It is a question that paranormal investigators often hear, "Is my house haunted?" … or … "Is there a ghost in my home?". Maybe you are curious about your house possibly being haunted. For traditional scientists, there are no such things as ghosts or hauntings. So, for many people the answer to ‘is a house haunted’ is always ‘NO’. But for those who are ‘ghost chasers’ or paranormal investigators, answering the question about a haunting requires time consuming research which involves both instruments that can measure anomalies and disciplined observation. In the end, it may well require the assistance of someone like a psychic medium, clairvoyant or spirit medium to help with dealing with hauntings and/or ghosts.
Most often paranormal investigators fail to find conclusive proof of a haunting. More often than not investigators find logical explanations for seemingly paranormal events. It might be a faulty furnace or air in the water pipes or a tree branch bumping the house. However, every now and then a ghost investigation turns up evidence that can indicate a ghost(s) or some sort of spirit or paranormal activity is taking place. Sometimes this evidence can be quite astonishing. Perhaps the best way to help you understand hauntings and haunting investigations is to provide some examples. Below are a couple of examples of ghost hunting and paranormal investigating that can provide some insight into uncovering if a location is haunted or not.
A Ghostly Visitation of a Deceased Loved One
There was a woman who thought she was being haunted by her husband who had passed away only a few months earlier. She said when she went to bed at night she could hear him breathing. She could feel the room get cold. And she felt as if her deceased husband was sitting in his favorite chair watching her sleep. Finally, this woman couldn’t deal with this nightly haunting any longer and called a local paranormal investigation group. The paranormal investigators asked the woman to spend the night at a hotel while they set up instruments in her home to monitor possible ghostly events. The woman waited up all night at the hotel knowing the investigators would catch the evidence she needed to prove to friends and relatives she wasn’t imagining her husband’s spirit visiting nightly.
The investigators came up with nothing on their instruments and observed no paranormal events. The woman was completely frustrated and despondent. However, one of the paranormal investigators, seeing her distress, volunteered to stay with her the following night to see if he could provide any help. The investigator set up a thermometer to monitor changes in room temperature in the woman’s bedroom and ask the woman to call him if she felt her husband’s spirit was visiting.
Late in the evening the woman called to the investigator (who was staying in the room next door) and said the room was getting cold and she could hear her husband breathing. The investigator entered her room, checked the thermometer and, yes, the room had become considerably colder, much colder than his room next door. He began to listen and, yes, he could slightly hear what could be called breathing near the woman’s husband’s chair. He noticed curtains behind the chair and discovered the window was ever so slightly cracked open and with each breeze there was a barely audible ‘whooshing’ sound. The slightly cracked window also explained why her room was much colder. A strong breeze could also slightly disturb the curtains behind the chair, giving the illusion of motion in and around the chair, especially in a dimly lit room.
When the woman’s husband was alive he would often wait till his wife was asleep and go crack open the window (he always got to warm in the bedroom and she often got too cold). In the morning the woman would find the window cracked open and complain to her husband about how cold she got at night. She would then close the window and ask him to leave it shut (which he never did). After her husband passed on, the woman thought she had shut the window and figured there was no longer any reason to check it.
Greatly relieved, the woman thanked the investigator. The investigator explained he was happy to help and that he knew, from experience, that grief can often cause us to experience the world in a different way. Much to her relief, the ‘haunting’ stopped. But, the woman was left with one mystery: She was sure she had closed and locked that window the day after her husband’s funeral.
An Unusual Apartment Haunting
A young woman contacted a local paranormal group and reported she was being haunted. She would hear noises, felt a presence and could swear someone was watching her in her apartment. No one she knew had passed away. She’d told her parents about the haunting and they told her it was likely just nerves (since this was her first time living away from home). Besides, all those older buildings in the city converted to apartments had some sort or creaking, cracking noises going on. Her parents suggested that their daughter needed to get use to the new sounds and atmosphere of her first apartment. But, the young woman just knew there was more to the sounds and that eerie feeling of not being alone or being watched. She contacted the apartment manager and asked if someone had died in the apartment. The apartment manager just laughed at her and told her she was just nervous, being such an attractive young woman living alone in an apartment for the first time. Finally, out of desperation, she called the local paranormal investigators.
The paranormal investigators agreed to help, but the young woman had a unique condition to their investigation: She wanted the investigation done quietly, covertly, so as not to disturb the neighbors and have them thinking she was a bit ‘crazy’. The investigators agreed and discreetly began moving technical gear and computers into her apartment.
It only took one night and the paranormal team discovered an anomaly. Using listening devices and cameras strategically placed around the apartment (and one hidden outside the young woman’s front door), the investigators discovered the sound of what seemed to be footsteps. Using a sophisticated computer program they were able to filter out and account for all sounds except these peculiar footsteps.
The investigators decided the next move would be to empty the apartment of people and combine EVP (electronic voice recording) with video recordings and random photo snap shots. The photo snap shots would be triggered by any sounds within her bedroom. Investigators wanted to pay special attention to the young woman’s bedroom where the unusual sound of footsteps were thought to originate. Again, the investigators struck pay dirt – not only did they record the sounds of footsteps but they also got a number of photographs triggered by sounds in the bedroom. However, there was something mysterious about all the material the investigators collected.
The video never recorded anyone or anything in the bedroom. A number of photographs had automatically been taken of in response to the sound of footsteps and a strange rustling sound. Most of the photographs showed an empty room. But two photographs seemed to show a ghostly image that appeared to be pointing at a wall in the bedroom that faced the outside street. The combined evidence made little sense. EVP generally records sounds that are almost too soft for human hearing. Sometimes EVP recordings catch louder sounds, but often there is more on the recording than just a few, typical audible sounds. Yet, these footsteps and rustling noises were loud enough to trigger a sound controlled camera. It was the couple of photos that caught the ghostly image that fascinated the investigators. The ‘ghost’ was NOT walking. In fact, this image was so faint that the group debated if it wasn’t some sort of reflective light from the camera flash. What everyone did seem to agree on was that whatever they were looking at was clearing pointing to a particular wall, twice, in two different photos.
The next night the paranormal group decided to take a different approach. In teams the investigators would quietly watch the wall with portable thermal imaging cameras. Towards evening the group was rewarded for their patience and caught a heat signature on the wall. The thing was, this image was giving off quiet footsteps and rustling sounds and moving slowly across the wall. Then, the image moved into the next room. The team decided to track this heat generating image and followed it towards the back of the apartment. Wordlessly a few team members quickly moved outside the apartment to the street in order to track the image as it moved out of the interior of the young woman’s apartment. After a few minutes they lost track of the image and the group gathered at the last location the thermal image had been seen. They soon discovered a trap door that entered a reasonably wide space between walls. It was an old passageway for pipes and electrical that ran between the street and the inside of the young woman’s apartment. And, the team became convinced they had been tracking a real person, not a ghost.
The police were called. Officers soon began questioning the young woman’s neighbors, the building owner and the landlord. It was revealed that there were a number of these passageways throughout the building. Soon evidence uncovered that the apartment manager had created ‘peep holes’ in the apartment walls of tenets. He had been spying, even photographing some of tenets. The landlord/apartment manager was charged with criminal voyeurism and fired.
Do you have questions about ghosts, spirits or hauntings? Give Psychic Elijah a call at – 1-800-340-8374
The above two examples of ‘hauntings’ help illustrate how answering the question, "Is my house haunted?", can be a difficult one to answer. Just by examining a ‘haunting’ carefully can uncover perfectly reasonable explanations for mysterious sounds, temperature changes and supposed ghostly images. Yet, every now and then, inexplicable events can occur that indicate an authentic haunting. Documented, well researched hauntings are the exception not the rule when investigators are called to help homeowners explain seemingly paranormal events.
If you need help with, or just want to ask questions about, ghosts and hauntings, visit 1800 Ghost Help. You can reach any of their ghost specialists at 1-800-340-8374. You might also enjoy checking out Ghost Hunting For Beginners.
