Origins of the Experiment

Eight years ago, when I was a freshman at Michigan State University, I joined the school’s Paranormal Society, one of the largest clubs of its kind in the Midwest. The first person I met there was Brienna, who quickly climbed the ranks as lead investigator of the club and is still a long time collaborator on paranormal projects of our own. I later met Angela, who injected new ways of looking at things into the work we did.

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As a filmmaker first and foremost, I documented our entire journey. During college, I produced a weekly webseries called Afterlife Road which ran for 200 episodes and eventually culminated in two award-winning films that screened across the country.

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I say “filmmaker first” because, honestly, I’ve always indulged more in camera gear than paranormal gear. Recently, I picked up the Insta X5 360 Camera for a side-project I was working on. I had worked with immersive video in the past, and knew some of these cameras’ limitations. But I was impressed that the X5 seemed to solve the battery, low-light, and other usability problems that plagued earlier models.

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So it didn’t take long for me to start thinking about how the camera, originally purchased for something else entirely, might fit into my paranormal research. I started bringing it on ghost hunts, filming 8K immersive video + audio renders of the sites we were investigating. While I quietly gathered this “background” footage, our team kept filming and investigating as usual.

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Introducing the Estes Method

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Anyone who has followed our work knows I consider the Estes Method the biggest innovation in “mainstream” paranormal investigating. Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve probably seen it done: it’s where you use a traditional spirit box, but instead of plugging in a speaker, someone “taps in” to the box with noise-reducing headphones and a blindfold. They can’t see or hear what anyone present is saying or doing.

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Regardless of if this Method truly is any less biased or subjective as any TV ghost hunter will tell you, I love the method for three specific reasons:

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1. Firstly, of all the “mainstream” ghost hunting tropes (others that immediately jump out are the SLS camera and K2 Meters) it is a breath of fresh air to see something that at least encourages discussion, experimentation, and jargon that promotes objectivity over reading into every false positive a janky old Kinect camera is picking up.

2. Secondly, I’ve seen an undeniable trend during my years of doing the Estes Method: the lack of sight, sound, and being hyper-focused on the rhythmic sweeping of static often puts you in a more open, dare I say meditative state. This’ll become a theme over the course of our initial Remote Contact experiments. 

3. Thirdly, the Estes Method practically begs for further tweaking, creativity, and experimentation. If you’ve followed us for a while you also know I’m particularly fond of scrying and mirrors. Often, we’ve swapped the blindfold for a strategically placed scrying mirror, so that the person “under” the Method still can’t see anyone present in the room… but instead of darkness, they’re scrying. This really leans into the meditative angle of the Estes Method, which might explain why results have been quite impressive and seemingly “elevated” over the traditional blindfold method. 

You may see where I’m going with this. 

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Enter VR: The Beginning of Remote Contact

I had an Oculus sitting around, so I loaded our 360° loops into it. From there, the idea was obvious: what happens if the Estes receiver wears a VR headset instead of a blindfold?

At first, it was just a fun idea, sitting “inside” a haunted location while running the Method. But then we started noticing some interesting patterns. The responses the receiver gave seemed to align not with the physical space we were in, but with the virtual location they were immersed in.

In a strange way, it felt like a form of remote viewing.

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At that point, I knew we had to properly document our sessions. Our first three rounds of experiments, filmed in a 2 week span during our public ghost hunt at the Festival of Oddities and MADCON 8, were released on PARAFlixx as a standalone short film.

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To keep things simple, we chose a single “undisclosed/anonymous” location to focus on for the majority of these filmed sessions. When letting volunteers use the VR Headset to “view” this haunted location during a virtual Estes Session, we intentionally withheld the exact place, any of its history, or its lore. That way, we wouldn’t prime any of these participants with a particular “vibe” or entity they thought they were “supposed” to pick up on. Essentially, we did our part to keep it as much of a “clean slate” as possible. For the purposes of the film, I did go in a little more detail about this location, which is essentially an open field in the middle of some very haunted woods. I still kept the location and its history anonymous for the integrity of the experiment, but I did let slip that there’s one specific, elemental-type entity there that I was curious to see if we could learn more about. It didn’t seem tethered to this location, so it seemed like the perfect entity to potentially contact remotely.

The short film ended with a call to action: for YOU to participate in our ongoing Remote Contact.

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How You Can Participate

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If you have any type of VR headset (even a DIY one, like a Google Cardboard) we invite YOU to join the ongoing experiment.

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To keep things simple for this first public launch, we’re focusing on a single 360° video: the same haunted woods from the film. By staying with one site, we can gather deeper, more consistent data before expanding to our other documented locations.

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Below, you’ll find a YouTube video containing a 5-minute immersive audio/visual loop of the location. If you’ll be viewing somewhere without reliable internet, I recommend downloading it first.​