Tammy Wilson August, 2009

It’s late and just as you’re drifting off to sleep, you hear something.  What was it?  There’s no one else at home.  The cat’s asleep at the end of the bed.  “It must have been the wind,” you tell yourself.  It always makes you feel better to believe it’s just the wind.  Until you feel that cool breeze float across your bed and realize there is no wind…

People have been telling ghost stories since the beginning of time – the Greeks and Romans had ghost stories, and even the Bible mentions one in the story of Samuel and the Witch of Endor.  The oldest documented ghost story in Oklahoma dates back before statehood in 1896.  What’s more, it was printed in the Guthrie Daily Leader, a newspaper!  The story began on April 9, 1896 with an article about a prostitute receiving a hasty pauper’s burial.  A week later another article appeared declaring a haunting:

“The shack on the Santa Fe right of way in which the Cyprian Lula Myers recently died is haunted.  Horrible groans issue from the shack every night and passerby assert that weird and ghastly incantations take place within the building which was vacated shortly after the unfortunate girl’s death.  Last night a well-known sport called at the house and tried the front door.  It failed to give way.  He tried the back door with the same result, and returning to the front door it suddenly flew open and a blood-red hand holding a vial appeared in the room.  Much excitement prevails among the neighbors residing in the vicinity of the haunted house.”

News stories of this nature continue over the next several days until finally, the body is exhumed to make sure it was not face down or had been buried alive according to some of the rumors that began to float around the community.  There was no more mention of ghosts by the Santa Fe right of way after that April.

Nowadays, newspapers would not declare hauntings as truthful news.  With the progression of technology and science people have become more skeptical of such things.  Non-believers will maintain that the existence of ghosts cannot be proven; believers maintain the non-existence of ghosts has not been proven, either.  However, there are some things that are simply unexplainable, even by science.

So whether you are a believer in things that go bump in the night or not, you have to admit a good old ghost story is always fun.  Some are made up as cautionary tales, some are just for fun, and some are eye witness accounts.  I have been fascinated with ghost stories and tales of the supernatural since I was a small child, but as an adult, my interest turned to the history behind these stories.  It made sense to me that a place might only be haunted if there were sufficient history related to the location to make it so.  If there is a location with reported ghostly activity and no reason for it, then it becomes more an urban legend than a haunting, but if you have several unrelated people telling the same stories over a number of years, well, there might be something to it.

In the early 1970’s my mother and I lived in a house on Cherokee Street in Enid, Oklahoma with our St. Bernard, Buffy.

My mother said strange things would happen at this house on a regular basis such as the cupboard doors and drawers would open and close and the lights would go on and off randomly.  Things would be moved.  She had a ceramic Trojan horse that sat on top of the TV but sometimes she would come home to find it sitting on the mantle across the room from the TV.  The recliner would sometimes be turned facing the corner.

She remembered when she moved in that the windows were all covered in tinfoil and there had been some old bits and pieces of photography equipment laying around.  She always had a creepy feeling that some bad things may have happened there.

One night she was asleep on her bed and she was awakened to find herself half way off of the bed as if she had been dragged.  All the lights were on, the shades were up, the cupboard doors and drawers were all hanging open and Buffy was trembling and whimpering underneath the dining room table.  My mother was terrified and had a very bad feeling as if something evil was lurking there.  She took me out of my crib and immediately left the house.  She proceeded to move us out the next day.

About 20 years later she was working at a local agency when a man came in and sat down at her desk.  She was taking his information and helping him fill out his papers and she noticed that his address was that same house on Cherokee Street.

“I used to live in that house,” she told the man at her desk.

“Really?”  He hesitated.  “Did you ever have anything… weird… happen there?”

They exchanged stories about the house and she found that he had been having the same strange things going on there 20 years later.

I thought this was a great example of a haunted house since two completely unrelated people had things happen there, so I frequently relayed it to friends during ghost story sessions.  One evening I was telling the story to my friend that worked at a local pharmacy and when I mentioned the address, he became white as a ghost himself and started pacing around the room, muttering frantically.  I asked him what was wrong with him.

He said to me, “We used to deliver medicine to a lady that lived there and we always thought she was crazy because she was always going on about how the devil lived in her house!”

Three people, completely unrelated, several years apart – same stories.  No one knows the reason behind the activity there, but it is indisputable that it’s there.

The oldest bar in town, open since 1948, is the Frisco Bar.  It was originally down the street from its current location but that building is no longer there.  The current building was a machine shop downstairs with a brothel upstairs.  The Frisco is famous for its ice cold beer, but there are chilly spirits of another kind there, too.

A massive collection of beer bottles and cans lines the upper walls of the bar.  One evening, the owner was standing behind the bar visiting with one of the customers when one beer can came flying several feet away from the shelf and nearly hit the customer at the bar.  Now, keep in mind that these cans and bottles are nestled quite closely together on these shelves in tiers, but not one of them was disturbed by this one that seemingly propelled itself off the shelf.  A picture has also fallen off the wall and to the floor, and again, not one can or bottle was disturbed.  The owner and other employees have witnessed the water faucet at the sink behind the bar coming on by itself as well.

They say the Frisco ghost is to blame for the flying objects and random water running.  In the early morning hours one day the owner and another man were in the bar.  The owner had just returned from picking up the newspaper from the front sidewalk when his friend asked, “Didn’t you lock that back door?”  The owner assured him he had.

The man told him he had heard it open and said, “Someone just walked up that ramp to the men’s room.”

The pwner wasn’t too worried about it.  “That just the ghost,” he told him.  He reported that people often hear the back door open and when they look to see who’s coming, they witness a black figure walking up the ramp toward the men’s room.  The owner and some of the others are used to the ghost by now while some won’t readily admit to it, but will certainly clean up as quickly as they can when they’re there alone.

Another historic building in Enid is the Surety Abstract Building.  Most of my generation remember it as Lambert’s, a high end dress shop, but before it was Lambert’s, it was a department store called Herzberg’s.

The owner of Surety Abstract jokingly made a comment to a long time Enid attorney that they thought the building might be haunted.  They had witnessed several strange occurrences and were unable to explain them any other way.  The attorney thought for a moment and stated he didn’t really know why it would be haunted.  They finished their business and he returned to his office only to return a short time later with an old newspaper article and declared, “You know, it just might be haunted.”

The 1956 newspaper article relayed the story of a woman that worked in the Herzberg Department Store.  Her estranged ex-husband came into the store one afternoon as she worked demanding she give him $70 for a dentist visit.  She refused and he gunned her down and turned the gun on himself, right there in the store.  The owner had not been aware of this story until she saw the article.

The employees at Surety have seen stacks of things knocked off the counter, heard noises, seen people walk by and when they look, there’s no one there.

I interviewed the children of the previous owner of the building.  They state as children they found every possible nook and cranny of the old building to play hide and seek in and never had any ghostly encounters, but got spooked by the mannequins more than once!

One of the sons is of the opinion it could be the jolly spirit of their dad who is by far the most interesting character to have ever possessed the building.

“This is the large building to the south that Lambert’s occupied in its last years of existence where Dad held an auction one week prior to his passing to ‘get all his affairs in order.’  This was not the building with the mannequins.  The air conditioner and the elevator always had a squeak, which could explain the noises heard from the first floor.  The ‘haunting’ that could be going on could be all the elder ladies hitting on the handsome gentleman in the better place that they all now share.”

Oddly enough, another obscure piece of Enid’s bizarre history rests right outside the Surety Abstract Building.  In the one hundred years of Enid’s history, only three police officers have ever died in the line of duty.  The first took place June 26, 1895 when Enid City Marshal, E.C. Williams, was shot while attempting to break up a fight between the owner of the newspaper and the local Land Office man.  Nearly eleven years later, Marshal Thomas Radford was murdered by a man that was angry with him for closing his rooming house.  The third officer to lose his life was Officer Cal Palmer in 1936 while attempting to arrest a would-be robber.  It’s not all that unusual for police officers to be killed in the line of duty and luckily Enid has only lost three, but the twist to this story is that they all three died on the same corner several years apart – the corner of Grand and Broadway. The corner has since become a bit of a superstition amongst the Enid Police Department and it might be wise for you, too, to take a little extra care traveling that route.

This is just a glimpse into my hometown’s haunted history.  Whether you’re interested in ghost stories or not, most town’s have a lot of interesting history and the stories make learning about it entertaining.  Take some time to learn your community’s haunted history – I bet you’ll be surprised at how many stories you find.

Tags: ghosts, investigation, paranormal

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James Choron August, 2009

The Place With No Name

Regardless of what you’ve heard, Western Siberia is a wonderous place nothing like we were led to believe in the West. It is not a frozen wasteland. There are no starving bears chasing emaciated wolves up and down the frozen, dreary streets vying for the skeletal forms that huddle wretchedly in long lines waiting for their daily crust of bread and cup of thin turnip soup.

Siberia is big and bold and beautiful a land of extremes, and contrast with frigid winters and sweltering summers high, snow capped mountains and pine forests that stretch out as far as the eye can seee. It is a land of great modern cities like Novosibersk with it’s population of three million, and tiny villages like Dubovka with is population of thirty.

At one time, Siberia was synonymous with “suffering” and “pain”. At one time, it was the heart and soul of the most infamous and notorious prison system the world has eve seen Stalin’a GuLag (That, by the way, is the proper way to write the word… it is an acronym, meaning Gu(sodarstnoi)La(ger)… Government Camps…) stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, from Vorkuta, above the Arctic Circle to Magadan on the Sea of Alaska it was a place of torture, torment and grief. It was a place to which many came, but few returned.

The train lumbered through the tiny village in the dead of night. It was mid winter, and great sheets of ice shrouded the twelve wooden cars that crept along behind the big, black 6-8-6 steam locomotive. A thick cloud of smoke belched from the engine as it struggled to push aside the dense piles of snow that all but obliterated the tracks. Thinner streams of smoke trailed from each of the cars. It was the only sign that inside each car, packed like sprats in a tin, were eighty human beings lost souls most of which were making their final trip to a place with no name. For five days they had been crowded into the cars five days with one cup of thin soup and one slice of coarse black bread to keep them alive barely five long days with no room to lie down and room to sit only in shifts five long days of a single bucket for a toilet, shared by all, and a tiny coal fed, iron stove to fight off the frigid temperatures which plumeted, at night to over forty below zero. These were the damned. The victims of a dying dictator’s paranoia. They were doctors, lawyers, engineers, soldiers, wives, mothers and children. All of them had managed to run afoul of Stalin, or his infamous henchman Lavrenti Baria. Now, those who had survived the trip, were near their destination a place with no name. They were only the latest arrivals… not the first… not the last. It seems only fitting that these nameless “Enemies of the State” were bound for an equally nameless “last stop” a place in which most, if not all of them, would eventually end up in an eqally nameless mass grave, in the place that they called “Site 36″. The place without a name.

Things are different now. Site 36 has long been closed. The land that that once made up the most infamous camp in Stalin’s GuLag has long ago been turned to farmland. One or two scattered villages dot the landscape, several of these are populated by those who once labored here for the state and their descendants, either as guards or as prisoners. They get along, now. It is as though they share a special kind of sadness, a common nightmare. Their children and grandchildren do not know who was who. It is a peaceful place now, and only the old railway platform marks the exact location of the old camp. No train serves it now. The villagers travel by car, or by bus, the fifty kilometers into Novosibersk when they do their weekly, or monthly shopping for the things that their tiny local shops do not carry. But the legacy of Site 36 hasn’t ended. The local farmers still find “unwanted” obstacles in their fields not the least of which are the numerous uncharted, unmarked mass graves. Then, too, there are the sounds in the night.

Every night the train still comes. The clack-clack-clack of it’s drivers echoing across the wheat and potato fields and through the windows of every house in every nearby village. Every night, the lonely wail of it’s whistle echoes through the stillness of the Siberian night, and every night, the hiss of it’s air brakes slashes the stillness as the train and it’s load of misery ease into the platform at the place without a name. Each night, the shouts of the guards, the barking of their dogs, and the cries and moans of the newly damned are heard echoing through the stillness, just as they have for over half a century. Once in a while the other sounds are drowned out by the sharp crack of a pistol shot, the bark of a rifle or the gutteral growl of a submachine gun. Sometimes you can hear the sirens.

The people who live in the area are used to all this. When asked about it, they shrug and say simply that things like this happen. And, happen they do every night at the place without a name.

© 2007/2009 by Dr. J. Lee Choron. All rights reserved unless otherwise specified by the author in writing.

Tags: ghost, investigation, paranormal, siberia

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Tammy Wilson February, 2009

When I first started investigating, I was dead set (no pun intended) on gathering “scientific evidence” that ghosts exist.  I had gadgets and I had a tool belt to carry my gadgets in.  All those gadgets do is make you appear to be technologically hip – until your EMF meter goes off and the homeowner asks you why and you say, “Um… I’m not sure.”  Cover blown – your hip status just went down the toilet, folks.

There are simply too many factors that come into play when you get gadgets involved.  Unless you are a photographer by trade, you likely don’t know all the intricacies of your camera and all the ins and outs of photography.  You can’t truly 100% say that weird blob is anomalous.  You can say you “think” it’s anomalous, but really, in the grand scheme of things, do you honestly “think” anyone gives a rat’s ass what you “think”?  Not really.  They have you there because they want to know what you know, not what you “think.”

Now that I’ve been doing this for a few years, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve changed my focus quite a bit.  I have changed my focus to the history behind the hauntings rather than the science of the hauntings.  Why is history so important to an investigation?  Because no matter what kind of temperature readings, EMF spikes, or moon phases you have in your favor, you ain’t got jack without the history.  The history is the basis of anything and everything going on, if in fact, there really is something going on.  If you have exhausted every scientific experiment you can think of and checked all the plumbing and there simply is nothing coming up but these people are still giving you accounts of things that have happened to them, then you owe it to them to find out why.  That’s why they called you.

If you can find out the history of a location, you will likely find out why it’s haunted.  If you can’t find out exactly why, you may at least be able to verify that it is.

My mother lived in a house in Enid, Oklahoma when I was a baby and things happened to her all the time.  She would come home and the recliner would be turned facing the wall.  Knick-knacks would be moved from where she put them, the lights would come on, the cabinet doors would open – you know, classic haunted house stuff.  One night she was awakened to find herself half way off of her bed, as if she had been dragged off of it.  All the lights in the house were on and all the cabinet doors and drawers were open.  Buffy, our fearless St. Bernard, was cowering under the dining room table whimpering like a baby.  She took me from my crib and got the heck outta Dodge and moved out the next day.

About 20 years later, she was working at the employment office when a gentleman came to her desk with his paperwork.  As she was going through his papers, she saw the address.  It was the same address as the house I was just telling you about.  She says, “Oh, I used to live in that house about 20 years ago,” and the guy says, “Really… anything weird ever happen to you there?”  So they exchange stories and it turns out this guy is having things happen, too.

Well, I always thought this was a great creepy story so one night I’m relaying it to a few friends.  I say the address and one of my friends starts completely freaking out.  After he settles down he proceeds to tell me, “We always deliver medicine to the old lady that lives there and she is always going on about how the devil lives in her house and we always just thought she was crazy!”

So, you see, there are three stories from three totally unrelated people over the span of several years, of things happening to them in this same house.  Do we know why the house is haunted?  No.  But with three stories like that, I think we can safely say that it is haunted.

This example is why it is so very important to know the history of the location you are investigating.  Corroborating stories are more validation to me than an orb in a picture or a crazy EMF reading any day.

So this brings us to “How do I find out the history?”  Well, that’s not nearly as easy as waltzing through a place with a bunch of gear that squawks and beeps and flashes, but in the end will be much more impressive, not to mention fulfilling for you as an investigator.  People are impressed with intelligence and if you can show that you have done your homework, you will likely gain more credibility for that than for having more crap on your tool belt than someone else.

If you are a credible investigator at all, you will have a very lengthy and in depth questionnaire you’ll use to interview your clients with.  Once you have talked with them ad nauseam and you have determined that their troubles are not the cat knocking things over, the pipes rumbling, or the medication they’re taking, then you can begin your quest.

Remember when you were a kid and you thought it would be cool to be like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or even Sherlock Holmes?  Well, here’s your chance because being a Paranormal Investigator is much like being a private investigator.  You have to be very observant of everything in the location and even the actions of the owners.  You will have to be able to purvey the scene, interview witnesses, dig for clues, and follow those clues until you find the answer, just like a detective.  I would say luckily, you don’t have to have a PI license to do this, but you know, sometimes I think you should because that would cut down on a lot of idiots out there yelling “Ghost” every time they get an orb, but I digress…

The first thing you need to do on your hunt to uncover the past is take good notes.  Look for anything that denotes a particular era – pictures, certificates, scrapbooks, photo albums, etc.  See if they have any pictures of the location as it looked originally.  Sometimes buildings and homes change considerably over the years and these changes might prove to be pertinent to your investigation on down the road.  Ask the owner what history they know, if any.  Ask them if they have the abstract of the location.  The abstract will have all the deeds and mortgages and documents pertaining to the property in it and you can find out a lot from an abstract, such as any changes or additions to the property over the years and people involved in buying or selling it.

Ask the occupants what they know about their neighbors.  Find out if any of them have been there for a while.  They may not know much about the neighbors and the neighbors might not seem to know a lot either, but Mrs. Cravitz across the street might be able to recall some minute thing that may not seem to matter, but might be a big clue later on.  Take good notes!  Note anything you find out from the neighbors!

Now, being in the legal field for the last several years, I have learned how to find a lot of things out that people don’t really know about or think about.  There are several online search engines that you can subscribe to and would probably be a wise investment if you plan to do a lot of research.  There’s also a social security death index online that can be helpful.  But for the real nitty gritty research, you’re going to have to get off your butt and actually do some legwork.

Your local courthouse can be a plethora of information.  If you can’t get your hands on the abstract, go to the deeds office and look up the address and you can find every deed that has ever been done on that property.  Deeds reflect who owns the land and you should be able to tell from the different deeds whether improvements such as houses, etc. have been made on the land.  Also note that the deed will just tell you who owned or owns a piece of property – it won’t tell you if someone else rented it.  But you can find that out, too.  You can also find out who pays the taxes on the property by contacting the Assessor’s office.  This information should all be public record.  You can find out a lot about a piece of property from the Assessor’s office and I have never had an experience where they weren’t happy to answer any of my questions.  All of this is free – the only thing that will cost you is copies.  Everything that is in the abstract should be available at the deeds office; it just won’t be all in one handy book like an abstract.

Another thing you might ask for while at the deeds office is to look at the plat of the location.  A plat is a plan, map or chart of a city, town or section, usually on land that has been subdivided, indicating boundaries and borders of individual properties. Each lot is identified by number and letter. Lot dimensions are noted. It may also include features such as building locations, water pipes, sewer lines, vegetation, topography, etc.  This can show you what was originally in that location and the layout of the property surrounding it.  You might also be able to check with the local code or zoning office and see if they have any permits for building improvements or renovations on the property you are investigating – these might have names on them you need or even might tell you about a stairwell or attic that’s been walled up.

To find out who has actually lived in the house you can access the city’s City Directory.  Most cities have these and they are normally available at the library or the city offices.  Some people call them a Criss-Cross directory also because you can look things up by address, name, or phone number and they’re all cross-referenced.  These are great tools in locating people, past or present.  They come out once a year and you should be able to get a hold of them fairly easily.

The city utility office is another place you can check for past residents.  They are usually very accommodating if you tell them you are doing historical research on the house.  I don’t think I’ve ever been told they couldn’t give me that information.

Once you have a good list of names of previous residents, then you can start trying to contact them.  I have found that a letter is much less scary for someone to receive than a phone call out of the blue, by a complete stranger, asking them about ghosts.  A letter will give them time to process what you are actually saying to them and to do some research on you to determine whether you’re sincere and credible, or a total loon.  If they decide you’re a loon, you’re pretty much out of luck and they will probably throw away your letter or save it and show it to their friends saying, “Look what I got in the mail from this loon!” and you’ll never hear a word from them.  Or they might be afraid of appearing like the loon and not say anything at all.  Or you could get really lucky and they will call you with their stories.

If you don’t hear anything from the previous residents, don’t get discouraged.  Go to the graveyard.  Not literally, but start digging through the obituaries.  Most libraries have a database of some kind of all the obituaries. You can probably access them on microfilm.  Genealogy groups are also a good resource and most communities have them and they are always willing to help people, given you don’t blurt out what you’re doing, or they may think you’re loony.  Cemetery associations also should have records of every person buried in the cemeteries and they may be another place to check with.

If someone died of unnatural causes, there will likely be a newspaper article on it and if you search the dates surrounding the death, you might come up with a story or two about the occurrence.

If the person died from a crime, there will be a police report, which you should be able to obtain relatively easily from your local police department.  Now with everything being available online, many court districts have court documents available online.  You would need to find out their location on the net and then you can search by name to see if anyone has any documents filed in the court system.  If you have the name of a murderer, you can probably get copies of things like a probable cause affidavit, which basically outlines the crime committed and you will get a lot of details from that.  We were working on a home where a heinous murder took place and we were able to obtain a copy of the probable cause affidavit and the information sheet the state filed and we culled several details from those basic documents.  We found out where the bodies were discovered, who all the witnesses were, all kinds of things that related directly to the haunting.  We were also able to go online to the Department of Corrections and look up the killer – which doesn’t necessarily pertain to the haunting directly, but it was interesting and a name might be relevant to the haunting in the long run.

It would also probably behoove you to become chummy with the local police department.  With this particular house I mentioned, we were able to get a walk through with the detective that worked the scene when it happened.  He was able to give us a lot of background and the facts of the case, which was pretty exciting because we had all grown up hearing about this murder and over the years the stories grow and change and you never know the truth, so it was cool that he was able to give us the true story and details that we wouldn’t have otherwise known.  Of course, if the crime was a long time ago, this might not be something that’s possible, but if it is, take advantage of it.

Some counties and towns have their own history books.  My county has a huge two volume set that was put together by the local historical society in the 80’s and it was done by gathering stories and histories from families throughout the county.  I use these in my research of local ghost towns and they are one of my most prized and priceless resources, so check with your local historical society or museum and see if they have such a creature, because if they do, you will feel like you have totally hit the jackpot once you start going through it and realizing how much information is in those kinds of books.

If, after you have exhausted all these ideas, you just can’t get one thing to make sense, then I would say to go ahead and document everything the client is telling you, conduct your technical investigation, and provide them with a copy of the report.  Have them keep a journal of any further occurrences.  Perhaps by documenting everything well, your information may be able to help the next person that lives there.  Someone may remember something later on that will make sense to someone and they may call you back.  Check back with them periodically to keep track of whatever’s happening there.

As I mentioned earlier, being armed with knowledge is much more impressive than being armed with a bunch of gadgets and you should be well armed now that you know how to conduct a proper historical investigation.  It may sound like a lot of work, but you’ll be glad in the long run that you did it and your clients will have a lot more respect for you knowing you worked hard to truly research their problem.  I’ve met people that have written books and books on the history of haunted places and have made a great living based on their knowledge of history of haunted places, but I have yet to meet one successful author or investigator that’s successful because he had the biggest tool belt and the most expensive meters.

Tags: ghost, how to, hunting, investigation, paranormal

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James Choron October, 2008

Documentation
Just the facts

While the subject of proper documentation has arisen several times in the couse of this procedural manual it is important that we have a  compete and thorough understanding of what constitutes such documentation. It is impossible to over stress the importance of this critical, but sometimes admittedly tedious aspect of conducting a properly scientific investigation of a paranormal incident or event.
As mentioned, our group uses a standard military and police form to record the interviewing of witnesses and a standard military and police incident report. These are available in packages of 100 from any specialty shop dealing with Police and Security supplies and in most cases local police departments and sheriff’s departs do not mind ordering such forms for an investigative group or supplying them with copies that can in turn be copied. The filling out of such a report should follow the guidelines set by the form itself which are basic questions which provide an overview of the incident being investigated and the testimony of witnesses. Keep in mind that all such forms should be made in triplicate and all entries should be initialed as a proof of accuracy after being read over by both the interviewer and interviewee. Likewise a recording of the interview on either videotape or audiotape is highly recommended but in all cases a standard release form permitting the use of such material for research purposes must be signed by the interviewee and notarized with a copy going to the interviewer, interviewee and to the archives of the organization conducting the investigation. Such documentation makes any follow-up on the case or a similar case far easier to undertake since a precedent has already been established. When dealing with an interview always keep in mind the cardinal rules of good journalism which apply to any investigation. Questions should be concerned with who, what, when, where, why and once this information has been gathered the open question of how can be addressed. Investigation reports should be consecutively numbered, dated and should contain the full given names, ages, occupation, physical address and telephone number of the party being interviewed and a statement in the words of the party being interviewed of exactly what happened and/or what was witnessed.
Documentation of this sort, done in a professional manner provides credibility for our field. It lifts our investigations above the level of hearsay and rumor and into the realm of hard science.
A separate form should be used, also in triplicate, which records the results of any and all electronic or photographic evidence gathered on an investigation and as in all other aspects of documentation should bear the signature and contact information of at least three (3) witnesses. Likewise this should also be filed in a coherent system that is readily accessible in the even to f a follow-up investigation of the same incident at a later date or as background material in an investigation of a similar incident.

NOTE: All interview forms should be signed and dated by all parties present and initialed line by line on each statement given by the witness. The form should also be accompanied by a photograph of the witness. Attached to the documentation form in a prominent place. It is highly recommended that any interview forms should also be legally notarized so as to constitute valid testimony in any ongoing investigation at a later date.

Tags: ghost, hunting, investigation, paranormal

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