This is the gear we actually bring with us on every investigation. Not gear we’d love to own, not gear we tested once at a convention, and not gear that looked cool on someone else’s YouTube channel. The pieces below are what we pack into the bag for every hotel, museum, and field trip.
If a tool doesn’t earn its place in our setup after multiple investigations, we don’t include it here. We’re a small family operation, our budget isn’t unlimited, and we’d rather own a few reliable tools than a closet full of gadgets we never use.
Everything below is what we use, with an honest take on what each piece is actually good for, and what it isn’t.
The Core Four
EVP Recorder: EVIDA 64GB Digital Voice Recorder
What it is: A compact digital voice recorder with 64GB of storage, voice-activated recording, and password protection. We use ours for capturing EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena), which are sounds and voices that sometimes show up on audio recordings made in active locations but weren’t heard at the time.
Why we use it: EVP work is one of the most accessible parts of paranormal investigation. You set the recorder running, ask questions out loud with deliberate pauses, and review the audio later. The voice-activated mode is helpful because it means you’re not scrubbing through hours of dead silence to find a thirty-second response.
Honest take: A good EVP recorder is the most important single piece of paranormal gear we own. Most of what we’ve captured over the years has come through audio, not photos or video. The EVIDA is reliable, the battery lasts well, and the audio quality is more than enough for what we do. We don’t claim every odd noise on it is paranormal. Most of what we record turns out to be nothing. But the few moments that have made us stop and replay it have all come from audio first.
👉 Check current price on Amazon
EMF Meter: Wintact Digital EMF Detector
What it is: A rechargeable handheld digital EMF (electromagnetic field) meter with a built-in temperature sensor, LCD backlight, and sound-light alarm. It measures both magnetic radiation in milligauss and electric field strength in volts per meter.
Why we use it: EMF meters are a paranormal investigator’s most basic tool, and for good reason. The theory is that paranormal activity can cause unexplained spikes in electromagnetic fields, so a meter that beeps and lights up when fields change gives you a real-time read on the environment. The temperature sensor is a useful bonus, since cold spots are often reported in active locations.
Honest take: EMF meters pick up everything electromagnetic, not just the paranormal. Old hotel wiring, refrigerators, phones, fluorescent lights, fuse boxes, and your own router in the next room can all trigger readings. We’ve learned to walk every space first, identify the baseline noise, and only treat unexplained spikes in places that shouldn’t have a source as worth paying attention to. Used that way, this meter has flagged genuinely interesting hot spots more than once. Used carelessly, it’ll convince you any old house is full of ghosts.
👉 Check current price on Amazon
Spirit Box: P-SB7T (with Temperature and Flashlight)
What it is: A spirit box, sometimes called a ghost box, that rapidly scans through AM and FM radio frequencies. The theory behind it is that paranormal entities can use the white noise and audio fragments produced by the scan to form words or short phrases. This particular model is the P-SB7T, the most popular spirit box in the field, with a built-in temperature sensor and a flashlight.
Why we use it: When it works, it’s compelling. We’ve had nights where we asked a direct question out loud and a word that fit the question came through the static within seconds. We’ve also had nights where the box did nothing useful at all. We’ve come to think of it as our most experimental tool. It’s part of the kit, but we set our expectations accordingly.
Honest take: Spirit box results are heavily susceptible to apophenia, which is the human tendency to find meaning and patterns in random noise. Hearing what sounds like a word in radio static doesn’t necessarily mean a word was spoken. We try to set a high bar for what counts. The response has to be on-topic, fast, and clearly intelligible to multiple people in the room before we treat it as anything more than coincidence. By that standard, we get fewer hits than people on TV claim, but the hits we do get are harder to explain.
👉 Check current price on Amazon
SLS Camera: Homemade Build
What it is: An SLS (Structured Light Sensor) camera is a device that projects an invisible grid of infrared dots into a space and uses depth-sensing software to detect human-shaped figures in the room. When it identifies a figure, it draws a stick-figure overlay on the screen showing the figure’s position and posture. The technology comes from the original Microsoft Kinect, which was repurposed by the paranormal community years ago.
Why we built our own: Commercial SLS cameras designed for paranormal use can run several hundred dollars, and most of them are just repackaged Kinect sensors. We built ours from the original parts for a fraction of the cost. We brought it to the Jerome Grand Hotel on our 2021 return trip, and what it picked up there is its own story.
Build details and a step-by-step breakdown of how we put ours together coming soon. If you’re impatient and want to know what to look for, search YouTube for “DIY SLS camera Kinect” and you’ll find the foundational tutorials.
How We Actually Use This Stuff
Owning the gear isn’t the same as knowing how to use it. We’ve spent years figuring out a workflow that gets us useful results without driving ourselves crazy chasing every random reading.
- Baseline first. Before we run anything, we walk the entire space with the EMF meter to establish what the “normal” electromagnetic environment looks like. Wiring in the walls, appliances, electronics. Whatever the natural background is, we map it before we start looking for anomalies.
- Record everything. Even when nothing seems to be happening, the audio recorder is running. Most of what we’ve captured we didn’t hear at the time. Review later.
- Multiple witnesses. If something only one person hears or sees, we note it but we don’t treat it as evidence. If two or more people independently report the same thing at the same time, that changes things.
- Document it on the spot. The kids’ journal entries from our Jerome Grand Hotel stay are still our best record of that night. Memory fades fast. Photos and recordings help, but written notes at the time of the event are gold.
If You’re Just Getting Started
You don’t need everything on this page to start investigating. Honestly, you don’t need most of it.
If you’re just beginning, here’s what we’d recommend, in order:
- An EVP recorder. This is the single most useful tool for capturing genuinely interesting evidence. Audio carries information that visual gear often misses, and it’s the cheapest way to find out whether there’s something to a location.
- A notebook and pen. Not glamorous. Still the single best paranormal investigation tool ever made. Write down what you experience, when, and where.
- An EMF meter. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with EVP work, add an EMF meter. It’ll teach you to think about the environment more carefully.
- A spirit box. Last, because it’s the easiest one to misuse. Once you’ve spent some time doing simpler investigations, you’ll have the discipline to use a spirit box without convincing yourself of things that aren’t there.
You can build a real investigator’s kit with the first two items for under fifty dollars. Don’t let anyone tell you you need a thousand-dollar setup before you can start.
What We’re Testing Next
We’re currently considering the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer Gen 2 smart glasses as an addition to our daytime documentation kit. The hands-free POV capture would be a meaningful upgrade for walking through hotels, ghost tours, and historic sites where we want to keep our hands free for other gear. When we make the call on whether to add them to the kit, we’ll write a full honest review of how they actually perform on a real investigation, including their limitations in low-light conditions.
If you have gear you think we should test, send it our way through our contact page.
Full Equipment Reviews
When we put a new piece of gear through its paces, we publish a full review. For deeper, longer-form testing notes on specific tools, head over to our Equipment Reviews archive.
A Note on the Links
The Amazon links above point to the exact products we own and use. Some of these links are affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no additional cost to you. We only recommend gear we actually use, and we don’t change our opinions based on commission rates. For the full breakdown of how this works and our editorial standards, see our Affiliate Disclosure.
If you buy any of the gear above, we’d love to hear how you’re using it. Drop us a line through our contact page, or share your story for our paranormal experiences archive.