FAQ

If you have any questions about TSI that have not been addressed here, please contact us at  .

How can you afford to do investigations for free?
Every member of TSI has a full- and/or part-time job outside of the paranormal field. All of our equipment and expenses are paid for out of our own pockets. We do paranormal investigations in an attempt to help people and believe it would be unethical to charge a fee for a service of this nature.

How do you investigate abandoned buildings?
While we do investigate both public and private locations, it is with an invitation, the co-operation of an authorized party, and always legally conducted. Likewise, we are supportive of our fellow paranormal investigators who follow the proper channels and respect the law when doing investigations.

Many people believe there is no such thing as ghosts. What evidence, in your research and investigation, can prove these skeptics wrong?
Well, that’s the whole issue behind paranormal research, isn’t it? I don’t believe there will ever be “definitive” evidence that will convince a skeptic that ghosts or spirits exist. A skeptic will remain a skeptic until s/he experiences something paranormal in person. Even then, some skeptics simply don’t want to believe – for whatever personal, emotional, or psychological reason – and will never be convinced. The problem seems to be that the skeptic wants the experience to be repeated in a controlled environment and that simply is not possible given the nature of the research subject.

Why does your group (mostly) investigate in the dark?
First, most occurrences of paranormal activity are reported to happen at night. Of course, this is when most people tend to be home, so that's when they're going to witness it. Second, the normal, active background sounds of the day are gone and it's more likely that a person is going to hear the activity when it's quiet. For us, it means less chance of sound contamination. (We know that sound travels differently at night than during the day, which is taken into consideration during night investigations.) So investigating at night allows us to experience the sounds the same way the clients do.*

(*NOTE: This is not to say that we will not investigate in the daytime. If a client is reporting most activity occurring during the day, we will make every attempt to investigate in the same conditions - daytime - in which the client is experiencing the activity. It simply would not make sense to investigate at 8pm if the activity only occurs at 2pm.)

That explains investigating at night, but why the dark? Believe it or not, it can actually be easier to see shadow figures in the dark than in the day. One common analogy is that investigating in daylight (or with the lights on) is like shining a weak flashlight in the daytime: it's much easier to see that same light from the flashlight in the dark than in the daylight. Our team members have witnessed shadow figures that looked like they were white, as if emitting some form of their own light. And we've also witnessed dark shadow figures that were darker than the darkness of the room. It should be noted that it is rare that we are ever in an absolutely dark room; there is almost always some form of ambient light coming in through windows from street lights, the moon, etc. In some businesses, it's not always possible to turn off every single form of light (like "Exit" signs, their computer equipment, etc.).

Further, some of the equipment we use - the infrared video and digital cameras - are used specifically because IR is able to record a spectrum of light that is not visible to the eye, and, we believe, may be able to record some forms of spirit activity. Plus, investigating in the dark allows the investigator to better utilize their other senses. We also take steps to maintain our night vision and usually use red flashlights. (Did you know it takes about 45 minutes to regain your night vision after being exposed to "normal" light?)

Another issue is that a lot of our investigations are in businesses. Having the lights on in a business that does not normally have their lights on at, say, 3am is going to attract unwanted attention. It's in everyone's best interest in those cases to have the lights out.

We realize that some ghost hunting groups will disagree with us and that's fine. We are definitely interested in trying different techniques and, so far, the "lights out" method is working best for us. Like many techniques employed by various paranormal investigation groups, it's not the only way to do things, but this is how we do it.