So after a round of pizza and soda, the Cornerstone Paranormal Team (of which ITP Hosts Dave & Teresa are members) set off to investigate the prison side of the Reformatory (there is an administration side that the other team started with and we switched off throughout the night). You know one thing about doing something like this with another team, you really can take a look at your methods, tools, team members and have something to compare too. Now, granted, this isn't to say one team is "better" than another, it's simply to say that if you have a paranormal team, you have to decide what type of team that you are.
For example, there are teams out there who are paranormal investigators. These teams go out and look for hard evidence that the paranormal exists. More often than not these teams don't find that hard evidence, but on occasion find circumspect evidence, or at least evidence that cannot be discredited. These teams usually consist of skeptics who believe in the possibilities, but not that all things are paranormal in nature.
You then have teams who go out and ghost hunt. These teams will be invited by many individuals or businesses who claim a haunting exists, or some other supernatural occurrence. These folks want their location to be haunted, and ghost hunters want to find the evidence that a haunting exists. It's not to say these teams are faking evidence, but it's also not to say they are always correct in their judgement of what truly is evidence. You'll often find these teams as having many investigations under their belt, and they'll have allot of evidence posted on the web for everyone to see what great ghost hunters they are. But are they? That is for the individual to decide.
I will state that Cornerstone Paranormal walked down the same cell blocks as the other team. We used different methods for EVP work (such as saying it's chow time, rec time, mail call, etc) and the other team used similar tactics (saying things as do you want a magazine, cigarettes, etc). CP found themselves with 3-10 EVP's from the night, while the other team claims to have "tons" of evidence. How would that be? Are the questions from the EVP sessions just different enough to elicit "tons" of evidence? These are things that we at CP try to validate, or debunk. Unlike other teams, who will run with that they collected and claim it all to be paranormal in nature (not looking to validate if a team member was cheating or if their ears are hearing things not truly there).
So the next time you check out a paranormal investigative team and want to join them, want to invite them in to check out your experiences, ask yourself this: Do I want to hear I'm haunted, or do I want to simply hear the truth?
