If you search the various paranormal groups out there you’ll probably see that many have their own reasons for “going Dark” from being able to channel the spirit energies to simply creating the atmosphere. But many touch upon the theory of using your senses, when you eliminate one sense your 4 remaining senses are in some way boosted. Like how the blind can hear better and use their sense of touch in a way that I cant fathom, you ever tried to make sense of brail? For someone who dosnt rely on brail to read its not an easy task to learn. So by eliminating the light what your now doing is increasing your listening skills and other senses, this, apparently makes for a good investigative state of mind. Kind of like having your own Spidey Senses, your more in tune with your surroundings and you’ll most likely be able to identify certain things better, the dark is also claimed to relax you. I know of a few people who perhaps have found the dark VERY relaxing and nearly nodded off during a vigil, but is the relaxed atmosphere really an aide or a hindrance to you, I mean when I’m feeling sleepy or very relax, I find that I miss a lot of things, I bring on the state of selective hearing and really can’t see that this would be a useful tool, but the theory does have merit. Think of it as your removing the physical senses rather than using your ears, your eyes and nose, your using sight, smell and sound essentially using your Psi, most people including investigators are most of the time caught up using their physical senses that when “going dark” it forces them to concentrate on using their senses at a heightened state.
Another idea behind the whole going dark is very simple, it works on the fact that there’s less noise, less traffic and less people outside making sounds that could potentially contaminate your investigation data. By removing as much outside contamination as possible, your’e effectively attempting to control the audio aspect of the investigation. As I said before you can search the web and find all sorts of different reasons for going dark. Another is the belief that spirits draw upon energy to manifest, so during the day the spirits can simply draw of the natural energies from the sun BUT by removing the sun (not literally) and limiting the power being used your essentially forcing the manifestation to draw upon your own energies or that of your kit. A phenomenon known as battery drain, though battery drain is yet to be a proven factor of an investigation again it remains an inconclusive theory.
Control is such an important part of an investigation, the fact is you really have very little control of anything during an investigation that the slightest bit can be incredibly useful, from noises outside to who’s where and when in the location being investigated. Being able to identify the different light sources makes analyzing evidence so much easier. So by ‘going dark’ you are controlling the various different sources of light from that of a flashlight, IR illumination to the LCD screen of a camcorder. This also comes back to the idea of less traffic, so by going dark your heightening your senses, your attempting to control not only the energies that a spirit or ghost can use to manifest but also the light sources making evidence review easier and potentially eliminating false positives BUT is this really the real reason for going dark?
I have a theory and I think that its something that may have come about by accident. The whole going dark idea I think comes from trying to create the spooky situation, haunted houses have been dark going back years and years, the dark gives you limited sight and therefore like on the attraction rides your more likely to be scared by something suddenly happening. This was translated to TV with shows like Most Haunted it makes for entertaining television, but does it really help to find ghosts? Like I said earlier I believe that we may have accidentally stumbled upon the real reason for going dark and that is that (according to my theory) the spirit world or spirit dimension may actually be present in another light spectrum, one that we are unable to see with our own eyes.
Something that modern technology has now enabled up to see, to use the term “Opened our eyes to a whole new world” may in fact be the exact and most appropriate quote. What we have now is the ability to see in total darkness something that some animals and insects have always been able to do, the infrared spectrum and now the Ultraviolet spectrum have been getting a lot of positive results in the way of capturing what’s believed to be ghosts or spirits. New technologies have been designed to not only see infrared like many house hold camcorders can do but also see the UV light spectrum, it seems the lower in the spectrum the camera can see the more likely you are of capturing spirit activity. This is something that Barry Fitzgerald of Ghost Hunters International introduced to us a few years ago. His cameras are what is know known as Full Spectrum the idea being that it doesn’t limit any light from being in the picture, which means that should an entity show its self, you’d have way more chance of capturing it.
So going back to the dark, its not every time that we receive reports of spirit activity happening at night, and for those it requires perhaps an extra investigation. But I for one still would never rule out investigation in the dark even if the reports are of things happening during the day. What if things do happen at night but the home owner simply isn’t aware, or like we have spoken about already the spirits or ghosts simply aren’t seen because they are visible only through the use of IR or UV devices, so I’d personally setup to record activity throughout the day and night, ‘going dark’ at the first opportunity.