We all have a sense of right and wrong. How it actually plays out is where we have issues with one another. For the most part, we all do things that are in our best interest. There’s nothing wrong with that. A former co-worker of mine used to remind me that, in general, people work from the premise of, “What’s in it for me?” There has to be a reward or payoff for someone to do something, whether that payoff is tangible, such as cash, or intangible, like a heartfelt thank you or the satisfaction of helping someone else. There is always a payoff of some kind. It doesn’t matter how small the action or interaction is. There is always something in it. There is always an exchange of some sort.

Except when there isn’t.

In a previous article, I talked about abuses in the metaphysical field, like mentors who abuse their mentees and students who try to take advantage of their teachers. There is also something I noticed in regard to the paranormal. I’m going to jump on my soapbox and rant about this a bit, as I never thought about it before, even though I had heard a couple of other metaphysicians say something about it.

I love watching shows about paranormal investigation. The reason is that I can often see the energy of the things they are trying to capture during the show. Even when they don’t see anything, I can see what’s there. It’s entertaining to me to watch people stumble around in the dark when the thing they’re looking for is standing right next to them, practically waving their arms and jumping up and down. Other times, I’m sad as I can see the state of the ghost still carrying the grief in death it carried in life. I can see the leftover energy of a trauma so severe that when that person died, they left a part of their soul behind. I roam through the locations with the teams, seeing things they don’t, and learn more about places I have never been and don’t ever plan to visit.

At first, I was paying more attention to the entities than the situations. After all, that is what I need to learn about. Once I get a sense of what it is, then I think about what my options are for dealing with it if I ever encounter something like that in the future. Then I noticed that there was a difference between investigating a home that someone was living in and a haunted business.

Here is where I get up on my soapbox. There are investigators that treat the two locations as if they are the same. They are not. A haunted business most often has moving chairs and glasses being tossed around. A haunted home may have fearful children with nightmares and fathers contemplating killing their families. Most people don’t understand when they call someone to do a paranormal investigation of their homes. The problem often doesn’t go away. It gets worse.

A typical paranormal investigative team sets up their equipment and then spends the rest of the time inciting or provoking the entities to react decisively enough to be captured by whatever gadgets they have running at the time. The best the team can do by the end of it is say, “Yes, you have something, or we couldn’t find anything.” If they do find something, they can’t always tell what it is or where it came from. Then they go home, patting themselves on the back for capturing evidence of the unknown.

Then the activity gets worse.

Some of these teams only want to capture evidence and will do whatever it takes, regardless of the cost. They will put not only the families they are investigating at risk but themselves, their team members, and their families. They will use any means such as provoking, using spirit boards, or performing ceremonies to give strength to the entities to capture evidence. What this leads to is the activity ramping up to new highs, team members being taken to the hospital, and incidences of activity in their own homes affecting their families. For some people, this is an acceptable risk. I think this is self-centered irresponsible behavior that will come back and kick them in the ass.

The way I see it is that the team has gone in there and gotten what they wanted, which is justification for the time and money spent on the project, but the family now has a bigger problem. Most of the time, teams can only validate what the family already knows, but they don’t do anything to solve the problem. They go in there, stir things up and leave. As if the family wasn’t already walking on eggshells and afraid to be in their own home, it’s even worse now. Hey, thanks for that, but I hope you got some good footage to brag about. Pfft.

The other thing to note is that lingering spirits are there for a reason. The reasons are many, so I won’t go into that now. They are wherever they are doing their ghosty thing, and then someone comes in, drops some gadgets and cords all over the place, then starts demanding the ghosts perform. Their lives were so traumatic that they couldn’t even properly die and move on, and now there’s a bunch of living people commanding them to do something.

There are places that investigative teams go over and over to incite a reaction from whomever, and whatever is still there. Think of an animal commanded relentlessly to perform again and again for years. Abuse anyone? Just because it’s a ghost doesn’t mean it’s there for us to harass forever, yet that’s what some of these places allow. They charge for the opportunity to incite whatever is there. No one actually thinks, “Hey, maybe we should help the spirits that are stuck here to move on.” No one remembers that what they’re taunting used to be a person.

The natural progression of a soul is birth, life, death, source, and back to birth again if they choose to take another turn on the ride. Ghosts that are still here are stuck between death and source. The path of that soul’s journey has been stalled. They’re stranded and can’t continue for whatever reason. They could probably use help in moving on, but most groups don’t do this.

Here is the point of my ramblings. If you’re going to go into someone’s house to investigate, go with the intent to actually HELP them. Be prepared to do whatever it takes to get whatever it is out of the house if that’s what the client wants. If that is beyond what you and your team can handle, call someone who can. If you don’t know anyone, call someone who can recommend someone. Don’t leave the client hanging. Don’t go in there unless you can be relatively certain your efforts will improve their circumstances.

If you do go into someone’s home, don’t aggravate what’s there. Remember, you’re going home afterward. The people who live there still live there and have to deal with the aftermath of your activities. Entities know when someone is there with the intention of making them leave. If they want to stay, they will do whatever they can to get rid of that person, and then after they’re gone, they retaliate on the family. I’ve seen this happen in some of my own cases.

Even with businesses, people still work there, and people might live there. Before putting on hooded robes, drawing chalk pentagrams, and chanting with candles, think about that. If you’re doing this only for your benefit, you are messing with the dead and endangering the living. Think beyond the end of your nose, get another hobby, and maybe someday you’ll find a reason to rant on your own paranormal ethics soapbox.