Investigating in a different way…
Often when we discuss the paranormal and investigating ghosts, we think about wandering around dark old buildings with various gadgets and our trusty torches.
These are concepts and approaches that have now become common place understanding, which have been backed up by mainstream media and TV.
Personally my beginnings in the field involved more of a research perspective with me reading many books and constantly seeking answers. The concept of investigating over night is actually relatively new to me, I have only really been out on over night investigations for the last twelve years really. Okay so twelve years may seem a while, but before that I spent over twenty years in libraries and looking stuff up online, once that became a thing.
However early on I knew that these opportunities to visit historic locations overnight should not be wasted and I took it as a chance to try and document as much as possible. In fact that was how my website originally began, as a place I could share the details of my investigations with other like minded individuals. So, please check out some of my investigations and cases over the years.
Documenting experiences and these investigations was something that seemed relatively common place to me at that point, especially as much of what I had read had come about in a similar fashion.
Strangely as I became more involved with over night investigations or ghost hunting, I began to realise that documenting those experiences or writing up investigations was not as popular as I had first thought. Don’t get me wrong there are many out there that do document their investigations and do share them too, but many don’t leaving a wealth of information lost.
Once I joined the Society for Psychical Research I was happy to once again discover a wealth of information related to the paranormal. Most of which has now been compiled over more than one hundred years of research since the SPR was founded back in 1882. However it also highlighted the need for good hard data to back up any research I may do moving forward.
It’s not quite as exciting as ghost hunting…
The first thing I want to make clear is that by asking to look more at the data available, I am by no means saying that people should give up ghost hunting or overnight investigations. Although there is a lot of data out there that I feel needs to be ‘crunched’ in order to find patterns that could provide answers to the many questions we regularly ask.
As a matter of fact the continuation of ghost hunting may actually be key to this in order to maintain the new experiences and add them to the ones we already have. The most important thing is that we should document these experiences in order to comprehend the possible bigger picture.
I know that keeping track of all of our paranormal experiences isn’t always practical in the moment they occur, but we should do our best to do so. Granted that focussing on tracking this is considerably less exciting than standard ghost hunting, but still its something you could do afterwards.
Gathering lots of this kind of data is actually a million miles away from exciting, unless like me you have a thing for stats! Yes, I am that guy that gets a little excited about data, as you’ve probably guessed by now.
However there is a real need nowadays to capture this data in vast quantities in order to see if there are patterns, which could help us understand more. The problem that I see more and more of is that many of us are guilty of going out ghost hunting, but fail to gather any data. The strange thing about this is that these days we have so many gadgets and access to media devices, but we fail to document simple information on the experience.
Now don’t get me wrong there are a lot of people taking photos, capturing video and audio during their investigations; but we need to think a little more outside the box. Unfortunately these on their own are not really enough and if we want to gather ‘evidence’ for science we need more than that.
You may recall a previous post that I made, asking Could Artificial Intelligence Help Understand Paranormal Experiences. The cold truth is that this is already beginning with AI and Machine Learning looking at vast quantities of data in order to look at problems and seek patterns. In fact I was only contacted today by a group that are already looking into this by analysing ‘Phantasms of the Living’ using machine learning. Please take a look at what Maryland Paranormal Research have already achieved here..
This highlighted a fantastic opportunity to start looking at some real data or information to find those all important patterns we all seek. So, hopefully I will be giving you a little more on this in the near future after a few more emails back and forth between Maryland Paranormal Research and I.
Here’s where I need your help…
In order to understand more about paranormal activity, something that I have been looking at is gathering data on experiences that many of you may have had at some point. These experiences could be anything really in the realms of the paranormal, from simple feelings of temperature change to seeing a full blown apparition standing there waving at you. The experiences could be equally psychical too, that way even the interactions a medium has become relevant to this study. This is something that I know needs to be done in order to fully research some of my own ideas around psi and my theory of telepathic interaction too.
This approach of gathering data on the experiences of many people is certainly not new, in fact the SPR conducted a census back in the late 1800’s to first look into this. A census that has been repeated at least twice since. In fact there has been quite a few studies over the last hundred years of this manner.
As a little background on this, something else that I am doing is to gather data from other sources and reports to add into this piece of research to ensure I gather loads on this. Which means hitting the books and returning to the libraries too. So, that means the study will incorporate data from you guys using the link below, data that I have looked up in the SPR Journals and Proceedings, information from various books, information from various websites and of course my own investigations too.
However if you wish to help me out and tell me all about your experiences, please follow the link below and complete the form.
The Paranormal Activity Form
The form does ask for quite a bit of information, but don’t worry enter what you know for now, the more the better though. Also, if you’re not comfortable sharing your own home address and phone number then just enter NA in those fields. The location where the activity occurred is important though to enable me to tie it to other reports for the same location.
What is cool about this link is once you’ve been on an investigation, if you’ve experienced something then you can simply follow the link above and detail it. Then there will be a record that only took five minutes to log. You can even do it on your phone too! Just bookmark it for use.
The form does relate to one experience at one point in time too, so not for a sequence of experiences or events that took place over a longer time frame. However if there are several significant experiences that occurred over a length of time please feel free to add one for each.
The link does use a mail list subscriber, which I manage, but will not be sending you random stuff from, as that’s just not cool right! As the list is related to documenting paranormal experiences the only thing I may use it for is to gather more information on your experience from you by email if you’re happy to do so..
So, please click on the link and tell me about your paranormal experiences. In advance I would just like to thank you all for helping me with this, its greatly appreciated and please keep an eye on this website for more details as the research progresses.
Ashley Knibb 
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