Ghost Hunting...

Ghost hunting is a general phrase used by paranormal enthusiasts to describe the process of investigating an alleged haunting .

Typically, a 'hunting party' will involve 4-8 individuals who work as a team to collect evidence of paranormal activity. Each team member performs duties that are related to their particular field of expertise or interest. It is common practice for ghost hunters to behave in a scientific manner as they observe and record data using a variety of electronic gadgets, such as; EMF Meters , digital thermometers, infrared and night vision cameras, handheld video cameras, digital audio recorders, and computers.

Organized teams of ghost hunters are also called paranormal investigation groups.

Origins

Pliny the Younger recorded what has been regarded as the first story of a ghost hunt in 100 AD. A hearsay tale already a century old when Pliny told it, the anecdote concerns an allegedly haunted house in ancient Athens being investigated by a philosopher named Athenodoros Cananites .

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.

In the mid 1880's, William James , philosopher and founder of the American Psychological Association and brother of Henry James suggested applying scientific method to supernatural 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 alleged 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 ESP and Psychokinesis , but whose sole purpose is ghost hunting.