The hundreds of ghost hunting teams in the UK create a unique market that can be sold products and services that the normal consumer wouldn’t consider parting with their money for.

From Iphone applications and devices that are supposed to be able to help you work out if a ghost is causing a reported oddity, books on how to hunt ghosts and personalised team clothing, to guaranteed time at the top haunted hot spots across the country.

Ghost hunters tend not to worry about having to pay for the kit they use, or the personalised clothing they all wear because these are things they choose to have. However ghost hunters often kick up a fuss when it comes to being charged to enter certain famously haunted places across the country.

These tend to be buildings that have featured on paranormal television shows, or are listed in ghost folklore books or on websites dedicated to ghost lore. They often have infamous ghosts such as ‘the blue boy’, or ‘the grey lady’, or ‘the brown monk’ or ‘the judge’ and so on… often the ghosts are named; ‘Nanny rabbit’, ‘clogs’, ‘Burke & Hare’, ‘Mr. Boots’. These are the things that whet the appetite of the ghost hunter and ultimately makes them part with their cash.

The ghost hunter who happily pays to visit such locations is essentially a tourist who happens to like having the lights turned off. Yet there are ghost hunters who believe they have some sort of privilege that means they shouldn’t have to pay, or pay as much, to access these locations ; many complaining that they’re being “out costed” from being able to fairly access places to investigate.

Ultimately though, ghost hunting in such places is done so as a hobby as the associated ghost stories are often decades old with no new experiences from independent eyewitnesses to study (i.e. not ghost hunters having experiences on ghost hunts, but location staff/owners). There are only a handful of groups that study anomalous phenomena for educational or scientific reasons in the UK and those tend to be charities or linked to universities and similar – if they need access to locations that are famous for ghost lore then it’s usually for academic reasons and a mutual agreement between researcher and venue is met.

Having to pay to visit a location to carry out a hobby is not an outrageous demand, and to accuse supposedly haunted places of charging ‘too much’ and ‘out-costing’ people is unfair.

Many ghost hunting groups (but not all) have public liability insurance to cover them while they visit locations that they do not own, but insurance isn’t always the only thing on a location owners mind when it comes to letting in a group of people who aren’t professionals at what they do and, ultimately, are tourists.

I’ve personally researched in venues for years at a time and happily handed over cash because of the extra electricity we’re going to be using while there. Most ghost lore is linked to ancient buildings owned by charitable trusts that look after our wonderful and important heritage sites that need constant funding to keep them maintained.

Should such venues not ask for money when people want to visit them? Should ghost hunters be allowed to visit for free or next to nothing when it is the very heritage of a site that has attracted them in the first place?

I’m not sure what the justification for such a demand is, and for those who are skeptical that ghost groups make such demands a quick search on google or facebook will reveal that I’m not lying.

Many ghost hunters blame commercial groups who make a profit from ghost hunting enthusiasts for the rise in the fee that locations charge, often citing profiteering ghost groups as bad people who need to be tackled.

It is often said that by groups making a profit from charging members of the public to go on ghost hunts with them at these locations, it makes the locations aware of how much people are willing to pay – thus “out-costing” the regular ghost hunter.

I don’t agree that this is something that profiteering groups should be tackled for though. I would suggest that we should be looking at the claims such profiteering groups make to the general public about what service it is they provide (e.g. a serious paranormal investigation when it isn’t? Proper scientific research when it’s not? Just for entertainment?) And we should tackle misleading claims and bad behavior if the need arises.

Making location owners aware of the amounts they can charge people isn’t a terrible thing and in some cases is actually good (charities, for example).

It bugs me when ghost hunting groups complain about having to constantly pay loads of money to visit apparently haunted locations because it shows that they’re not really very serious about researching anomalous phenomena. In the six years that I have been studying ghosts and the places they’re said to hang out, I’ve only ever visited a handful of places that requested money and the money paid helped towards the running of the site.

Most places that I visit don’t charge because they’ve never had the need to ask paranormal investigators to visit. The experiences have mostly been recent and current and not founded in ghost lore books and websites.

One problem that arises from venues being able to charge people to access them is the rise in the number of venues claiming to be haunted when they’re not, just so that they can make money from Yvette Fielding wannabe’s. This is a serious problem, and one I’ve encountered first hand when investigating what appears to be a genuine report, only for investigators to catch people faking activity.

However, if such fakery is occurring, then asking the right questions and looking for the right signs should help investigators rule out ‘genuine’ reports from those that are fraudulent. If you simply hang on to every word of a story and let that be what drives your curiosity – to experience the ghost the story centres around – then you’re an easy  target for such frauds.

If you are open minded in your approach and consider all possibilities (and not just that there’s a ghost there that could be contacted) then you’re less likely to be caught out.

It is possible to conduct paranormal research without being charged phenomenal amounts of money to do so, but if you’re simply in it for the thrill of the hunt and the folklore stories that excite you then you’re a tourist and paying is inevitable.  That isn’t a product of the profiteering paranormal companies – it’s a product of your approach to ghost phenomena.

Photo credit: Tristan Barratt