ITC Apps – Your results may vary
I’m going to start off saying that you should use whatever you like to use.
There’s a whole lot about Ghost Hunting and Searching for spirits that is new, and a lot more research needs to be done in the app based ITC world.
Some of the more popular apps are (links): Phasmabox, Necrophonic, ITC-Paralus, SGK1 Ghost Hunting Kit, and Ultimate Ghost Detector
We have had interesting experiences using each one of these applications listed above as well as several others. (Yes we put our money where our mouth’s are and paid for them where applicable).
First we need to understand that your phones and mobile devices do in fact have a TON of sensors in them.
Can they be used for Ghost Hunting? Maybe.
Detecting EMF:
It’s important to know what the apps are claiming vs what your phone can actually do.
Practically every phone has the following “sensors”:
Accelerometer, Compass, GPS, Bluetooth, Touch Screen, WiFi, and Cellular
Some phones also have:
Magnetometer, Geomagnetic, environmental temperature, humidity, light and many more.
(For more information on sensors which can be on an android phone click here)
When trying to detect EMF and other environmental data, I would recommend you check the apps performance against a known meter and compare results. You may have very good results, you may not. It really depends on the App and the available sensors in your phone.
We have had very limited success with EMF detecting apps so don’t really recommend them for most use cases.
Sound/Word/Visualization
These are interesting, I’m honestly not how sold we are on these.
Most of them generate random sounds, words, or visualizations, some are pure random, some based on sensor input. The idea is that a spirit can manipulate these apps to communicate. Then it’s up to the investigator to make sense of what comes through.
It’s really difficult to tell if what was getting generated was because it was just a random sound, or if it was a response.
Sound Banks
Using the sound banks, We found ourselves wanting an intelligent response, so we would start to pick and choose maybe 1 thing out of the mass generation of random sounds that was getting played and saying yes, that might be a response. Reflecting on this, we have to question, was that really a response or was it just us making a mental connection due to our phones picking a random sound? The skeptic in us say it was just a random sound.
Visualizations
These are interesting. Using various methods generic visualizations are created. Watching the screen you can see shapes kind of move. The idea is a spirit can manipulate the sensors that the app uses to generate images. They remind me a lot of my childhood days where I would watch static on the TV screen and notice patterns in the static. You start to see a worm or a line moving on the screen. The same thing seems to happen with these visualization apps. My brain wants to find patterns. It wants to see shapes, it wants to make sense of the chaos. This is not to say it’s impossible that some spirits are able to come through on these. It’s saying we need to be aware that what we think we are seeing could just be a trick of our own brains.
Word Bank
We have had the best experiences with these types of apps, and honestly had the best results with the Paralus app. We were getting what seems to be intelligent direct responses to questions asked. These apps do not see to rely on just randomly spitting out words or phrases like most of the sound bank apps. Most of these work using a word database, and uses the sensor inputs to pick a word from the database.
Since we had the best results using Paralus, I’ll go a bit more in depth about this app in particular. It seems to use the compass for it’s basic emf detection and uses the data from that sensor to pick words from it’s word bank. What really set it apart, is that It didn’t seem to be generating anything for the sake of generating it. It would very often just sit there with nothing coming out, and when it did put words out, they seemed to be very targeted.
See more about our experience using the Paralus app in our post about “The Murder House” – Gettysburg PA