More Trade Secrets: The Essential Ghost Hunters's Toolbox

By Calvin Waters

The advice on how to use real Ghost Hunting equipment can only be be answered by real researchers with years of experience in the ghost hunting field. Many would be Ghost Hunters only shop Paranormal Detection Equipment, Electronic Ghost Hunting Detectors because they think it is cool and want to try their hand at it. Usually without any prior training or other interest then doing what they think is cool.

Paranormal investigators make use of over a dozen different tools and electronic devices to help track down and locate possible evidence of paranormal. But are they in your ghost Hunters toolbox?

I can remember the day when individuals went into a very haunted house armed only with a Camera: 35mm camera with black and white film and/or infrared film. It took no more then that to make many into true believers. Today it is all about full documentation with no errors, and sworn testimony to the level that it makes us all look suspect. that is if we don't have or do what they do on TV.

A Ghost Hunter from JACKSON, MS. she wrote me telling me in her long email that she had been ghost hunting professionally for over 5 years. And that she was an upstanding Member of the TAPS Family.

Her request was for me to explain how to use the EMF detector she owned for 4.5 years and never quite got the hang of. In truth I discovered she actually used it because the clients who she investigated for expected it. But she had no clue to what the readings actually meant.

My advice is: Determine which ghost hunting methods you'll feel most comfortable working with: sensory or scientific. Sensory includes the use of dowsing rods, wind chimes and even psychics, sensitive's or mediums.

Scientific employs gadgets such as video cameras, thermal imaging scopes and electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors. Some ghost hunters use a combination of both.

Read complete article at http://www.hauntedamericatours.com/ghosthunting/Ghosttool.php

Experts gather to investigate ghosts in Edinburgh

Experts from across the globe are taking part in a series of spooky investigations in Edinburgh to find out if ghosts really do exist.

The first international study into paranormal experiences was launched in the vaults of the capital's Nicol Edwards pub, with experts keen to hear the nation's spookiest tales.

Professor Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire is involved in a project into the psychology of the paranormal. Asked if he believes in ghosts, he replied: "I am a bit of a sceptic. I think there has to be a scientific explanation for most things."

He added: "Over the years we have carried out a number of investigations in vaults around Edinburgh with tales of people feeling a presence, hearing footprints, seeing shadows."

In 2001 Mr Wiseman was involved in a ten-day study of the Edinburgh Castle vaults, which involved some 240 members of the public. The team used scientific equipment to measure phenomena including temperature, magnetic fields and light levels.

Tests took place in vaults which had a reputation for being haunted and others that did not. Although those involved were unaware which was which, they reported strange results from the chambers that were reputedly haunted.

REad complete story and watch the video at http://news.stv.tv/scotland/81384-experts-gather-to-investigate-ghosts-in-edinburgh/

Ghost hunters out for answers

Group explores paranormal and hopes to save Fort Wayne building
By Kevin Leininger
of The News-Sentinel

As a boy growing up in Arkansas, Rob Stone thought the old woman he saw at his grandparents' farmhouse was just an “imaginary friend” - until a photograph of his dead great-grandmother revealed a strikingly similar appearance between the two.

As a teenager in Fort Wayne, Paul Walter had a similarly weird experience: the vision of a woman wearing rimless glasses and a dress, who he at first thought was his grandmother - who was in another room at the time. Both got goose bumps when the dress Walters described turned out to resemble his great-grandmother's burial gown.

Youthful fantasies? Memories twisted by time? Bad dreams? Stone and Walter can't say for sure, which is why they and several other local “ghost hunters” have formed an organization designed to disprove or verify the existence of things that go bump in the night.

In the process, they hope to help save one of Fort Wayne's unique but endangered architectural treasures that may - or may not - have ghost stories of its own to tell.

“All of us are active in our community; one guy is an engineer, some of us are in manufacturing or own (a) business. We want people who want to get to the bottom of these experiences,” said Stone, 41. As spokesman for In Nomine Paranormal Research, he doesn't want his 7-month-old organization's serious, methodical search for answers to be hijacked by thrill-seekers whose knowledge of paranormal research is limited to movies like “Ghostbusters.”

“It's neat to try to document the unexplainable. It's a debunking process,” said Walter, 28, explaining that group members use technology to search for answers that often defy human senses and reason.

The group, which was created when like-minded people discovered each other on the Internet, uses devices to detect abnormal electro-magnetic levels and also uses audio and visual equipment in an attempt to record … well, something.


Stone, who administers the information technologies network at Lincoln Foodservice in Fort Wayne, said the quest has taken the 10-member group to an old house in Sturgis, Mich., an old hotel in Sandusky, Ohio, and, more recently, to Fort Wayne's Masonic Temple, which has been the scene of several unexplained events and will host the group's first paranormal conference in May.

The conference will feature sessions on demonology, exorcism and ghost-hunting; presentations of personal paranormal experiences; a four-hour ghost hunt in the Temple; and other lectures. Proceeds will go to the Temple's preservation fund.

As Masons, Stone and Walter are very familiar with the eight-story temple that has stood at 216 E. Washington Blvd. since 1923 but has fallen on hard times in recent years because of soaring maintenance and utility costs and declining membership.

They have also become familiar with several oddities they cannot yet explain, including shadowy forms moving through doorways and elevated electro-magnetic levels, especially near a fifth-floor conference room and trophy case.

As with the group's other investigations, the existence of paranormal activity has not been conclusively documented at the Temple. But Stone said many “rational” explanations for the odd energy readings have been refuted, such as the presence of electrical wires and circuit boxes - a potentially disappointing but necessary step toward proving the existence of paranormal activity.

Stone said his group's ghost-hunting, counseling and related services are free to anyone who has experienced the inexplicable and is seeking answers.

The group also plans to explore local ghostly legends such as the story of the so-called “Waynedale Witch,” a 27-year-old woman murdered in 1965, doing whatever is possible to separate fact from fancy.

What drives the 10 members of In Nomine (Latin for “In the name of”)?

“For me, it's mostly scientific,” Stone said. “But it's also religious. Most of our members are Christian, but we also have one pagan. They taught us in Sunday school that you die and go to heaven. Why are (spirits) still here?

“We feel like we're meeting a need. Not everybody takes this as seriously as we do.”

As Stone, Walter and I spoke in the Temple's partially darkened, cavernous social room, a series of loud clanks came out of nowhere.

Ghosts?

“The furnace,” Stone said.

Sourced from http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090205/NEWS/902050316/0/FRONTPAGE