issues in the home. This energy we are dealing with is universal - it involves the atmosphere, the sunlight photons, the electromagnetic measures, the quantum field, and all chemical and electrical contributions from individual's bodies, and their minds.
Homeowners with these issues almost always say it settles down over time and consistency. If the people in the home remain the same, if the construction stops, if it becomes a static and predictable environment, things quiet.
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grief and dead loved ones
This category is very common. Homeowners start reporting incidents and weird feelings, shadows, someone touching them as they sleep, etc., and then beeline an explanation to a recent or even distant death of a family member or friend. They are certain it is them haunting the family.
Depending on one's beliefs and religion, or their dire wishes, it is nearly impossible to explain that loved ones move on to another plane of being, a higher calling.
These families usually find relief in creating a way to put the loved one to rest. This may be planting a tree, making a plaque in the yard, setting up a vignette of photos and memorabilia, visiting a grave regularly. If their belief is strong that the loved one is there, it causes no harm, but it is helpful to sit down the homeowners and discuss a possible official goodbye, letting the loved one know they can move on and all is good here, you've got this.
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paranormal stalkers/goths/horror lovers
During the height of the Ghost Hunters Era, it seemed everyone was not only watching ghost hunting shows, but wanting to be on one. They were forming their own makeshift teams. They were dabbling in EVP work. Maybe they loved dark things and horror and hauntings seemed to tickle their goth bone. Whatever the reasons, these folks call in the ghost hunters to talk ghost hunting and sometimes to exaggerate and get excited talking about ghosts and joining a real investigation. In the early 2000s, it seemed like a lot of folks wanted ghosts in their homes like some people want pets.
These families usually don't want the ghosts gone, they simply want to hang with ghost hunters and possibly find a way to get a video on TikTok or promises of a tv show. To them, ghosts are rockstars.
The way to handle this family has always been to encourage ways to express their love of dark things, i.e. urban exploration, art, Halloween yard haunt designs, etc. Theirs is a romanticism and ghost hunting will only hype them up and let them down, but if they embrace their creative and dark sides with other outlets, they usually find they have talents they never knew.
