An activities log is strongly recommended if, in the course of a private in-home investigation, you or your team follow a structured set of tasks such as set-up, interviews, baseline sweeps, vigils, etc. Who was on surveillance duty? Which activity was done when, and how long did it take? Where in the venue did it occur? Who participated, and who didn’t participate? The answers to these and similar questions are useful to document for a number of reasons....

While other groups may choose to honor a more metaphysically based approach to the subject, for PPI paranormal phenomena are first and foremost an exercise in careful environmental monitoring. Establishing a baseline of readings is fundamental to conducting our investigations according to the scientific method....

For our clients' benefit, a journaling resource (to log witnessed occurrences of paranormal activity prior to an investigation) is available as a free-of-charge PDF download andincludes sample journal entries....

Even in the earliest days at PPI, I was heavily involved in the report-writing side of things. In fact, I created the report system PPI continues to use today. Consequently, other team members submitted to me their “evidence”— which is what we were still calling it back then. They provided me with short narratives about their data and experiences, and even if they'd summarily say, "Found nothin'," they’d still burn their digital audio and photos onto writable CDs, which I then documented piecemeal and added to the report as fussily word-processed charts....

A paranormal investigation is theater—the good ol’ fashioned kind that comes out of rituals. When the rituals are collaborative, as they often are in, say, an EVP vigil, the theater is participatory as well, and everyone participates even when they have no lines. Participants want to compare notes, corroborate one another’s claims, and get in on social camaraderie of swapping anecdotes....

In "Spooking Yourself: Confirmation Bias, Consensus Building, and Household Myth-Making," Karl Sherlock explains one of the most frequent pitfalls in claiming to witness paranormal activity, and warns against two of the most common behaviors that result from it, manufacturing consensus and collaborating on household myths.

For many reasons, establishing and following a clear set of surveillance protocols during investigations is crucial. For starters, anyone claiming to honor the scientific method in paranormal investigating understands the importance of controls. By “controls,” we mean those precautions taken to contain how data is collected, to limit contamination of that data, and to identify potential misinterpretations and false positives....