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Tools of the Trade: Paranormal investigators deploy special equipment

HOUGHTON – The Copper Country Paranormal Investigators might not use magnetic flux beams or ectoplasmic disintegrators like the original Ghostbusters from the 1984 movie, but the right equipment is still key to identifying and measuring paranormal activity.

One key device is an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector, like the Mel Meter lead investigator Lee Ecke brought to a Thursday CCPI meeting.

“We see that spike whenever there’s about to be paranormal activity,” Ecke said.

A digital voice recorder is also important. When investigators replay digital tapes recorded in suspected paranormal situations, they sometimes hear low-frequency voices they didn’t hear while recording, apparently from ghostly presences.

Investigator Maria Redd once made a recording at the famously haunted Waverly Hills Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky. When she played it back – she replayed the recording again at Thursday’s meeting – a low male voice can be heard beneath the female conversation Redd remembers, urging someone to “come on, calm down.”

Full-visual-spectrum digital and video cameras can sometimes record manifestations that occur in colors not available to the human eye, “where the spirits will often manifest,” Ecke said.

Keeping track of temperature is also key, said investigator Julia Smith, and it’s best to have a device that will record high and low temperatures during an investigation, as unexplained temperature spikes or drops are considered a key sign of paranormal activity.

That sometimes happens, said Smith, when a “spirit will attempt to suck all the energy out of a room that it’s in.”

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