The Case in Brief
Why Serious Ghost Hunters Watch the Sky as Closely as the Séance Room Ask any seasoned paranormal investigator the best night to go investigating is, and they will rarely say whenever I’m…
Why Serious Ghost Hunters Watch the Sky as Closely as the Séance Room
Ask any seasoned paranormal investigator the best night to go investigating is, and they will rarely say whenever I’m free. Seasoned investigators plan around the calendar and the forecast with almost as much care as they do their equipment checklist and for good reason, decades of amateur research, a handful of genuinely provocative scientific studies, and centuries of older folk belief all point toward the same conclusion. That some nights just seem to yield more reported activity than others.
None of this is set in stone, and plenty of skeptics argue it’s not about the location or the environment but rather the investigator’s expectations. But whether it’s environmental, psychological, or something else entirely understanding why investigators favor certain seasons and conditions is the first step to running a more thoughtful investigation of your own.
The Ancient Case for Autumn
Long before the invention of EMF meters and infrared cameras, the people of the British Isles have already associated autumn with the time of the year when the veil between the living and the dead isthinnest. The Celtic holiday of Samhain, which falls approximatelyhalfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, has been connected to Halloween traditions because it fell during the period of transition from the lighter half to the darker half of the year.
It was during this time that the ancient Irish believed that the dead could return from the afterworld. But the level of precision with which ancient peoples determined this period of transition is astonishing. The five-thousand-year-old passage tomb in the Mound of the Hostages in County Meath has been constructed in such a way that the sunlight can penetrate the passageway and shine on the chamber’s floor only at Samhain and at Imbolc, the Celtic equivalent of the spring equinox and seems to point to this tradition being more precise and methodical than carelessly rooted in folklore as some would argue.
This ancient belief has survived to this day in the way it has subconsciously influenced modern paranormal researchers. Mark Keyes, the director of the Pennsylvania Paranormal Association, has noted that his organization sees an increase in clients interested in paranormal investigations around September-December, due to this same ancient tradition being unconsciously incorporated into modern society.
The idea of the veil being thinnest during these months of the year. He has argued that it could be mere coincidencesthat the peak of this supposed increase in paranormal activity falls around the time of the year when researchers and investigators are most likely to think about it and when the nights start growing longer. But the fact that this idea, this ancient folklore has survived in human consciousness since before the first Celtic druids started recording their histories is fascinating in and of itself, and is worth of further contemplation.
What Actually Happens in the Air During a Storm
Unlike autumn’s reputation which is mostly built on folk tales, the reputation of the weather among investigators is built around a few physical mechanisms that are at least testable, even if the paranormal conclusions drawn from them are firmly doubted. Paranormal research groups that take a more scientific approach tend to track four specific readings in particular: temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and wind, believing that energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely transferred, and that a location undergoing rapid atmospheric change might have more ambient energy available for something paranormal to take advantage of.
Investigators using instruments that were originally made for meteorologists, such as handheld Kestrel weather meters, log these readings throughout a session in order to check if they coincide with EMF peaks, temperature drops, or any other audio anomalies, treating a coincidence between multiple instruments as more valuable than any single one.
Humidity in particular is given special attention because of the high energetic potential of the water vapor, and some investigators believe that the condensation process taking place during and after a storm might explain the jump in reported activity. Thunderstorms draw even more attention because the electromagnetic discharge of a lightning strike is a genuinely measurable atmospheric event, and investigators reason that a location undergoing that kind of electrical disturbance might be an easier environment for a paranormal presence to manifest in, or at least be perceived.
It is worth noting that this same stormy weather also reliably produces two rare, natural phenomena, ball lightning and St. Elmo’s fire, both of which have almost certainly been mistaken for a ghostly light or apparition at one time or another, a reminder that a strange sighting during a storm should get a mundane explanation first and a paranormal one only when all mundane ones have been exhausted.
Sound offers its own reason why storms and windy nights feel different. Vic Tandy, an electrical engineer at Coventry University who spent years studying a particular link between low frequency sound and reported haunting experiences, found that infrasound, frequencies below the range of human hearing, were generated by everything from resonating architecture to wind moving across the right kind of structure, and that exposure to it reliably produced feelings the participants described as unease, a strange blend of tranquility and anxiety, and shivers down the spine.
Infrasound triggers the body’s fight-or-flight response, Tandy said of his research, and storms, high winds, and old buildings with pipes, vents, and hollow spaces are exactly the conditions most likely to generate it, whether or not anything paranormal is actually present.
The Electromagnetic Field Question
No piece of equipment appears in more amateur investigations than the EMF meter, which has a theory of operation worth discussing, because it intersects with both weather and location. Ethnographic research on English paranormal investigation groups has demonstrated that they consider electromagnetic energy to be the central, if contentious, form of evidence in any investigation: the working theory holds that a large or fluctuating electromagnetic field might stimulate the temporal lobe in a fashion that leads the subject to believe that they are sensing an unseen presence, a mechanism that is considered sufficiently plausible to base entire investigations around while remaining privately unsure whether it demonstrates a scientific explanation, a genuine spirit, or both simultaneously.
One investigator under study was so invested in this theory that he rigged a location with a radio-frequency transmitter to artificially raise electromagnetic readings for an experiment, hoping to demonstrate for himself that raised EMF levels alone might be sufficient to induce the sorts of sensations that one might assume paranormal in origin unless one knew that they were being fooled, and was no more certain of the cause by the experiment’s end than he had been at its beginning. That same skepticism should be borne in mind in aweather-based theory of investigation: a correlation between a reading and a feeling is no proof of causation, however tempting the two might appear to coincide at a given moment.
The Full Moon Myth, and What the Data Actually Shows
Few ideas have as much credence amongst ghost hunters or less basis in reality as the association between full moons and paranormal activity. One independent group of investigators chose to put the theory to the test, scoring 110 different investigations performed across one autumn and winter against moon phase, weather conditions, and the distance of the moon on the given night.
Full moons in their sample set had an unimpressive record, with only two of five investigations on a night of the full moon falling in the top half of all scored sessions and none of them in the top ten. It wast the waning crescent, and specifically the perigee (the point of the orbit where the moon is closest to the earth) that defined the highest scoring investigations. The lesson is not that investigators should seek out one lucky phase rather than another, but that the popular belief has little grounding in reality. Investigators should look to their own experience and scoring before leaping to conclusions.
The Stone Tape Theory, and Why Some Investigators Chase Anniversaries
A separate thread of belief, more focused on timing than weather, isthat a place is most likely to be active on or around the anniversary of whatever tragic incident supposedly haunts it, a residual haunting repeating like a recording rather than a spirit aware of the present. It stretches back further than most assume, to Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century speculation that spoken words leave a lasting trace in the air long after they have been spoken, refined across the twentieth century into what researchers eventually called place-memory, the belief that a location, rather than a wandering spirit, retains an impression of whatever emotionally significant event once happened there.
Thomas Charles Lethbridge expanded on the idea in 1961 to state that impressions could be stored directly on a location’s own energy field, and the 1972 BBC production The Stone Tape gave the theory its lasting name and image: a building’s stone and mortar recording a traumatic event the way a tape recorder captures sound, then replaying it indefinitely to anyone standing in the right place. Investigators who take this theory seriously tend to use it in conjunction with the seasonal and weather-based approaches already discussed, taking a location’s anniversary date, paired with similar weather conditions to those on the original night in question, as theirsingle best-informed guess as to when a residual haunting is most likely to replay.
A Word on Safety Before Chasing a Storm
None of this means that an actual storm is a good time to go out and investigate right away. Lightning, high winds, and flash floods kill people every year in perfectly mundane ways, and a storm is precisely the sort of real-world threat a crumbling nineteenth-century building, the sort of place disproportionately associated with famously haunted structures, has more of in terms of possible dangers like falling limbs, unstable roofing, slick stone steps, and downed power lines, than anything a potential increase in paranormal activity might provide.
Investigators who do choose to chase down stormy conditions tend to do so from the safety of a building’s interior while observing the outside, or from behind the safety of a car while watching the sky, and treat the storm as something to be tracked on radar and respected, rather than something they should run out and race into the arms of. Whatever a barometer reading might say about likelihoods, no photograph or EVP is worth a lightning strike or a fall on wet stone.
Planning an Investigation Around the Calendar and the Forecast
Put together, the practical advice that comes out of this is pretty consistent. Autumn, and specifically the weeks surrounding Halloween, seems to have the deepest backing of folkloric and anecdotal evidence, for any combination of tradition and increased attention that’s worth. Within any season, a night with an active (recently passed) storm front, rising humidity, and a shifting barometer is, on average, what investigators tend to flag most often as promising, assuming every reading has been taken meticulously enough to preclude the storm itself from explaining a headache, a draft, or a strange light mistaken as otherwise.
A full moon is, on present evidence, no guarantee of anything, and investigators chasing a specific lunar phase might be better advised to chase perigee instead. And regardless of season or sky, a baseline reading of temperature, humidity, EMF, and light levels taken at the very start of a session, before anything unusual has supposedly happened, is the single biggest habit that distinguishes a careful from a merely hoping investigation.
Winter deserves more credit than it usually gets in these conversations, too. The long, early darkness of December and January gives investigators far more usable nighttime hours than a June excursion ever could, and the off-season slowdown at many seasonal attractions means fewer other visitors and less ambient electrical interference from crowds and their phones, and at outdoor sites in particular, a stillness that makes a genuine anomaly easier to notice against a quieter baseline. The tradeoff is real, though; cold hands are harder to operate small equipment, and freezing temperatures add their own set of unrelated readings that have little to do with anything paranormal. But a well-prepared winter investigation, appropriately dressed for the actual weather and not the atmosphere of the chosen site, can often reward the effort with precisely the same sort of quiet, low-interference conditions that a busy October weekend at a famous site can’t offer at any price.
Do you plan your own investigations around the weather, or is it the location that matters to you more? Let us know in the comments below.
Sources consulted for this post include Constance Holden and Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “Random Samples,” Science, New Series, Vol. 301, No. 5640 (September 19, 2003), pp. 1665, 1667; Michele Hanks, “Between Electricity and Spirit: Paranormal Investigation and the Creation of Doubt in England,” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 118, No. 4 (December 2016), pp. 811–823; Heritage Ireland’s history of Samhain and its roots in Halloween; AccuWeather’s interview with Pennsylvania Paranormal Association director Mark Keyes; East Coast Research and Investigation of the Paranormal’s published theories on weather and paranormal activity; Kestrel Instruments’ guide to environmental readings used in ghost hunting; and the moon-phase investigation study published by Stories in the Cemetery.
