Research for Hauntings: Key Points
- Equipment can record strange activity, but only historical research can show why a place is haunted and who might be haunting it. When current and former occupants who have never met tell the same stories, their matching accounts are hard to dismiss.
- Current occupants and longtime neighbors can share memories and local folklore. Their accounts may be inaccurate or exaggerated, so researchers should check them against written records.
- Deeds show who owned the land, and city directories show who actually lived in the house, including renters. Together they create a timeline of past occupants who can be researched or contacted.
- Obituaries, news stories, death certificates, institutional records, autopsies, coroner’s inquests, and police reports can show how and why people died at a location. Older records sometimes hide the real cause of death, so researchers should read them carefully.
- Plat maps, Sanborn fire insurance maps, building permits, architectural drawings, and vintage photographs show how a property changed over time. They can even explain odd details like drafts coming from doors or windows that no longer exist.
- Librarians, archivists, and historical society staff can lead researchers to collections and records they might never find alone. Online databases like DiedInHouse.com can speed up early research, but researchers should check their results against primary sources.
Introduction
Every ghost story needs a home. And every home has a history. Cameras, recorders, and other devices can document weird activity but don’t have the ability to explain why it happens or who might be involved. Zak Bagans (2019) says that hauntings are born from past events and that without understanding history, investigators cannot fully comprehend them. Once a place appears genuinely haunted, the questions shift. What went down? Who lived, or suffered, or died within those walls? Ghost-hunting becomes a sort of detective job—answering these questions. That work depends on libraries, archives, public records offices, and the qualified workers who care for them. Careful research with primary sources gives an investigation a historical grounding, and it can provide evidence that equipment alone cannot.
Building a Sound Research Approach
How can I get started researching ghost hauntings or other paranormal events? Use designs that anticipate common confounders in paranormal research (e.g., cueing, publication bias, and researcher degrees of freedom), and detail how you will reduce them. This approach is in line with ideas for robust, preregistered designs to substantiate anomalous effects while reducing conventional explanations (LeBel et al., 2022). Discussions within the Journal of Scientific Exploration emphasize the necessity of prospective testing that avoids bias and p-hacking, thereby increasing evidential standards (LeBel et al., 2022).
Identify the historical ancestry of the discipline of parapsychology with growing methodological safeguards. Early parapsychology produced standardized methodologies (e.g., Rhine-era ESP studies), while current scholars warned of limitations and the need for strict controls (Rhine, 1950; Alvarado, 2020). Grounding your project in these historical approaches allows you to justify your methodology and provides readers a way to evaluate methodological rigor.
Starting With People and Existing Records
Technology can’t prove a haunting like history does. In a situation described by Bagans (2019), the current inhabitants of a residence report certain incidents, and prior owners report the same events. Never met. Never traded stories. Testimony like this from individuals who have no relationship to each other is difficult to refute. But to track down those previous owners, an investigator must first establish the history of the property. Troy Taylor says that houses have a past, just like individuals do and that clues can be found in plain sight, such as a child’s growth chart hidden beneath layers of paint (Taylor, 2009, referenced in Bagans, 2019). Even new house constructions have a backstory, because the land beneath them was utilized for something previously. The researcher needs only a handful of tools: a strong notepad, a sharpened pencil, a magnifying glass to review documents, ample curiosity, and a decent supply of energy (Bagans, 2019).
Research usually starts with the people closest to the property. Current residents can share what they know, but their experiences may influence their accounts (Bagans, 2019). Another reliable source can be longtime neighbors. Any woman who has lived down the street for 50 years may be able to tell you about most of the prior residents (Potts, 2004). and any local folklore surrounding the house. Folklore is often only partially true, and while Bagans (2019) acknowledges its partiality, he warns against dismissing all aspects of it, as it is still relevant (Potts, 2004). The researcher may be guided in the right direction, “although sometimes by a meandering route” (p. 2). These oral accounts serve as an initial step. They are not the target. They have to examine their allegations against written documents.
A researcher should verify whether someone else has documented the property before starting from scratch. Each state has a historic preservation officer that submits notable structures to the National Register of Historic Places (Bagans 2019). The Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record have also recorded tens of thousands of structures, with measured drawings, photographs, and written histories available on microfilm and at the Library of Congress (Bagans, 2019). Local history books can be valuable for public buildings or notable homes, and occasionally they can even contain the ghost stories themselves (McNeill,2006).
Tracing Owners, Occupants, and Deaths
However, most houses are unremarkable, necessitating a piecemeal approach to reconstructing their history from individual sources. Bagans (2019) relates this technique to genealogy research. Land deeds serve as an excellent starting point. A deed is a document recording the transfer of ownership from grantor to grantee. It normally gives names, a sale price, a description of the property and sometimes limits on the usage of land (Taylor, 2009, cited in Bagans, 2019). However, deeds have their limitations. They say they are the proprietors of the land, not of the structures on it and they mention nothing about tenants. City directories fill the void. They provide the names, residences, and occupations of the people of a city for a given year and often contain a reverse directory, which enables investigators to look up a street address to identify who lived there (Bagans, 2019). Using deeds and directories together, an investigator can create a timeline of occupants. That timetable allows for courteous, professional letters to past residents inquiring if they ever observed anything weird.
The sequence of names leads to newspapers, one of the richest primary sources out there. City libraries maintain past issues and often provide indexes of obituaries, including their publication dates (Bagans, 2019). Furthermore, genealogical and historical societies may have copies of obituaries (Taylor, 2009, as referenced in Bagans, 2019). An obituary is a short biography and the language used may suggest the manner of death. A term such as “died suddenly” could refer to an accident, a murder, a suicide, or even a heart attack. Words like “lingering” or “long illness” could mean cancer, heart disease, or tuberculosis (Bagans, 2019). If a death was dramatic, the paper that day undoubtedly had a news story about it.
Official death records go further. Researchers have to take considerable caution with death certificates, which list the cause of death. Older certificates frequently obscured the true cause to protect a family’s reputation, like reporting a suicide as an accident, and often they utilize outdated disease names that require a glossary (Bagans, 2019). Documents from hospitals, asylums, tuberculosis sanatoriums, poorhouses, and jails can be used to document deaths. If the institution closed long ago, accessing these documents may be difficult without the support of a historical society (Bagans, 2019). Coroner’s and autopsy documents are particularly beneficial when a death is suspicious. Coroner’s inquests specifically called witnesses, had seated juries, and had findings from the postmortem examination (Bagans, 2019). The vast majority of coroner’s reports are public. Police reports are public records as well, but there may be a modest cost and a short wait (Bagans, 2019). Funeral home records are less accurate, as they are private, and access depends on the business.
Physical Records, Digital Tools, and Library Support
Maps and construction records document the physical history of a property. Plat maps document how land was split into streets, blocks, and lots. Rural plat maps might even include cemeteries (Bagans, 2019). From the 1860s, Sanborn maps for fire insurance were made for over 12,000 American cities and towns, showing the size, shape, construction details, and function of buildings (Bagans, 2019). Beautiful bird’s-eye view maps from the late 1800s are excellent, but they mostly help with well-recognized or highly visible destinations. Building permits can show where doors and windows used to be, which can be important when residents complain of drafts or chills they can’t explain (Bagans, 2019). Architectural plans, vintage photographs, and biographical encyclopedias from the late 1800s and early 1900s fill in the picture of who lived in a house and what it formerly looked like.
The Internet has become an additional instrument for study. According to Bagans (2019), Ron Condrey created DiedInHouse.com in 2015 after finding out that someone had recently died in his purchased home. When Bagans wrote his book, the site was only for the United States and it had limited records because it only began digitizing in the 1980s. Since then the site has grown. It now features searches for homes, business properties, and hotels across the United States, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Australia, and South Africa (DiedInHouse.com, n.d.). The site says its reports can contain deaths at a home, including dates and causes, adjacent registered sex offenders, meth activity, fire incidents, proximity to cemeteries, and the names of former occupants (DiedInHouse.com, n.d.). Its most extensive alternative, the Premium Search, does not extend beyond U.S. addresses (DiedInHouse.com, n.d.). These tools can speed up the early stages of research. However, a database report should be viewed as a lead; primary sources should confirm it, especially for older homes with histories predating digital records.
Use original publications (conference proceedings, early periodicals such as the Journal of Parapsychology, and accounts of original experiments) rather than secondary summaries. The very establishment of journals during the Rhine era (e.g., Journal of Parapsychology) indicates the necessity of primary reporting routes for psi research (Various, 2022; Alvarado, 2020).
When citing original sources, report methodological data that are relevant for replication: target type, blinding techniques, randomization, sample numbers, control conditions, and preregistration status. Historical overviews have shown that many foundational publications lacked the full methodological transparency that is anticipated now and required explicit reporting in primary sources (Rhine, 1950; Alvarado, 2020).
The most valuable partners for the investigator throughout this process are library experts (Lorenzen, 2001). Reference librarians know whether local newspapers have been microfilmed or digitized, where the obituary indexes are maintained, and whether the library has Sanborn or plat maps for the area. Archivists and local history librarians are able to direct scholars to particular collections, manuscript files, and photograph archives that are not listed in any internet database. Staff members of historical and genealogy societies may have vast knowledge of local families and neighborhoods. Bagans (2019) suggests that when visiting a library or historical society, researchers take a current snapshot of the house, since it may trigger someone’s memories. This technique can also be used to compare against books on house styles. Researchers discover that the best outcomes come when they state clearly what their goals are, ask for help finding particular types of records, and treat the resources and the staff’s time with respect. Many librarians also have the expertise to obtain data from other institutions, which expands the search much beyond one building.
Conclusion
Researching a haunted place takes time, but the result can be substantial. When investigators leave behind their technology and travel to libraries and archives, they can link reported activity to real individuals and real events. Deeds and directories tell you who resided in a house. Newspapers, death certificates, and coroner’s records tell the story of what happened to them. Maps, permits, and images offer an in-depth look at the structural changes over time. Library-excelling, well-recognized groups and modern databases are beneficial along the way. Together these materials help investigators conduct what Bagans (2019) deems possibly the most crucial element of the work: connect the spirit in the house to photographs formerly lived there. A ghost story without history is just a story. It is evidence worthy of serious consideration, derived from primary sources.
References
Alvarado, C. S. (2020). Early Psychical Research Reference Works: Remarks on Nandor Fodor’s Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 34(4), 717–754. https://doi.org/10.31275/20201785
Bagans, Z. (2019). Ghost-hunting for dummies. For Dummies.
DiedInHouse.com. (n.d.). DiedInHouse.com: Your trusted source for stigmatized properties and house history. Retrieved [Month Day, Year], from https://diedinhouse.com
LeBel, E. P., Augustine, K., & Rock, A. J. (2022). Beyond the BICS Essays: Envisioning a More Rigorous Preregistered Survival Study. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 36(2), 436–447. https://doi.org/10.31275/20222691
Lorenzen, M. (2001). The land of confusion? High school students and their use of the World Wide Web for research. Research Strategies, 18(2), 151–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0734-3310(01)00074-5
McNeill, L. S. (2006). Contemporary ghost hunting and the relationship between proof and experience. Contemporary legend, 9, 96-110.
Potts, J. (2004). Ghost hunting in the twenty-first century. From shaman to scientist: Essays on humanity’s search for spirits, 211-232.
Rhine, J. B. (1950). Psi Phenomena and Psychiatry. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 43(11), 804–814. https://doi.org/10.1177/003591575004301106
Various, V. (2022). Conference Abstracts: SSE/PA Connections, 2021. Journal of Parapsychology, 86(1), 17–98. https://doi.org/10.30891/jopar.2022.01.04
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