Our group is comprised of mostly family and friends. For that reason, safety is always our primary concern. No investigation is worth risking injury or death, and this applies to both strangers and our own group.

I just read an article about a group of hunters and enthusiasts waiting on a railroad bridge for the return of a spectral locomotive. Well, the tragedy occurred when an all too real one came down the rolling down the tracks.

Please remember to use good judgment. Nothing is worth the risk of becoming a ghost yourself.

Kudos to these researchers for doing the hard work.

Sometimes a ghost story can be used to start an investigation that leads to a injustice being corrected. Hopefully, this will cause the record to be set right for these people and their families.

We spend countless hours doing research, digging through microfiche, squinting at census records and bouncing ideas off each other. Often, we uncover information that completely unravels the urban legend or debunks a ghost story, but it usually opens up doors to a more interesting story. Like they say “Truth is stranger than fiction”.

Grandfather’s ghost story leads to mass grave.

I love a ghost story. Any ghost story. My book shelf is loaded with books on Florida ghosts, Irish Ghosts, New England ghosts, lighthouse ghosts, battlefield ghosts; basically, I have a lot of books with ghost stories in them.

Likewise, I find myself often watching T.V. shows about ghosts. I enjoy the stories for what they are – entertainment. The problem comes when you start looking into the actual facts of these stories. Often, the tales are impossible to research because they fail to give important details such as names and dates.  Do stories that are unsubstantiated have less value than those with verifiable facts? I suppose it depends on your outlook.  If all you’re looking for is entertainment, then no.  But if you’re looking for something more, something deeper, you have to be able to weed out the urban legends and get down to the bones of a story.  That is where historical research comes in.

I know we don’t update the website very often, but that isn’t because we’re not active.  While you won’t find us posting endless hours of EVPs or countless orb photographs, that doesn’t mean we’re not hard at work.  We’re usually plodding away in search of a stray fact, some dusty truth hidden below the fantastic tales told by so many websites and books.  Here is where we conduct most of our paranormal investigations:

Yep- we do most of our investigating at the local library.  You’d be amazed what you can find in there! The items in that image are the tools of the trade that often get overlooked when you drop by a ghost hunting website and check out their recommended equipment. A pen, some paper, old newspapers on film and a microfiche reader. They pair nicely with HeritageQuest, NewsBank and Ancestry.com. In fact, it doesn’t need to get much more high-tech than that to debunk most ghost stories we come across.  Fact checking the tales is tireless, often unrewarding work.  Often, we discover some tidbit of information in an old newspaper article or locate a headstone that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the tale we’ve been investigating is, well, complete make believe.  It can be quite a let-down, and being the voice of reason when everyone else wants to hear a good story can be daunting at times.  It’s a bit like being a detective, a genealogist, a historian and a lawyer arguing an unpopular case all rolled into one.

Despite all that, there is sometimes a reward; a pot of gold at the end of the research rainbow.  A good example of this can be found in the Boston House.  We’ve been researching the claims attached to the building for years.  Many of them have proven to be nothing more than a really great story to tell around a campfire.  Yet as we debunked those tales, a different picture emerged.  The Boston House has been dubbed haunted for many, many years- something well documented in the local papers.  Those reported paranormal encounters pre-date the currently popular explanation for the hauntings.  Even more interesting is the fact that the home played host to a number of tragedies, any of which could have resulted in paranormal activity.  Finally, as if it were icing on the cake, many credible witnesses have come forward over the years to share their experiences.  These experiences create the perfect situation for furthering the investigation; specific claims that can be investigated on site.

I often wonder how other groups work through their cases.  I find it hard to believe we’re alone in the stacks, the odd group out as we sift through the sensational stories to find the gems that call for further investigation.   I can only hope there are, and that groups with this methodology prevail in finding out the truth behind all the ghost stories we love to tell.

“…if you don’t believe in reincarnation, then the odds are that you have at least felt a ghostly presence behind you in an “empty” house. Or that you have heard loved ones speak to you after they passed away. Or that you have a lucky shirt. Or that you can tell when a certain person is about to text you, or when someone unseen is looking at you. For if you have never had a paranormal experience such as these, and believe in none of the things that science says do not exist except as tricks played on the gullible or—as neuroscientists are now beginning to see—by the normal workings of the mind carried to an extreme, well, then you are in a lonely minority. According to periodic surveys by Gallup and other pollsters, fully 90 percent of Americans say they have experienced such things or believe they exist.

This excerpt is taken from Newsweek (Monday, November 3, 2008).  Are you surprised to find that 90 percent of Americans claimed to have had a paranormal experience or to hold to the belief that the paranormal exists? I wasn’t, but researchers sure are.  They continue to study the phenomenon, flabbergasted by the idea that in today’s modern, science-based world people continue to cling to these archaic beliefs.

In 2006, researchers Neil Dagnall, Andrew Parkera and Gary Munley published an article titled, “Paranormal belief and reasoning” in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences.  The article addresses the psychology of the paranormal, and the abstract’s first sentence shows exactly where the document is headed:

“This paper examined whether belief in the paranormal is linked to a general weakness in probabilistic reasoning, or whether belief in the paranormal is directly linked to the perception of randomness (misrepresentation of chance).”

Probabilistic reasoning, also known as probabilistic logic, refers to problem-solving techniques that center on “the use of probability theory for weighing evidence and inferring conclusions.”1

Interestingly, the results of the study weren’t what one might expect.  Instead of proving that those who believe in the paranormal have a weakness of probabilistic reasoning, they found that weakness was a deficit in perception of randomness. From the article:

“These results suggest that paranormal belief is not associated with a general weakness in probabilistic reasoning but arises from a specific deficit associated with perception of randomness (misrepresentation of chance).”

In the article,”Putting Randomness in its Place,” author Gennady Stolyarov II addresses this topic further.

” A widespread misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “randomness” often results in false generalizations made regarding reality. In particular, the view of randomness as metaphysical, rather than epistemological, is responsible for numerous commonplace fallacies.

To see randomness as metaphysical is to see it as an inherent aspect of reality as such?as embedded inextricably in “the way things are.” Typically, people holding this view will take it in one of two directions. Some of them will see randomness pejoratively?thinking that there is no way reality could be like that: chaotic, undefined, unpredictable. Such individuals will typically posit that, because reality cannot be random, it must therefore be centrally planned by a super-intelligent entity, such as a deity.

Others, however, will use the metaphysical perception of randomness to deny evident and ubiquitously observable truths about our world: the facts that all entities obey certain natural laws, that these laws are accessible to human beings, and that they can inform our decision-making and actions.”

This view isn’t unique; in fact, if you search Google Scholar for ‘paranormal weak mind,’ you’ll turn up roughly 5,000 results. So the question becomes simple- in the face of all this scientific proof to the contrary, how and why is it possible that these paranormal beliefs continue to thrive