Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee & Paranormal Documentary

Since my move to Milwaukee about a year ago I had the opportunity to work with a local paranormal group in the Milwaukee area. Noah Leigh is the founder and lead investigator of the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee (PIM). He and I met while investigating Willow Creek Farms in Shannon, Illinois just before I moved to Milwaukee for grad school.

Having been invited on a couple of their investigations it was easy to see that PIM took the paranormal seriously – making it their goal to not only know everything their is to know about the way their equipment functions and why but also make sure they they are investigating in a logical and systematic way. They understand that the most important part of a single piece of evidence is not the evidence in itself but how they went about obtaining that piece of evidence and limiting the amount of potential error that may discredit that piece of evidence. For instance, PIM is a group that recently began using – what they like to call – “control recorders”. These are simply recorders that each investigators will have on their person at all times – no matter what. This is to prevent any confusion while reviewing the digital recorders. If you are an investigator you know you have been in a situation like this while reviewing evidence – “hey Bill – is this you singing again?” Rather than taking Bill’s word (although I do trust him) I can simply review his control recorder at that exact time during the investigation. I know in the past we have thrown out a lot of evidence because we thought that it might have been one of the investigators.  This is a great idea and I think a lot of groups will benefit from using these recorders.

Soon after Noah and I met we began to brainstorm an idea for a documentary. This is something that I had always had an interest in doing. Of course, I know nothing about mass producing films and such so we agreed to simply make this an online documentary where everyone can watch on youtube/vimeo. So, throughout the past year I have been vigorously learning all that I can about cameras and audio to make this documentary look great. I have also interviewed numerous people in both PIM and FCPS as well as some local enthusiasts. Our purpose for this project is to simply show what investigating the paranormal is REALLY like. It’s not like what you see on t.v. I believe this information will get people to think about the way they investigation and encourage them to want to learn about being logical investigators. Know how your equipment works is crucial in understanding your data. This documentary will also give insight to those who are thinking about joining or even starting a paranormal group of their own. Whatever way you see it this documentary will be a tool for all paranormal enthusiasts.

The documentary will be released on both youtube and vimeo during the month of October 2011. Each Wednesday of the month we will release episodes ranging from why investigate the paranormal , what are sensitives and why?, types of equipment, and the final report. 

The above video is a short equipment review that we did during our last investigation of the Brumder Mansion. This will give you an idea of what the documentary will be like. For those interested, they use Polaroid PDR400 recorders as our control recorders. These recorders record in .wav, have 2 GB built in memory with a miniSD card slot that is expandable up to 16 GB, has great stereo microphones, and of course USB connector. You can find these recorders for only $24.95. I highly recommend that your group invest in these recorders since they are cheap AND record in WAV.

Thanks again for stopping by our site!

Aaron Powers  Co-founder of Forest City Paranormal Society