You don’t need any equipment to investigate your haunted home.
Check these resources for more about ghost hunting without equipment, or with low-tech tools. (Links will open in a new window.)
Podcast: Ghost Hunting without Equipment
Basic tools every ghost hunter must have
The next step
If you’re investigating a haunted house, you’ll see the best results with simple tools from your home repair kit.
If you don’t already own these, most of them will cost less than $10.
For more extensive research, you may want to invest in more elaborate equipment, but even those items are under $100 and usually serve more than one purpose in your home.
In my free ebook, Is Your House Haunted?, I recommend simple tools such as a carpenter’s level, a candle and a ruler. (I also explain exactly how to use them.)
If you want to expand your ghost research, I recommend the following tools:
EMF detector
Almost any EMF detector will work for basic research. You can even use a hiking compass to find elevated EMF levels. (See Use a compass to measure EMF.)
I’ve used a Cell Sensor for nearly years. It’s a good meter and it costs half as much as a K-II meter.
I use the K-II meter to check normal (and abnormally high) EMF levels. Many people like this meter to find paranormal surges in EMF energy, and to communicate in real time with ghosts. If you only buy one EMF meter, and the K-II is within your budget, it’s the one I recommend.
Digital voice recorder
If you want to record in your haunted home, to see if spirits are trying to talk to you, I suggest a simple, digital voice recorder.
Any digital voice recorder is fine. It should not be entirely voice-activated, though that option may work for you… but choose a recorder only if voice-activated recording is an optional setting.
Read reviews. Be sure that the microphone in the recorder is multi-directional, and doesn’t just record sounds in one direction. Also be sure that it’s very sensitive, and that you can download the recordings to your computer, easily.
Digital thermometers
To measure hot and cold spots, you’ll need a thermometer that measures the air temperature. Most non-contact, point-and-shoot laser thermometers actually measure the surface temperature of whatever it’s pointed at. In other words, the thermometer is measuring the temperature of an object, not the air temperature. That’s not our first interest.
Here’s one IR thermometer that’s inexpensive and fits in a shirt pocket.
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However, it can be helpful to identify where heat and cold are coming from. In the book, I describe low-tech methods to do this.
However, Black & Decker makes a digital thermometer specifically designed to discover thermal leaks. Though this won’t tell you the air temperature, it can identify hot spots and cold spots in the walls, floor, or ceiling, and on haunted objects.
On the other hand, a lit candle or incense can show you if you have a draft that’s affecting the room temperature, or a specific area in the room.
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