By Rick Hinton
Does a paranormal investigator investigate their own home? Or, for that matter, let another group do it? It is a timeless question and one wrestled with throughout the paranormal community. I still feel the same way I did when this article was published a few years back. It can be an iffy proposition at best.
Here is the gist of what I wrote:
An association (relationship) with a spiritual entity in your residence becomes a personal matter, and like it or not, you either learn to co-exist with your house guest or ultimately take steps to usher them out the door. In a strange twist, if they choose to hang around, they become members of the family, becoming familiar with our quirks and eccentricities, as we do theirs. They tend to play upon these until we become comfortably numb and accepting. However, what happens when you decide to dig a little deeper and invite in a troop of unfamiliar faces with an arsenal of cameras, recorders, meters with colorful lights, diverse personalities and a barrage of questions?
Fun and games for our spectral roommates become an invasion. It is believed that investigating your abode is not a good thing. For the spirits involved, it is an intrusion. After the equipment is packed, you still have to live there and deal with the consequences. Whether you do the investigation – or someone else – it may ramp up activity. If not, the ghosts may retreat into the shadows and stay quiet during the investigation, then re-emerge after it ends.
If the homeowners conduct their ghost hunt, I would imagine the same results as outsiders coming in. Your resident ghosts may be angrier that you tried to one-up them. Ghosts, much like people, do not care much for change. They appear caught in a timeless transition of repetition and shenanigans, with a mission that so far has eluded us.
The house that my wife and I currently live in on Southport Road has an additional resident (or two). It’s nothing malevolent. She has the run of the house and does little things to let us know she is still around. We are co-existing. However, with our home in Kentucky, I’m not sure what is going on there; and maybe I don’t want to know. During the last months of my mother’s life, I set up equipment on a couple of occasions, one time aiming an infrared camera upon her as she slept. Audio recorders were placed throughout the house. To this day, I have yet to review these recordings; perhaps I never will. It may have been a mistake. Did I manage to intensify the paranormal activity?
