Dr. Mark Farley's Personal Blog

One of the reasons why this woman was so scared is that we are programmed from birth to fear anything paranormal.

When you visit a city and want to take a ghost tour, always look for a local tour company. You’ll get an authentic experience and help the local economy. The tour guides from local tour agencies work in, live in, and investigate the areas they tour. The stories they share are their own, not intellectual property owned by a large corporation.

With social media and the chance to monetize, everyone wants to be an influencer, and the chance of becoming famous is a hell of a temptation. Today, it seems the main motivation for people to become paranormal investigators is to gain fame and appear on television. As a community, we need to rise above these temptations.

I believe if you’re truly trying to “help” the client. You should be focusing on explaining the events they are witnessing. In these situations, proof doesn’t help anyone but you; explanations help the client. Deep down, the practice of debunking only helps the investigator. Because deep down, through this facade of skewed skepticism, they really want to capture the “Holy Grail” of paranormal evidence. Investigations are for explaining; research is for proving.

I am rather strict during the investigation because the last thing I want is a team full of thrill seekers. I want professionals; I want standards; and I want quality. If our field is going to be accepted as a legitimate field of study. These are the three traits I feel every team must strive for.

A haunting is nothing more than an attachment that enables a spirit to interact in our world. Without that ability to interact in our world, we would never know that a site is haunted. In fact, I surmise that paranormal investigations consist of nothing more than investigators collecting evidence of these interactions.

The most commonly accepted definition of a residual haunting is one that recurs repeatedly, like a video playing on a perpetual loop. In my experience, if a haunting truly repeats itself, it should be predictable.