How To Hunt Ghosts (Without Fooling Yourself)
Advice from a professional ghost hunter who’s written multiple books on the subject.
One of my toddler’s favorite books is We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, the rhythmically poetic classic in which a family and their children venture through fields, a river, and a snowstorm before encountering the titular bear in a dark cave who, of course, chases them all the way home. After a couple of reads, you cannot get the words out of your head. It’s a literary ear worm:
We’re going on a bear hunt! We’re gonna catch a big one!
The words play in my head over and over as I prepare for my first ghost hunt. Because there is no way I can be a “serious” ghost journalist if I do not attempt to have my own encounter with one, of course. And although I have not been visited by one, I never tried to find a ghost, either. Therefore:
I’m going on a ghost hunt! Will I catch a big one?
To give it a go, as the Brits say, I thought I only had to complete two steps:
Choose a local haunted place as the site of my hunt.
Buy ghost hunting equipment and go to that place.
It turns out that Googling “how to go ghost hunting” turns up hundreds — maybe thousands — of advice articles from a range of sources, some more credible than others. There are countless websites with “haunted” in their name, and more likely than not designed with the standard horror color palette of red, purple, or green text on a black background. Then there are more legitimate sources, such as this New York Times Wirecutter piece on ghost hunting equipment, as well as advice from The Washington Post on how to pack your ghost hunting bag like a real paranormal investigator. Nothing, however, fit what I actually needed, which was a definitive answer on the best way to find a ghost.
As a journalist and a former U.S. public school “gifted” kid with unchecked ambition, I have a deep, personality-driven desire to do this the right way, as much as I wanted to just grab a flashlight and run to the nearest medieval ruins to investigate.
So I called up Benjamin Radford, a known paranormal investigator who serves as a deputy editor for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a researcher at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, N.Y. He answered the call from a hotel meeting room in nearby Buffalo, in the midst of the Center’s fiftieth anniversary celebration and conference. (The keynote speaker was none other than science hero to millennials everywhere, Bill Nye.)
“It’s about the mentality,” Radford says. “It’s about understanding critical thinking and understanding what counts as evidence, and what doesn’t.”
Radford’s taken a special interest in hunting for ghosts, so much so that he’s written two books on how to do it. His method is a self-described blend of solid investigation technique, forensics, folklore, journalism, and what us journalists call “shoe leather reporting,” which means actually being there in person as a witness. “It’s the most popular paranormal vocation around the world,” he says. “But it wasn’t until the last few decades where ghosts were thought to be something the layperson could investigate.”
Radford’s stance is that anyone can look for ghosts, but they need to do it the right way.
His approach:
Find out what the historical record says about the haunting.
Talk to firsthand or other sources close to the haunting.
Make a list of what you will be looking for.
Hunt the ghost using those testable parts.
Repeat steps one through four in as many haunted locations as you can.
Let’s take it step-by-step.
Find out what the historical record says about the haunting.
“Collect as many sources as you can on the story,” Radford says. This includes online research as well as what local historical societies or historians have to say on the haunting. Radford goes old school, sitting at his kitchen table with photocopies of every record he can find and uses a highlighter to parse the similarities and differences between them. He notices if the stories mention the event happens on different dates, or if names match up. The idea is to determine which parts of the story are falsifiable, meaning being able to show whether they are wrong. Those bits will be tested and tracked on your ghost hunt.
Talk to firsthand or other sources close to the haunting.
Historical societies and local historians are both excellent sources for records when attempting to confirm an event or reported haunting.
Or sometimes, if the event has happened in a restaurant or other publicly-accessible place, you can go and speak to people there about the event.
A word of caution, though. “This is actually a trap that many ghost hunters fall into, and I’ve seen this over and over again,” Bradford says. “They’ll get parts of the story, and then they’ll talk to some local historical society who will say ‘Oh, yeah, there was a woman named Marie who lived here.’ Well, of course there was. The building is 200 years old in England. At some point there was [a woman named Marie]. So, that’s not the question you’re wanting to ask.”
It is not uncommon at this point for holes to appear in the story. Local historians can tell you whether they have heard about the haunting, and oftentimes can debunk it, Radford says. But if you have made it this far without the story falling apart, you go to the next step.
Make a list of what you will be looking for.
One word for this: evidence.
Evidence could be photographs or what the ghost hunting community calls EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena. These kinds of ephemera should not be taken at face value as being true, according to Radford. More often than not, they are the product of ghost hunters wanting their efforts to have created something showing that something paranormal has indeed taken place.
Instead, a ghost hunter should replicate what parts of the story can be proven wrong. Radford offers this hypothetical: “On moonless nights in November on the anniversary of some tragic event, you can see the ghost come by? Okay, well, be there that night.”
One famous example: psychologist richard wiseman’s research on Catherine Howard’s alleged haunting of Hampton Court Palace. Wiseman and his team gathered data on multiple historically reported experiences, including sightings of a woman in white, hearing screams, and feeling a drop in temperature.
Those experiences with multiple substantiations are what you need to determine through research prior to your ghost hunt. They will create the list of what you will look for on your hunt.
Hunt the ghost using those testable parts.
So you found your haunted location, and you determined which parts of the ghost story you can test. Now what?
If you are anything like me, you think you need as much gear as Bill Murray in Ghostbusters. Gizmos, gadgets, and supercomputers a-go-go. It is the 21st century, after all.
Interestingly, Radford strongly advises against buying anything marketed as ghost hunting equipment. “Avoid the beep gadgets,” he says. “There’s no validation to any of that. You’re just wasting your time and your money.”
The stuff Radford recommends bringing are everyday objects you most likely already have. A tape measure. A Leatherman tool kit. Some string. “I sometimes bring flour,” he adds. “If I’ve set up a camera and I want to know whether someone has tampered with it, I can sprinkle some flour on the ground, and there’ll be footprints. It’s old-school Scooby Doo, but it works.”
Your smart phone is another useful tool. “It’s got a camera, it’s got an [audio] recorder,” Radford says. If ghost voices are on your list of things to look for, the mic on a smart phone is more than good enough to pick up those sounds.
What ghost hunters want to avoid is paying attention to anomalies, says Radford, meaning attaching significance to observations not on your list. “You don’t want to waste your time recording hours and hours of video and audio, and then after eight hours you hear a [random] sound, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know what that was.’ Neither do you.”
Repeat steps one through four in as many haunted locations as you can.
Scientific practice requires repeating experiments to gather data to either prove or disprove your hypothesis. We saw this in the steps above. It also applies, Radford says, to visiting multiple haunted locations to record as many observations as possible. Research practice recommends larger sample sizes so as to make the resulting data as accurate as possible. “Don’t go to one place. Don’t go to two places. I would go to at least a half dozen,” Radford says.
Overall, ghost hunters need to go into every investigation with an open mind. “It’s about the mentality,” Radford says. “It’s about understanding critical thinking and understanding what counts as evidence, and what doesn’t.”
Despite establishing a thorough science and research-backed method for hunting ghosts, Radford emphasizes the fact remains that ghosts have never been scientifically established. “We don’t know that they exist, period. Much less their characteristics,” says Radford. “If you don’t know the characteristics of what you’re looking for, by definition, you can’t know when you found it.”
After speaking with Radford, I think I know what to look for. Stay tuned to see whether I find it.
Future reporting diaries will document my search for haunted locations to visit, and take you on my ghost hunts. So much more to come here.
