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An idiot's guide to ghost hunting
Other | Wednesday 26th September 2012 | Osh
Don't let those demons win. Fight back. (But not with flour)
You’ve recently seen Paranormal Activity 4 or Casper the Friendly Ghost and you’re now convinced that someone or something is haunting you. You’ve been finding used tea bags all over the flat, your muesli keeps mysteriously disappearing and someone keeps weeing in your cat litter tray. What’s weird is you don’t even have a cat and you live alone on the 5th floor. So who keeps buying new cat litter!?
What you need is good solid knowledge on ghosts. You need to know their preferred habitats, what time of day they are most active; and you won’t get anywhere unless you know what kind of pies they like. Allow me to further your knowledge with the assistance of paranormal researcher Matt Schultz, who really knows his stuff. And I mean, this guy is convinced ghosts are real.
The basic tools:
Ghost hunting is a funny old business. You might think it’s enough to douse your carpets with flour before heading to bed and set up a booby trap on top of your bedroom door with a bucket of sticky weed. But that’s amateur stuff. All you’re going to do is a) aggravate the ghost/demon/cat b) challenge them to be more inventive with their haunting or c) have the plan backfire terribly when you get up in a daze to go pee, only to end up at the bottom of your stairs covered in flour and sticky weed, with one leg behind your neck.
Before you even think about starting you’ll need to get hold of a basic Pro Ghost Hunting Kit (available on Ebay for as little as £119), including such necessary tools as:
- The Olympus VN-PC Series Recorder
- K-2 Electromagnetic Field Meter (with On/Off switch)
- A Non-Contact Thermometer (pocket size for those trips down into the basement – you will literally feel the temperature drop in your pocket!)
- Motion Detector Light (doubles up as a torch)
- Wind-up Torch (if your Motion Detector cuts out. Will make a lot of noise and disturb ghosts. Use sparingly.)
With these simple tools you are ready to face your demons (hopefully pleasant ones) and cast them out (in a nice way) back to the gates of hell (or inside a vacuum cleaner if you have one lying about.)
One thing you need to know: ghosts only come out when it’s dark. Now, a lot of cynics out there will probably be saying ‘Yeah, yeah, well obviously when it’s dark your senses are heightened and you mistake shadows and flecks of dust for spectral activity. Well they don’t call them cynics for nothing!
Ghosts are also only likely to materialise after midnight and usually only in an old pub or castle, as that’s where all the people of history died. It makes ghost hunting a lot easier when you can narrow down your avenues. Ever felt a ghostly presence in an aquarium? Didn’t think so. Ghosts hate fish. Make sure you know probable locations. If you’re looking for a ghost on a bouncy castle or at Thorpe Park, forget about it. An old gothic chapel or creepy graveyard however? Bingo.
Ghosts thrive in cold conditions. The colder and damper the better. Ghosts are like mould in a way. You’ll never find a ghost lounging around by the pool sunbathing. Always in cold cellars, attics and old buildings without insulation. Ever stepped place in an underground room and noticed a sudden drop in temperature? That’s not a lack of sunlight and central heating, my friend. That’s ghosts.
What do you say when contacting the dead? The best thing to do is ask them about pie. ‘What sort of pie do you like?’ paranormal researcher Matt Schultz suggests. It’s a curve ball. The ghost was all prepared to play coy and give vague scratching responses, spell out a triple word score on a Scrabble board or make a table hover, but with that simple question, you’ve got them wrapped around your little finger. ‘What sort of pie do I like?’ muses the ghost. The answer is cabbage pie. All ghosts love cabbage pie. It’s all they ate when they were alive hundreds of years ago.
Lastly, before you set off on your ghost hunting quest, you probably want to know why there is no hard proof of ghosts. It’s simple really. Ghosts travel at the speed of light and are invisible. There is currently no equipment available in the legal market that can capture invisible things travelling at the speed of light. So back off, cynics!
By Liam McKenna
