Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (32 page)

Another challenge we have to get over is consensus in the field. It’s just not there right now. There are too many groups that are simply looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. It’s a distraction and takes away from the credibility of the field. The procedures don’t always translate to every paranormal group either. Antagonizing spirits works for some, like Zak, but not others. We’re a long way away from paranormal unity. I agree with what Zak said earlier—if we had a database where people came together to compare their findings instead of staying secluded, we might be able to get over the credibility issue. Too many groups want to hold on to their evidence instead of sharing it. When you deal with people, you deal with their jealousy, and unfortunately that is, in part, what is holding this field back.

Debby Constantino
—I would like to focus more of our time on helping find lost children. As well as grief management. There are so many kids who go missing and end up being found only when their body is identified by the police. I believe EVP is a powerful tool that can be used before something happens to them, not after.

I think when communication improves on our side, it will probably improve on the spirits’ side as well. We were doing an EVP session once when Mark said, “You guys need to come through more clearly. We can’t make out what you’re saying.” We then recorded an EVP that said “Reverse the polarity. Mark can’t hear you.” We always talk about ways to improve communication with the spirits, but I’m so curious to know what they’re doing on their side to improve communication with us. Because I have no doubt, they are.

In the future I would like to see a day when EVP’s are used to validate mediums/psychics. Unfortunately this is a field where anyone can label them self a psychic, and receive money for it. There are plenty of amazing psychics out there, who deserve compensation. There is no way to hone in on your path unless you do it on a full time basis. I see no problem with true mediums being compensated. There are others that are a disgrace to the field. I also look forward to a day when technology will hopefully make it possible for us to actually see the spirits we are communicating with. I hope this happens in our lifetime, as this will change everything.

Bishop James Long
Archbishop for the U.S. Old Catholic Church.

For ten years Bishop Long has been performing exorcisms and can tell you exactly how many he’s done. “Twenty-four solemn rites of exorcism.” And in all twenty-four cases he’s “delivered” the entity from the host, which is the church’s way of saying, “we banished that evil bitch.” James has performed hundreds of lesser rituals of exorcism so it’s his specialty and something he takes seriously after so much training and experience with demons. And that’s exactly what scares him.

“Demonology has nothing to do with the paranormal,” he says. “It’s purely theological, and in fact exorcists and demonologists are not the same thing. I am concerned more and more that the information age will convince people they can do the things that have taken me nearly a decade to perfect. I am afraid people will claim to be demonologists because they read a book on it or see a rite being performed on YouTube. Then they’ll try to perform their own exorcisms and get injured or even worse.

“People who are not trained in demonology and attempt to perform rituals that they have no business performing are playing with fire. If that trend continues, people are going to get hurt. When performing the solemn rite of exorcism, there’s a real potential of the possessed person expiring. That right is reserved for an ordained clergyman and can be deadly if done wrong. People who have performed an exorcism incorrectly have been charged with manslaughter in the past, so in the future I hope this trend of amateurs performing exorcism stops.”

John Zaffis
Leading Paranormal Researcher and Author and Host of
Haunted Collector.

I think we’re living the future now. The U.S. is looking at things differently than the rest of the world so we’re blazing a trail for everyone else. Other countries are afraid to talk about the paranormal, but our TV shows open it up more and start the dialogue. But talk is just the start. I also want us to lead the way and prove what we talk about.

When you refer to our scientific base, we have EVPs, photos, videos, and all these other pieces of evidence, but what are we doing with it? Nothing. It’s just sitting there. I want to see us do something with all of our evidence. We need correlation and cooperation. I wish paranormal investigators would intermingle and get along and share info more. I think they’re too compartmentalized now.

It’s a spiritual realm that we deal with, which makes it the hardest thing to prove. Scientists say we are not a real field of study because we can’t get repeatability and our findings are not continuous. We need that if we ever want to be recognized as a real science. I want to see a day when we prove that these experiments are real so people look at it, and us, differently.

I agree that we need a dedicated research center, but it has to be removed from the paranormal community. It has to be staffed with people who are unbiased. Right now there is too much bickering internally. The paranormal community, in my estimation, is in chaos. It’s a difficult field because everyone has their own ways and aren’t too keen on sharing anything. If we had a college or a university who embraced our field then we could make progress. We need a structured environment where the PIs are not structured and the learning can take place. I hope to see that in the future.

My expertise is haunted items and attachment theory. I’ve spent thirty-seven years trying to determine how an ordinary item can hold on to spiritual energy. People and buildings can be possessed, so why not items like a typewriter or a vase? Everything is composed of energy—minerals, wood, metal, everything— so why can’t paranormal energy be attached to everyday items?

The circumstances with haunted items are different than with people. You always have to ask “how did a spirit get associated with the item?” So many different theories apply. Spirits seem to find comfort in one item just as they did in life. Maybe a favorite item is the only thing that anchors them to the old world. It might have been a favorite chair that was not bequeathed to the right person and the spirit is upset about that. It might be a piece of jewelry that it coveted in life and still holds on to it. It’s been proven that jewels and precious metals can store energy, so it’s very common that jewelry is haunted.

The future of paranormal communication is exciting to think about. For hundreds of years, our communication technologies did not progress much. In the future, cell phones and iPods might be able to hold energy of the deceased. That makes communication devices an exciting prospect for communication with the dead. I’ve heard of cases of computers suddenly typing unexplained personal messages and cell phones coming to life when they shouldn’t. Communications devices could be huge game changers for the paranormal in the future. Gary Galka is passionate about making new equipment to communicate with the departed sprits and is such a talented man. I’m excited that he or other talented individuals will achieve reliable communications and find the repeatability that our science community looks for.

Dave Schrader Host of
Darkness Radio
and Coauthor of
The Other Side: A Teen’s Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal.

Some people criticize the current glut of paranormal TV shows and say that they’re hurting the field as a whole. I disagree, but I also think there needs to be some change in the future. TV shows are good because they bring their subjects out into the open and make people talk about the paranormal openly instead of in a hush. Everyone has a story, and if they see others talking about it, then they will too instead of keeping to themselves and wondering if they’re crazy.

Scientists watch the shows and try to prove us wrong, but that’s fine too. As long as people are trying to get answers, then that’s progress. Some of the best inventors and best advocates of paranormal activity started as skeptics and came into this field to get answers, only to be influenced by the results they were getting and dig deeper. That’s exactly what we need more of.

The technology we have makes it easy for people to get to incidents quicker, and just about everyone has a phone with a camera now. That’s good news because it means that a lot of people can be out there seeking answers that they don’t get from churches, friends, science, and other outlets. The bad news is that a lot of these people keep their evidence to themselves because they want to be the ones to break it to the world. Nobody wants to share. No one wants to help each other out. Everyone thinks they can be an investigator and get their dramatic evidence on TV. Everyone wants the exclusive of investigating a location. Those people are in it for the wrong reasons, and until someone can step forward and say “this is an agreed-upon way of doing this,” the field will have difficulty progressing.

This is the big drawback to all of the attention on the field and the improved technology—the huge number of hobbyists who really don’t know what they’re doing. I commend them for wanting to contribute, and there are amateurs who have come up with some great pieces of evidence. But it’s the serious investigators who have been doing it a long time who will really make a difference and will force us to get better.

I think the day when we all collaborate is coming and hopefully Paranormal Challenge will help streamline things by getting teams to agree to accepted ways of doing things. That standardization is what we need. It seems the momentum and interest in the field is still going and there are great minds like Gary Galka and Bill Chappell (two former skeptics) who are inventing equipment to bridge the gap in technologies, so I don’t see it slowing down. Paranormal interest is very cyclical. There are several phases in history where it’s been very popular and then disappeared. Right now it’s popular and people are seeking answers again and looking for something to cling to. Is there a plan to all of this? I think so.

Dr. Andrew Nichols
Director of the American Institute of Parapsychology.

The ghost hunting movement is not the same as parapsychology, although we are interested in some of the same topics. Hauntings and poltergeists are one aspect where the two fields cross over, but parapsychology is the study of “psi” (or psychic) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition. These experiences seem to challenge contemporary conceptions of human nature and of the physical world. They appear to involve the transfer of information and the influence of physical systems independently of time and space, via mechanisms we cannot currently explain.

There are several areas of parapsychology, but applied and clinical parapsychology is the future of the field. In order for parapsychology and paranormal research to grow, there have to be practical applications. Researchers need to focus on developing ways for people to use the science and the findings of psychic research, which is currently a major drawback. Skepticism among scientists is also a big obstacle because we haven’t been able to formulate testable theories on how these things work.

The good news is that psychology, which is mostly an accepted science, suffers from many of the same problems. Psychology has a dozen theories on how the mind works, most of them unproven, but it still expands. The dream of integrating mainstream psychology with parapsychology hasn’t gone very far. We have dreams of parapsychology becoming an accepted branch of psychology, but that hasn’t happened, and it’s not likely to, so I think the only way our field will have a future is by carving it out ourselves.

We have to do what psychoanalysis did and just ignore the mainstream and establish our own theories and practices. Parapsychology has to develop its own models on how the mind works that are based just as much on experimental and empirical evidence as any other social science. We have to train our own parapsychologists, who can work with people who have had experiences that they can’t explain. We have to stop worrying about what everyone else thinks and just move forward, and that means finding practical applications for what we do.

Within terms of law enforcement, I don’t think police departments turn to psychics and mediums as a last resort, they’re just the last resort that they’ll admit to. A number of psychics work with the FBI and police, but law enforcement agencies don’t like to admit it, which is a shame, but is understandable because of the stigma associated with it. We have to reduce that stigma through successful application. We have to show demonstrable results in sufficient quantity to overcome the resistance of the skeptics. There will always be some individuals who ridicule and deride the personal status of psychics to undermine the progress of this field until we become more credible.

Science is a tool, not a belief system for understanding the universe. The human mind has a transcendent function that provides us with awareness that we are interconnected in some unexplained way. Everyone seeks to understand the interaction between the human and the environment. That’s what parapsychology is all about. Humans are part of the environment and at the deepest level of consciousness we are all connected. Most people sense this to be true.

The reality is that the public is on our side. Most people have admitted to having paranormal or psychic experiences and know it is real. At least 75 percent of the population has had at least one paranormal experience in their lifetime and while their experiences do not meet the rigors of scientific inquiry, they still believe.

The psychic experience is subjective and can’t be recorded reliably by any means that we have today, but so are dreams, and we know those exist. Psychology studies dreams even though they’re subjective, so why can’t we study the interactions of the mind and the environment? As it is, dreams have to be relayed to the psychologist. They can’t be directly recorded by any machine. The subject matter of parapsychology is similar; we try to tap into a different level of reality. We process psychic information all the time just as we process dream information all the time. Until science develops a device to record dreams, they have to be relayed subjectively by the dreamer the same way ghost experiences have to be relayed by the observer to the public.