Truth About Cemeteries  The burial grounds of the living tend to be a starting point for many avid ghost hunters but are they really a legitimate choice for investigation with environmental conditions and other false positives present?

Everyone in paranormal study has a starting point; usually a cemetery after the sun disappears far below the horizon.  Camera in hand, hoping to capture some anomalous activity, we ask permission to take the pictures of the dearly departed.

Unfortunately, without experience and a firm knowledge base, we put ourselves at risk in capturing likely an artifact that could easily be explained as lens flare, ground fog, motion blur, a camera strap, insects, our own breathe or a stray hair that decides to showcase itself in front of the lens.

The risk of capturing a false positive isn’t exclusive to just digital still or film camera in an outdoor environment. Video cameras have IR bounce back from reflective surfaces such as highly polished gravestones and audio recorders capturing voices from great distances or noises from our own movements that our ears naturally filter out through the concentration of our next step.

Even breath condensation can be a culprit and in fact it can occur under very warm temperatures if relative humidity and temperatures are met. Go here to calculate the conditions needed for breath condensation. Flying insects can appear in an unusual manner once you add a camera with a flash under low light conditions.

We cannot control the outdoor environment but we can remove some of the human intervention which could be a contributing factor. Establishing these habits can aid us later on once be move indoors as well. How do we do this?

Simple methodologies like removing camera straps, holding your breath or if you’re fortunate enough to possess an advanced camera, the use of a tripod and remote or time lapse photography. With audio simply by recording in a passive manner without movement or conversation for 5 minutes is all that is needed.

“What activity is likely present in cemeteries?”

I never asked this question when I first started my exploration. Instead I just assumed that since the dearly departed were buried here, their consciousness might choose to exist in the same location as its shell. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough hard data to support any one theory but parapsychologists believe an imprint is likely to reside in these locations from the mourning.

Native Americans buried their dead in what they believed to be “sacred” land and picked the locations very carefully. Many also believe that our earlier settlers buried in similar fashions.

“Does this mean then that cemeteries contain nothing but imprints?”

No in fact some cemeteries are said to harbor a single ghost and not the hordes that many amateur ghost hunters believe. In fact a very controversial theory remains with some supportive evidence that some cemeteries are the breeding grounds of portals or “vortexes” that offer a doorway to other dimensions.

Some of this is said to be attributed to ley lines but all of this must be regarded as theory and folklore because there just isn’t enough supportive data to draw any conclusion other than strange events have been documented.

Submitted by: Haydon L. Hall

Reference - Loyd Auerback - A Paranormal Casebook Pages 11,12