This particular blog post was inspired by Titiana Ladley’s comment on my post last month about hounding my husband, who’s a paranormal investigator, for story ideas.
Honestly, no, I don’t. Sure, we’ll debate the philosophy of the paranormal, what the possibility certain things are—like are evp’s (electric voice phenomenon) anything more than just bubbles in time, looping back to tell us something? There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG where the crew keeps randomly hearing voices, all mushed together, and barely understandable, at least until they get to a certain point in time, and the voices become clear again. My husband and I have discussed the possibility that evp’s are nothing more than a similar phenomenon.
And I’m sure if I wanted to, I could run with such theories and come up with some far out stories, but I don’t.
Partially because when my husband, who’s an investigator, and a psychic medium, reminds me of how things work, I tend to get hung up on wanting everything to be as real as possible, and then I lose all the fantastic that made the story idea interesting in the first place.
Because, I have to say, in a clinical sense, ghost hunting is boring. The actual activity that happens is minor—gust of wind, movement of a door, or slight rearranging of items. Mostly it is running around in the dark with digital recorders, video cameras, and maybe some kind of emf (electrical magnetic field) detector. A lot of the jumpiness that you see on television is done for dramatic effect for a show… In essence, it’s several hours of being quiet, wandering around in the dark.
I know there’s a lot of people out there who find it fascinating, but what most people don’t know is that on the shows where they constantly find paranormal activity, it can take months of investigations to find the one place that actually has some kind of claims.
My husband investigates almost every weekend of the year. Different places.
How many has he been to this year that he would consider truly haunted? Maybe seven. Most of the time, there is no definitive evidence gathered to prove one way or another that a haunting exists.
And if there’s one thing that ghost hunters want, it’s definitive proof that this stuff actually exists. That’s why they do this—they want rock-solid, scientific evidence.
And that has something to do with why I don’t take too many of my husband’s ghost stories and write them—they’re not fantastic enough to write about, they’re more the scientific, and I love the fantastic.
Candice Gilmer writes paranormal romance and contemporary romance for Samhain and Lyrical Press. Her website contains lots of excerpts and soon-to-be-released material, including her new Christmas story, Mission of Christmas. And she’s just starting to figure out Word Press, so bare with her…
