Back to Ghosts

Ghosts is a paranormal claim. Existence of ghosts has not been scientifically verified. Attempts at scientific verification of ghosts have been made but unsuccessful. Ghosts remain a popular paranormal topic, intriguing many, experienced by some. But are ghosts really a real fragment of a formerly living human being? Or are they merely a synthetic experience solely in the imagination of the individual experiencer? I intend to find out.

Fortunately the paranormal claim of ghosts is associated with claims of physical manifestation. Ghosts, as described, are not just some immaterial spirit that only speaks to some and that has no interaction with our physical world. Ghosts are said to move objects, to push people down stairs, to cause a sensation of cold areas, to affect EMF-meters, to produce EVP-phenomena, to manifest visible manifestations in the form of orbs or partial white figures of people - to touch people and to communicate with those that can hear them. These are all claims that can be tested, and it must be possible to investigate whether ghosts are real, or imaginary.

As an excellent medium but also a skeptic I take on the challenge.

How I will investigate ghosts

My investigation of ghosts will take place in several steps of increasing difficulty and quality depending on if I pass preceding levels to advance on to the next. Simple preliminary stages that are easy to conduct and that cost nothing, but that for that reason may not be to the best scientific standards, will be sufficient for an initial assessment which already gives the claim a reasonable chance of being proven against.

Level 1 - Familiarizing with the phenomenon and simple fact check of ghosts

This first stage should cost nothing and should be simple to perform. This is my first approach at looking into my experiences of ghosts. It is also the first time ever that I listen to ghosts and interact with them in conversation and interview. I am the medium who is involved in this study. No technical equipment of any kind are engaged in this study. And so far, no extra visits to haunted sites for the purpose of investigation has been necessary. This study already involves seven different ghosts from three different sites and started on Monday September 20th 2010 when ghost Erik contacted me and I decided it gave the right opportunity to start investigating, and these three cases collectively have been going on until today October 10 2010.

1st site - four ghosts Location I have not visited but saw on tv. Four ghosts from there contacted me at their initiative.
2nd site - two ghosts Local building which I have visited but not for haunting purposes. The ghosts contacted me themselves.
3rd site - one ghost A ghost in my own home.

These three sites are all located in Sweden. I need to wrap up these cases before I leave the country at the end of the year. This is how I investigate at this level:
*Pay attention to the phenomenon and make notes and observations. In the past I have ignored my occasional visual and felt experiences of ghosts. Now I pay attention to it to define the experience.
*Listen to the ghosts. I have not done this before. Write down what they say verbatum.
*Engage in dialogue with the ghosts. See how they respond and what their behavior is like. Make notes. Has not been done before.
*Interview the ghosts and try to get specific facts from them that could later be checked out.
*Ask the ghosts for specialized facts from their time, information which I should not have been able to know about. Ask them for information which is most likely to be wrong than right if this is only the case of my imaginary processes.
*Once I decide that I have spoken enough with a ghost to wrap it up, submit a copy of the conversations to a skeptic. Then try to find records of these persons based on the information the ghosts gave. Look up words they have said, and information they have said. Try to find content in what the ghosts have said which could not reflect reality, either a word that does not exist, statements that are proven untrue regarding the time in which they lived or their occupation for instance, but most especially that the person of the name, date of birth, and so forth, did not exist at all. (Copies are submitted to a skeptic before doing the fact check, so that I could not have edited or written the conversations after performing the fact check. This however has a credibility issue - there will in most cases not be any way of confirming that I did not perform a fact check first and then construct a person based on that, unless certain records are only available after making an appointment etc. Still it is better procedure than to not submit the conversations to a skeptic at all, and it is a start at skeptical investigation.)
*Ask the ghosts to move objects or to make other physical manifestations, only at a beginners level nothing too complicated quite yet. (I do not want to engage too much with ghosts if turns out they are not real. It is better to work on the facts that they have given and to only if the fact check produces reason to proceed further, only then to engage more actively with the ghosts.)

This level of ghost investigation has several credibility issues which translates into that any confirming results can not be taken as evidence, only as indication to proceed with further investigation.

Next levels - If I get there

If collectively the persons depicted by the seven ghosts above can be confirmed, and words and information given by the ghosts seems accurate, I proceed to more elaborate ghost investigations. Adding to the previous methods, these will also include, introduced at increments:

*Visiting haunted sites. This costs money.
*Videotaping my visits (just to show you what it looks like). Costs money.
*Having skeptics take me to an undisclosed location maybe even blindfolded. That way there are no clues for me.
*Further work with asking ghosts to make physical manifestations of various forms.
*Testing the various technical equipment often used by ghost investigators, even though my main emphasis is on the medium's access to a ghost.
*And other methods that make the investigations more elaborate, more costly, more scientific, and its results more reliable.