The Paradox of a “Private” Case

One thing that modern paranormal investigators struggle with is balancing the drive to promote unity and cooperation within the paranormal community and our commitment to helping our clients, most of whom demand free and confidential investigations.  Let’s face it with today’s saturated paranormal market, if you don’t offer investigations for free and promise confidentiality clients will just go somewhere else.

 

As investigators, we want to share our data and techniques with other teams.  We want to make our findings available so that the results can be tested and duplicated by other investigators.  Only by adhering to recognized scientific methodology can we hope to be taken seriously.  But how to we do that and still meet our client’s expectations of privacy.  When we offer confidentiality and promise not to publish names and addresses, how are other investigators ever to be able to validate our work? 

 

I believe that it is possible to be faithful to our promises to the client and to share our data with other researchers in the paranormal community.  It’s possible as long as we take adequate precautions to protect our client’s privacy.

 

One way is to publish our data as blind experiments.  To do this we must maintain a database of cases with enough detail to make our experiments reproducible but still keep the client’s name and location confidential.  Assigning case numbers is one sure way to do that.  But still we want to be able to track possible ley lines or paranormal geographic hot spots so some kind of location identifier is necessary.  Using a telephone prefix or zip code will help with identifying a general location without giving the details that will violate confidentiality agreements.

 

As paranormal investigators we walk a fine line, balancing our need to research and experiment with our desire to help our clients.  We must be able to continue to offer them the confidentiality the need or we will find that those private cases are no longer coming our way.   It may take a little extra effort on our part but in the end all that hard work just might pay off in a big way.

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Stephanie Davisson is the president of Puget Sound Ghost Hunters.  She has travelled around the US lecturing on the paranormal and has had the privilege to investigate numerous sites in the US and Europe.

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