Gathering Background Data
As much information as possible should be gathered about the case once the decision has been made to proceed with the investigation. Know what you are getting yourself into; find out all you can about the history of the house or building. Your clients are your first source for information about the property, but sometimes they don't know the complete story. Particularly in the case of older buildings, the full history may take some digging to uncover.
What shape is the property in, and are there any areas that should be avoided due to safety issues? This could be anything from quicksand on the property to weak floorboards, walls, or ceilings in the building. Safety issues should be discussed with the property owner at the initial interview, and the team members should be briefed immediately prior to starting the investigation. Always be aware of your surroundings. Most investigations are done at night, but a walk-through done under good lighting conditions offers you the opportunity to find and note safety hazards that might go unnoticed in the dark.
Permission Granted
You must have permission to explore a site. If it is necessary to trespass on someone's property to gain access to the property you're investigating, or if you are investigating an alleged haunting in an abandoned property or cemetery, be sure to get the proper permissions before setting foot on the site in question. You don't want to get in trouble with property owners or the law.
The popularity of ghost hunting has led to property damage and personal injury in some areas. In an allegedly haunted house in Worthington, Ohio, a homeowner fired shots to scare off a group of self-proclaimed teenage ghost hunters and shot a girl in the head. Trespassing ghost hunters have been arrested in many states.
You most certainly don't want to be arrested for trespassing. There are legal repercussions, and it will tarnish your professional reputation. Permission is usually not hard to obtain, and team members work better when they know they have every right to be there.
Institutional Resources
The researchers should visit the local library and the local historical society, if there is one in the area, to check on the background of the property. Because hauntings often occur in older properties, it may be necessary to dig quite far back into the property records.
Allot enough time to do this part of the investigation properly; it may take several long days of research to follow the paper trail. There is often red tape to be cut through at historical societies, so contacting them ahead of time is a good idea, particularly if they are only open a few days a week or have membership requirements to search their records.
Place a call to public libraries and ask pertinent questions about their hours and procedures for researchers. They will often have records on microfiche, and most have the local newspaper on file going back to the early days of the community. You can check records to see if anything newsworthy happened in the vicinity of your site. If a murder, suicide, or any other traumatic incident occurred on the premises, a search of newspapers may turn up something that verifies potential paranormal activity. It can also verify names of people or facts involved in the case.
You can search census records, court records, and birth, marriage, and death records at most county courthouses for a nominal fee. Once you've found out who lived in the house during a given time frame, these records can yield a lot of background information. State historical societies are a good place to access information if you have the last name of the person for whom you are searching. This can yield the birth and death years and possibly the names of other family members buried nearby.
Famed stage magician Harry Houdini was probably the first well-known psychic investigator. After his mother's death in the 1920s, Houdini turned his energies toward debunking spiritualists and so-called haunted houses. This activity cost Houdini the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a staunch believer in spiritualism.
This sort of record checking can be time consuming, especially in big cities where the higher population will mean sifting through a lot more data. Checking online to see if some records might be available through the city or county's Internet site is one way of saving time during this phase of the investigation. Cemetery records are sometimes listed in a database online.
