How Incoming Ghost Reports Were Handled and Filed

Every ghost report that arrives at an Ontario society starts as a sentence from a stranger. Someone saw a light move across a kitchen, heard boots on a stair, felt a hand on a shoulder. The work of turning that sentence into something a historian can use is slow, deliberate, and rarely dramatic. This is how field research methods shape the intake and filing of those accounts, and why the society writes down what happened without ever deciding that a ghost did it.

The details cited in this entry were checked on field research across disciplines.

What happens the moment a report arrives

In field research terms, an intake form is raw data captured outside a laboratory, a library, or a workplace. A witness is not in a controlled setting. They are standing in their own hallway at eleven at night, and the society's director is writing on a clipboard. The discipline is to record the account as it was given, in the witness's own words, before anyone offers an interpretation. The society's early years, described on its own pages, show this habit from the start: accounts were taken down, dated, and signed, and the file was closed until a second reader could look at it.

Do you note the feelings, or only the facts?

Both, but in separate columns. Field researchers keep what is called an ethnographic record, and field notes are its backbone. The kinds of notes named in the method are jot notes, field notes proper, methodological notes, and journals or diaries. A witness who is shaking while describing a cold spot is a fact of the encounter. A director's private frustration that a call came at midnight belongs in a journal, not in the report. Keeping those apart is what lets a later reader trust the account without being handed someone else's mood.

The four kinds of field notes, and where each one goes

Jot notes are keywords or phrases written while the encounter is still happening, often standing up, often in poor light. Field notes proper describe the physical context and the people involved, including behaviour and nonverbal communication: the broken window latch, the smell of coal, the way the witness kept pointing at the ceiling. Methodological notes are the director's own ideas about how to run the next intake better. Journals and diaries hold the ethnographer's personal reactions, frustrations, and assessments of life and work in the field. A branch that filed everything in one pile would lose the difference between a witness's statement and a volunteer's opinion.

Why every branch writes the same way

A society with directors in several regions faces a quiet problem: one branch's file looks nothing like another's. The solution is not a template that flattens the story but a shared set of headings. Participant observation, data collection, and survey research are examples of field research methods, and each has its own record format. A house call is participant observation. A mailed questionnaire is survey research. The file says which one was used, because the reader needs to know whether the director stood in the room or read a letter three weeks later.

What the intake form asks, and what it refuses to ask

The form asks for the date, the location, the witness's account in sequence, and any prior history of the house. It does not ask whether the witness believes in ghosts. Field research taught social scientists to set aside ethnocentrism, the assumption that one's own group is superior, and the same principle applies to a report about a family in a farmhouse: the director's own beliefs about the supernatural are not evidence. The form also does not ask for a conclusion. A report that says "probably a ghost" has stopped being a record and started being an opinion.

How the society approaches field research across disciplines without pretending to be science

Anthropology, archaeology, biology, and economics all use fieldwork, and they use it differently. An anthropologist aims at ethnography, a grounded, inductive method that relies on participant observation over months or years. An archaeologist surveys and excavates. A biologist observes free-living animals without changing their setting. The society borrows the patience but not the claim. Its files are testimony collected in the field, and the field is a stretch of Ontario shoreline, a farm lane, a museum staircase. No result is presented as proof of anything beyond the account itself.

Where does the lighthouse fit into a filing cabinet?

Some files grow heavier than others. The legends attached to the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse have been retold for so long that a single report is hard to separate from the story it has become. The society's archive holds the reports; the retelling belongs to the wider folklore, and that retelling is documented elsewhere. The filing method keeps the two apart by dating each account and naming who gave it. When a later writer wants to know what was said in 2002 versus what was said in 1962, the file can answer, and the legend cannot.

The same discipline applies to the accounts gathered around Spadina House, where an anniversary evening in October 2003 produced one set of reports and the house's older history produced another. Neither set is filed as a haunting. Each is filed as what a person said on a given night. The distinction sounds small. It is the whole method.

Should a witness's nerves change the file?

No, but they should be recorded in the right place. A director who notices that a witness grows calm only while describing a particular room has made an observation about the telling, not about the room. That observation goes in the diary. The report keeps the words and the details. When the Niagara region's community radio broadcasts took up local hauntings in the mid-2000s, the value to a later researcher was the same: recordings of how people told the story, not a verdict on whether the story was true. Ethnomusicologists face an identical problem when they study music as a cultural product that cannot be understood without its context. Take the story out of its setting and you have a paragraph with no life in it.

How the archive survives a move, a fire, or a lost director

Paper files are fragile. A branch that keeps only a shoebox is one flood away from losing twenty years of reports. The society's own record of its early years and of the directors who built the branches shows how the collection was passed along, sometimes by hand, sometimes by photocopy. Digitising is not the same as preserving: a scan without a date and a location is a picture of a page, not a record. Each file carries its own labels forward. A genealogy researcher tracing a house on a Norfolk road can use the same method when checking land records against family accounts.

What a reader can check for themselves

If you live in an old Ontario house, start a single notebook. Write the date at the top of every entry before you write anything else. Put what you saw or heard in one paragraph, and put what you felt about it in a second paragraph clearly marked as your own reaction. Keep the original wording, even the awkward parts. Do not decide what it was. When a neighbour tells you the same story you have heard twice before, note that too, and note who told it first. That notebook is the same shape as the society's intake file, and it will outlast the memory of the night it describes. If you want to see how the method is described in full, the page on field research lays out the kinds of notes, the interviewing formats, and the analysis methods that a careful collector can borrow.