Witness statements in paranormal investigations are often unreliable. JAIMIE LEE-BARRON says you should treat witnesses kindly, but assess their stories carefully because of possible biases and emotions
Interviewing witnesses to the paranormal
Let me start by saying that people who are willing to confide in you about something that has happened to them should always be accepted and taken at face value at first.
We must remember that any form of perceived paranormal experience can ‘turn our world upside down’, so to speak, and some of them can be extremely frightening.
Therefore, when someone tells you his or her story, we must accept that it is very real to them. Whether it seems that way to us or not. These people are sometimes in a heightened emotional state and should be treated with care, compassion and understanding.
At this stage our own opinions don’t matter and it is always much more important that we are kind than that we are right. These are people’s lives we are talking about and so they must be respected.
That said, there are of course all kinds of witnesses who will tell you all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons, so we will need to, when the time is right, examine their testimony to help determine how best to proceed. certain questions will need to be asked in a certain way, taking very careful account of the answers given (or lack thereof).
The way we experience the world is determined by our upbringing and nature. We enter every situation carrying our ideas, opinions and beliefs with us. This makes it virtually impossible for any human being to remain 100% objective no matter how hard we try (but we still have to always ‘try’!) simply because these personal beliefs are an essential part of ourselves and in fact make us who we are.
Literally everything we see and do is colored by this and there is no way around it.
This often (but not always) makes eyewitness testimony an extremely unreliable source of information in itself, requiring such testimony to be supported by additional hard, empirical evidence. Obviously, this is incredibly difficult in the field of the paranormal.
“But what if there was more than one witness?” you ask. “If there is more than one person who confirms the story, that must mean it is a ‘true’ story, right?”
I hope the following information will clarify that assumption a little:
- Put 10 people in a room, expose them to an event, then immediately separate them and interview each of them separately. You end up with 10 different stories about what happened. Some of these testimonials will be quite similar, while others will vary wildly, in other words, you will have 10 different stories about the exact same thing, none of which are anywhere near 100% accurate. This all has to do with what people notice, how people react to whatever happens, and how people remember what happened because of the way it affected the emotional state of that moment.
- Put 10 people in a room and expose them to an event, and this time leave them in the room to discuss with each other what happened. You will end up with an overall consensus on what they saw. This consensus will be very much influenced by the strongest personality, who will lead all other members of the group to ultimately agree on what they have seen.
Again, this will be a complete hodgepodge of what actually happened, but to anyone listening to this group it seems that because they all tend to agree on some of the key details of what they saw , it seems to be much more reliable than our first example: But in reality it is not because it is tainted by consensus, or by what psychologists call ‘memory conformity’.
In this example, group 1 could be an individual witness to an alleged ‘paranormal’ event. While group 2 could represent the ‘paranormal investigation team’ as each team must be led by someone.
In this case, the lead ‘researcher’ (who often has the most powerful personality) or someone else, such as the ‘psychic medium’, is used simply because they can say more or less what they want, knowing that it cannot be confirmed by other members of the group and that their opinions are respected and are above reproach in all respects.
When it comes to investigating the paranormal, it is witness statements that are often the meat and potatoes of what we do, as there is rarely, if ever, more concrete evidence to present. Even after more than a century of scientific effort, first done by the Society for Psychical Research and later supplemented by the Parapsychology departments of countless universities, we still do not have a shred of conclusive evidence when it comes to the existence or non-existence. of spirits.
And without this much-needed evidence to support what people think they saw or heard, we are forced to rely on witness testimony to a much greater extent than we otherwise would. After all, it is difficult to obtain material evidence of something that is essentially intangible.
It is for this reason that it is imperative that we think critically about what we do, take our witness statements carefully, question them and record them appropriately for later reference, so that we can make absolutely the best of what we have .
Any detective will tell you that if they take statements from half a dozen eyewitnesses to a crime that has occurred, and they all seem to more or less corroborate with each other, that is like a bull alarm and they will . know immediately that something is wrong. When different people tell their own versions of something that happened, in reality there will be differences, some large, some small, but all important if we are to get a reasonable picture of what really happened.
The above is worth thinking about as we conduct our own investigations, and I hope it may be of some help in gaining a little more insight into the unreliability of witness statements.
Based in Greater Manchester, JAIMIE LEE-BARRON is a Christian parapsychologist and ordained minister with specialist training in the healing ministry of Deliverance.
