What Motivates Someone to Become a Ghost Hunter?

We have always been fascinated by things that can’t easily be explained, letting our imaginations run wild. Usually, there are practical and unexciting explanations for them. But some people think there’s more to what meets the eye. These people call themselves many things: paranormal investigators, parapsychological researchers or ghost hunters.

Research into paranormal activities isn’t a new phenomenon. It can be dated back to the 18th century with the rise of organisations dedicated to supernatural research, such as the Ghost Club and the Society for Psychical Research, and researchers such as Harry Price gaining wide recognition for their work.

The practice of paranormal investigation is widely considered a pseudoscience, due to its tendency to not follow the scientific method and its lack of reproducibility.

But what motivates someone to study and explore this field? A field that is mostly regarded with scepticism by the larger scientific community.

For Tony Martinsson and Niclas Laaksonen, brothers who started one of Sweden’s largest paranormal investigation companies LaxTon in 2014, it was to document supernatural occurrences because of their own personal spectral experiences.

The brothers said that their experience with the supernatural began when they were as young as nine and fourteen, respectively. Tony said: “In 1988 our cousins Peter and Johanna died in a fire on Christmas Eve in the night, only five and eleven years old. It was quite near that time that we had our first paranormal experience in our apartment in Kiruna.”

The brothers started a YouTube channel to document their investigations. Their channel attracted a lot of attention throughout Sweden, eventually becoming viral.

They have used their influence and expertise to bring the conversation surrounding paranormal phenomena to a mainstream audience with their own TV shows, special live streams on Sweden’s largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, whilst also continuing to work on their YouTube channel.

This has helped normalise paranormal experiences for many people and give them a platform to discuss it with sceptics and believers alike.

This platform has allowed the brothers to start a program where they analyse viewer submitted photographs and videos, explaining whether they are paranormal or not.

They discuss whether there can be any logical explanations such as flares or reflections, but according to them, “it is the people’s experience with the picture that [they] find the most interesting”.

But the ease with which images can be edited have made them more suspicious of submissions that seem “too good to be true”.

The brothers are aware that with today’s technology, it is easy to manipulate images, stating: “We try to do most of the analyses for pictures before showing them, but we always want to show some pictures that are fake too so people can see that we can identify them.”

People are attracted to the paranormal world for a variety of reasons.

According to LaxTon they do their work because they “want to learn more about why the energy is still here, or if the energy is just memories in the house”.

They also say: “Some [energies] are attached to us, like our cousins. They are with us when we do our lectures and in our apartments, especially during Christmas time.

“That is why we do what we do, because it is a great subject and we want to learn more. We want to learn the big question, what happens when we die? If we die and go to the other side, how is it on the other side and what is it? That is the big question.”