They were doing a sensory deprivation experiment at the site.

Justin Harmon had a blindfold over his eyes, was wearing ear muffs and was listening to white noise.

Para Vision teammate Daniel Shigroff was asking him questions.

The theory behind the test is that if Mr Harmon can answer the questions without hearing Mr Shigroff ask them, it helps prove paranormal activity.

Mr Shigroff said he was not one to easily scare, but on this particular excursion, the pair was not alone – and what was present was not a ghost.

“Something ran past the canteen building, through the trees,” he said.

“And you can hear branches breaking and all sorts of stuff.”

Sunshine Coast ‘ghost’ experience terrifies mum on camping trip

The first Mr Harmon became aware of Mr Shigroff’s fear was a tap on the shoulder with instructions to get out of the campsite.

“There’s something there that’s not a ghost,” Mr Shigroff said.

The Sunshine Coast investigators

The pair is part of a team that investigates paranormal activity across the Sunshine Coast.

Other members include Suzette Nielsen-Aquin, a Canadian native with a lifelong interest in the spirit world, and Mr Shigroff’s wife and daughters.

Another member includes a researcher who lives outside the Sunshine Coast region.

The team, which has an increasing membership, has been called by many businesses and homeowners since they formed in about 2018.

Its aim is to validate what someone is experiencing or offer some other explanation for a situation.

“If they’re uncomfortable with stuff going on in their environment, it puts them at ease if we can validate something they’re experiencing,” Ms Nielsen-Aquin said.

“They’re not going crazy, you know, it is real and they can sometimes feel comforted by it or put at ease.”

Mr Shigroff said that not every situation the team investigated was caused by ghosts or other “activity” and his approach was to try and find any other explanation before stretching into a paranormal realm.

The team could spend hours, or days at some places.

The big business of paranormal probing

Paranormal investigators who publish their exploits to YouTube and gain subscribers may start to produce an income stream from the online platform.

The Diary of a Ghost Hunter YouTube channel, for instance, has more than 6000 subscribers.

The Australian pair who runs the channel and associated podcast, known as Anne and Renata, talk about the “hustle” required to find new sites to explore because they had made ghost hunting their full-time jobs.

Youtubers.me also reported another channel, The Paranormal Files (Official Channel), had a net worth between $22,000 and $136,000.

Mr Shigroff was quick to separate his team from the dramatised paranormal probing prolific on YouTube.

“We’re legit paranormal and not entertainment paranormal,” he said.

“We’re not saying everything around us is paranormal, it’s not.

“You’ve got to have logic.”

The Sunshine Coast team members work other jobs and do the investigations because they are passionate about it.

Mr Shigroff is a timber pest inspector, Mr Harmon is between jobs and Ms Nielsen-Aquin is a writer.

The team does not have a YouTube channel and instead shares its investigations on Facebook, under the Para Vision Crew Investigation Homepage, and on Instagram.

Places with high ‘activity’

Some of the locations where the Para Vision team says it has found paranormal activity includes, typically, the Old Nambour and Buderim cemeteries but also a Sunshine Coast historical site, which they declined to name, and the old Maroochydore Fire Station on Aerodrome Rd.

They were asked to explore the old fire station by one of the business owners who leased the space.

“They had apparitions, they were feeling sick, stuff was getting moved,” Mr Shigroff said.

The team validated that business owner and found what they claimed was evidence of paranormal activity.

At Buderim cemetery the team had captured on film “dark shadow figures” and a “gatekeeper”, a human-looking figure standing at the gate of the site, Mr Shigroff said.

At the Nambour cemetery, Mr Shigroff said he had photographed an apparition on top of a grave and other shapes that did not belong at the site.

The team only looked at cemeteries if it had no other investigations planned.

“We don’t normally do cemeteries … but you can do if it’s done respectfully,” he said.

The investigator also added cemeteries were only open to the public during the day.

The team was also supposed to explore Dough Ho, in Mooloolaba, but the shop closed before it had a chance.

“They had spatulas fly out of things and things fall off shelves and coffee cups fly off,” he said.

Technology used in ghost hunts

The team uses custom-built equipment and camera lenses designed to film and photograph in the dark.

A gaming camera attached to a tablet is used to “map things out” in a dark room.

Voice recorders are also used.

Mr Shigroff said one of the most-asked questions was ‘why do you do it at night’?

“We’re trying to remove as much pollution as possible from our environment,” he said.

“Cars, people, sounds of animals, the wind, usually it’s more still at night.”

Interest in the paranormal

Mr Shigroff said Australian interest in the sector was increasing but there was a “conservativeness” that still existed.

Mr Harmon, who was from Alabama in the United States, said the paranormal movement was bigger over there.

Mr Shigroff said capturing evidence gave the team a sense of accomplishment.

“Some people will still doubt it,” he said.

“But the majority of people who doubt it don’t have the experiences we have.”

Mr Shigroff said he did not expect everyone to become a believer in ghosts and said people did not believe in lots of things.

“There’s lots of weird things that happen in this world that we just don’t know about,” he said.