In the world of paranormal investigating, many are chasing a type of thrill.  Whether they are looking for a personal experience or collecting evidence using a range of devices, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement.  If it weren't for these moments, many people would simply not still be investigating today.  Most people catch the 'paranormal' bug in the first place because they saw or felt something that they couldn't explain.  It shapes the way we think and feel about the paranormal and often starts the journey of many budding paranormal investigators.  The thing is, it is not something you can just turn on like a tap.  What happens when nothing happens on an investigation?  Some may view it as a disappointment or a waste of time.  I would say this kind of experience is actually quite valuable.

We talk about expectations and the paranormal.  Often if a location is promoted as 'The Most Haunted' (let's face it many are marketed that way), that is already setting an expectation.  Some locations have become infamous.  The type of location seems to matter as well.  Walking the halls of an abandoned mental asylum has a certain eeriness and expectation to it.  Sometimes we travel halfway around the World to attend such locations.  It is almost like setting ourselves up for disappointment, because the reality is a lot of locations don't deliver in the same way the hype frames it.  We also know that when we go into a location and expect something to happen, we can also misinterpret things because we really want it to be something to 'live up to the hype'.  It is easy to see how some people may walk away from such opportunities disappointed.  Instead of viewing it this way, it can help our paranormal research and also our growth as paranormal investigators.

Creating a baseline

In the movie Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz claims 

"People usually ignore the strange and unusual.  I myself am strange and unusual."

How do we know what unusual looks like if we don't know what the usual looks like?  Quite simply, we have the opportunity to observe a location in its 'natural' state.  It allows us to measure and establish a baseline.  What are the common noises of the location?  Where are the drafts?  Is there any loose wiring that causes EMF spikes?

In Melbourne, there is a famous story about La Rundle asylum. Before it was revitalised into an arts and cultural precinct, La Rundle was one of Melbourne’s most infamous abandoned locations. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the site had become a well-known hotspot for trespassers who would sneak through broken fences to illegally participate in their own make-shift ghost hunts.  They were really just there to have a paranormal experience.  They all walked out with the same experience, eerie music or chime, depending on who you talked to, that would echo through the halls around 9pm at night.  It became known as the Ghost Bell.  People speculated it could have been a nurse haunting the halls, responding to their patients.  While it was a great story, the reality, once it was looked into properly, was that it turned out it was chiming clock at the nearby La Trobe University.  Thanks to the stillness of night, minimal ambient noise, and the echo chamber-like acoustics of the building's architecture, the chime would bounce and distort as it filtered through empty corridors and broken windows.  It’s a perfect example of how atmosphere, expectation, and context can form a narrative.  It is also the perfect example as to why a baseline is needed.  We need to get a feel of a building and really understand what its 'normal' is so that we can then start to define what could be 'paranormal'.

La Rundle Asylum before it was redeveloped.  Photo by Sarah LLIFS

Quiet doesn't mean that nothing is happening

Just because our equipment is not going off, doesn't mean that anything is happening.  Too often, we rely on flashy lights to tell us something is happening.  Does it really mean there is something paranormal if it is flashing?  No it doesnt, all it means is that it is registering some sort of change in our surroundings.  When nothing is happening and we are not focusing on our pieces of equipment, we sit in the stillness and we observe, we watch and we wait.  My good friend Bill from the Australian Paranormal Society always drills into people every time you investigate with him, not to spend your time looking down at the devices.  Use your eyes and look up because you could literally miss something amazing walking right past you because you are focusing on a device, waiting for it to 'light up' or speak a word.  All of this fancy equipment didn't exist a few decades ago, yet people still investigated the paranormal.  They used the art of observation and recorded their findings.  The paranormal isn't necessarily grand and in your face.  It could be subtle.  This is why we need to slow down and observe.  Not only are we creating that baseline, but we are then establishing if there is a change.  Sure it may not be as exciting for some, but this is what paranormal research is all about, which brings me to my last point.

Choosing integrity over sensationalism

Many of us are fans of paranormal reality shows, and more recently the different YouTubers.  Some do it as a hobby while others have made a career out of creating content on the paranormal.  People have followings for different reasons.  Some love watching the overhyped, overacted videos where something is happening at every corner.  It is not necessarily even about the activity but the chemistry of the people they are watching and how entertaining they are.  There are other creators who are more subtle and a lot more honest with what is happening.  It is still edited in a way to be entertaining, but lets just say there aren't demons in every crevice of the building.  What we know is that no one is going to watch 2 hours of someone sitting there doing nothing because it is boring and as mentioned above, many will view it as a waste of their time.  This is where we have a choice.  There are ways to produce content that is honest and genuine without faking or hyping up things that aren't happening and again, that can come down to the personalities on the screen.  People do tend to resonate with them more when they are honest and they see this as a form of integrity.

As investigators, we have a responsibility to be truthful.  You may not realise it, but there is always someone watching what you do.  You may not have a social media following or YouTube channel, but you may be on an investigation with someone who is there doing their first.  Take yourself back to your first investigation.  What were you doing?  You were probably paying attention to what everyone else was doing around you.  Many people tend to emulate what they see other people do and put their own spin on it.  This is why integrity is important.  There is so much we can learn from an investigation that isn't exciting with activity all over the place and while it may not spark the feeling of excitement, it does help build our knowledge base so that when that experience happens that we can say for sure we can't explain happens, it becomes more meaningful.

If every location were active every time, the paranormal wouldn’t be 'para' anymore. It would just be 'normal'.