Paranormal Investigation Files

The PRD

We established that we were comprised of believers, skeptics, and everything in between. We four, who understood that there was much we did not understand, myself, Allen, Amy and Michael. At this time in the world, the concepts of paranormal investigation had not yet reached any reputable syndicated series on television just yet. There were specials, and recounted tales every now and then, but most of what televised in paranormal investigation was intended for thrills.

We knew that we did not want to be legend trippers, thrill seeking through one urban legend to the next solely for the experience of being frightened for the excitement and potential danger of the trip; we knew that we did not want to chase empty spaces, or do things the same way that quite literally every other ghost hunting society was doing things.

It wasn't for the purpose of being different for its own sake, as much as it was that collectively, we could agree that what was being done over-and-over again was not working... that in well over a hundred years since the rise and fall of American Spiritualism, its popularity and decline, that none of its methodology worked. In over one-hundred years, the damage done to paranormal investigation was replete with charlatanism, predators and false prophets all claiming in one way or another to be experts on the afterlife.

It occurred to us that there are no experts on the afterlife. How could there be? How could anyone claim expertise on a field that was at best purely derived of conjecture and speculation, whose studies were only ever and always theories that begat theories that begat theories? Indeed, for expertise to exist in any field, the amount of hands on experience is successful in tried and true methods, and results, repeatable, measurable and quantifiable in a very tangible, factual manner. Paranormal investigation, metaphysical sciences, these were all baseless pseudosciences built on dogmatic inclinations founded under the principals of early American Spiritualism... a practice that had no set doctrine of its own, and whose methods often conflicted from one "expert" to the next. 

Our early foundations were spent in Amy's garage, restyled in the fashion of a hangout spot, couches and creature comforts to ensure that we could speak in privacy, but never be too far from breaking to go on a food run, or do something else when we came upon a challenge that required further research.

One of the most certain things about our humble origins is that we determined that in order for us to objectively and honestly perform investigations of any kind, we would need to be a non-sectarian organization. Me, I'm non-denominational Christian, as was Allen... but Amy was absolutely into facets of spiritualism, and Michael... well he was somewhere between Judaism and agnosticism. The clearest indicatives of our foundations were that we could not build our charter from a basis of any one of our personal beliefs, because those beliefs would create expectations, cognitive and confirmation biases, which in turn would contaminate our investigations and discredit any potential evidence that we did find.

So, we chartered the PRD as a non-sectarian paranormal research and development group, and our designs were to gather any and all hauntings, urban legends, and strange happenings in local reports... and then one at a time, either prove or disprove each of them. It seemed simple enough, and though we were still new, and what we called our "New Protocol" was still in its infancy, we learned very quickly why the old methods were so unreliable.