Been thinking about this.
A popular ghost hunting location (famous hotel here in CO, unnamed) is aggressively promoting ghost hunting tours through its halls and hotspots on Facebook. No complaint from me – well, a little, but it’s not my hotel. But someone made a remark to me not long ago about whether a location can be over-investigated. Trampled through by hordes of Ghost Hunter fans in search of cool orb pictures or curious EVP’s, leaving the place exhausted in some way.
That’s an interesting question – it kind of suggests that ghost hunting is a bit like fishing. That there’s a finite amount of evidence to be captured, or a certain richness of paranormal phenomena that gets diluted by so many people trying to capture it on tape or SD card.
That seems, on the face of it, to be a rather silly notion. Ghosts aren’t fish, and locations aren’t stocked, and evidence captured shouldn’t really depend on how many people are there trying to capture it – day in and day out.
Now, there may be a notion that sentient spirits, aware that their presence is known far and wide, may be more or less eager to reveal themselves based on their perception that more ghost hunters are looking for them. Less, if they’re shy. More, if they want their post-death survival to be widely revealed. If the former is the case, then one might surmise that frequent investigations will make the capturing of evidence more rare….if the latter, then evidence would be more frequent.
And then there’s the notion that, if the spirits are NOT sentient, it doesn’t matter one way or another. Evidence of their presence will be unaffected by any disposition of the spirits toward being hunted – that evidence gathering is a bit like storm chasing, it will happen or not based on environmental or unseen factors beyond the control of the spirits themselves, or the number or expertise of those trying to capture it.
So in a sense, the question relies on whether you think that spirits care if they’re being hunted, are awarethey’re being hunted, or if what ghost hunters are trying to find is completely immune to the process, frequency and scope of the hunts themselves. Should this be the case, one would think that trying to summon a ghost to speak to a digital voice recorder for an EVP recording is a waste of time, like throwing cloud seeding material at a thunderstorm in the hopes of generating a tornado to film.
It comes down to whether you think that spirits can be interacted with, and if they can, whether they have an opinion about the living trying to reach across the mortality divide. Maybe some do, maybe some don’t.
And maybe it’s a little like talking back to your TV.
