Tammy's Rant about Ghost Hunting

One of the things about me is that I tell it like I see it.  Everyone doesn't agree and everyone doesn't like it.  I have even been called at home by other teams and asked to take down things on my site that showed them in an unfavorable light.  In the vein of trying to get along, I did.  But here's the deal - if you don't want to be called out for being shady - don't be shady.  To me, that's not that hard.

I have one of a very few teams that does not and will not wear matching T-shirts.  For those of you that do that and you think it's necessary, great for you.  Some teams tout that they make them look professional.  You can "look" professional all day long but that doesn't mean you "are" professional.  Professional is saying that you will honor a client's confidentiality and actually doing it.  Saying you will and then having a whole group of people show up at their home wearing ghost hunter T-shirts isn't exactly going to do the trick.  The T-shirts don't do anything but make you look uniform, and well, I am glad that there are no two people alike on my team.  Folks, what people wear when they come to investigate your house is not what matters.  What matters is that they treat you and your home with respect and they don't create unnecessary drama where there is already an uncertain circumstance.

Which leads me to my next rant.  This has been touched on before by a few other investigators and I feel the need to point it out again.  Say you get contacted by someone that thinks they have a haunting.  You go out for the preliminary walk through and you discover they own 7 cats, 3 dogs, and have little kids and a few friends living at the house.  Say the older kid is wild and throws toys at the younger kid.  Say all the cats live in the house and so do the dogs, along with the friends that are crashing there for a while.  In my humble opinion, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out it's probably not a haunting you are dealing with but a very basic mess.  So many ghost hunters will automatically disregard the obvious in these kinds of situations and fall into the "Yeah, that IS weird" mindset when they are told the younger child is getting scratches and bruises and no one can figure out why - it MUST be ghosts.  How about trying that it might be all those cats and that Tonka truck that his older brother just chunked at him while you weren't looking...  But that doesn't make for good TV or message board content, so we can't just say that, can we?

I also get annoyed with people that get mad at me because I don't think the TAPS ghost hunters are paranormal gods.  Hello, they are regular guys just like the rest of us, that happened to get lucky enough to BS their way into a TV show.  I've been on TLC and it was a great experience and of course if given the opportunity, I would do it again.  But let me tell you something about when we did that show.  They got very annoyed with us because they would say, "hey, do this..." and we would say, "we would never do that..." and we wouldn't - not even for TV.  They wanted to make it exciting and in the real world of ghost hunting, it just isn't always exciting and Tonya and I were not going to lie to make good TV because we were coming back here and would have to carry on and we refused to compromise our ethics for TV.  Some people are cool with that, and if they are, great, that's their choice but I don't have to do it and I don't have to condone it.  I'm not saying TAPS aren't great guys, I'm just saying I'm not impressed - we do the same thing they do, we're just not on TV for it.

I think that the AAEVP and IGHS are hokey.  You don't have to pay anyone money or be certified to be a ghost hunter.  You don't need a ton of expensive equipment or a lot of money.  What you need is some common sense, good observation skills. research skills, and even a sense of humor and autonomy.  You don't have to look like everyone else and you don't have to do it the same way everyone else does it.  There are no experts in this field and no one is right or wrong.  The only wrong thing is being an asshole or being competitive with other teams.  Those kinds of people need to get over it because chances are, most people don't give a rat's ass about what they're doing, so they really shouldn't care what anyone else is doing.

Sadly though, this field is full of people that will insist you buy their T-shirt and loads of expensive equipment, that you ham it up when a camera is around, that mysterious bumps in the night are NOT those 27 cats in your 4 room house, and that will compete with any other team out there and do everything they can to discredit anyone besides them that gets any attention or makes headway.  Just think about these things when you are considering a team to investigate your property or looking for one to join up with.

I didn't write this about anyone in particular, so don't go get your panties in a wad if you fit one of these descriptions.  If you do, it might do you well to rethink the way you're doing things.  But if you don't - carry on, it's your name, not mine.  I wrote it in hopes of making people think about some things when looking into this field.  If I can show one or two people that it's all really silly, then that's good for me.