Urban Legends Are A Great Way To Gain Experience

Urban Legends Are A Great Way To Gain Experience.

You can tell a professional paranormal team from a thrill-seeking team by the amount of preparation they do before the investigation.  The actual investigation is only the tip of the spear.  Researching the site and interviewing witnesses is the basic foundation of any paranormal investigation.  Because without research, how does your team know what they are investigating?

Like all things in the paranormal, research isn’t instinctual.  It takes practice and experience to learn how to do it correctly.  But there is always a catch-22 in the paranormal.  Investigators gain experience through investigating.  You can only gain experience by participating in active investigations.  Since investigations are hard to come by, experience is hard to gain.  So how does a team gain the experience they need?  Luckily, I know a shortcut.

I started out my paranormal career by investigating cemeteries and urban legends.  Now, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the internet wasn’t as prominent.  This meant searching through old newspapers, books, and other reference materials to find information.  Also, if you wanted to find what was usually an obscure, hard-to-find place, you had to learn to read a map and navigate using road atlases.

Today, the internet and GPS make it easy to do research and find places.  If a team wants to gain experience, I usually suggest investigating an urban legend.  These places usually don’t require you to trespass.  Information is also readily available.  It also allows your team to gain experience in researching a location and planning an investigation—all the skills a newly formed paranormal team needs to learn.

House investigations are hard to come by, especially for new teams starting out.  I also don’t recommend a new team attempt a house investigation until they have had several chances to work together.  Urban legends are perfect for team building.  Most urban legends usually have a paranormal twist anyway, so researching and then investigating them is a perfect opportunity to learn necessary skills.  Urban legends will also provide your team with a chance to answer the four basic questions every investigation should strive to answer—the who, what, when, and why a place is haunted.