Who You Gonna Call? Shelly and Andrew!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Happy Halloween! (And pass the Twizzlers.) Not to clog this with dreaded backstory, but when I attended the Midwest Writers Workshop (highly recommended!) they assigned a person to pick me up at the airport. She was lovely, and we chatted on the way to the event.

"So what do you do in real life," I asked, being curious and friendly.

"My husband and I are ghost-hunters," she said.

Now I ask you, Reds, when was the last time you heard that? 

So I got the whole scoop, of course but you all were haunting me. I knew it was a perfect blog for the Reds. 

So. No more backstory. 

Who You Gonna Call? 

by Shelly and Andrew Gage

There are a lot of ghost-hunting “reality” shows on TV these days.  Most of them do a pretty good job of showing investigations – the wandering in the dark, the use of various gadgets, and different ways of conducting EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) sessions.

  What they don’t show you, aside from leaving out the hours and hours spent reviewing footage and audio recordings in order to come up with the minute or less of evidence for the “reveal,” is how paranormal investigators work with their clients.  One of the most challenging parts of paranormal investigating is not dealing with the dead, but working with the living.

The first step in any investigation is getting familiar with the client.  We need to build trust with the client while at the same time gathering enough information to make a judgment call as to how reliable a witness he or she is.  Ideally, we’ll feel that the client is experiencing something, and the client will trust us enough to feel comfortable leaving us in his home, unsupervised, for several hours late at night.  (It’s not impossible to investigate with the client present, but it can be a hindrance particularly if the client is not familiar with investigative methods.)

A key thing to figure out is what the client wants.  What’s her motivation for calling us in?  What is he hoping we’ll find?  Some clients want confirmation that their house is haunted; others would much prefer that it wasn’t.  Our job as investigators is not only to capture evidence but also to manage expectations.  We aren’t going to manipulate our findings but our presentation of them will vary based upon what the client is looking for.  

If she’s really hoping that the activity she’s experiencing is grandma’s spirit lingering but all we find is evidence of bad wiring, we need to present that in a way that doesn’t belittle her feelings.  If he’s hoping we can prove that there are no ghosts and what we find can’t be debunked, then we need to find a way to assure him that paranormal presences aren’t automatically a threat. 

Clients call us in for many reasons.  In one of our first investigations of a private residence, we learned that our client was hoping we’d find proof that his mother’s home was haunted by the spirit of his grandfather.  While we did capture some evidence of a haunting, we weren’t able to say definitively that the presence was his grandfather.  Because we handled the situation with sensitivity, we were able to establish a good relationship with that client.  He’s joined us for other investigations, and referred people to us for help.

In another investigation, we discovered in the midst of reporting that we’d found nothing paranormal that our client was having trouble with her live-in boyfriend.  She’d been hoping we’d find a presence in her house which might be responsible for the changes she was seeing in him.  It was a tricky situation to handle - we’re paranormal investigators, not relationship counselors.  To our relief, our client was satisfied with our report, and she was so pleased that she referred her sister to us.

In addition to investigating private residences at the request of home-owners, we also investigate public sites.  In these cases, our concern is assuring the clients that they will control access to the results. 

Some sites would rather not announce that they’re haunted.  Others embrace it and are pleased to share whatever evidence we bring them.  We’ve investigated both.  A local bar was glad to have us in to investigate, but we had to promise not to share our results or even reveal we’d investigated there.  We have been scrupulously careful to not reveal anything about our investigation. 

On the other hand, the civic theater was thrilled to have us in to investigate and pleased to have us share our results on our website.  Because we’ve honored our agreements with both clients, we are welcome to return to investigate again and we are able to use the theater as a reference when talking with other places about investigating. 

If we do our jobs correctly, we will leave our clients feeling satisfied, regardless of what evidence we do or do not capture.  The client should feel that we’ve done a thorough job, that we’ve listened and considered what he’s reported to us, and that we’ve addressed any concerns she might have.

 In the end the ghosts might prove unreliable, but we never should.



HANK: Amazing, huh? Thank you for such a unique insight!  Okay, I have a LOT of questions. Like--tell us more about these photos! But you guys go first.