Ghost Articles & Haunted Stories
Ghost hunting is practiced by many paranormal investigation groups whose members sometimes promote their findings on the web as proof of hauntings. These findings are generally challenged by skeptics as wishful thinking, pareidolia or the product of scientifically unsound practices and beliefs. Critics question ghost-hunting's methodology, particularly its use of instrumentation, as there is no scientifically-proven link between the existence of ghosts and cold spots or electromagnetic fields.[
The Ghost Club, founded in London in 1862, is believed to be the oldest paranormal research organization in the world. Famous members of the club have included Charles Dickens, Sir William Crookes, Sir William Fletcher Barrett and Harry Price.
Early "ghost hunter" Harry PriceIn the mid
1880's, William James, philosopher and founder of
the American Psychological Association and brother
of Henry James suggested applying scientific method
to paranormal questions such as the existence of ghosts
or spirits. He found allies in England such as Alfred
Russel Wallace, Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick
and his wife, Eleanor, Edmund Gurney, and others to
form the core of the Society for Psychical Research
to collect evidence concerning apparitions, haunted
houses, and similar phenomena. The investigators gathered
case studies, attended séances, designed tests
of claimants' veracity, and ran what came to be known
as the Census of Hallucinations, which counted apparitions
of persons who were said to have made spectral appearances
on the day they died
Similar investigation into hauntings was undertaken
by Harry Price through London's National Laboratory
of Psychical Research during the 1920s, and later
in the 1950s and 60s by American independent researchers
such as Hans Holzer and Ed and Lorraine Warren. Other
paranormal and parapsychological investigators like
Loyd Auerbach, Christopher Chacon and William Roll
were each independently conducting field and laboratory
investigations in the 1970s and 80s, long before reality
TV cast a spotlight onto this subject matter.
Ghost hunting among part-time hobbyists began to be popular in the late 1970s with the founding of the Chicago area Ghost Tracker’s Club, which became the Ghost Research Society (GRS) in 1981. The popularity of the Ghostbusters movie of 1984 may have boosted the proliferation of such "ghost clubs".
In the last decade, the term "paranormal investigation" has increasingly been adopted by hobbyist and professional groups who do not investigate any other aspects of the paranormal such as Extra-sensory perception and Psychokinesis, but whose sole purpose is ghost hunting.
