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Running Your Own Ghost Investigation?
Quirkz writes "I am a skeptic, but have friends and family who swear by their ghost stories. I have access to a supposedly haunted house and been tempted to run a proper scientific investigation. My first question is what sorts of tools or measurements would make for sensible metrics to test during a hunt? Temperature change seems to be a common one, but the other devices you'll see ghost hunters use seem pretty random. The second question is what kinds of results would it take to be 'interesting'? Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it."
You definitely need a proton pack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_pack
Dowsing rod.
Gullibility,
Not sure who sells that online....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
not much of a skeptic are you.
Slip them a well-measured dose of LSD.
It seems like a mistake to go to some place and look for the absence of an anomaly. The burden of proof is on the one who makes the claim. You will never prove that ghosts don't exists in a house. Maybe they will be there tomorrow when you aren't around. Maybe you don't have the proper equipment to detect one.
Why not just make it up? That's what Andrew Wakefield did to "prove" MMR vaccines gave children autism.
I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother doing a serious investigation. Do what they do with all those horrid son-of-blair-witch-project TV shows do and just bullshit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bring some common fucking sense, and a stick to hit those who didn't bring any?
John
It's one thing to call yourself a skeptic but to keep your mind open. It's another to believe the pseudoscience of the ghost hunters and to walk around looking for EM fields or aberrations in infrared cameras which don't exist in the first place.
Those guys are nut jobs or con artists and you sound like one of the former.
-Not a ghost
Buy an Edison Phone from Chris Moon and his mom.
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
Take the people who believe they're in a haunted house and send them through an MRI to see what part of their brain is damaged. Don't waste your time in the supposed haunted house, the feeling of a 'presence' and 'ghosts' and any other paranormal crap is all in the person's head. So start there.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Have a look at these guys:
http://www.rockymountainparanormal.com/paranormal.htm
I have a causal interest in the scientific processes of these organisations and they are the best I have seen (unfortunately, not many good mobs out there for those not interested in sensationalist media representation). They may be able to give you some guidance.
Ghost investigations? Nothing else in the queue for the front page today?
Dear Slashdot, I have family and friends that believe the Earth is 6,600 years old, what tools do I need to prove them right?
Long live the New Flesh!
Whatever you do, don't cross the beams.
Ghost Busters on your speed dial and some antidotes.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
...an objectively testable prediction. If you can't get them to make such a prediction quit wasting your time.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If TV is any guide, make sure sure to practice your reflexes: you must be able to scream in terror at the slightest sound, movement or smell. Also, cultivate your sense of paranoia, because how else will you see the ghosts behind every action? Plus, go down to the hardware store and buy every piece of random electronic testing equipment, because any sensor will detect ghosts if you look hard enough...
While I'm a firm skeptic, I will concede they make for good stories.
With the billions of people who have by now inhabited Earth and died here, we'd by up to our armpits in protoplasm if they really did exist.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Bring a CO detector. There is some thought that having a low level of carbon monoxide in a house can create hallucinations in some people that lead them to believe the house is haunted. If so then it's certainly a medical concern and should be taken care of.
A skeptic is not even who denies or acknowledges the existence of a haunted house. And you are on the right track.
A skeptic is one who says, "It is probably not true as there is no evidence for it, but let me find out if there is any fire behind the smoke."
All you need to do is spend the night in the house, and that should do it. The brain and the body are the best sensors for the paranormal after all you only have yourself to convince. Good Luck!! :)
The only really valid comparison would be, going by the measurements most commonly used, an identical house in an identical location with an identical set of environmental/atmospheric conditions. And/or the same house in the same spot which has been validly seen as being in the "non-haunted" state.
Because, of the most common metrics used by the "ghost hunter"-set, all of them are possibly confounded by non-ghostly factors. An EM spike? Power fluctuation, or atmospheric charge, or static caused because your jeans don't fit right. Thermal imaging cameras are not normally believable, but normally a thermistor-equipped probe style temperature sensor can be used to trace "cold spots".
The only truly scientific way to isolate that this activity is the action of an unseen, or ghostly, actor, is to eliminate all possible other sources of explanation. Of course, anecdotal evidence can be gathered first hand, and if you were to have a full body apparition appear in front of several normally rational individuals in a well lit place, with documentation via toxicology that no possible mind altering substances are present, AND live confirmation via long-distance viewing (through, perhaps, a telescope from a mile away and a convenient hole in the building) of the event having taken place, you might start someone to actually ponder the existence of a ghost.
However, unless one of those observers is the Amazing Randi, and you can reproduce the event, I don't think anyone is going to believe you. At this point, we do not have the technology to measure accurately enough to isolate possible "ghostly" effects, and ghosts are notoriously uncooperative in a laboratory setting. (Not to mention the ethical issues... a ghost created by violent death? You can't just build a laboratory, bring someone in, and kill them in a horrible and gruesome way, then repeating that until something happens that can be measured as a potential ghost effect.)
The Ghostbusters also use equipment to hunt and find ghosts, such as a PKE meter, Ecto-Goggles, and a Ghost Sniffer. A PKE meter is a handheld device, used in locating and measuring Psycho-Kinetic Energy, which is a unique environmental byproduct emitted by ghosts. The device's most prominent feature are winged arms that raise and lower in relation to the amount of PKE detected while a digital display gives an exact reading for the operator. The Giga meter is a device similar to the PKE meter, featured in Ghostbusters II. As explained by Egon in the original script, the Giga meter measures PKE in GeV, or giga-electronvolts. Ecto-Goggles, sometimes known as "Spectro-Visors", are a special pair of goggles that visually trace PKE readings. They are particularly useful in helping its wearer see normally invisible ghosts and it can also be used to assist in tracking ghosts within a visible field of search.
wouldn't be easier just to change both friends and family?
I'd recommend something like an FMRI or PET scanner which can determine when you're perceiving something (i.e. don't measure the house, measure yourself).
Since ghosts don't seem to show up on recordings in any reliable, repeatable way, it suggests that if they do exist they directly project their energy into the brain, rather than manifest physically. So you'd need to detect the perception, rather than the physical anomaly itself (which probably doesn't exist).
Can't find links, but I've read articles about how magnetic fields and subsonic sounds can be interpreted as ghosts or similar phenomena.
Science only allows you to test your assumptions. If you get multiple results that match your hypothesis, then you have a decent theory. Unfortunately for you, you can't scientifically prove that something doesn't exist, but you could show that your hypothesis, that conditions inside the so-called haunted location match the conditions of similar locations that are not presumed to be haunted. That kind of evidence isn't flashy or interesting. It's like saying water is wet and some other people saying that some water is not wet. All you can do is show that the water is wet everywhere. Since the haunted claims don't make sense, there's not a lot of interesting science to be done.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
You say you're a skeptic, but you're going about this the wrong way by trying to confirm the existence of ghosts. It seems to presuppose the conclusion. You're going in to test, but already you're confirmation biased: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
You want to go in there and find out what's REALLY going on. Not look for ghosts. Or leave it to someone who knows what they're doing. If you start measuring electrical activity and whatnot, who knows what you'll pick up. But a ghost is still extremely unlikely. Ever heard of Occam's Razor?
Anyway, before you start measuring (experimenting), you need a likely hypothesis that you're going to be testing. Good luck on that one with the ghosts.
Get your relatives copies of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
... prove anything other than that the temperature changed?
A: It doesn't. Unless you have already pre-supposed the conclusion that there are such things as ghosts, and that they cause temperature changes. The same goes for any other so-called "evidence" that you could prove of ghosts.
Incidentally, isn't it surprising that nobody's heard anything from Doris Stokes since she "crossed over to the other side"?
(A: No.)
My father is a minister who actually dealt with these things. The best explanation I can give is to reference the movie "Mystery Men" where the invisible man was only invisible when no one was looking. I know personally of at least three people who are dead because they wanted to know and were willing to risk everything to find out. Broken necks, scared to death, completely consumed by fire. While most of them were in Africa, I have first hand accounts.
Personally as a info geek I look at it this way, "You don't check the amount of gas in a container by lighting a match". It has nothing to do with religion, truth or anything else you may subscribe to but rather the simple question, "Is it worth it?"
"Not knowing something that has no impact on your life is not worth risking anything"
Take something that can measure many environmental factors, such as a heat camera, electromagnetic/electric field detector, and perhaps even a geiger counter.
But, if my experiences and those of others are of any indication, not much will happen until all your stuff is turned off.
My advice, though - if you want to catch a ghost, ask it to show itself. Sometimes all they really want is to be noticed. And be careful. Concentrations of energy such as that can be dangerous if handled inexpertly.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
you'll be seeing all kinds of shit after a few hours :)
They'll never believe anything that doesn't support their position anyway, and you can't prove something that can vanish at any moment isn't there...
Any ghost hypothesis has got to have some sort of description of what a ghost is (varies across cultures) and what effects it would have on the measurable world. This could mean anything to anyone, so while you're having someone explain it to you, you might also get them to pick up the burden of proof.
"Supposedly-haunted" houses are often sites of gas leaks, high carbon-dioxide levels, etc. These sorts of things cause audio and optical hallucinations when the exposure is low, and can be dangerous if higher. I'd definitely start your equipment list with some basic home safety detectors for gas, CO2, CO, radon, etc, since those are often the most likely explanation in cases where there are documented "hauntings" seen/heard by multiple people.
You need a PKE meter of course.
From: http://ghostbusters.wikia.com/wiki/P.K.E._Meter
The PKE Meter was one of the Ghostbusters' tools invented by Dr. Egon Spengler that enabled them to track ghosts. The full name of the device is a Psychokinetic Energy meter, so named because its function is to detect the amounts of said energy and to direct the user to its location.
. .
there have been times where I've wandered these parts late at night in lonely topics, and I swear I've heard the cries of the negative karma posters, screaming for revenge. They say their souls will not rest until they've compensated for their sins in life. On nights like these, they say you can see their cold remarks beckoning from the mist, trying to pull you into hell with them...
Use an Engram Meter. Determine if ghosts have Thetans.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Just shout, really loudly, "HEY GHOST!".
If you hear "HEY HUMAN" then shout "MARCO?". If you hear "POLLO!" go find the source of the sound.
If it's your friend, laugh. If it's nothing, lather-rinse-repeat. If it's a ghost, you'll see it. Then ask it to follow you home.
What the hell else are you going to do? Temperature change? Wind. What the hell, it can change by ten degrees in an hour quite easily.
Like everything else in english, you have to answer one question: what's a ghost. Define the term, circle the nouns, and look for them. Then underline the verbs and see if the nouns are doing the verbs. Since when does anyone define a ghost as something that can change temperature. That's just a lot of hot air -- maybe from the ghost.
in to the abyss, the abyss will gaze back at you.
If you want to know what to measure, ask them why they believe the house is haunted, and then confirm that whatever they experienced is the definition of a ghost.
I don't know. Why don't we just devise an experiment to prove that Polywater doesn't exist.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
I don't know if you're shooting for "look, a ghost!" or "look, a fireplace," but it's really easy to see some "unexplainable" readings with a lot of different tools. Pick something that can detect small amounts of voltage, sound, light, temperature... any one of them will work.
A common one is a hand-held voltage meter. Stick it on the lowest voltage setting and connect a couple of wires to it. You can even wind/shape the wires onto a "ghost sensing" stick or rod if you'd like. While walking around just about anywhere, you'll find many locations or pockets of air that cause small voltages to appear. Depending on your point of view it can be due to an old fireplace, the quirks of the local ventilation or a ghost.
The grad students in my lab do this to new undergrads to try and convince them the lab (in the basement of a 100 year old building) is haunted.
I'd suggest an infrasonic microphone, feelings normally associated with haunting have been shown to also be caused by sounds in the 1-20 Hz range. Places normally considered haunted have been shown to have infrasonic sources that when turned off, cause the feelings to disappear.
http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ghost-in-machine.pdf (7 page PDF)
I've never really been a fan of Ghost. I just use bzip2 to make images. It works great, is fast, and I never have to worry about a later version not supporting the compression.
/dev/hda > myimage.img.bz2
/dev/hda
Create image:
# bzip2 -1c <
Restore image:
# bzip2 -dc < myimage.img.bz2 >
Easy, and no proprietary software to be deprecated out from under me.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
Hunting for ghosts can be fun, exciting, educational (if you like history) and perhaps a healthy outlet. As a skeptic myself, my wife and I really enjoy staying in supposed haunted hotels. We have stayed in several, and most of the hotels are old, beautiful, and historic. We haven't found a ghost yet, although we have had some weird things occur that seem odd. It doesn't matter at the end of the day (or night) that some poltergeist or level 5 free form book stacking apparition hadn't come into our room. What did matter is that we did something fun and cool together.
Now, some people will try to make you feel stupid for wanting to explore a house that has supposed strange goings on, but in reality these same people would have subscribed to Pluto being a *real* planet, or the Earth being flat, or of the aether theory. They also can't explain why the two Voyager spacecraft haven't reached the Heliopause, or what exactly *is* dark matter. They don't have those answers do they? Did anyone see it coming that the periodic table was changed? In short not very many things are nailed down as far as being immutable. Perhaps supposed hauntings are vibrational in nature and related to another plane of existence. Perhaps 'hauntings' are a great demonstration of the phenomenal power of the human mind, or maybe hauntings are really just an example of the power of the human mind and its propensity to create stories in an attempt to rationalize an event whose mechanism is unknown to the witness.
What I *do* know is that irregardless of all those things, we don't even take cameras, or really even poke about the haunted hotels we stay in. We just have fun and learn a bit of local history wherever we happen to be. In ending, life is full mystery and fun, and maybe indulging in a bit of fantasy and romance in a world that seems hell bent on destroying every legend, myth, and bit of intrigue that's left out there isn't so bad after all..
The problem here is you need a "theory of ghosts" that defines the alleged phenomenon in terms of physically measurable effects or attributes. What is a ghost? Is it supposed to be something which "appears" (emits light), can influence/affect other objects (either through electrical/magnetic fields, radiological effects or other apparent application of force).
Once you have a theory of ghost you can develop tests to detect the effects of ghost. Of course, all of this just means that "ghost" is something that has physically measurable effects. There is no way of linking this back to some sort of metaphysical concept like "soul" or "spirit" (unless you develop theories for the whole lot in terms of physical effects and causal links). It could well be that "ghost" turns out to be just a name for some other physical phenomenon as yet not understood e.g. phlogiston, aether.
Good question, especially when you're me, a skeptic with a physics background, who lives with two ghost tour guides, one an atheist and the other a believer, who both swear blind that weird things happen.
Yup, cold spots are a common occurrence. If I have to guess at a potential mechanism for the phenomena, then I'd suggest that it's heat flowing out of the area and concentrating on one spot to produce some kind of artefact that we call a ghost. Presuming that ghosts have an information content, then it's not a stupid idea, it's just a matter of entropy. Life is very good at temporarily reversing entropy, it's kind of a defining feature.
Personally I'd take several bars of metal of varying SHC, embedded with thermocouples. If there is a swing in temperature, it'll be interesting to see how much power is behind the swing, which the varying SHC will let you work out.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Ghosts can be quite amiable to being photographed, but you don't want to end up in a situation where the spirit was willing but the flash was weak.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I see a lot of people on here claiming the burden of proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims. This is not true. The burden of proof always lies with the person with the interest and the ability to get such proof. So if you are going to call people stupid or say they are wrong, and you aren't willing to seek the proof, you are just talking out your ass.
I've never watched any of those shows, but I think they do a lot with temperature, infrared imaging, audio recording, and magnetic fields.
For non-haunted locations, the difficulty will be finding a quiet, dark place that doesn't seem spooky. Ideally, a house that is supposedly haunted but relatively new so that you can find another house of the same model that wouldn't be haunted for any reason. Probably a mobile home, since a lot of those are used for disreputable purposes, they're relatively cheap, and they make a lot of them.
Actually, this would be a good thing for the myth-busters, since they have the resources to buy a new (and therefore un-haunted) mobile home and modify it to match the "haunted" one exactly.
Fact is, you can never prove a negative. It's impossible.
I think the most hilarious thing in the world is that most of the people that believe in Ghosts also believe in reincarnation. If that's not an Oxymoron, I don't know what is.
Before you start an experiment looking for ghost, take a moment to at least come up with a theory on what a ghost would be and how it would exist.
All of the so called ghost hunters seem to skip that part and assume that ghosts might exist (actually, they assume they DO exist - yet another leap) and are simply investigating to find out if ghosts exist at a particular location.
To date, there has been no scientific evidence that ghost exists.
If you can prove the existance of a ghost, I'm sure it would qualify for James Randii's Million dollar prize.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
if there was something to test for, then ghosts would have been "found" by now. Things like "change in temperature" are only useful if a study has conclusively proven that ghosts can cause such a thing. Had that happened, you could measure for otherwise unexplained temperature changes and then have that as potential evidence.
It's a problem of there not having been a studied, known-good. IE, a situation where we almost all scientists could agree a ghost existed in a particular place, and that said ghost caused a particular list of manifestations/effects. Until such a thing happens, there's absolutely no reason to think a change in temperature isn't due to a gap in the floorboard that is letting air in from outside, which you're just not seeing; being cold, doesn't mean there is a ghost.
Conservation of energy, or to be more explicit, where "ghosts" get their energy from, is one aspect of physics which seems to be completely ignored by "paranormal investigators" (perhaps because it requires more carefully designed experiments compared with the usual "investigations" which seem to mostly be people walking around with cameras and voice recorders in "spooky" locations). If ghosts or poltergeists (or at least the physical activities attributed to them) are real then energy must have been expended by some physical phenomenon to effect those activities.
Of particular interest should be the apparent correlation between "cold spots" and other "paranormal" activity, such as measurable EM fields. Perhaps the phenomenon behind many "hauntings" is actually some form of direct conversion of heat energy into electricity; if you could prove that and find the physical mechanism behind it you would become famous. Of course, part of the problem with investigating this aspect of the physics of "hauntings" is that you need to find a site where you can perform repeatable measurements and then you must carefully document where all the energy is coming from and going to.
What if this signature were clever?
I went on a 'ghost hunt' aboard the Queen Mary with a guy that claims to do work similar to what the TAPS team does. He genuinely shocked that only a fraction of the people that came in (including myself *SMUG!!*) brought a flashlight.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Something to detect infrasound? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#Infrasonic_17_Hz_tone_experiment
Turn off water and gas and bleed the pipes. Disconnect the electricity. All cameras should also be covered from another angle. Black out the windows and check the night before the measurements to make sure no light is entering through holes, in fact completely covering the building in black plastic would be a good idea and would also take care of external drafts. Then measure all the sources of radiation you can think of.
Bring a carbon monoxide detector:
http://www.ghostvillage.com/resources/2004/resources_10312004.shtml
... And then don't do anything those idiots do. They are as valid as the con-artist "psychics" that used to tour the country. If you go in to a situation like that wanting to see something, you will see it, of course. Creaking doors will suddenly be talking to you, because that is what you want to hear.
What you need to do is find the "evidence" that people are looking at, and find plausible explanations for them. A lot of the "haunted" bullshit is just normal noise for an old house; if you're dealing with a >100 year old house, of course it's going to creak in the night - and in the day, too - just find the source of the noise and call it a day.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There's a reward of 1,000,000 dollars to anyone who can prove EVPs exist, but you have to follow rules and guidelines. You might want to start there to get an idea of what might have to be 'socially' acceptable to confirm or deny the existence of ghosts.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/37-static/254-jref-challenge-faq.html
Just buy a copy of "Flim-Flam" by James Randi and call it good. Although it's an older book (early 80's), he carefully dissects and debunks several popular myths of the day (UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, etc). There is no evidence for such things as ghosts and haunted houses. Either you want some gadgets so you can play tricks on your friends, or you haven't thought about the ramifications very carefully.
Temperature change - it's not a very reliable metric for a reading in free air. A cool breeze from a natural cause can rapidly change your readings. Less than ethical 'spiritual investigators' could even deliberately open a window or run water and not record that part on video, and abandoned old houses are very likely to have large openings that allow large drafts - the typical 30 years abandoned house has holes big enough for stray cats or raccoons to get in and out.
So, would you get better data if you shielded a temperature probe from drafts, and placed it against a sizable thermal mass like a concrete wall or granite mantle-piece. What if you measured a 20 degree change in seconds on a heavy thermal mass object with a sensor that was protected from other sides by a sealed Styrofoam shell, while you had strips of light paper hung nearby in many directions to indicate possible drafts? You're not just looking for a change, but a change whose type and magnitude makes it less likely there's a sufficient natural explanation.
Noises - Turn on the faucets and see if you can produce a natural water hammering noise. Make sure to include ones down in the basement or outside the house. Open chimney flues. Open or close furnace or air conditioning vents, even if they appear not to be hooked up to the main system any more. Try different settings in many combinations. Check water even if the water is supposedly completely turned off, as sometimes a little trickle is leaking, and it will build up to normal pressure and cause transient effects that you can't reproduce unless you let that pressure build up for days again. Do a survey of all the rooms, including closets, and look for evidence of nesting birds, rodents and other possible organic sources of odd sounds. You know all those movies with the wind blowing scratchy old tree branches across the shingles? Look for real possible cases of those. Watch for ways somebody could try to sneak up close to the house and deliberately hoax you, because anyone trying that will probably use noises. That doesn't mean, of course, that any noise you still can't explain is supernatural.
Lights - A good camera could record a mysterious light accurately, much more accurately than a cheap one. Old fashioned film cameras might reveal things that don't show to digital ones, and vice versa. You might even be able to mount multiple types of cameras and/or film stocks so you could trigger them all at once and get interesting comparison photos. A simple prism can spread out the spectrum of a strange light on a flat wall, you can get a test light source that has known peak frequencies to 'calibrate' the prism so you aren't just reporting that the peak looked vaguely greenish, and a really strange spectrum that can't be from something like car headlights or a flashlight reflecting around might be pretty good evidence, or at least guide you in going further next time. A camera can record color much too faint for you to see, so photograph those faint specta with long exposures. Imagine if the spectrum you photograph is almost monochromatic, with only a few sharply defined peaks, and those are not on wavelengths that match any commercial laser pointer or specialty florescent bulb or other such source. Or what if a polarimeter reveals the odd light is elliptically polarised? A pair of polarised sunglasses and a bit of cross polarising filter you can rotate before them is a pretty cheap piece of test gear.
Electronics. Old fashioned CB radios or kid's walkie-talkies might be less hypersenitive to interference than your modern devices. Experiment to find ways to communicate with helpers that don't seem subject to odd noises. What does your digital display look like when its signal is glitching from normal causes? What does your radio handset sound like as you and your helper walk farther and farther apart outdoors, until one of you walks under a highway overpass? If there is something really strange going on, you won't know it because systems are experiencing normal failures, but you might just spot something really interesting if the failure mode ISN'T one of the normal ones.
Who is John Cabal?
How is it that these test prove the existence of ghost anyway? Or rather...How does an area dropping in temperature drastically in one area equate to the presence of ghost activity?
I suppose it's all in how you're defining paranormal (either ghost or just dark matter), but in either case here is why I think Ghost Hunters is retarded in general. They say that if an orb or light appears and the temperature drops around it and voices are recorded that this evidence of a ghost. I say, it's clearly evidence of a man in an invisible suit. Or proof of an alien or proof of god, or some other mythical creature.
The bottom line is that there are unexplained phenomenon in the world, but this doesn't mean ghosts. Not that there couldn't be ghosts, just saying these fringe scientists need to work on these practices a bit better.
Ave Molech Setting
Personally I'm a skeptic but if you want to punch holes in any hard-core science types, remind them that Einstein said that time is relative and what your hunting is apparently mass-less. The sure volumes of accounts of paranormal should be enough for anyone curious to do some research. As for equipment I would say use any thing you can, EMF being popular. As other's have stated don't believe any unexplained anomaly to be something spectacular just note it as evidence and over time you will hopefully develop patterns in the evidence that can be further studied.
http://portlandparanormal.net
What difference does it make if ghosts are real or not? Even if they were real, they can't do anything because they're dead. Maybe a few dead spirits have a way of triggering a mirage or hologram in our minds using a resonant reflection of their previous life force energy. So what. Even if it did exist for one in a million formerly living people, it doesn't matter. It would be just an image, it's not real.
Ghosts of dead people aren't going to help you pay this month's rent, find you a place to park, or change the stinky baby diapers for you. Dead people wouldn't care about any of the things that are important to living people.
Why would they? They're dead. Nothing matters to them. They can't shoot you, rape you, or knock your teeth out. All they can do, at their very baddest, is just sort-of make a semi-illusionary quasi-image in the dark night. So what.
Ghosts are not important because they're powerless because they're dead.
Now vampires, on the other hand....
it suggests that if they do exist they directly project their energy into the brain, rather than manifest physically.
Really? To me that suggests that they do not exist and that it is some quirk of the way the human brain works that tricks us into thinking we saw something. I think that there probably is some interesting science behind ghosts but it is in the field of psychology, not physics.
I had noticed that reason and critical thinking were fading in the world of late, but I never thought that the rot would get so bad that the foremost geek site on the internet would be giving credence to this sort of rubbish. What the hell were the editors thinking? What should I even have to say that ghosts don't exist and that this "investigation" may as well be looking for invisible green unicorns?
As a society, we're reverting back to superstition and ignorance. We've even given up on even imagining a better future.
The only question I ask is: where did it all go wrong? When did the world abandon progress?
May the Maths Be with you!
I've never seen it used in a ghost hunt but i think it would be great to use Schlieren Imaging. Seems pretty cheap to setup and even if you didn't capture a ghost it's still a lot of fun to look at. After watching the Schlieren toilet video though I've never inhaled while flushing.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=schlieren+imaging&aq=f
I had some plastic dome lights in my house and as they would cool, they would pop once as one layer changed size more than another. This produced a Piezo effect. When the thing would pop, I would think I saw a flash but other people would see or hear different things. It turns out that even if I removed as much of the sonic energy as I could, I would still see the flash that wasn't there so I'm guessing the rapid changing electronic field was messing with my brain. Another person in the house would see ghosts. It turns out that some of the places in the world that have the most sightings of angles and ghosts have a high level of geo-piezo activity and there has been a theory that people who are susceptible tend to see either angles or ghosts or aliens depending on the stories they were told when they were brought up. I wish I had saved the lamp shade, it would have been useful for more experimentation.
I've only seen one episode, but it was the one about Lizzy Borden. The episode was, essentially, a bunch of fat, sweaty guys yelling at an empty room. It was sublime.
Not very scientific, however - so probably not good advice for you. Unless you videotape it and put it on youtube. Then it would definitely be the right way to go.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
... and wait for documented evidence.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Since you're posting on /., I can only assume your cat was really, really upset with you.
Right here. Just send me your credit card numbers ;-)
You will never convince the believer, and at best look silly to non-believers. So I guess regardless of the tools or outcome, the best you can look forward to, is embarrassing your self. Not a very good position to be in if you ask me.
Notice, this does not cover the scenario where you would actually find proof.. Haha. Good luck with that, I thought we all figured out already that the "ghost" phenomenon was the effect of EMP on brain (an EM device).
The trouble with ghost hunting, is that it is very difficult to quantify what a ghost is. How are you to find something, when you are unclear about what you're looking for? If you are looking for a tiger, then it's easy enough to consider that evidence of a tiger's recent presence might include footprints, fur, meal scraps and possibly excrement. Ghosts, on the other hand, apparently don't interact with the world in the same way we do.
People report feeling a chill when in contact with a ghost, but this may be psychosomatic. A thermal camera pointed at the person who is your best guess at who might encounter the ghost is probably called for here, but instead of sticking it on a tripod, it might be best to keep it in hand, so that in the event someone does have a chill, you can use it to track down any potential source.
Electronic Voice Phenomenon is also commonly reported. I would suggest using multiple recording devices distributed in overlapping regions of the location, so that any EVP which is picked up can be compared to other recording devices, so as to eliminate the possibility that the mysterious, muffled voice you've picked up, isn't just someone making an off-hand comment in the other room.
Photographs are also known to pick up ghostly apparitions, so go ahead and take plenty of pictures. You may need to do some research to figure out the ideal variety of camera. I've heard of some interesting results coming from Polaroid cameras, where entire sentences in Latin have been spelled out in the air, perceptible only to the camera. Digital cameras also have the ability to pick up things in the invisible light spectrum (hold down a button on a remote control, and point it at the camera-- the camera clearly picks up the light, but your eye does not), so you might get something interesting there, as well. Just the same, traditional film cameras have a long history of producing strange results. If you've got the budget for it, you might bring all three.
Since we don't know the precise nature of the creature being searched for, I think it's valid to use your imagination when choosing equipment. A tool to map the magnetic fields in the area, especially if you can map them in real-time or at least, in regular intervals, could possibly yield interesting results, when compared to a good baseline. Maybe you can find a type of film that reacts to an invisible spectrum of light? Radar or Sonar, even? You're looking for any anomalous data, which you will then seek an explanation for. When you find a collection of anomalies which cannot be explained by our current scientific understanding of the universe, and they have some manner of consistency with each other, then you may indeed have found a ghost; at which point, you'll continue your investigation, and see if you can replicate your results.
It seems an interesting project, and I'd love to know if any results come from it.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_house#Carbon_monoxide_as_an_explanation_for_perceived_hauntings
I would take a good quality film camera and a tape recording system. Temperature shifts, etc. do not mean it's haunted. If you want proof of a ghost, you're going to have to document it visually or aurally. Some people believe that analog devices (tape and film) are better for this sort of thing. The good news is that if you can prove that place is really haunted, there's a million dollars in it for you: www.randi.org. The bad news is that ghosts don't exist. The concept comes from fiction. The burden of proof is on the one making the claim & Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. See also www.skeptic.com.
You can't convince them there are no ghosts. But you might be able to convince them to be more skeptical. Set up some fake ghost stuff & prank them with it.
Play some creepy words backwards that is only audible when you mess with the sound tape. Play some ultra sound. Shove some dry ice under the floor boards. Make them look like chumps.
There have been many attempts to approach the paranormal with the scientific method. The results have not been impressive. I am educated in the sciences also with a great interest in "stories told around the camp fire." You can be a skeptic and still find all of this a lot of fun. Yet twice in my life I have encountered something very real, but which I could not explain. One of those encounters left me hysterical, teeth chattering terrified, and so upset I could not sleep that night. I assure you, I would not have attempted to take measurements of that!
btw, here's a link to the prize: http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
Watch some nature shows and try to copy some of their tactics for capturing and identifying rare creatures. I think the main thing is to set up a system that does not put the creature on YOUR schedule. In other words don't go to the site for a few hours, set up your instruments and declare failure when you don't find anything. Set up autonomous instruments that stay on site for long periods of time in order to have any hope of finding / catching this rare creature if it exists.
I'm assuming you're earnest about this... so on that premise, here's what'll happen:
You'll put together a set of measurements from this place. Then you'll try to interpret it with no reference point. You have no baseline measurements. Have you tested 20, or say even a handful, of regular, non-haunted houses to establish a control that you can compare to? Chances are you'll pick up SOME noise in SOME measurements that may or may not be construed to be paranormal, or maybe not. Who knows.
What are your predictions? Is there a set of particular things you'll be looking for? Can it be summed up as more-or-less "anything that seems wierd in the measurements"?
I'm not trying to dissuade you from doing it. Just don't call it scientific and then do bad science. It could be a very cool movie project, and it could be a lot of fun doing it, so it may entirely be worth your time. So if it seems cool then go for it.. but plz do not slap a "scientific" label onto it frivolously.
That's all you need to shoot yourself in the head if you take this seriously enough to even think about "investigating" it.
You need bio equipment. Ok, a haunted house is a money making opportunity. So consider how one explanation for the Amityville Horror is ergot poisoning: people get exposed to natural hallucinogens and can't explain why they see ghosts. Hence, to them, there are ghosts. In many dark, creepy houses that have been considered haunted, you'll probably have owners who have not been taking good care of the property. Gutters clog, water overflows over and into the walls...BAM mold problem. Here's the steps you need to take to capitalize off this: 1. Take petri dishes with you and place them in the basement, bathroom, attic and anywhere else that would potentially be interesting, biologically. Grow the samples in a controlled environment and find out if you have anything interesting. Next step, expose the cultures that you can't identify to rats, guinea pigs or your relatives. If anything has an effect, you've found your golden ticket. 2. Next, sell people the idea that you can bring back the dead and expose people who pay you big bucks to your "substance G." 3. While you have this revenue stream, find some chemist (or starving grad student) who will help you identify the chemical that makes it possible in "substance G." 4. Sell "substance G" through a network of reputable distributors. Hopefully, you won't end up rediscovering acid. Happy hunting!
http://www.psy.herts.ac.uk/ghost/theories-infra.html
The way to go about it isn't to make up crazy shit and then go see if you can find it. That is the job of your crazy friends. If they say a house is haunted, they probably have some crazy reason to say that. Get them to state that crazy reason and go from there. If they say they feel a chill down their spine, get them to state if it is a physical chill that a thermometer might measure, or if it's rather a feeling inside of them. If they hear voices, get out a microphone. If they see dead people, get a camera. In the likely event that you pick up something that may or may not be what they were talking about, they'll probably own it as evidence of what they were saying, and you now have something you can actually act on - the puzzle of finding out what whatever you recorded actually was. Prepare to be laughed at if you don't solve the puzzle and for them to be strengthened in their crazy. If you explain the phenomena they'll likely conclude that what you recorded wasn't what they originally experienced. If you fail to record anything interesting, they'll probably say that that's not how these things work and that you just don't get it. You will not find satisfaction down this route. If you must proceed, look at the work of James Randi, though probably you shouldn't copy his inflammatory style.
I would say where most the popular ghost shows fail is the failure to track all persons in the area.
Obviously you shouldn't tell anyone when you are conducting your experiment because it will only encourage smart asses to fuck with you.
If you put an android or iphone on every person conducting the experiment with GPS and accelerometer tracking you could later play back where everyone was when something went bump in the night.
Take a lot of wire and run it all over the house, using a minimal length. This will balance out the EMI fields (if any) which are attributed to feeling of a "presence". In the lab, this feeling of a presence has been replicated by people wearing salad colendars on their heads with inductive EMI circuits. So by providing a more conductive medium than earth or air, you should eliminate any "stray" fields (including EM noise) (and 'kill' the ghosts)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You need drugs. Psychoactive ones. Those guys on Ghost Adventures are always tripping balls.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
If you would like some advice I have been doing investigations for awhile. I would be happy to help.
When contemplating the existence of ghosts and other non-material things it's important to remember that nearly 100% of the forces and energies in the universe are undetectable by human senses. So believing in ghosts is no more foolish than not believing. But what is very foolish, is thinking that anything you can't see or hear doesn't exist.
You may want to check the TV show "Ghost Hunter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunters. TAPS seems to use a rigorous method when trying to determine if a place is 'haunted' or not. For what I can remember, they use the following equipment :
EMF meter : measures the electromagnetic field, which may indicate paranormal activity. Beware, as electrical equipment generates EMF as well, so high readings may indicate poorly shielded electrical equipment. You'll want to shut down everything that runs on electricity in the house (lights included). Also, you'll want to read about side-effects of being in a high EMF area (paranoia, hallucination, feeling of being observed, ...) which may explain a false sense of something paranormal going on.
Thermometers : to look for cold spots. Rapid drops of temperature may indicate... something.
Audio recorder : to try to catch electronic voice phenomenon.
Video camera : documents everything you do, and may catch moving objects. Would probably need to be infrared, as you'll need to kill the lights.
"Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not? I don't have much hope of changing the minds of those who believe, but it would be satisfying to at least be scientific about it."
Well, in principle, you're the one acting out the part of "I think there is something worth investigating here". So it's up to you (or your ghost-believing friends) to establish a specific, witnessable claim as to something that is happening; a falsifiable theory. Are ghosts supposed to be visible? Are they a moving thermal field? The skeptics expect the null hypothesis (nothing has changed), the ghost-believers some alternative hypothesis (something has changed), so it's really up to the latter to well-define their extraordinary claim.
Asking skeptics to state what would convince them otherwise is not generally how science works; it's neither time-effective (for the skeptics, for whom there is an infinitude of ridiculous claims in the world), nor is it logically sensible (in terms of established philosophy of science).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I have SEEN things one could have a very hard time to believe if I explained them, and I do not have any reasonable scientific or common sense explanation for them. They involve a lost rubber ball falling completely vertically out of nowhere minutes afterwards, and other flying stuff.
We definetly have much more to learn
James Randi is a stage magician where the stock-in-trade is creating illusions. In stage magic, it is all for fun, but Randi got upset that various ghost hunters and psychics and so on were doing the same thing while claiming it was real instead of a magic trick.
His basic knock on scientists conducting investigations into Uri Geller and the like is that scientists take things at face value -- that the people in question are playing fair. I believe Randi spoke well of Johnny Carson as providing a public forum for Geller and others to attempt to prove whatever it is that they are supposed to do -- Carson as an entertainer had technical knowledge about stage magic performance and knew what tricks to look for.
To investigate ghost claims, not only do you have to be thorough with your data gathering, you have to be on guard with respect to deception. Remember, before he hooked up with his geek friend who had gear that worked on ghosts for real, the Bill Murray character was a lacadaisical scientist and a charlatan ESP researcher.
Bring a laptop, turn it on in the middle of the night and run MS Word and wait until the ghost start typing. If the ghost don't like MS software, have OpenOffice.org installed just in case. If the ghost opens the internet browser and start searching for porn online just get out of the house at once.
Are you thinking of running around with stupid ghost toys and trying to measure ghost things? If so, you're just a Ghost Engineer. Ghost Engineers are useless.
If you want to be useful, be a Ghost Scientist. Go and get yourself a Testable Hypothesis, then head to your local haunted house in search of Reproducible Results.
Quirkz, You might want to try out the following website: http://www.theshadowlands.net/ghost/. There is an awful lot of crap and the website is outdated, but there are some interesting things in it. The 'Haunted Places Index' under 'Haunted Places' gives a pretty thorough overview of haunted sites in your area, so you can at least visit places where other people have reported ghosts before (think 2008 was last time the list was updated, however). The 'Ghost Hunting' tab has a whole wealth of information about how to conduct a ghost hunt. The 'Galleries' tab holds a lot of "ghost evidence", as I guess it would be called. Some of it seems pretty convincing, or at least unexplainable, if you believe what the picture/EVP-takers are saying. And there's always all the ghost shows on the tv, too. Whatever yo do, it seems the best advice is to go in as a group, mostly for confidence and witnessing purposes.
Ghost hunting is something I would like to try out once myself, just to see something that cannot be explained. The funny thing about ghosts is that for all their insubstantiality, usually the best hauntings have several items in common: the manifestations occur with regular frequency, the haunting is usually confined to specific locations, and that multiple people have experienced the same paranormal activity at the same time. How could anything so random and unpredictable as a ghost ever meet (and consistently meet) these requirements? Some other good questions:
Why is it that most hauntings occur at night, or at least people get their best evidence at nighttime? How can animals and babies detect paranormal happenings, is this an ability we 'switch off' as mature humans so we don't experience sensory overload when we perceive our reality (perhaps this is why we experience hauntings at night, we're more attuned with the lights out)?
How are haunted locations necessary for a manifestation; if a person died a hundred years ago, the Earth is millions of miles away from where it was in the universe when that person died, yet there continue to be sightings of the same ghosts, to the present day, in the same location? Do ghosts experience gravity, then? When the structure/location the ghosts appear in gets demolished or burned down, why do the paranormal happenings generally cease? Are ghosts prisoners or physic leftovers of the buildings where they lived? Is there a universal physic connection or lock to keep a ghost in place? Could it be moved? Could it be an energy source?
When ghosthunters record EVPs, the responses they get occur either a second ahead or behind their questions, are ghosts slightly-off in the time-stream, or stuck inbetween or outside the reality we experience everyday (or is it just random fuzz in the recording equipment that's a coincidence)? How can something from the past, definitely dead and gone, influence actions and activities in the present? Is this the closest we can come to time travel? Is the past really there and we are experiencing it as it happened, or is it something entirely else? Is it possible the present can influence the activities of the past in this manner (how are ghosts answering questions in EVPs)? Are these just microcosmic "mini-pasts" that can only influence small areas of reality nearby and not actual links to the time stream (reminders)? Are there "time-bubbles" where the universe "messes up" reality? How come we never see ghosts or hauntings from the future?
How come ghosts only seem to come from human beings and human activities? How come not dinosaurs or neanderthals? How come only certain circumstances and certain personalities leave hauntings behind, while the great majority of people leave no trace, paranormal or otherwise? Why only certain circumstances (murder, unrequited love, injustice) permit ghosts to occur while others do not? How come there are larger populations of ghosts seen in hopstials and mental asylums compared to normal domiciles?
Anyway, this is a lot of rambling, but I hope I've raised some good questions for others to mull over. Good night, and good luck in your ghost searching.
The line in the above post should be about large STATUES being moved and stood up.
I'd like to prove that there are no ejorbijorbies in my neighbor's house. Can you recommend a good method for me to detect them?
There are no ghosts. Any questions?
If you are going to measure temperature, get many thermometers and place them in many places at the same time. Don't forget to put one outside as well. If you get a cold snap / temperature drop then you need to compare that to the outside temperature as it very well could be a breeze. Do the same for checking for sounds, and as stated before, get equipment that will "hear" outside the normal range of human hearing. Same for video equipment, get stuff that will "see" in infrared as well as the visible spectrum, many of the surveillance cameras will do this. As was stated before, remember that disproving ghosts is not possible so don't expect to convince anyone.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
You can't prove a negative. There is no such thing as ghosts so no baseline could possibly be taken to be able to "prove" they don't exist. It's an absolutely silly notion that you needn't waste your time with other than to try and get help for those in your life who believe in such nonsense.
Tell them you _found_ ghosts. A bunch of them. Mean ones. That eat souls for breakfast.
But, no worries, you can take care of the problem once they provide you with the
hardware components for your ghost eradicator:
Then, fix the thermostat, squeeky hinge, and loose shutter and say the ghosts are gone. Win-win.
There have been people talking to ghosts or at least claiming to know how to find them for thousands of years. Research some traditional methods, in particular ones based in alchemy or feng shui, because of how rules-based they are. Feng shui isn't just something modern interior desingers learn to look hip and enlightened, it was also a set of rules for observing and shaping the world, more generally, so any feng shui principles (or rather any scientific essence you can garner from them) may be worthwhile. Combine the traditional methods with scientific observation and repetition, and some non-haunted baseline measurements as you already suggested.
With all the rules and thorough documentation of feng shui, they may have been onto something.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Bring dogs and cats with you. If they kill each other, there are no ghosts. If they start living together, there are ghosts. And then, there will be mass hysteria.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
1/ Get a trusted friend/acquittance /. I suggest a slow painful poison or something spectacular eg. Steamroller
2/ Give them a puzzle that can only be worked out when they receive a private piece of information that is unlikely to be guessed or worked out. I suggest a simple program that can only be unlocked with a GUID
3/ Go over to the other side. In order to properly entertain
4/ Both you and your friend go to the same Clairvoyant/Psychic/HippyChick where you pas the information mentioned in #2
5/ Friend/acquittance solves puzzle and ( providing everything was properly and irrefutably documented ) makes a fortune going on chatshows and gets more girls than he can lay his tongue on.
6/ You go on to feed the worms.
Gullibility.
As long as you have that the necessary tools can be cheaply and easily fashioned from string, masking tape, and empty toilet rolls. They won't look as impressive a genuine e-meter, but they work just as well.
While you can't prove a negative you can certainly find causation for all the spook stories your friends are telling you about. Don't go looking for what isn't there, because you won't find it. Instead, take notes of their stories "sensations". There are likely reasons for their not-so-convincing stories, and you can find them. Then search their house as an investigative Engineer, and find the cause of the boards creaking in the middle of the night, such as the thermal contraction of the house as the night cools it. The banging is likely the heating system warming up and expanding the pipes pushing on the fittings. If they say they "get chills" in the middle of the night then find the drafty cracks where they need to caulk and insulate. You can use a FLIR camera for most of those issues.
Quirkz, You might want to try out the following website: http://www.theshadowlands.net/ghost/. There is an awful lot of crap and the website is outdated, but there are some interesting things in it. The 'Haunted Places Index' under 'Haunted Places' gives a pretty thorough overview of haunted sites in your area, so you can at least visit places where other people have reported ghosts before (think 2008 was last time the list was updated, however). The 'Ghost Hunting' tab has a whole wealth of information about how to conduct a ghost hunt. The 'Galleries' tab holds a lot of "ghost evidence", as I guess it would be called. Some of it seems pretty convincing, or at least unexplainable, if you believe what the picture/EVP-takers are saying. And there's always all the ghost shows on the tv, too. Whatever yo do, it seems the best advice is to go in as a group, mostly for confidence and witnessing purposes.
Ghost hunting is something I would like to try out once myself, just to see something that cannot be explained. The funny thing about ghosts is that for all their insubstantiality, usually the best hauntings have several items in common: the manifestations occur with regular frequency, the haunting is usually confined to specific locations, and that multiple people have experienced the same paranormal activity at the same time. How could anything so random and unpredictable as a ghost ever meet (and consistently meet) these requirements? Some other good questions:
Why is it that most hauntings occur at night, or at least people get their best evidence at nighttime? How can animals and babies detect paranormal happenings, is this an ability we 'switch off' as mature humans so we don't experience sensory overload when we perceive our reality (perhaps this is why we experience hauntings at night, we're more attuned with the lights out)?
How are haunted locations necessary for a manifestation; if a person died a hundred years ago, the Earth is millions of miles away from where it was in the universe when that person died, yet there continue to be sightings of the same ghosts, to the present day, in the same location? Do ghosts experience gravity, then? When the structure/location the ghosts appear in gets demolished or burned down, why do the paranormal happenings generally cease? Are ghosts prisoners or physic leftovers of the buildings where they lived? Is there a universal physic connection or lock to keep a ghost in place? Could it be moved? Could it be an energy source?
When ghosthunters record EVPs, the responses they get occur either a second ahead or behind their questions, are ghosts slightly-off in the time-stream, or stuck inbetween or outside the reality we experience everyday (or is it just random fuzz in the recording equipment that's a coincidence)? How can something from the past, definitely dead and gone, influence actions and activities in the present? Is this the closest we can come to time travel? Is the past really there and we are experiencing it as it happened, or is it something entirely else? Is it possible the present can influence the activities of the past in this manner (how are ghosts answering questions in EVPs)? Are these just microcosmic "mini-pasts" that can only influence small areas of reality nearby and not actual links to the time stream (reminders)? Are there "time-bubbles" where the universe "messes up" reality? How come we never see ghosts or hauntings from the future?
How come ghosts only seem to come from human beings and human activities? How come not dinosaurs or neanderthals? How come only certain circumstances and certain personalities leave hauntings behind, while the great majority of people leave no trace, paranormal or otherwise? Why only certain circumstances (murder, unrequited love, injustice) permit ghosts to occur while others do not? How come there are larger populations of ghosts seen in hopstials and mental asylums compared to normal domiciles?
Anyway, this is a lot of rambling, but I hope I've raised some good questions for others to mull over. Good night, and good luck in your ghost searching.
Don't listen to the assholes. If you're serious, invest in a decent digital audio recorder. Tascam, Yamaha and others make decent ones for just over $100. And I think Musician's Friend sells a house branded model for just under $100. Do some research on "EVP" or "electronic voice phenomena" and you'll find out what some other people have done in this field.
I'm not saying you're going to find anything or if there's anything to find. But there are serious people who believe that it's worth researching. You'll either find out that it's all a bunch of BS and stop wasting your time or you'll get some interesting results and keep going. Don't have expectations, you're just exploring Ghosts have been part of human experience for millennia. Whether it's some real phenomena or all made up in our heads, whether it's dead people or some artifact of the multiverse or a purely psychological phenomena caused by our fear of death - who knows. Isaac Newton was an alchemist. Carl Jung a magician. Jacques Vallee a serious researcher in an area that everyone laughs at and has written some very, very interesting work. None of those guys were losers, especially compared to the people here that "believe in science" and are telling you with certainty that you are a fool for even asking the question.
If people can spend tens of billions looking for a Hogg's Boson, I don't see why you shouldn't spend $100 on a good digital audio recorder and satisfy your personal curiosity about ghosts. After all, a lot of people who would consider themselves "skeptics" still believe that there's an "invisible hand of the free market" that will solve all our problems if we could just kill off the government and (get this) let corporations do whatever they want. Now that's some real "woo".
And if you don't find any ghosts, you've still got a really cool little handheld digital audio recorder that has an SD slot and a pair of condenser mics and really, really good sound. A speed control so you can learn guitar riffs off of albums and become a guitar legend and get laid. And some spooky stories to tell all the hot chicks while the "skeptics" up above are eating cheetos and compiling kernels.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And I don't mean illegal aliens from other countries. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Only old japanese women living in your closet. http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/woman-arrested-for-living-in-closet-in-fukuoka
A few years ago I went to a ghost-hunting class held by a local ghost-hunting group, and was astounded at how much technology they use. It's definitely not a cheap hobby.
Here's a partial list of what they had:
* Electromagnetic and Geomagnetic Field Meters (EMF and GMF meters)
* Geiger counters
* Temperature gauges (both infrared and digital)
* Humidity gauges
* Radio frequency meters/analyzers
* Ion counters
* Multiple video cameras hooked up to DVRs (including night vision cameras)
* Multiple audio recorders
* Infrared motion sensors
* Hardware random number generators
Here is my list of equipment you need to procure or construct yourself if not available.
- Small solenoids/servos with power pack and wireless remote control( think "bump" "tap tap" somewhere or slamming door)
- Coils and small DC power supplies.
- Infrasound generators.
- Infrared thermal lamps.
- Compact source of static charged air with proximity sensor trigger (stand up hairs on back of neck)
- Powerful permanent magnets hidden in objects, hidden electromagnetic coil (think moving/falling vase). - Sources of cold air.
- Rigged sensor equipment.
Usage:
1) Use these gadgets to make the occupants REALLY think the place is haunted.
2) ???
3) Charge for each return visit until making desired profit.
Wait what? Oh you wanted to "investigate"...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
are idiots.
I would bring a carbon monoxide detector. Preferably one capable of detecting very low levels and with a digital display, like this one.
Chances are they have a natural gas or oil furnace (or fireplace, wood burning stove, etc) which isn't working properly. Incomplete combustion or a leaky exhaust system can cause carbon monoxide buildup in the house. This is especially true in winter, when people are running the heater a lot and keeping the doors and windows closed. It also explains why ghost sightings tend to be more common in cold climates or older homes.
Per the wikipedia article: Many of the phenomena generally associated with haunted houses, including strange visions and sounds and feelings of dread, can be attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning, as its symptoms include confusion, delirium, emotional disturbances, and hallucinations.
No disrespect to the original poster, but if there was something there to be scientific about, something to measure real researchers would have done so and wouldn't be leaving it up to curious people like yourself.
Having written that, no way you would get me into a haunted house :)
Sounds pretty draconian--do you live in the California Nebula?
In my galaxy they just check positron emissions. My probabilistic engine has been using about a quark a month for eons and they just keep letting it slide.
Seriously, many folks who have seen ghosts are actually being affected by Carbon Monoxide. You'll need a good meter, tho, as the CO meters that are found in homes are not sensitive enough.
"haunted" houses are usually old abandoned places. Broken windows, leaky roofs are a recipe for rotten floors. As a kid some friends and I went into a house we all tried to convince each other was "haunted". (just idiot kids trying to freak each other out really) The floors were creaky as hell and pretty soft or bouncy in spots, even to our light weights. Everything was fine though; until we tried to head upstairs. Chuck; being the heaviest, went up last and his foot broke right through a rotted out tread. He couldn't pull it out on his own and for a while, none of us dared go back down the now proven unsafe stairs to help him. Albert and I ended up making a long reach and helped him out. We left by crawling out an upstairs window onto the back porch and did a hang drop into the yard. Chuck got some stitches and a tetanus shot, we all got nasty lectures from our parents.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Don't challenge these loons. Do use the situation, gently, for advantage.
Irrational people should be controlled and guided by their betters, even the purpose be benign and to help them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Just because you can ask a question, doesnt mean it deserves an answer. The whole notion of ghosts is rooted in religious thinking based on literally zero evidence. If a dish falls, or a chair moves, and its proven to be some odd energy force, you're still 100% away from a magic entity that is the spirit of a human that is traveling around the universe in tandem with the earth at millions of miles an hour, changing directions to match the rotation and revolution of the earth, the movement of our star, and solar system and local group and supercluster, etc. just to live in a house. if the soul has mass, we'd be able to measure it with a scale, which to date hasnt been done. It's not worth investing time and money researching peoples imaginary causes based on no evidence. someone from a primitive time jumped to the conclusion of a ghost for an unexplained phenomenon, and because of the widespread belief in immortal souls and an afterlife it's survived into the modern era, where in most every other area of thought those same people demand evidence. There is no place for magic or wizards as explanations, since to date every single thing that has been discovered has been found to be natural in origin. and that means also that everything that was attributed to supernatural agents, has been replaced by a natural explanation, or is still unexplained (yes, "magic did it" isnt actually explanatory)
... airline pilots are not prone to flights of fancy - more of the "Show me State" type of folk.
F401 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Air_Lines_Flight_401 ] was an L1011 Jumbo jet that crashed into the everglades, killing all on board, due to mechanical failure + pilot error + design flaw - the pilots were fixing an indicator light, bumped the controls, moved the plan off of auto-pilot (without knowledge) and into a slow decent, over and into an area with no lights.
Later some AOK parts of the crashed plan became spare parts - cargo doors and such.
Later, crews on flights with those spare parts on their aircraft started reporting, at great risk to career, the sightings of members of the dead crew.
They told their chief pilot, he told other chief pilots, one of then told my (retired) father / pilot, he told me.
I don't care if the intermediaries believe the story. I do believe that they accurately retold what they were told. Old-School airline pilots, with enough years of experience to be trusted with a jets and 100s of people are a fact-based, safety-first, salt-of-the-earth lot.
A reporter/author heard the story and wrote the book "Ghost of Flight 401"
(now, could I please have some Karma? - thx)
Has anyone ever been able to definitely prove the presence of a ghost? Houdini was rather well known for his attempts at contacting his mother through seances but was never able to find a clairvoyant who was real. Quite a few "ghost shows" are on TV where the "investigators" get all worked up about something quite ordinary ("Ooooh - look - only part of this chair is warm - someone was sitting here in the last hour!!! OMG get a thermal picture of it - this is too weird - I'm freaking out!!!!"). Yet these shows never find anything remotely mystifying.
So you're left with the task of proving/disproving the presence of something you and everyone else knows nothing about - much less how to test for the presence of it. Do they affect magnetic fields? Do they emit light? Do they make noise? Do they alter the temperature of the air around them? Are they affected by unlicensed nuclear accelerators? For ghosts, the answer would have to be "maybe". For humans, the answer for every question is "yes" (yes, we do emit very faint light). So if you do detect something, it's almost certain it's not a ghost, but rather a human.
The primary impact that such energy entities have is psychological.
Oh, please.
You claim that "their" primary impact is psychological, but have somehow just ruled out that maybe you're experiencing a psychological problem. The brain is an incredibly complex machine receiving constant, uninterrupted input from 5 senses. Senses that can be tricked by optical illusions, auditory illusions, tactile illusions, false pattern-finding, and just plain old everyday hallucinations: what does the brain do every night except provide us fully-realized hallucinations by mucking with the chemicals in our head? We are literally transported to new wholly false environments that don't require the input of our senses; even without the senses receiving input, our brain is still capable of creating completion environments and emotions. Is it so inconceivable that some of those same chemicals may not accidentally get pumped out during our waking hours?
By objective experience, we know that the brain fills in gaps where none exist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
It's not magic, it's not Jesus, it's the operation of a complex, yet incomplete organic machine, doing an incredible, yet imperfect job of forming a mental conception of its environment.
Surround yourself with enough occult/new age literature and "practitioners" and you prime your brain to see things out of the corner of your eye. You prime yourself to hear and feel things, and to trick yourself into hearing sounds and feeling sensations where none exist. I sometimes hear phantom ringtones coming from my pocket. Is it Jesus? Or just some fragment of my brain chemistry hallucinating that my phone just rang? What would Occam say?
There are entheogens beyond entheogens that can cause ego-death. MDMA aka ecstacy, is used in psychotherapy to create synthetic emotions: it is literally used to induce empathy as a means of treating PTSD. So based on our objective experience of dream creation, based on what we know of chemically-induced emotion, is it Jesus and Demons? What would Occam say?
The idea that God would finally present himself to you, but only in a discrete manner that could also be explained by natural phenomena that effects everybody instead of just full-on revealing himself is ridiculous. If God is going to make the effort to reveal himself, why would he hint at it? By definition, he's literally eschewing the requirement that his presence be believed on faith. Is the logic that he's on the fence about it? Does coincidence ever get a chance in this world? As soon as you turn improbable into a synonym for impossible, you're making the choice to redefine the word, you're making the choice to let hucksters and scam artists turn fear and anxiety of the unknown against you. There's tons of books and forums full of "experts" disproving the moon-landing, "experts" revealing that Paul McCartney really is dead; you can find an "expert" on anything, it's up to you to realize when you've let yourself get taken.
I'm sorry that life is depressing; making up stories about it isn't the way to fix it.
In a historical sense, alchemy is nothing more than very early chemistry which was given a bad name by rampant fraud. Even Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy in his day, trying to make scientific discoveries. In that sense, alchemy is very, very real, it just goes by a different name.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Blah blah blah.... Insert clever comment here _______...Mines better, no mine...!
What a bunch of COOL and CYNICAL wanna be techie jackasses...
It's a market, some are exploited, most are simply entertained. Sitting around arguing whether or not it's real...Seriously? Are you retarded, did your mother drop you? When something is so blatantly obvious, why argue to the center of it? You do it to be entertained, right?
It's actually quite sad what /. has become, and the market they've chosen to entertain.
Insert flame bellow - Puterg33k OUT, lemme guess you wont miss me? STFU.
First, note your relatives purported observations. See if your observations concur. Formulate a theory to explain the observations. Deduce a physically testable consequence from theory, ideally one that has the best chance of falsifying the theory as presented. Test. Modify the theory. repeat. It is also helpful to look for consistent observations in modifying the theory, but not as helpful, due to underdetermination. Consider the Quine-Duhem thesis of unarticulated "auxiliary hypotheses" in your deduction of testable implications.
I can't believe all the Ghost doubt. I've seen it myself, more than once. And I'm not crazy. Well, maybe Swayze crazy...
Delusions are fun! Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite delusions. Just treat this like a request on the best way to LARP. In that vein, I'd suggest he do something novel. Rather than test what is happening in the environment, test what is happening to the observer. Shave his family bald and attach homemade EEGs. Blood pressure, skin conductivity, a thermal camera aimed at the observers if there is some money involved, a thermometer up their bald rear if they there isn't. Sounds like fun to me. As a control he could use the same sensors at home while watching a famly film, and in a peaceful outdoors setting. I'd be truly interested in knowing if the foreknowledge that a place is considered to be haunted is the main factor, or if its the general ambience of a place (tapestries and wood paneling vs. wallpaper with little flowers and espn blaring).
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
First, you got to decide what you want the outcome of the investigation to be:
Piss off all your relatives and friends who strongly believe in ghosts
Piss off religious people who all mildly believe in ghosts
Create a media sensation, publish a TV series and make money from it
Write a ghost story book to make money from it
Corroborate what all scientists already know - that there are no ghosts
Only then you can decide what to do, measure and photograph...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I look upon most groups with a mixture of suspicion and humour. None of them seem to realise that magnetic fields are a vector quantity, so if you point the EMF meter one way, and then another, of course it'll be different! And many groups use EMFs meters designed for use in detecting domestic power cables! Then there's EVP (electronic voice phenomena), the way that disembodied spirits imprint their "voices" on tape and disks without anyone noticing at the time. I've heard only a few that are somewhat convincing. Most are shrouded in a sea of fog and hiss, some you have to adjust the speed, introduce filters, play backwards....if you have to go to that much trouble, chances are there was nothing of any interest there in the first place!
I've written up some of my thoughts on ghosts on my website; everything from experiences on ghost hunts, to the scientific evidence for ghosts (there isn't much!), to a presentation I gave at the London "Skeptics in the pub" about 5 or 6 years ago. Have a look at this page. Pleasant dreams ;-)
My web domain.
I disagree.
There has not once, ever, been a scientifically valid positive result from a single test for ghosts. Further research in the area, after this much overwhelming evidence, is useless.
You don't have any evidence there. You have a lack of evidence. Lack of evidence isn't proof of anything. If you lose your car keys and look for them in the kitchen, the living room, the basement, and the bathroom and don't find them - that doesn't mean that your keys no longer exist.
The problem with supernatural phenomena is that they can never be science, so the scientific method breaks down when you try to apply it. For instance, let us say that I have a hypothesis that you never say the word "butterscotch". I follow you around and record your conversations. I even offer you a butterscotch sundae, hoping you'll say "Oo! A butterscotch sundae!" And let's say I never hear you utter the word. Does that mean I am right? How about if you somehow get wind of my experiment and know that I want you to say "butterscotch". What then? Maybe you're just not saying it on purpose because you know I'd like you to.
In the matter of the supernatural, you cannot use the scientific method because (if true) there would be other minds at work potentially skewing the results of your experiments.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Start by checking the house for any hallucinogenic gasses and substances.
(2) Allow ten years for your researches. (Assuming you're not being led by a controlling person and you choose your approach and objectives) Maturity will bring a certain degree of
(a) "I wouldn't have believed that if I hadn't been there" and
(b) "Even after researching the hoodwinkers (a) is still spooky" and
(c) I have to accept I can't explain some phenomena.
Now (c), [can't explain] is a trap! For every super-natural spasm there are really a dozen everyday explanations. But seek out the people who might be able to spot the 'normal' explanation. (IMHO Most of these are clueless which is why you want to seek the third category of people in (1) who are usually a lot brighter.)
(3) I can tell you there are some 'super-natural' things 'that are a fact'. For example I have dowsed a water main leak about which I knew nothing with my bare hands. So what does that prove? That is the important question! It doesn't prove Ley lines, or that dowsing can be used to show [fill in your fantasy] or that Auntie Flo is 'with you' at a spiritualist seance.
(4) Good luck. SCIENCE (It used to be called things like "Natural philosophy") is about studying phenomena and reproducing results. Don't be afraid to EXPERIMENT because what YOU find may be useful to somebody one day.
PS Personally I have been 'forced' to do fortune telling for people (I'm one of those sorts of unusual chaps who are assumed by various vacuous people to be 'natural' fortune tellers.) Without the aid of spirits or 'fluences I've scared myself and subjects by the thrust (they might say accuracy) of my guesswork. It is jaw dropping to be told by somebody you met ten minutes previously that "In 50 years I have never told anybody that" - but that's just 'reading people" See http://vulpeculox.net/misc/try.htm and http://vulpeculox.net/archive/brose.htm for things that I learned as a result.
PPS The world is OVERFLOWING with weirdos who don't have much sense of hard scientific ground. (And most of the rest are gullible as hell.) When I first put my FACTS about the Compass pubs in a line on the web (14 years ago) I received 14 pages of close handwritten script on air-mail paper from a nutter who tried through mathematics to show that volume...great pyramid...12345.67890...moon...volume...etc. [Eh?] The moral of this story is that SCIENTIFIC METHOD - including peer review - is your friend. By all means investigate but never let it be said "He should get out more"
Using logic with those who don't "believe in" (i.e. trust) logic and reason dooms you to failure.
NOTE: Never argue with an ignorant man, for he is impenetrable to all reason.
Try here [gop.com] and here [democrats.org].
That pretty much sums up the differences between the parties right there.
Check out the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Make a search for "Ghost Hunting" and you'll find a couple of episodes from the past where they are talking about this. I'm sure you'll get some ideas from those guys.
Have you ever wondered why skeptics never find ghosts? It's because, basically, skeptics are annoying people and ghosts don't like to hang around them. Too much negativity, and not enough good-looking cheerleader girlfriends, and especially not enough of the dumb ones who say "let's leave the rest of the party in the well-lit living room and go make out in the abandoned upstairs wing of the house - we don't need to bring a flashlight."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You could start with a really stretchy hard-to-validate hypothesis, like "there are some non-physical beings hanging around this house who are the personalities of humans who were once living here and are now dead but still manage to influence the physical world", vs a null hypothesis of "uh, no" and try to find ways to measure the physical effects that would distinguish those two hypotheses, but I'd recommend not spending too much time building equipment for that.
Or you could go with a simpler hypothesis, like "I ain't afraid of no ghosts!" that you can find tools to measure something about. Maybe you'll find that you ain't afraid of ghosts, and that your friends are, and that creaky noises upstairs or bats in the attic or rats in the cellar sound to them like ghosts, and sound to you like loose shingles or a leaky steam radiator system.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
First of all I'd eliminate electricity related phenomena, this would narrow your search. Every electricity is producing electromagnetic waves, so you definitely need a radio receiver (no idea which). Analyzing radio data is not really easy thing, however. Good luck.
-- Sneer
a. You can't use physical instruments to detect a spiritual phenomenon. Open a gateway to "the other side." Make contact with someone knowledgeable there. Request that they kindly check for ghosts on your behalf. Even if ghosts aren't found, conversation with your knowledgeable contact will likely prove plenty satisfying to your friends and family.
b. Acknowledge that you can't answer this question. Instead of trying to answer it, you could try to make it go away. Successfully perpetrate a hoax. When they all believe it, either reveal it to them, demonstrating the need for greater skepticism on their part - or else, leave them to play with it, thinking they've found the answer. In either situation, arrange for nothing bad to happen to you afterward, as if it does, the ghost will get the credit for your misfortune, as punishment to you for upstaging it.
In every event, do not attempt to use a shotgun as a means of defense from spiritual entities.
I am part of a group that does exactly that. Our understanding so far is that skeptics emits skeptical beams (which you can cross) which make ghosts disappear. All you need is to go there, to talk to people and to keep your eyes open. You don't need instruments, you need to talk to people. A digital camera is all you need. People who absolutely want to find something strange use bad instruments that measure temperature and random electromagnetic events. They don't realize that any normal place has huge variations of that already because they put it on only in "haunted" places. You don't need those.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Dont remember where i read it, but sometimes the reports of haunted places is because of sounds. In one case there was a haunted house where people reported a feeling of "dread". A scientist found that a nearby fan was emiting a sound, which with the right reverb generated a 12-18 dB soundwave. He later reproduced this in a office which wasnt haunted, and once again the testpersons reported feeling afraid. So bring something to check for sounds!
You can't get closer to "proving" that there's no ghost than this:
- Get some "experts". Maybe a shaman or two. A priest. Whatever you can find.
- Find a similar house with no ghost.
- See if the experts can determine which one is the house with the ghost (or at least agree on which one of the two as more ghosts if it comes to that)
That some people are able to perceive ghosts - sometimes, in some way - is about the only thing that all ghost-believers might agree on. So you need to show, that "perceiving ghosts" and "not perceiving ghosts" might just not be connected to the a place but be dependant only on the perceiving subject.
As an alternative: Take an important object that has a connection to the ghost, have a photo of it prepared by a shaman or something. The same with a photo of an identical object that is not connected to the ghost. Now put the two photos online and have people who think they can do that vote for which photo shows the "ghost focus" (along with some other stuff that you might need for your statistics... calculating correlations with age, "do you believe" and "any past experience?" and stuff like that might get you more significant results just in case you end up accidentally proving the existence of ghosts :D).
You're about to step into the trap of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. You yourself say that temperature changes are interesting readings. What does this mean? If you detect a sudden change in temperature, that must mean there's a ghost? The proper way to go about it would be to say "hey, there's a change in temperature, lets find out what caused this change". When you can prove a ghost caused the temperature change, then there's a relationship between the two. If you can prove there's a change in temperature, that does not prove there's a ghost.
In similar way, if you're looking for other stereotypes and can tick each stereotype box on your list, then your own intuition might say "hay, that means there's a ghost here", while in reality you're connecting dots between which there is absolutely no relationship, let alone a causality. If you want to scientifically determine there is indeed a ghost, then you cannot hunt for stereotypical occurrences and conclude that there is indeed a ghost. It just doesn't work that way.
what i would personally do is
go to the place, check it out, make a little plan of it.
then go home and decide about a bunch of places where you gonna "see a ghost", record it all.
then go to the haunted place with the other people that believe in ghosts, at those locations that decided "something" will happen back at home, you act as if you see stuff.
90% sure that they will fall for it and also see something.
make sure you recorded everything and then later show them the vid you made first to proof that you only faked it at every location.
now, sadly they will most likely suggest that there are still ghosts, so smack some common sense into them.
You're willing to go out and look for yourself?
Most of the people here will never, ever do that. Heck, most people here, unless it's a TV program they can zone out in front of while pretending to be 'learning', will do exactly zero research into anything which has even a slight chance of accruing ridicule.
Kudos to you.
-FL
you leave the TV switched on.
Something interesting I once saw on NatGeo: the anxiety that people experience in an allegedly haunted house is the result of infra sounds, coming from a source such as a nearby powerful engine. You will definitely have to check the sound spectrum ...
All your cameras, microphones etc. will record nothing that canot be explained. Yet your relatives will keep claiming they saw, heard, felt something "weird". After a couple of nights, both camps will be more entrenched than before, and you will be accused of manipulating your recordings. Also you will be reminded that "you cannot disprove my ghosts" (but see the other postings on the burden of proof).
hypothesis: haunted houses are "different" to non-haunted houses
apparatus: a house. various sensors: heat, light, pir, mag field, electrostatic field, airflow, accelerometer, video, sound etc (various wavelengths) placed strategicall and reproducibly around. In duplicate.
method: monitor every day for a year. take the averages of your duplicated sensors.
find correlations and outliers and account for temperature, daylight duration, animal habits.
repeat with a panel of houses, one of which is "haunted" (blind test).
repeat with human beings present, ensuring activities are identical in each house.
compare.
results: will be a model of how "a house" behaves over the year.
another model of how "a house with people in" behaves over the year.
a third model of "a house with people in thats different to all the others
repeat all of the above 10 times.
find one thats different to all the others.
use stats eg chi-square to find probability of reliability of the results.
conclusions:
the house that is different will turn out to be the one that the locals reckon is "haunted" more than average.
there may be some short cuts you can take but that's pretty much how you'd go about it and have it defendable.
remember: there is no such thing as a "bad" result in science. there is as much validity in finding nothing as
finding something. and i suspect in that case you are going to get as much "validity" as you need.
of course the beauty of ghost hunting is the massive cognitive bias. plenty of work has been one on that.
Old houses may sport moulds and fungi. Fungi can contain all sorts of head-messing substances. It may be possible to get some altered mental state by inhaling spores. That might explain why reports of ghosts are confined to particular loci, expecially old buildings in stormy weather.
Actually "it isn't" is a highly suspect comment scientifically. There was no evidence presented and no logical justification. Given that sqldr has suggested this as a scientific fact this makes him guilty of pseudoscience, in that he puts forward a supposedly scientific opinion without rigorous evidence. I personally don't believe in ghosts either, but I at least have enough confidence in the scientific method that I can support this persons efforts to investigate the phenomenon without fear that the dogma I cling to to understand my life might be shattered.
To the thread: No one knows how to look for ghosts, no one has any kind of coherent hypothesis (as far as I know) that explains what they would even be if they exist. There is no experiment that can be devised that would detect something that one knows nothing about. One can of course throw out wild guesses as to what instruments might show activity and for my part I would like to wildly guess that sensitive electromagnetic equipment might be your best bet. The wiki article on ghost hunting has a list of methods, if you didn't already check this you should have before posting here. I am also a big fan of cellulose film photography and taking wierd arty pictures so if I was on a mission to find ghosts I would probably try that, with the hope that if (when) I fail to find ghosts, I still have some nice pics to show for it.
Parent++.
I don't see how playing into your families delusions helps them or you? Why not hunt for the Easter Bunny with them, or Santa... or setup a trap for the tooth fairy.
I see dumb people. I say hire Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, and Ashton Kutcher and have them spend a night in the haunted house to see who kicks who's arse!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Won't anybody be serious about this, even if we all think that ghosts are a figment of people's imagination? If anything, the investigation should be fun to do AND an excuse to use cool gadgets.
I don't know much about required gear, but if you want to make as accurate a comparison as possible, you need to run your investigation in 2 houses which are extremely similar. Old houses are always the haunted ones, but most of the hauntings can be explained by the amplification of creaking pipes through the walls and things like that. So your best bet would be to find a haunted house which has an almost identical brother (preferably built at around the same time and by the same contractor), not too far away either because some spooky behavior could be caused my micro earthquakes combined with the ground composition and what not.
And to those who think saying that "the burden of proof is on the believer", how's that stance working out with religious groups, creationists and kids that believe in Santa Claus? To me, that stance is a cop-out.
Quirkz, if you're in the Montreal, Canada area, let me know I'd like to help out ;)
~Syberz
There are several people like Ben Radford, Joe Nickell and others who have long experience doing proper, scientific investigations of paranormal phenomena like ghosts. I recommend you take advantage of their expertise. Ben Radford recently published a book called Scientific Paranormal Investigation last summer that covers alot of the territory. It is highly recommended, available as a paperback & ebook. An older book by Joe Nickell & Robert A. Baker is called Missing Pieces. It was published in 1992 but of course much of what it says is still totally valid.
No investigation is complete without a 1959 Cadillac Meteor, a proton pack, and Bill Murray.
I read this article recently which mentions one explanation for "hauntings":
http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html
So, one thing to check for would be infrasound. If you find it and can identify the source, you may be able to put a stop to the "hauntings".
-- Wodin
Remember the poster on Fox Mulder's wall that said "I want to believe"? That pretty much sums up the mentality of the true believe--they WANT to believe.*
You can't change that mentality. If someone really wants to believe, no amount of evidence or reasoning is ever going to really get through to them. Whether you're telling a UFO nut that aliens aren't probing our rednecks, a Jesus freak that JC isn't coming back for him, or a Koran-thumper that Allah doesn't have a bunch of virgins waiting for him on the other side of his suicide bombing--you're wasting your time. You'd be no less successful arguing with a brick wall.
*Kudos, BTW, to the one X-Files writer who got this, and used it for comic fodder: the great Darin Morgan.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
A good salesman. The opportunities for massive profits when dealing with crazies is endless!!!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Yes every one, we know they are not ghosts. But maybe you can help your relatives know what is causing the sounds they hear.
You can build a simple device with a computer sound card recording 2 microphones spaced a fixed distance apart. Get a FFT program and record the bumps. The FFT can tell you the angle the sound came from. Moving it around you can triangulate and find the source.
If you want to really do a great job of this, get 2 sound cards and 4 mics. Put the mikes on the corners of a triangular pyramid. Make sure the lengths of wires are the same for all mics. Spend some time testing this out before you go into the dark. Then set up your equipment. You can pinpoint where the sounds are coming from. If you want to get really fancy, get a floor plan of the building so you can mark exactly where the sounds came from. Then you can investigate that location.
You may have to repeat this in each room of the house. Sounds coming from other rooms will not be accurately located. There will also be echos of sounds you will have to eliminate, but with a little work you should have a device that can resolve the problems your relatives are having.
First, you'd have to know what physical changes a ghost would exhibit...
Don't take your cue from those ghost hunter TV shows. Those are just entertainment and money-making. I doubt anyone involved with those shows has any interest whatsoever in ghosts.
I've got 2 ghost stories (actual sightings) myself. One, we eventually figured was probably just cigarette smoke hanging in a funny pattern. The other is still unexplained. Someone else had seen the exact same thing in the same place 20 years earlier, but had never mentioned to anyone. That person was able to tell me exactly what I saw before I even made my description... It wasn't just any random "ghostly thing" either, it was a person that appeared, did specific actions, then vanished...
Your post is reasonable, and good advice. However, your use of the 'word' irregardless means that you should never receive any positive mod points for it.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/irregardless+
an erroneous word that, etymologically, means the exact opposite of what it is used to express, attested in non-standard writing from at least 1870s
You cannot prove a negative. There is no "scientific" way you can prove the house is not haunted. Regardless of what tools you use and what data you collect, you will convince no one. Science may be the most amazing tool for revealing truth about our universe, but it cannot answer every question. Go find a few people who believe in ghosts and ask them what proof they would accept to convince them there are no ghosts. This is a matter of changing the minds of people who are prone to magical thinking. Reason, logic, and evidence don't have much impact on people who are prone to magical thinking. Don't bother.
-- QED
Running your own ghost investigation can be a very intense experience. But without the proper tools by your side, you might as well be hunting blind. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of what you will need to be an effective ghost hunter...
A team of people - It's easy to get lost in your own mind. This is why it is an advantage to have one or more "second opinions" in your investigation. This also ensures that you can split up into smaller groups and study different areas of your hunting location. It is also important to make sure your team is like minded with preconcieved notions of what a ghost is and how to find them. This will also cut down on the number of arguments you and your team have while on the site.
Research - It's important to know the history of your site better than the ghosts do. This will not only allow you to navigate the location better with limited visibility, but also provide specific areas within the site that have a history of phenomena that you are attempting to observe.
Audio Recorder - EVP is a very important tool that can allow you to communicate with the beyond and receive messages. A simple audio recorder can pick up voices from entities that remain at the site. Don't worry about spending gobs of money on "Professinal sound equipment" because ghosts don't know how to use it. Make sure you select the cheapest recoding medium with the worst A/D converters and an even worse audio CODEC to ensure you have the greatest chance of getting enough garbled noise and artifacts that sound like voices to validate your site as haunted.
EMF Detector - Electro-magnetic fields are a sure sign that there is spiritual activity at your site. If you can afford a real one, get it (otherwise, a small cardboard box with a needle that moves when you shake it may be just as well). Ghosts create EM fields around them, so be sure to check near all outlets, electrical conduits, and breaker/fuse boxes to find them.
Video Cameras - The best you can hope for is to capture a real life aparition on video. Make sure your camera has a "Low Light" or "Nightshot" mode so you can capture spirits in the dark. Like the audio eqipment, Professinoal or HD cameras will not catch ghosts (again, ghosts don't keep up with technology and don't know how to use them), so make sure you get the cheapest thing Wal-Mart carries (Tip: If you spent more than $130 on a video camera, you spent WAY too much).
Still Cameras - Try the cheapest Radio Shack camera you can find. The fewer the MP, the better. Less pixels allows the ghost to imprint more of its light image on fewer areas of the sensor. This may cause your image to become washed out, but it definitely gives you the image, and thus, evidence.
Talk to the ghosts - Sometimes ghosts are a bit shy. So don't be afraid to talk to them... or taunt them... or yell at them. Ghosts feed off emotions, so be sure you're extremely emotionally charged when you conduct your investigation.
Only hunt at night/Turn off the lights - It's pretty much a proven fact by now that ghosts don't come out during the day, or when the lights are on. This could be because they're photosensitive or dead (nobody knows for sure). In any case, you won't catch anything until you wait until nigtfall and turn the lights off.
Caffine and Energy Drinks - This is probably one of the single most important tools in your arsenal. It's critical that you stay alert and aware by drinking a lot of caffine or energy drinks. This will keep you awake for the whole night to conduct your investigation, and also provide enhanced awareness of your surroundings. If there's a squeak or a creek, you'll hear it and be able to capture it on your recording mediums.
A healthy imagination - Before you conduct your investigation, discuss with your team what you'll be looking for based on what you found in your research. If there's an old man who died in a rocking chair somewhere at your site and there are reports of that rocking chair spontaneously moving, focus on that.
I hope these tips have sparked everyones curiosity about the joy of ghost investigations. Remember, the science of it isn't nearly as important as the desire to believe in something greater than what ordinary people can see.
Even if you explain all the reasons why things happened in such a way, that won't make any supernatural stuff not to be so.
Just think what would happen if supernatural stuff wasn't repeatable? I mean, if you have some measurement, and you can set up an experiment and repeat, that is truly a part of nature (nevermind the supposed explanation), and not supernatural anymore.
Magnetism, or electricity, or things like that, at some point were believed to be supernatural, or just plain bollocks.
In a nutshell: Supernatural experiences are not repeatable. If they are, they are natural. And finding a reason to why something happens doesn't make it less extraordinary. I find extraordinary the way glues stick stuff, why gravity works the way it is, and why is there something instead of nothing at all And all that are natural phenomena.
Baseline readings at several presumably non-haunted locations seem to be obvious requirements for comparison. Once you have those, what kinds of results would it take to convince a skeptic there's something unusual going on, or demonstrate that there's not?
Nothing alone those lines. First, you'd need to demonstrate that a ghost actually makes the sort of changes you're expecting in your "readings." To do that, you would need to already provably have a ghost handy, so that you could test its effects on its surroundings. Otherwise, you haven't even established the phenomena you're claiming as evidence.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Okay, try to think outside your comfort zone for a bit here: What if there are really spirits in the house, BUT they're not simply dead people who don't know they're dead, like pop culture would have you believe? If they were actually a fallen angel (demon) whose job is to turn people away from the true God, what would they do? Given that they would be well aware of your presence and why you are there, they might perhaps perform for the folks who want to believe in "ghosts" but would not do a darn thing for the folks who want to prove there is no supernatural. Either scenario, their purpose is fulfilled. I'll probably get enough flames for that bit of commentary, so I won't get into how I think you should get rid of them.
1) Understand the tools current 'ghosts hunters' use. Why? because they don't use them right and you need to be able to explain that to others.
2) Find the properties people are looking for and find proper equipment.
All you can do is show why a specific instance isn't a ghost, not that there are no ghosts. People who believe ion ghosts have it entrenched in the ideology. However, it can be important to curious readers.
I would go to Randi.org and ask this question. There are people there that actually do this and will have some great advice.
Good luck
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
well, i don't believe in ghosts but there are houses where some freaking shit is obviously going on. VERY loud noises from nowhere, doors locking / unlocking "by themselves", cupboards doors smashing and such. for documenting it, not much more than minidisk with good (stereo) microphone and digital camera is needed. bonus points for camera with motion detection (cheap canon with chdk?) and concealment, to make sure your buddy is not fucking with your mind.
Any. And you'd be the first.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have access to a supposedly haunted house
Your investigation has to be framed around what the "believers" define "haunted" to mean. For example, if they define it to mean drawers opening and closing by themselves, well you need some night cameras set up to film if something moves. If they define 'haunted' to mean strange sounds, well, you need recording equipment. If it's defined as temperature drops, well, you get the idea.
If, however, 'haunted' is defined as 'We feel something in the house,' well, you can't measure that.
(I live in an old house - My wife and I sleep in the basement. I'm a light sleeper and from time to time I hear footsteps upstairs in the middle of the night. Creeps me out a little, but if I really cared that much I could set up some equipment to try to measure what I'm hearing. Same deal here.)
Apparently Slashdot is not the best place to find folks who are supportive of this idea. I'll let you know what I have done. I have an EMF reader. I took it to a friends house which was thought to be haunted. I took readings all over the house to get an idea of the ambient readings and readings off of major sources of electromagnetism like power outlets, and appliances. Ambient may change by less than one degree. Other items may read around 5. I checked the power feed coming into the home which was higher, I forget how much, but you should go ahead and write these things down. After establishing base readings for all of these things in investigated behind the refrigerator where the activity was thought to originate. Now, this is obviously an appliance that generates an EMF. As a control I checked a large freezer in a different portion of the house. After establishing base readings for the fridge and the freezer I began exploring behind the fridge more. The readings there, in the middle of the air, NOT directly near the appliances like it was necessary to get with all the other readings, were much higher than anything else I'd tested. Higher than the freezer or the power line coming into the house. In addition all other sources remained relatively consistent. This source was really high reading in comparison to any others, but it also faded slowly over the course of several hours until it disappeared entirely. None of the other readings I got in the house followed this pattern. I don't know if it was scientific enough, but it convinced me that something was different from normal EMF readings in that spot.
Neither our best science, nor anything in the Bible, indicates that this is possible. The Bible clearly says "In that hour [of death] their thoughts perish" and that "the dead know not any thing," and science agrees. Now please tell me how honest and credible people relate, at the time, receiving communications about such things as a family member's injury or death when there is no possible way this could be communicated by radio, etc. It shouldn't happen, but it does, too often to ignore. But you can't depend on it happening, and too many things perceived as bieng such communications are clearly wrong. Einstein read to his comatose relative despite the lack of scientific support for any theory that he would get through to her. The far more common situation involves coming bolt upright out of either a waking or sleep state, as thougth you had received some message, when known facts lead you to go deal with some emergency without having the facts yet. The architect who suddenly called for a check on a balcony he had designed and approved anc then it collapsed when he walked out on it hours before a major gathering on it. No motive to make that up. I've had a sudden impulse to go check on someone, who I did not know was suicidal, and hadn't talked to in awhile, in time to interrupt a suicide attempt in progress, yet missed the known signals in someone I knew as well or better who I did know had been suicidal in the past. Math and statistics are not my field of expertise, but I did pass statistics in college with a high enough grade to include it in my major requirements, but it doesn't take a math or statistics expert or a genius to figure out that I know some, but nowhere near all, of how a Schnauzer puppy was unintentionally and unknowingly trained to identify child or adult survivors of early childhood sexual abuse, something that unexpectedly came to figure in my law practice, etc., just like a bird dog is trained to alert on a covey of quail, with an uncanny reliability rate that appears to out-perform trained human experts. Trust me, I could have qualified him and offered his evidence in court had the occasion arisen. I don't know how we did it. If I could figure out how to replicate the process reliably, I could make a fortune while doing some good, but I don't have a clue. There are perceptual capabilities in dog and more in human brains we have only begun to understand and use, but I still can't find a credible source for the theory of haunting, communication between the living and the dead, etc., useful as this can sometimes be as a literary device. Disclosure: my analysis, as a lawyer, of the evidence for divine creation and for getting from nothing to human life by random chance and evolution tells me that it conclusively proves both are so clearly unlikely to the point of odds beyond being stated intelligibly, or impossible, that even talking about proving "scientifically" that either occurred becomes ludicrously improbable, that either requires a huge "leap of faith," that there are troublesome motives to adopt either of these positions, and that, historically, the former yields better results in areas such as human rights. Actual or purported, and noted, supporters of each theory range from the honest and very intelligent to dishonest fools.
This maybe isn't a helpful reply, but among the various arguments on whether ghosts even exist or not and methods to try and prove or disprove it, I have to note that it might be really hard to prove with measurements or scientific method because AFAIK no one really knows how to build instruments that measure ghosts? Temperature drop? Could be subjective. It's not unusual to feel a chill even when no one around you does. Is it a ghost? Probably not. Magnetic disturbance? We know that many man-made and naturally occurring things produce EM disturbances. We don't know if ghosts do or not, so the presence of an EM disturbance is only proof of an EM disturbance.
Sometimes something that seems really "ghostly" happens and it's really hard to find any other answer. Once, a friend and I were returning at night from a pistol range to my house, which I'd bought not long before. I unlocked the front door and started to open it only to feel it pulled inward hard enough to almost wrench it from my hand. I pulled back hard, shut the door, and stepped back. My friend said "What happened?!" and we both took our pistols from our cases and loaded them as I explained. When ready, my friend slowly opened the door a little (no pull this time) as I reached in to flip the light switch, both of us with rounds in the pipe). I turned on the light and stepped back. My friend gave the door a push to open it fully. I went in first. Back door was closed. No windows I could see were open.
We turned on every light, searched the whole house, even the attic. No windows were unlocked, the back door was locked and hadn't been opened (it was impossible to cross that tile floor without leaving footprints when coming from outside). All locks were new, double-cylinder deadbolts and security screen doors front and rear. It was pretty spooky.
Three months later I found the explanation when I discovered that whoever installed the furnace had, instead of making a proper cold air return, simply cut a whole in the floor beneath the furnace and it was sucking in air from beneath the house. I then duplicated the effect and concluded the first time I opened the door the furnace had been on, but that it had stopped by the time my friend opened it the second time. No ghost. Just a hard to discover non-paranormal explanation.
OTOH, about 15 years ago, someone I knew pretty well told me she had been visited by the spirit of a family member of ours who had recently died. I didn't believe it, and thought that it was either caused by grief, or that she was possibly even making it up (I had reason to believe she might do that). Still, she knew something that I knew that she would have had no way of knowing, and she claimed the spirit of our family member gave it to her. I couldn't explain that, but did not at all believe her story, dismissing it as probable delusion and possible fabrication.
Five or six years later, I was visited by the same deceased family member, not once, but twice, and she actually reached out her hand and touched me on the shoulder. Not just the motion, I could feel the pressure of her hand. It wasn't the least bit scary, so I rather hesitate to call this a ghost encounter. It was warm and comfortable, easy and familiar. It never happened again after those two closely spaced events, nor has anyone else on either side of the family - including the other person who saw her - ever reported another encounter.
I had to go and eat some crow with my relative by telling her that I not only believed her and that it had happened to me, too. She was very gracious about the whole thing, although at first she wondered if I was telling the truth myself, until I described the encounters. Family members either believe these stories or don't, depending on what they already think about the possibility of such a thing happening. Some changed their minds based on the fact that I said it happened to me. They didn't believe the other person, and had good reason not to, as did I. Turns out she was telling the truth that time, though.
I'm fairly sure most smartphones use a combination of GPS and accelerometers for their compass functionality and not a magnetic compass.
That's what's its there for, to prepare you for a career in paranormal studies/investigations.
I commend you for trying to find the truth for yourself. I would ignore the responses from those that without having tried to get answers themselves make sweeping statements and conclusions. That is useless. I WAS a pretty much a complete skeptic about most of the reports and still am for the most part. You HAVE TO BE in order to find anything worthwhile. There are many normal things that on the surface appear not to be. This is especially when you get a little fear going. But keep an open mind, do your investigating and eliminate as much as possible the explainable stuff. You may not find anything on your first attempt but if you are serious about it, take multiple samples (several tries at a given site). I am lucky enough to have direct access to a 'reliable' site that frequently provides audio that will convince even the most skeptical. I've eliminated the mice, bugs, birds and people stuff and what's left would blow you away. I can say from my experience that the device that provides most frequent success is a sound recorder. If you get a lot of activity on it then using other devices can help sort things out further. Notice I don't use the word 'ghost'. I can say for sure I don't know what it is. Therefore why would I conclude it's a ghost? But what I have recorded (50+ tapes) would make most people say ghost for sure. One interesting thing is, at least at the location I'm using, if I make changes to the equipment or rearrange things, it almost always quiets down for a few days. So just running in there and trying to capture something usually fails. Overall I've been monitoring this site for almost three years now. So if you are able to, try placing the recording equipment in the same place over several days. It might make all the difference. Of course you have to contend with the possibility of tampering.
That is just plain stupid. If it has an effect on the natural world it can be measured. If it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
Ok then. I want you to come up with a meter that measures love.
Love absolutely changes the world. But love could never be science. You can't measure it, can't get a test tube full of it to determine its properties, has no atomic weight. Some people say it isn't even real.
And yet it changes the world.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
and some clay, of course! Demi Moore being present would also be helpful.
Hello,
I am the founder of the British Anomalistic Research Society and we critically analyse claims of paranormal experiences across Britain and use a rational method to look for rational causes for what has been witnessed.
As much as people may mock this sort of research, what we know for sure is that people do experience things that they cannot explain, however people then tend to make leaps of logic about what caused the experience - saying "a ghost did it" or "it was an alien spaceship we saw" doesn't actually provide an answer because these conclusions aren't testable things - we don't have a testable definition for a ghost is, so how can we be sure that a ghost caused the experience if we don't know what one actually is? All we have are ideas.
You can read through the different methods most ghost researchers use and the flaws attached to them on our website at http://www.barsoc.org
If there were ghosts, that would mean there is an afterlife. If the afterlife were confirmed, people would be committing suicide in droves to get to "heaven". If there were a Big Guy Upstairs, he probably wouldn't like this, so he wouldn't allow ghosts to be seen on Earth. So: ghosts don't exist if there isn't an afterlife, and ghosts don't exist if there is an afterlife. The End.
In my opinion they do anyway, how can anyone admit the existence of God and then dismiss something as trivial as a ghost or a alien. That doesnt make any sense seems hipocritical even. Those who choose not to believe in at least the possibility of God are the same type of people who would burn ancient scientists for refuting the idea that the world was flat or that we revolved around the sun. Ignorant people in a ignorant, intolerant world and you can see that symbolically represented in the confines of this forum. Constantly the empirical scientific mind comes to blows with the lazy dreamer... I am a lazy dreamer, I enjoy believing there is stuff out there we do not yet have the capacity to understand. All through history what science thought it knew has consistently been disproven and replaced with newer theory. So it continues today and fifty years from now a lot of what we think we know as fact will once again be disproven. Scientists can wrap their minds around things like string theories, and infinite alternate realities, and dark matter, time travel, folding space to travel long distances... but the idea that a Ghost might exist... thats too far fetched. Intellect and the entire concept of what we know is laughable at best.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
old post, i know, but I hope someone is still reading this:
Research what ghost hunters and other shows do. I would recommend watching several episodes of Ghost Hunters, if you are serious about this for a couple of reasons: what they get right, and what they get wrong. When someone describes a phenomena, they try to debunk it. I don't know if there is anything to the claims that EM caused by bad wiring creates the creepy feeling people claim to report, but they are big on finding things like that. Then, when something funny happens to them, they often assume it is paranormal, sometimes going so far as to pop off an explanation that they couldn't possibly know for a fact.
For example, if a battery goes dead, they say "it takes energy to manifest, so the ghost must have been drawing power from our equipment". (How do they know that ghosts even exist, let alone whether they are battery-powered?) It seems like they are very skeptical toward the claims of others, but not toward their own.
So, I am recommending that you try to do exactly what they do; go in, try to get EVP readings (note that for EVP, people often will play with the sound settings, changing the speed, pitch, etc, until they get something sounding like a human voice), try the mag-light trick (unscrew a flashlight until it is barely making connection. Ask questions and if it turns on or off during specific questions, present that), and above all else, take a ton of footage. Ghost hunters send in several people for six to eight hours, just to produce a few minutes of footage.
After you have produced footage that could be somewhat convincing, go back and explain as much as possible. Show what you had to do to make the EVP sound kind-of-sort-of like a voice. Explain how pareidolia ties into this, and show how much time was spent dicking around, just to get a few minutes of difficult-to-explain footage. Try to trick them, and then teach how the trick was done. If you come across anything you can't explain, you may want to put it online, and ask if anybody else has any ideas.
I know this is a great deal of work, especially when you consider that you will have to work twice as hard as people who get paid to do this stuff, but, that is what it would take to really tear this apart.
Also, some of us would love to see Ghost Hunters given the Penn & Teller treatment. Post your results online, please!
"Get me a command line...[then]...Try: find / -name ghost.\* Then, hit return." — CEO Bruce Whiting, "The Latch-Key Solution" (part of a Silicon Valley ghost story for geeks, heard at www.realtorandceo.com)
That people believe religions and superstitions is is why we have war and mass murder and persecution over ideologies and religions, and why billions of dollars are raked in by religious con artists each year. So this person wants to pander to idiots and their stupid useless beliefs. Please, don't feed the dumbfucks, the minds of humanity don't need further enslaving.