In March 2020, I was participating in an online meetup by my team, Association of Paranormal Study. We were chatting with Dr. Ann Winsper and Dr. Rachael Ironside, two well-respected female academics in the paranormal and parapsychology field. Towards the end of the conversation, it was brought up that people use ghost hunting to process trauma. My mind went absolutely wild.

Whether we like it or not, trauma is the norm of our world. It’s not a new thing either. For thousands of years, mankind has been through some sort of trauma. Examples include war, famine, slavery, abuse, just to name a few. This is a constant occurrence in the existence of man, and it’s not stopping anytime soon. If anything, modern society is bringing about new forms of trauma every day.

That trauma is what echoes from the past into the future. Those are the echoes that modern day paranormal investigators are trying to communicate with. When we look at the common definitions of “spirits” and “ghosts”, they can be related back to processing trauma. Earthbound spirits normally have some sort of unfinished business.

What is Unfinished Business?

The term “unfinished business” is fairly vague. It’s a very general blanket statement describing something that person cannot let go of. I suppose that could include leaving the stovetop on (I wonder that everytime I go out) to getting revenge on someone who hurt that person. That hurt could be anything from a failed business translation, assault, or asking for forgiveness. “Unfinished business” is an extremely general term that we often don’t talk about enough in the paranormal world. Asking general questions in the dark and speculating what that unfinished business is isn’t enough.

But it’s not only the spirits who have unfinished business. This is something that the living has as well. How often do paranormal investigators have an experience and want to keep ghost hunting to “search for the truth” and find the answers to the afterlife? Boom. Most of us have unfinished business based on that alone, and we’re processing our own form of trauma from that spooky experience.

Grieving Through Ghost Hunting

For me personally, while I had spooky experiences as a child, I also struggle with the idea of death. I lost the majority of my core family members before I turned 30. Even then, I lose two major parental figures before I was 15 years old.

I struggle with the idea of our consciousness not surviving after death. While most people gravitate towards religion and the idea of heaven to alleviate those fears, I chose ghost hunting. I go on paranormal investigations to get some sort of sliver of proof that after-death consciousness survival is real. Even if I can’t prove it scientifically, if I can get personal validation, I’ll be happy.

But even with the experiences I’ve had, I question myself. Was I hallucinated? Or was it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy and I created the experience for myself? By paranormal investigating, I’m processing my own grief of losing my grandparents and my mother. So, for me, ghost hunting is my way of grieving.

Fear of the Unknown

This might explain why paranormal investigators get so rattled when something does physically manifest before us. In the paranormal community, I’ve noticed that there is an obsession with control. Meaning the investigator or the ghost hunter has to be in control of everything. We want to investigate the paranormal, but only on our own terms based on our own comfort level.

This is definitely a valid need because we don’t want things to happen to us outside of our boundaries. We don’t want our consent to be violated by having the spirits do more than what we are comfortable with. So, while paranormal investigators and ghost hunters want to experience and process certain chapters of history, we only want to experience on our terms and what we are the most comfortable with.

Dealing with Sins of the Past

There are a lot of elements in history that make us uncomfortable; slavery, child labor, abuse from leaders, etc. While modern-day paranormal investigators are far enough removed to not deal with a lot of these traumas first-hand, perhaps it still brings about negative feelings.

For example, many Americans are still just learning about the internment of Japanese-Americans, and it makes them uncomfortable. Some have even tried to justify it, even though they think the Holocaust was inexcusable. Then, I get messages from hopeful investigators asking me how to do a ghost hunt at an internment camp. 

While the situation above is directly related to an awful time on the dawn of the mid-20th century, it’s not all that different from wanting to investigate sites of mass bloodshed, like battlefields. Ghost hunters are also clamoring to get to places like Waverly Hills Sanatorium, St. Albans Sanatorium, and Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. The fact that places like asylums and sanatoriums grossly mistreated their patients and even wrongfully held perfectly healthy people captive for the sake of “medicine” is unsettling. 

It’s hard to think that our country, our parents, their friends, and our government may have participated in atrocities that harmed another group of people. Or worse, completely erase a culture.

Facing Our Own Trauma

We might also be affected by some form of trauma or illness and trying to find some meaning behind it in the paranormal world. This may result in researching cases where people have had more paranormal experiences after a car accident or having a near-death experience during surgery. One could argue that someone’s psychic abilities awakening after a traumatic experience could be a form of processing.

Even in poltergeist cases, which stem from extreme emotional distress, it’s a form of processing trauma. In this case, the process is working from the outside in.

Coping in Person

Paranormal investigating gives people the unique opportunity to be “in the room where it happened”, to quote Hamilton. We can go to the Lizzie Borden House and stand in the rooms where Andrew and Abby Borden were hacked to death with a hatchet. We can stand on the battlefields of Gettysburg and picture the men running and shooting and cannons firing in our heads while feeling the gentle breeze.

Battlefields are popular places to investigate. It also gives ghost hunters and investigators to look at these places in person and really get a sense of the massive amount of death that took place. We can see the actual place where these people once lived. Granted, anyone can do this by visiting historic sites, reading the information boards, listening to the audio tour, etc.

But paranormal investigating and ghost hunting takes it an extra step by making us believe we are talking to the people of that time period. Meaning, we are talking to the owners of the house, we’re talking to the murder victims, we’re talking to former patients of the asylum.

Choosing What to Deal With

Ghost hunting also gives people a specific choice in what kind of trauma and tragedy they want to deal with. For example, there is a lot of queer history with haunted prisons and mental asylums. Until 1976, sodomy was considered a felony in the United States. This means that locations like Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum imprisoned homosexual men for being who they are. And yet, this is a chapter in paranormal media and history that is often ignored completely.

But as paranormal investigators, we have a certain level of privilege to completely ignore that chapter in TALA’s history and only choose to acknowledge what makes us comfortable. It’s not like these ghosts have manifested in reality and made us look at them and acknowledge their existence. Well, most of the time. However, this makes many people uncomfortable. So, while ghost hunting is used to process trauma, it gives the person a safe space to decide what kind of trauma they want to process. That is until a spirit makes itself known outside the box of comfort.

How to Move Forward

Now that we’ve talked about this, what do you think of this? Do you believe that we’re using ghost hunting to process trauma? It could mean different things like grieving, making sense with a problematic history, or trying to process a scary expeirence.

This can also explain why some people take it so personally when you debunk their photos, videos, and overall experiences. While you may be debunking their data, they take it personally because they see you invalidating their grief, trauma, etc. They also see validation in television and other paranormal media. It seems that as time passes, most of these people are able to remove their emotions from the situation and look at it more objectively without personal attachment.

With this in mind, there is something much deeper to the paranormal than just “looking for ghosts.”