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"Solving mysteries and understanding the world around us takes time and effort and investigation."

A paranormal investigator (PI) is a person who investigates claims regarding the presence of ghosts, demons, spirits, aliens, lake monsters, the chupacabra, and other "strange and bizarre" things. (The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP) lists 45 subjects for investigation. The Skeptic's Dictionary Paranormal Topics page lists over 50 subjects.) The paranormal investigator should be distinguished from the parapsychologist or laboratory researcher of paranormal although some paranormal investigators also do lab work

True believers, debunkers, and deniers:There are those who do not go into the field to investigate, nor do they study the reports of those who do, yet they accept or reject the conclusions of a PI. Such people are sometimes characterized as either "true believers" or "debunkers." It is probably fair to designate someone who accepts a claim that a ghost or lake monster has been verified, even though he or she hasn't done any investigation or studied any reports, as a "true believer." I don't think it is accurate to refer to everyone who rejects a claim that a ghost has been verified, even though he or she hasn't done any field investigations or studied a specific report, as a "debunker." To debunk is to expose something as false or as not what it is claimed to be. You can't expose something by simply denying its existence. A better term for such people would be "paranormal denier," rather than debunker or skeptic. Debunking is often what a PI does after investigating a place that others have claimed to know is haunted or inhabited by a monster, etc. Debunking is also something that a house PI might do after studying the reports of field PIs.

We have thousands of years of stories about strange phenomena, and many years of investigation into paranormal claims, but no hard evidence yet that a single ghost, for example, exists. If one is familiar with the history of ghost stories and spirit hunting, and one has studied the reports of many PIs, one might reject a current claim that a ghost has been spotted or that a building is haunted by a demon without doing a personal investigation. Since the existing scientific evidence has failed to verify the existence of a single ghost, lake monster, spirit, or alien being, the likelihood of the next positive report being true is slim. Thus, being a paranormal denier seems much more reasonable than being a true believer, accepting a ghost story without investigating it is madness. One should not claim to know that there is no ghost or demon, nor should one claim to know with absolute certainty that any investigation of allegedly haunted premises cannot possibly find the presence of a ghost or a natural explanation. Even a paranormal denier should and would admit that it is possible that the next ghost story will prove true, even if it is highly improbable.

Wide variation in quality of PIs:As already noted, there are many subjects that a PI might focus on. One of the more popular areas of investigation these days concerns ghosts and haunted buildings. Although many PIs who investigate ghosts and hauntings claim to be scientific and skeptical, a cursory look at websites and television programs devoted to "ghost hunting," "ghostbusting," or "hauntings" indicates that the claim is often hollow.

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual PIs and PI groups around the world. A Google search for "paranormal investigator" on April 15, 2010, yielded about 686,000 results. Several popular television programs in the U.S. feature PIs

investigating allegedly haunted places. A scientific PI does not assume that what he or she is investigating is haunted. The point of doing an investigation should be to investigate claims of weird phenomena and attempt to discover the cause or causes of the apparently paranormal experiences. The goal should not be to prove or disprove the existence of anything in particular.

Many PIs seem to be more interested in fame, fortune, and fun than they are in serious scientific investigation of the paranormal. I'm thinking of those television programs where "investigators" keep bumping into each other and shining their flashlights in the dark while uttering things like "Oh my God! Did you feel that?!" Even police officers are getting into the act. Larry Potash of WGN in Chicago reported on some Chicago cops who work on the side as Paranormal Detectives. Regular cops trade in their guns for EMF detectors and infrared cameras as they investigate places thought to be haunted. One of them claims ghosts give off energy that can be detected by an EMF detector. Did he read that in the instructions? I doubt it. Why not use a hydrometer? Maybe ghosts give off moisture. Why not use a compass? Maybe ghosts have magnetic fields that point to true north. The cops seem unaware that police radios or a number of other things could affect their EMF detectors.

It is disturbing that grown men who work by day as police officers are wasting their time investigating things that go bump in the night when they have no idea what they're doing. It is even more disturbing to find that their bosses approve. When it was pointed out to both cops and bosses that somebody might question their credibility in court if it were known that these guys were ghost chasers, the boss said they'd cross that bridge if they ever get to it.

Not only does WGN question the work of the paranormal detectives and wonder about the negative effect such activity might have on public confidence in the competence of its police officers, it brings in a scientific investigator, James Underdown of Independent Investigations Group, to show an alternative way to do a paranormal investigation. The skeptical way involves having a toolkit with critical thinking as the chief investigative tool, a much more valuable tool than an EMF detector for such work. The scientific paranormal investigator looks for a natural explanation for unusual sounds, drafts, closing of doors, etc.

The Chicago cops seem sincere in their belief that their investigations might have some value, and they're willing to be made a laughingstock for their activities, at least as long as their bosses condone their foolishness. They do not, however, give paranormal investigation a good name.

The scientific PI: The scientific PI approaches an investigation with an open mind, collects and examines as much relevant evidence as is reasonable for the claim being investigated, develops hypotheses, and tries to falsify them. Yes, a scientist tries to falsify, not verify, his hypothesis. If you set out to verify your hypothesis you are very likely to be misdirected by confirmation bias. You will look only for those things that confirm what you believe and you will systematically ignore those things that might disconfirm your belief. To keep an open mind, the scientist, like a good detective, must not form hypotheses too early in the investigation, as the tendency of all of us is to confirm, not disconfirm, our hypotheses. Unless you are lucky, and your first guess happens to be the right one, you run the risk of building up a convincing case for a false claim. (The study of criminal profiling offers examples of the dangers of forming hypotheses too early in an investigation.) The importance of trying to collect data that is relevant to the investigation in such a way that one's biases don't lead one to ignore important avenues of investigation cannot be overemphasized.

A scientific PI also knows the purpose and limits of the technology he or she uses in the investigation. The main tools in the PI's toolkit should be critical thinking and a healthy skepticism. If he brings a camera or tape recorder to the scene, he uses them for documentation, not as tools for identifying "spirits" or "demons". If you're collecting data from measuring devices, you have to take multiple samples at different times on different days. The good scientist works first at ruling out natural and obvious sources of phenomena. When a gate closes behind him, he doesn't think 'the ghost of grandma', he thinks wind or gravity. When a rapid thumping or scratching noise is heard above the room, he doesn't think 'the ghost of a murdered guest'; he thinks squirrels or rats, or tree branches scraping the roof. When a temperature change occurs, he does not think 'Satan is here'; he thinks wind draft or architectural feature that needs exploring. When he feels a presence, he might think infrasound rather than ghost. When he sees something that looks like a light or a human form moving without visible cause, he might ask 'is my brain tricking me? Is there a physical source for these perceptions?'

A scientific PI does all the necessary groundwork before actually setting out to a location, including historical research and interviewing people. One example should suffice to illustrate this point. It comes from PI Ben Radford.

The ghost hunting team of Ghost Hunters International traveled to Montego Bay, Jamaica, to investigate “one of the world’s most haunted places”: Rose Hall, said to be haunted by the ghost of an evil woman named Annie Palmer, “The White Witch of Rose Hall.”

Annie Palmer is in fact the title character in a famous Jamaican novel, The White Witch of Rose Hall, published in 1929 by Herbert G. de Lisser. There was no real Annie Palmer even remotely resembling that of the White Witch. Thus Annie Palmer never existed, thus they presumably could not have found any evidence of her ghost. Rose Hall, “the most haunted house in the Western Hemisphere” and indeed one of “the world’s most haunted places” is in reality merely myth passed off by careless writers as fact.

As psychologist Ray Hyman once quipped: don't try to explain something until you're first sure it happened.