Over the years, PPI has developed a great many forms, procedures, and policies that have helped us to fulfill our charter as a TAPS Family paranormal investigation group. If you're thinking of forming one of your own, if you want to organize a ghost-hunting club, or if you're looking for ideas to better run an existing team, we share these resources in a fraternal spirit and a hope that they could be of help to you.
- Written by PPI Managment
As Pacific Paranormal Investigations proudly glances backward on its decade of volunteer investigative and educational outreach, we're also looking foward to the next generation of paranormal investigators. That's why we are opening our vaults and sharing with the public those investigative and organizational resources we we’ve worked very hard to develop these last ten years.
- Written by PPI Managment
An activities log is strongly recommended if, in the course of a private in-home investigation, you or your team follow a structured set of tasks such as set-up, interviews, baseline sweeps, vigils, etc. Who was on surveillance duty? Which activity was done when, and how long did it take? Where in the venue did it occur? Who participated, and who didn’t participate? The answers to these and similar questions are useful to document for a number of reasons....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
The purpose of this document is to establish in advance of your death a set of protocols by which designated individuals (“designees”) will attempt transcommunication with you by way of electronic voice phenomenon or an equivalent method. By completing and submitting this affidavit, you and your designees consent to its use as outlined herein....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
AVP. Audible Voice Phenomena. Are they really from beyond the grave? Regardless of how you value them, a little knowledge about the most common varieties of them and the issues that should be addressed with them will go a long way to making your account of your investigation something others can depend on....
- Written by PPI Managment
While other groups may choose to honor a more metaphysically based approach to the subject, for PPI paranormal phenomena are first and foremost an exercise in careful environmental monitoring. Establishing a baseline of readings is fundamental to conducting our investigations according to the scientific method....
- Written by Brian Miller
Bylaws are a basic part of the governance of any organized group. Establishing rules, structure, and guiding principles, bylaws live up to their name: by these laws, a group holds itself accountable and becomes dependably managed. Without bylaws, a group that doesn't articulate its own standards risks flagging membership and organizational instability....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
EVP are probably the most prolific results produced by paranormal investigations. There are good things about this, and there are bad things. The bad news is that, working under the assumption evidence of the paranormal is a rarity, with so many examples of EVP populating the internet, the likelihood any of it being genuinely "paranormal" is pretty low.
- Written by Karl Sherlock
Why are Class C EVPs the most common, you may ask? Probably because they're the least likely to be paranormal. Some could be paranormal, certainly, but they're usually too obscured to say with any certainty that they're not caused by some other normal acoustic source in the environment, much less interpret what exactly they're saying....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
Class B EVPs suffer from an identity crisis, fraught with credibility issues and doubt. As such, they're easy to misclassify. In fact, the uncertainty about so many Class B EVPs has raised many a debate as to whether or not another system for classification should be used....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
The American originator of EVP Classification system, Sarah Estep, describes the Class A event of interest as a "clear and distinct voice or sound that is universally accepted and undisputed, because it must be understood by anyone with normal hearing and without being told or prompted to what is being said or heard. It can be heard without the use of headphones.” Estep here is talking about the consensus that forms around what’s clear and trustworthy....
- Written by PPI Managment
Although the purpose of any “ghost hunting” vigil is varied, its primary objective is to transcommunicate: to make “contact” with putative spirits and carry on an exchange. Audio-visual recording is the preferred technique because it, both, documents a session and yields the most intriguing findings in the recorded audio: electronic voice phenomena....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
If you’re an amateur paranormal researcher, and you’re sharing your media and data files with others, then you are obligated to name your files with data that catagorically identifies its content and assigns it a unique address in your database. Furthermore, an investigative group trying to build its own paranormal library of evidence must, out of necessity, use a system of file naming protocols to make cataloguing possible, and, in the case of client outreach, protect the privacy of your client....
- Written by PPI Managment
Even in the earliest days at PPI, I was heavily involved in the report-writing side of things. In fact, I created the report system PPI continues to use today. Consequently, other team members submitted to me their “evidence”— which is what we were still calling it back then. They provided me with short narratives about their data and experiences, and even if they'd summarily say, "Found nothin'," they’d still burn their digital audio and photos onto writable CDs, which I then documented piecemeal and added to the report as fussily word-processed charts....
- Written by PPI Managment
In this resource you'll find an overview of PPI's principles of investigating that can be used as a model or adapted for your own investigative group. It includes i) a current inventory of our equipment and tools, ii) a detailed accounting of our procedures during an investigation, iii) a comprehensive delineation of the protocols we follow, and iv) a declaration of our code of ethics.
- Written by PPI Managment
A paranormal investigation is theater—the good ol’ fashioned kind that comes out of rituals. When the rituals are collaborative, as they often are in, say, an EVP vigil, the theater is participatory as well, and everyone participates even when they have no lines. Participants want to compare notes, corroborate one another’s claims, and get in on social camaraderie of swapping anecdotes....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
While it can sometimes become as tedious as any other component of the post-investigation process, audio review is among the most rewarding phases of an investigation. Not only does it tend to produce proportionally more results than any other data set, it generally offers the most intriguing findings. In fact, most investigators will cite their best EVP as their most persuasive "evidence" of paranormal activity. This is because the voices that emerge from out of that an unseen realm, so fallibly human and familiar to us, invariably appeal to our pathos in ways cold spots and orb photos could never hope to....
- Written by Karl Sherlock
Statements Written by David Hanson
Professionalism in the field of paranormal investigating is a bit of an oxymoron because we’re not really professionals. We’re amateurs, even if we get paid for it and publish books about it. Those who bring expertise to the field do so usually by way of other professions, and even those who tout being pros on TV are primarily reality television professionals or actors outright. Because of our amateur status, then, we’re all actors of a sort....
- Written by PPI Managment
For many reasons, establishing and following a clear set of surveillance protocols during investigations is crucial. For starters, anyone claiming to honor the scientific method in paranormal investigating understands the importance of controls. By “controls,” we mean those precautions taken to contain how data is collected, to limit contamination of that data, and to identify potential misinterpretations and false positives....
