Introduction to Ghost Hunting
(c)2009 by Fiona Broome, founder of HollowHill.com
Ghost tours
If your community has a regular ghost tour, that's a great way to get started.
Go on the tour, note the locations, and return to them for your own research.
Generally, ghost tours focus on public places that you can visit on your own. However, we recommend evaluating their presentations carefully.
Many tours mix genuine history with urban legends and impressive theatrics. It's important to verify every story. In some cases, only about 20% of the tale is true.
Ghost tours are designed to be entertaining... not necessarily actual history.
Here's a classic example: In New Orleans' French Quarter, most ghost tours stop at the infamous Lalaurie Mansion. Many tour guides describe - in lurid detail - how an abused servant girl leaped to her death from a window on the top floor of the home. Tourists dutifully take pictures of that third floor, hoping for orbs or other ghostly evidence.
However, when Madame Lalaurie lived there, the house had only two floors. The third was a later addition, long after the time of the horrific stories that make the Lalaurie Mansion the high point of most local ghost tours.
Websites
Although the easiest to research, we place websites low on our list of resources. Many of them simply copy from each other. Even the original online story may have been a misquote from a book of folklore.
For example, HollowHill.com was the first website to describe the hauntings at New Hampshire's Gilson Road cemetery.
We provided the information for the Halloween 2000 Nashua (NH) newspaper article.
We've also used that site as a reliable training spot for new members of our research team.
So, a lot of people know about Gilson's ghosts.
However, when we search on the Internet, we find impossible and ridiculous stories about that haunted cemetery, and some completely misleading directions to the site. Clearly, the authors of the webpages have never been there. They're just building on others' stories.
At least two websites report tales of the ghost of "Mary Miller Jason" of the Old Burial Yard in York, Maine. They're repeating an error in a regional ghost book. According to the haunted gravestone, the ghost's name is actually Mary Nasson.
We do use the Internet to research ghost stories. Then, we look for additional information to confirm each story, before visiting the site. At the very least, if the ghost has a first and last name, we check FamilySearch.org to see if they have genealogical information about the ghost.
(For example, Mary Nasson of York, Maine, is listed there, with an alternate spelling of Mary Nason. A typo from the Nason spelling probably explains the 'Jason' surname error.)
So, if you're using websites for research, confirm every story with at least one other, more reliable source.
There are plenty of true, unexplained hauntings, but most have some historical foundation.
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introduction to ghost hunting, part 2
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