Now, let's talk about communication with the dead, in haunted locations. I'm speaking from personal experience as I describe this process.
The first thing to understand is that ghosts do not moan, wail, or carry on in lurid fashion, as represented in movies and on sensational TV shows.
Oh, Banshees wail, but they aren't ghosts; they're from the Otherworld, and generally categorized with faeries. (See the Banshee article at this Topic, for more information.)
Ghosts contact me with a bit less clarity and consistency than the "messages" I get from... I don't even know where the messages come from, to be honest.
Communication with/to ghosts follows no rules, but it is possible to give some general guidelines.
When and where it starts
For me, ghost contact is similar to receiving "messages." It is compelling enough that everything else in the environment tends to recede.
From most reports, ghosts do not initiate contact until you've been in the haunted location at least 20 minutes. However, my experiences have been different; some ghosts are practically jumping up and down, eager for attention from the moment they see me pull up in the car.
A couple of years ago, at Gilson Road Cemetery (Nashua, NH), a fellow ghost hunter observed trees falling just feet from my car, as I drove up. That's a bit dramatic.
However, on other occasions, I've been aware of entities attempting to communicate as soon as I walked through the gate to the cemetery. At the other extreme, I was in a haunted college and it took nearly half an hour for a ghost to make contact there.
What happens
As a medium, I sense energy at first. Usually, it has an emotional content. I can sense if the ghost--or what happened at that location--is sad, a celebration, a rite of passage, or something else.
I have the sense of seeing things, but I'm always aware that it is like a memory, inside my conciousness, not seen by others in the same location.
At times, I can hear things or smell them. Whatever I hear, it's generally within the experience, not something that others will hear. When I smell things, others usually perceive the same odor.
(I have never had an experience where I could hear and see and smell and sense the energy of the haunting, all at the same time. If the haunting seems so real that it could be part of a performance, maybe it is. On at least one ghost hunt, someone has tried playing pranks on me, to see if I'd fall for his ruse. If you know what's normal at a ghost hunt, you won't be fooled by a joker.)
