The Paranormal Reporter

You may have seen this tool being used on the Ghost Hunters TV show. They call it a Geophone, and it measures vibration in the ground, and lights up a set of LED lights when it measures something. It is the same type of device that is used to measure seismic activity.

My Geophone (still from video below). Image credit: Alejandro Rojas

TV Ghost Hunters use Geophone

In the episode I watched, the Ghost Hunters were hearing footsteps, so they set up one of these devices on the floor to see if they could detect vibration in conjunction with the foot step sounds. The next time they heard footsteps nearby, the Geophone did not go off. However, they demonstrated that the Geophone did measure their slightest movements, and they were about the same distance from the Geophone that the footstep sounds seemed to be. To the Ghost Hunters, this indicated that the footsteps could be just some strange sound being made by some entity in the room, because the sounds were loud enough that they should have vibrated the ground.

Finding the components

I decided I wanted to have this device in my ghost hunter kit. However, when I looked it up, all I could find were components, not a fully functioning pre-built unit. So I order the kit with the components and decided I would try my hand at putting it together.

Google is usually always there to help me find answers to all of my problems. I thought for sure I would be able to Google some instructions on putting the unit together. To my surprise I found nothing. I was on my own. This was scarier to me than most of the paranormal situations I had found myself in. You can only imagine my look of horror when I came to realize Google had failed me for the first time.

Childhood trauma

The scariest part was that the kit I had found came with a DC adapter to plug into the wall. I am almost certain that I was supposed to cut off the adapter at the end and put the raw wires into the LED device. Eek!

This brought up a scary memory from my childhood, although in hind sight it was actually kind of an adventurous as well. When I was a little kid my sister called for me to crawl under a coffee table with her, she had a brilliant idea. She had found some tweezers and thought it would be cool to see what would happen if she stuck them into the wall socket. Luckily her little experiment didn’t kill us, and the only real damage we suffered was our eyebrows getting singed off. Thank goodness they grew back.

Anyway, I didn’t want anything to do with the DC unit part. On the site I had ordered from it said a 9-volt battery would also work, so that is the route I went. I bought a pack of 9-volt snap in connectors.

Putting the components together

Without any direction except for some schematics that I could not make heads nor tails of, I was on my own. I figured out where and how to connect the 9-volt to the device. I had to actually solder wires to the Geophone device, and then connect those to the LED unit, and to my surprise it all worked. I also had to adjust the sensitivity, which is actually very easy.

To get it working I mounted the Geophone to a CD spool for now. Because I had such trouble finding a resource on putting this together, I also made a video that you can watch below that shows how I did it if you need more details.

It seems to work pretty good. If you put it on a table, it can detect the slightest touch of the table. On my balcony it did not detect my 6 pound chihuahua walking by. Although it did detect my slightest movement. This shows that a ghost must at least make more movement than a chihuahua and that I need to lose some weight. Ugh.

I am excited to get this thing out in the field, and I will let you know what I find. Here is the link to the page I ordered the components from. I got everything else I needed from Radio Shack. Check out the video for more on how to put it together and how it works.