Essential Works
A bibliography of one hundred essential works for the study and practice of historically informed ghost hunting.
Download the BibliographyThe Society
The Paranormal Society for Historically Informed Ghost Hunting is a research collective dedicated to the discovery and study of ghosts and to the examination of the historical and social practices by which ghosts become knowable.
Certification puts the Society’s methods to work.
Property certification gives the Society a public form in which its methods can be exercised, inspected, and made useful. The underlying inquiry remains larger: what kind of entity is a ghost, what forms of evidence allow one to appear, and how do investigators participate in the world they hope to observe?
The Society’s writings remain the intellectual basis of the program. They are presented unabridged, on their original pages.
Read About UsPrinciples & practice
The conceptual apparatus of an investigation
0106
Historically Informed Ghost Hunting
The Society’s general account of ghosts, belief, history, ethnography, and the structure of an investigation protocol.
02Attunement
Hospitality toward the uncanny, reflexive analysis, and the difficult distinction between projected and transcendent ghosts.
03Diagnostics
The site as a material, social, and historical configuration in which a haunting may acquire its particular form.
04Invigilation
Hopeful witnessing and the disciplined inclusion of investigators as embodied agents within the scene they observe.
05Provocations
Controlled noise, ritual performance, and the search for correspondences in the margins of ordinary sense data.