Interviewing A Witness

interviewing the witness

Presented by Troy Taylor, Author of the GHOST HUNTER'S GUIDEBOOK and President of the American Ghost Society

In the following section, we will take a look at the basics of interviewing a witness to a paranormal event. Space does not allow us to print all of the details here but in Troy Taylor's Ghost Hunter's Guidebook, several sections are devoted to witnesses and the actual questions to ask them. It also features a step-by-step guide to actually conducting the entire investigation.

Interviewing a witness may be the hardest thing that you have to do during an investigation. As any law enforcement officer will tell you, two witnesses rarely see the same incident in the exact same way. Paranormal investigators run into the same situation but in a different manner.... in our case, a witness will see and hear something totally alien to them, something frightening and something they don't understand. This makes our job even tougher.

A witness should be handled in a careful and deliberate manner. They have to be made to feel comfortable with the investigation and the entire situation. The paranormal may see like "old hat" to us, but it is something completely bizarre to the ordinary person.
The following are some hints and tips that will help you through a proper interview with a witness. These are some things to watch out for:

1. Check all of the details of the account with the witness and make sure that all of the outside facts are in order and not just their immediate encounter. If they recall that it was snowing that night, check the weather conditions and see, because if it wasn't, that might not be the only problem with their memory.

2. Attempt to recreate the events if possible. Place each witness in the same position they were in when the encounter occurred. If they reported a strange noise, try to recreate that noise by natural means and make sure the normal possibilities are ruled out.

3. Try to get a full and complete report of everything that happened. This might be important later as the mind tends to forget slight details as time goes by.

Okay, let's say that you have followed all of the rules and the case seems genuine. It appears that the witness statement holds up to scrutiny.... but does it really?
I can't stress how important it is to be careful when assessing this testimony. Being careful is the best way to discover what really happened. You have to make sure that you are objective when writing up your report. Don't let yourself be influenced by information that you may have run across in reading or research.

Your assessment of the witness testimony may be imperative to the case. Is the witness believable? If you have any doubts about what may have happened, you need to rule those out while you are at the location.

The following is a list of testimonial problems that can occur with the witness and again, some other things that you need to watch out for when conducting an interview:

1. A witness may be totally unaware of how some phenomena may occur. Check into the details... there may be something natural about the house that is caused the lights to go on and off or something about nearby train tracks that are causing things to move about.

2. Eyewitness testimony is not always what actually happened... but what the witness believe to have happened. It is good to find out ahead of time is the witness is already "sure" the house is "haunted" or not. This kind of thinking can easily color their testimony.

3. A witness can be influenced by information you give them. Be careful about what you say before the interview. Even joking about paranormal events can be bad. You could laugh and say "that sounds like the Amityville Horror" and the next thing you know, the witness is reporting blood coming from the walls.... don't laugh about this one, it happens!

4. The witness may be mentally unstable. This also happens.... and more frequently than we would care to admit. I have been called to houses where the residents are just plain "nuts". Obviously, we are not health care workers, so there is little we can do in this situation but try to extricate ourselves from the situation as politely as possible.

5. The witness may deliberately fabricate events. This is a two-fold problem.... on one hand you have a person who has may the whole thing up and on the other, a person who actually had a real experience but can't recall all of the details, so they have "filled in the blanks" with less honest information.

Don't let yourself get pulled in by this! It is easy to do and it happens to the best investigators sometimes. Following through on a case like this could be disastrous for your reputation. You have to learn when to tell if someone is lying... it will become identifiable by asking pointed and direct questions about the events.