Piercers of the Veil

Piercers of the Veil, a secretive organisation focussed on intensive historical study, archiving, and collecting accounts of ghosts, as well as other supernatural phenomena. Possessing the largest collection of journals and first-person accounts of ghosts who’ve returned from the dead. However they're not gathering data for its own sake; they want to find out how ghosts are created. To what end, even the Piercers don’t know.

History

When in the 12th century, Hildegard of Bingen had her divine visions a small contingent of German monks investigated. Believing that these supernatural visitations were in fact hauntings they became scholars of ghosts and the afterlife. Although the group's investigations were shrouded in extreme secrecy, by the Renaissance curious nobility was joining the sect. In the following centuries the Piercers would almost completely move away from their religious roots. For instance recruiting the von Strauss family for their political influence amongst Germany's wealthy and elite.

Organisation

Entrance into the Piercers is tightly controlled by the scholars of the local chapters, which are seeded throughout Northern Europe and certain core cities in the United States, including Salem, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans. To gain access to the organization’s libraries, supplicants must pass several intensive membership rituals, including academic exams and even physical ordeals to ensure they can be trusted.

Piercer investigators are often tasked with arriving on the sites of haunted locations to take interviews or collect other information. Some are assigned to rival groups as infiltrators in order to steal information for the archives. Other Piercers seek out funding for their research projects from benevolent patrons. While they perceive themselves as the elite class of paranormal investigators, acolytes do attempt to ally with other groups in order to acquire more accounts of the afterlife.

References

WOD: World of Darkness: Ghost Hunters, p. 57-58