You’ve chosen a location to investigate possible paranormal activity. What should you bring along to ensure you won’t miss anything?

A camera would be an obvious choice; a sound recorder could also be essential. But what about the range of esoteric gadgets that have become almost de rigeur for the paranormal investigator – the EMF meters, infrared motion sensors, gaussmeters, digital thermometers, anenoameters? It all looks very serious, scientific and foolproof. But is any of it really going to detect anomalous phenomena?

As regular readers of Paranormal Magazine will know, ASSAP is a research organisation promoting a scientific approach to paranormal investigation. ASSAP’s series of Scientific Investigation articles which ran in the past 12 issues adopted a sensibly cautious position towards these instruments, stressing there is no real proof that ghosts or strange manifestations have any correlation to what is being detected by them.

This chimes with my own belief that the materialistic fascination with this hardware (fed by TV paranormal ‘investigation’ shows) is eclipsing the most reliable and sensitive kind of paranormal detector you can use to empower your investigation. I am talking about animals.

Let me share the experience that crystalised this for me. At around noon on December 19, 2006, my family and I went for a walk in a field at the edge of our town. The day was beautifully sunny and crisp, and as I turned a corner at the bottom of an upward slope I noticed that Ellie, my dog, was standing motionless, looking straight ahead up the hill. Looking ahead, I noticed something emerging from behind a tree, moving along the line of a path outside the field about a hundred yards ahead.

What I initially interpreted as two people wearing old-fashioned brown clothes suddenly felt not quite right. These ‘people’ were a constant shade from top to bottom. For ten seconds or so this vaguely human-shaped brown mass moved slowly along a wall and out of sight, possibly around a corner, it was difficult to tell. Ellie, who is as old as time and sees very poorly, continued to act totally out of character for the duration, frozen to the spot.

A minute or so later a group of people walked across the same spot, allowing me to observe how they looked perfectly normal and nothing at all like the previous thing. By this time my family was alongside us, seconds too late to share this bizarre sighting with me.

My terrier’s extremely guarded and vigilant posture, alerted by some means that couldn’t have been her terrible eyesight, strikingly demonstrated the old wisdom of how animals have extrasensory abilities. Many animals are known to have foreknowledge of earthquakes. The work of Dr Rupert Sheldrake shows how pets can react to events beyond their immediate location, attuned to what he calls ‘morphic resonances’. Why not paranormal phenomena as well?

A genuinely serious investigator of the paranormal should acknowledge how the nature of anomalous phenomena is too subtle, too elusive to be left exclusively to exotic instruments. A good dog could indeed be worth more than any ‘investigation kit’. Ellie showed no lasting trauma from her experience, and I hope to have her by my side if anything like it ever happens again.

By Jerry Glover

Over the course of two decades Jerry Glover has worked as an actor, comedian, satirist, critic, comedy writer, TV format-developer, BAFTA-nominated television producer, journalist, photographer, band manager and writer. His work has appeared in publications ranging from countercultural to academic and mainstream books, magazines and journals. He lives with his wife and daughter in Leighton Buzzard.

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