Let me guess, you tuned in to the latest paranormal program on SyFy, TLC, or the Discovery Channel and decided you wanted to give paranormal investigating a try, right?  It certainly looks interesting on TV, but....  Well, let's just say that things are WAY different in the real world of paranormal investigating.

It happens to a large number of people and let's face it, they do make it look interesting on TV and who wouldn't be curious about what spirits could be lurking around in his or her local cemeteries and abandoned buildings, etc.?   It is the things that the TV producers edit out that you should really be curious about.  Think about it, most investigations last from 7 to 10 hours to even longer.  How do you think all of that time is made to fit in an hour or half hour show?  Simple.  The producers edit out all the boring parts that show investigators sitting for hours in a room talking to something or someone that they cannot see and that may not even be there.  They don't show the investigators falling asleep in a corner somewhere because it is so late and nothing has happened all night. Sound exciting?  I think not!

If you don't think that is bad enough,  bear in mind that we haven't even gotten to the analysis yet.  How many video recorders were you using?  How many digital voice recorders?  Do you have a DVR system with 4 or even 8 channels?  For the sake of our story let's keep it simple.  You have conducted a hypothetical investigation and used 2 mini DVD night vision camcorders set up on tripods. You used a 4 channel DVR system so you had 4 IR cameras recording the entire time and you had a digital voice recorder with each of the cameras because most DVR systems do not record audio.  You also used two other voice recorders that the teams carried with them to record EVP sessions.  They managed to record 4 hours of audio on each of these. 

Now...add up the number of man hours it will take to analyze every second of footage.  The length of our hypothetical investigation was 10 hours.  For the mini DVD camcorders we have two of them so that's 20 hours of video to analyze there and don't forget these have audio as well but at least you can analyze the audio and video at the same time here. You have 10 hours on each of the 4 DVR cameras for a total of 40 hours.  We had a digital voice recorder with each of these cams so that's 40 hours of audio as well.  We had two more voice recorders with 4 hours each for 8 more total hours.  If you have been keeping up that is a total of 108 man hours.  Are you seeing my point yet? We haven't even mentioned data recorded in still digital photos that must be gone through, or data recorded on a thermal imaging camera if you use one.

There are 168 hours in a week and assuming a man sleeps for 8 hours each night,  that leaves 112 useable hours in a week.  So, provided he did not eat, take a shower, or go to the bathroom, one man could start at the beginning of the week and have 4 hours left sometime on Saturday afternoon.  Now, considering most people have jobs, kids, other activities, etc. to occupy a great deal of their time, it is very unlikely that a person could analyze this footage in a week.  Granted, it helps considerably when other team members pitch in and help out, but even if two people work on this analysis it is likely to take two or three weeks, even a month in some cases.  In many cases an investigator gets bored listening to static and jumps to other data and skips a huge amount of potential evidence.  In other cases, an investigator may abandon the analysis altogether.  What is the point collecting the data if it is not going to be analyzed properly?

Don't think for a second that I am trying to scare you away from the field of paranormal research.  That couldn't be further from the truth!  My intentions are to merely let you know that all is not as it seems in this field.  If your reasons for wanting to become a paranormal investigator come from anything you saw on TV, you need to think again.  That is all I am saying. 

What kind of people make good paranormal researchers?

The type of people who make the best paranormal investigators would be labeled as an open minded skeptic.  You may think this is a paradox but let me explain.  An open minded person is capable of accepting the unaccepted and believing the unbelievable.  Most people who you may label as open minded are very likely to believe practically anything, although there are various levels of open mindedness.

A skeptic is usually thought of as a person who would not accept anything, even if it hit him or her on the head.  A skeptic is dead set against anything and everything and is never ending in his or her quest to find a logical explanation for everything, even if they have to convince themselves that their eyes are playing tricks on them.  

A good paranormal investigator is a combination of the two.  Open minded enough to believe that paranormal activity can and does exist, but skeptical enough to not call everything they experience "paranormal".  One investigation comes to mind from a couple of years ago where an investigator swore up and down that they had captured an apparition in a mirror with a digital still camera.  After much excited exclamation by the investigator which we finally subdued (FYI: this person is no longer with NEARPS, for obvious reasons),  I uploaded the photo to our laptop to take a better look.  Instantly the "red flags" went up as I noticed that the clothing worn by the supposed entity was matched in color by our female client's apparel.  We went back to the location that the photo was taken and asked the client to stand in the exact same location she was in when the picture was taken.  I took the camera then snapped a photo that was almost an exact duplicate to the original.  This is the work of an open minded skeptic.  You see, I knew that it very easily COULD be an apparition in the photo, but was skeptical enough to explore other possible ways that the image in the photo could have occurred.  The only thing you will gain by labeling something as paranormal when it is not is to discredit your future evidence and any future evidence of your team.  Once you try to pass bogus evidence off as paranormal, no one will believe any of your future evidence is legitimate.

I hope you see where I am coming from on this.  An open minded person would have accepted the photo at first glance and the skeptic would have dismissed it without even looking at it.  The open minded skeptic analyzed the photo for what it was and let the evidence speak for itself! 

Not only does a person need to be an open minded skeptic, but patience is also a virtue when it comes to paranormal research.  How in the world do you have an investigation lasting 10 hours when you only have a two bedroom house?   Easy.  You spend a LOT of time in each room staring into darkness trying to observe something that may not even be present.  I compare the patience of a paranormal investigator to that of a die hard fisherman.  I don't know about other places, but here in Arkansas a man will sit in a boat all day in the hot blazing sun and not catch a damn thing.  If you don't have the patience to do something like that then paranormal research is definitely not for you.  Think about it, at least the fisherman knows when he catches a fish, but the paranormal investigator may not know he or she has caught anything until days later when they have spent hours listening to static on a digital voice recorder or staring at video on a monitor. 

As is the case with the fisherman when he finally pulls in that 8 pound trophy bass, when you do catch a substantial piece of evidence it makes all the long hours worth it.  So in the long run paranormal research can be very rewarding, but it is a VERY long run!  You need to know what you are facing exactly and I hope this article gives you some truths on what it is really like.

Article Written by Charles Crow and approved by the NEARPS Board of Directors

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