"I've caught a few. It wasn't really something I spent a lot of time on, but around Halloween, I would catch a few episodes of one of those shows. Believe me, there are tons of them out there now."
"What equipment do you recall them using?"
"Well, night vision cameras, of course." She began ticking things off on her fingers. "They also use audio recorders for electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP as they call it, thermal cameras, things that measure temperature or electromagnetic fields or EMF readings. There were also some weird things, too." She paused in remembering and chuckled. "One of them had some stuffed teddy bear they would bring out for child spirits to play with and it would supposedly light up if a ghost touched it. Oh and some really annoying radio thing that flips stations all the time, really fast, and they think ghosts talk through it."
"You say that as if you don't believe it."
"I'm a scientific person. Skepticism is like air to me," she said.
"So says the girl who is no longer breathing."
"Rub it in, Ayna, rub it in."
Ayana smiled a little, glad she seemed to be taking it all in stride so far. "So, with all this new equipment those gents use, we have to make sure that the haunting spirits are more careful with their communications."
"What I don't get is why you let them communicate at all if you don't want them communicating."
"Oh, we want them to communicate, Detective Zannah."
"We're partners, Ayna, you can call me Miftahul. Or Mifa for short if you want."
Ayana nodded. "We do want them to communicate. We want the interest, the hope of life after death out there. What we're concerned with is how much they give out and how they interact with the living. We can't have someone giving out all the information on how the afterlife works. It needs to be a mystery. It needs to remain unknown. So we can have a haunting spirit answer a few questions to affirm their existence, or at least, cast a shadow of a doubt for those that don't believe. However, something like appearing to them in full color as a solid human is strictly forbidden."
"What about the supposed demonic spirits that attack people or possess people?"
"Well, for one, we frown on calling them demonic. Evil, chaotic, non-human or curse in most cases, those terms are fine, but demonic indicates theology, and we tend to shy away from that here since there are so many religions and differing views out there."
"Hey, good question, which one is right?"
"Which one is right, what?"
"Which religion is right? Every single one of them says that they are the right one and all the others are wrong. Even the offshoots within Christianity, the Catholics saying the Baptists are going to hell, the Methodists calling the Mormons out as wrong. Then you have Islam, Buddhism, Jewish, and Pagan. Who is right?"
"There really is no right or wrong."
That took her a moment, as she wasn't expecting it. "Of course, there is right and wrong."
"Let me rephrase. No religion has it all right or all wrong. And most of them have the same basic foundation, not that any of them would admit it. It's just in the particulars where they begin to disagree. So while we may encounter non-human spirits, spirits that have never had a human incarnation, or evil spirits, or chaotic spirits, we don't classify them as demons, since that has religious overtones."
"Separation of church and state so to speak, gotcha."
Ayana nodded, somewhat amused at Mifa's ability to jump from topic to topic like this. It was like this with all of the newly dead, but it never ceased to amaze her. "Tell me, Mifa, are there any other large looming questions you have?"
"Probably a ton and I'm sure we'll get to them. It's weird. It's like my mind is fluid. I can't seem to just ignore the off-topic stuff and focus on what I need to do. It's all just there, flowing along like a river."
"Ah yes, stream of consciousness thinking. You'll get better at controlling it. Being newly dead can be a bit like being a child. You have to learn to control your mind once more, now that it has been freed from the flesh. You have less input for it to deal with, so in return, it has opened the floodgates."
"Well, here's hoping my brain-to-mouth filter is still somewhat functional. Not that it was ever all that great when I was alive."
Ayana let out a chuckle and nodded. "I suppose we'll have to see. Shall I continue?"
"Sure thing."
"Haunting spirits stay in an area designated by their attachments. Some can move to two or three different areas if they have that many attachments that feel like home to them. This can be especially true with celebrities and politicians, people who moved around a lot in the course of their lives. Some stay where they died, others may have attachments to a certain place or person or even a thing, and that is where they haunt."
"There are four general types of haunting spirits," Ayana said and continued, "the first type is a haunting that really no longer has an intelligent spirit behind it. It's almost like a kind of psychic record that plays at specific times or dates."
"A residual haunting?"
"Is that what those ghost experts call it?" Ayana asked.
"If I remember it right, yes. Where it's not really them, they just go through the motions, and never interact intelligently with anyone. Like, come in, look out the window, leave the room. No matter how much they try to talk to the spirit or get the ghost to deviate from that path, they never can."
"Yes, exactly, it's like trying to interact with a movie or television show. You can perhaps see, smell, or feel the spirit, but you'll get no interaction at all. Right. Very good. The second is a normal spirit. They will interact with people they come into contact with, but oftentimes, they see their surroundings as they were when they died. They feel that these living people are perhaps ghosts themselves, or at the very least intruders. They will interact with them, and sometimes will have moments of clarity when they recall that they are dead, but then they lapse right back into seeing things as they were when they died."
"Okay, got it."
Ayana nodded, pausing just a moment, then continued. "The third kind is a little bit different, and we tend to have them anyplace that has an abundance of spirits, like hospitals, prisons, and very old buildings. They are intelligent, aware that they are dead, and they see things as they really appear. If the place where they are has degraded due to abandonment they see it that way, though they do have the ability to see it as it had been, when they lived. They actually help us in a way. They handle the day-to-day stuff, making sure none of the other hunters actually harm living people. If a team of ghost hunters comes in, they contact us so we can be there to exercise a little bit more control over the situation."
"So they are basically the hall monitors and we're the teachers that get called in when people are playing with the big guns."