The institution
The 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.
Program & institution
Certification is an application of the practice, not its replacement.
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 existing writings of the Society remain the intellectual basis of the program. They are presented here without abridgment on their original pages.
Read About UsPrinciples & practice
The Conceptual Apparatus of an Investigation
Historically Informed Ghost Hunting
The Society’s general account of ghosts, belief, history, ethnography, and the structure of an investigation protocol.
02First Principles
The relation between a ghost, the meanings attached to it, and the sociocultural neighborhood in which it may be investigated.
03Attunement
Hospitality toward the uncanny, reflexive analysis, and the difficult distinction between projected and transcendent ghosts.
04Diagnostics
The site as a material, social, and historical configuration in which a haunting may acquire its particular form.
05Invigilation
Hopeful witnessing and the disciplined inclusion of investigators as embodied agents within the scene they observe.
06Provocations
Controlled noise, ritual performance, and the search for correspondences in the margins of ordinary sense data.
Current research
Spectral Corridor
The Society uses a ring-and-beam coordinate system to define geographical zones of inquiry centered on Fort Payne, Alabama, and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Current research geographyThe public program