History of PASS

In the beginning we just recorded the source of the publication and a one-line summary of the content. Several thousand articles were processed in this way. But that wasn’t enough. We soon realized that, if the collection was to be of any benefit to the membership, and to researchers and investigators in general, the clippings had to be recorded in a different manner. They had to be accessible to members working on the Traffic Light project, another strand of the ‘Domesday Book of the Paranormal’ (see Project Albion) .

A simple database was created, allowing searches on terms, names, places and so on divided into a number of fields, including a longer summary of the article. This means that simple statistics can be gathered - How many ghost reports do we have for Derby? Are there any haunted pubs in Newcastle that we can visit? And we can also check on the original ‘facts’ of a case, as reported by journalists. Just what was it that X said to the press during that poltergeist case?