Historically informed ghost hunters investigate ghosts and beliefs about ghosts. Ghosts are treated as real, at one level of analysis, where the evidentiary criteria for what counts as real are negotiated (implicitly in some cases) by a team of ghost hunters. At another level, ghosts are treated as fictive, as a tapestry of folklore, religious beliefs, and loose ontological claims that have been woven and rewoven for centuries.
A ghost is never just an irreducible spirit or a mere coincidence of cold air and spiking EMF. Wildly diverse claims about a ghost’s powers and motives can accrue over time, spawning new ghosts and new ghost types. And conversely, a ghost can shed its sociogenic features, reverting to a simpler schema. Historically informed hunters investigate ghosts and examine the social and historical forces that produce them, that attach them to local circumstances.
The practice of historically informed ghost hunting draws on the techniques and insights of researchers, spiritualists, philosophers, and fringe thinkers from the last four centuries. Works as diverse as Augustin Calmet’s Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits (1751) and Upton Sinclair’s Mental Radio (1929) are brought into conversation with each other and with contemporary studies in consciousness. No effort is made to synthesize these disparate voices into a unified philosophy, though many are rooted in the same Christian-Neoplatonic metaphysics. We join the conversation, a tracery of shadows and hearsay, as students, in order to understand how history has already framed our thinking and purposes. Otherwise, our ideas about ghosts are just ghosts once-removed, as unsubstantial and intemporal as the entities they signify.
Historically informed ghost hunting owes a special debt to nineteenth-century psychical researchers and the analytical tools of modern ethnography. These provide, respectively, a model for investigating ghosts that coherently integrates paranormal research and spiritualism, and a critical framework for evaluating ghost hunting as a specific cultural practice with its own customs and ways of self-knowing.
The phases of an investigation in historically informed ghost hunting are outlined in an investigation protocol. A protocol is both a specific sequence of procedures to be followed by a ghost hunting collective during the course of an investigation and an exposition of the conceptual and cultural assumptions embedded in the idea of a ghost, as understood by that collective. A protocol is therefore a manual for hunting ghosts of a specific cultural valence.
Our preferred protocol organizes participants into four different working groups: roaming investigators who seek out ghosts and explore questions about the role of technology in their discovery; station operators who code and manipulate sensory feedback loops using site-specific audio, video, and environmental data; mediumistic sitters who enter into liminal states in order to propagate signals across different domains; and site invigilators who oversee the hunt, ensuring that participants remain open to the tenancy of spirits while also taking into account how their prior beliefs influence the investigation.
Beyond the investigation protocol, four cardinal ideas are especially important in historically informed ghost hunting. The following articles provide an overview of each idea, without attempting to do justice to how they are specifically implemented in a hunt:
If you are interested in learning more about the social history of ghosts, ghost hunting, and the founding of modern paranormal research, you can download 100 Essential Works for Historically Informed Ghost Hunters:
If you are interested in becoming a member of the Society, please submit a request to JDC@paranormalsociety.org. All candidates are interviewed by remote video (Zoom).
Posted in Core Principles