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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."
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.
Gullibility,
Not sure who sells that online....
I believe that would be The Drudge Report...
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...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...
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).
not much of a skeptic are you.
I forgot that these days, skeptic means "don't ever investigate anything and for bonus points, display contempt for those who do".
The summary is a good example of what real, healthy skepticism is. It boils down to "I don't think I will find anything, but I don't actually know that until I look, so here is the experiment I want to conduct." Is it the lack of presumption and arrogance that offends you? Does the presence of open-minded people willing to look for evidence, even of things they don't actually believe in, make you feel uncomfortable with your narrow-minded worldview? I'm guessing that's where the contempt comes from.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
well, there's actually a really easy way to tell if your house is haunted:
it isn't.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
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..
Well the true skeptic will doubt the disbelievers too.
Being willing to consider evidence which doesn't fit your world view is good.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
In a perfect world, a skeptic would be free to test absolutely everything, from the existence of ghosts, to periodically making sure that newtonian mechanics and basic chemistry still remain valid, and that science hasn't all changed over night. Out here in the real world, we have to prioritise our time onto things that have a better chance of being valid.
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.
Check for the presence of Dihydrogen Monoxide on the person who saw or felt the presence of the ghost.
I have done extensive tests. Every person who has been exposed to a real ghost has traces of Dihydrogen Monoxide on their eyes.
Fight Spammers!
Do you investigate the flat Earth theory? Do you investigate the geocentric theory? Do you investigate spontaneous generation? Do you investigate alchemy? ARROGANCE!
Ah, another person tries for the low-hanging fruit. Perhaps my response will demonstrate why this is what you are doing.
First I'll say that the word "ghost" isn't a terribly great word. It implies that any strange phenomena are caused by dead people who still retain some kind of non-corporeal existence. The actual cause of such phenomena could very well be some not-yet-discovered natural force that has nothing to do with people at all, living or dead. What I personally believe is that strange things do happen that we do not (yet) know how to explain and as such, we have no idea what might be causing them. Using loaded words like "ghost" is therefore inappropriate, not to mention it's fodder for belligerent narrow-minded people who just want to demagogue something instead of contributing anything useful because they knee-jerk upon hearing a loaded word.
Moving along... Do I personally investigate those things you mentioned? No. The first three have been thoroughly falsified. Regarding alchemy, if you conducted a scientifically-sound experiment that claims to have produced conclusive evidence, I'd be willing to entertain that evidence so long as it's understood that the burden of proof is entirely on you and your methodology needs to be both sound and available for examination. If you can meet those conditions then I say go for it.
This is the part you seem to have a hard time with. I have seen abundant evidence that the Earth is spherical. That's why I see no point in investigating a flat-Earth theory. It is falsified by the knowledge that the Earth is spherical combined with the knowledge that spheres are not flat. I have seen no compelling reason to believe that "ghosts" (to use the colloquial, loaded word) have been falsified. Therefore I consider it an open question and I am willing to entertain scientific evidence of such.
Your mistake is that you think the two ideas are on equal ground. You cannot recognize and appreciate the difference between a thoroughly falsified notion and the truly unknown. That's why what you call "skepticism" is just narrow-minded arrogance, not unlike religious zealotry. It makes a mockery of the healthy kind of skepticism that says "show me the evidence".
You can cower behind that narrow-mindedness if it helps you protect your worldview from the terrible (to you) risk of being altered to accept new possibilities if that pleases you. Just understand that others like me are perfectly comfortable saying "I really, truly don't know, therefore it doesn't make sense to form a passionate belief about this subject."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I wish I had such gullible friends and family. Tell them you can find the ghost but only once they provide you with the hardware components for your ghost detector: . Then just sort of attach them randomly together, wander around the house for a while and say you didn't find any ghosts. It's a win-win situation.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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 think *something* is going on that we don't yet know about. If there were only the occasional nutty person who claimed to see strange things, I'd say he/she is probably just a lunatic. The problem is when there are so many tens of thousands of reports. The problem is compounded when many of them come from respectable people who tend to be credible in other matters, show no signs of mental instability, and generally gain nothing but ridicule and ostracism from reporting such things.
So what am I to believe? Are they all liars? Do that many people enjoy getting scorned, ridiculed, or thought of as crazy by their neighbors because of some strange form of masochism? Do that many people have such a specific type of hallucination, and particularly when multiple people witness the same thing, are they somehow having a shared hallucination? I find the above to be improbable. I find it more probable to believe that humanity hasn't yet learned about and figured out every possible thing under the sun, that there is still a great deal we don't know about the universe, that sometimes people encounter unknown phenomena. It could very well turn out to be not a physical phenomena, but rather an artifact of human consciousness -- either possibility could expand our knowledge of ourselves and our world.
Agreed, except that if one person wants to conduct an experiment like this, without taking away grant money and personnel that could be used for projects more likely to bear fruit, using his own time and his own money, I see no harm in it. I don't think he "has to" do anything just because someone else thinks he is wasting his time; I regard it as his time to use as he pleases. He seems to accept the necessity of producing actual evidence prior to drawing any conclusions and that's about all I would ask.
And if everything I've said in the above applied to chemical anomalies then yes, I could understand why the occasional person might want to look into the matter. The fact is that I don't hear all the time about relatively credible people reporting chemical anomalies, or about chemical reactions yielding products wildly different from what theory predicts, so I don't consider it to be on the same footing.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Does anyone else find it humorous, and somewhat telling, that the GOP uses the commercial TLD?
He wanted to be scientific in his investigations of ghosts.
All the randomly wired together equipment in the world won't help him prove a negative.
Evidence of Absence is only possible when the subject and the location and the time window are well defined (zero marbles in the glass jar at this instant).
But since he can't pin down the definition of a ghost (let alone measure it), there is no point in worrying about the location (plane of existence?), or time frame. Nothing he could produce would satisfy his septics.
So he arrives here asking what he can measure to be "scientific about it", to which we can only ask:
Be scientific about WHAT?
Any random forked stick should do until he answers the above.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What makes you think they are delusions?
Seriously, I mean the scientific approach wouldn't be that they are delusional, it would be that no evidence has been presented to you. Unless you can scientifically explain away whatever they presented as evidence for their beliefs, the best you have is that you aren't convinced. Not that they are delusional.
The concept of a haunting has been around for quite some time. Some of it probably is misinterpreting facts and a mind running creatively wild, or purposeful lies designed to influence behavior of some sort. But you can't say all or every single claimed instance is because you simply do no know the facts or have the ability to test them. And as we all know, the lack of evidence does not mean it's impossible, it only means it hasn't been proven yet.
so does my church
Not so ironic when you think about it...
Seriously, I mean the scientific approach wouldn't be that they are delusional, it would be that no evidence has been presented to you. Unless you can scientifically explain away whatever they presented as evidence for their beliefs, the best you have is that you aren't convinced. Not that they are delusional.
Part of the scientific method is to give up after a while. 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.
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I wanna play!
I wish I had such gullible congressmen and congresswomen. Tell them you can find the terrorist but only once they provide you with the funds for your terrorist detector. Then just sort of attach them randomly at airports, pat-down / grope anyone that walks through them for a while and say you didn't find any terrorists. (Implying that it's keeping the terrorists away.) It's a win-win situation.
Best "String" Ever!
Lol.. There was not once, ever, been a scientifically valid positive result for a transistor or digital signal, until- wait for it- someone went off on a wild goose chase and discovered that basis for what makes 90% of technology possible today.
But hey, I would say that ghosts and the supernatural simply hasn't been scientifically tested. It may be because they aren't real, but then again, how do you scientifically test something you can't scientifically understand? But in the cases where they were tested, it either turned out to be something else and a product of someone's imagination or simply a no show for the spirit. About the only way it could be tested is if there was more knowledge of it and that's only going to be possible if people continue to examine the supposed haunting.
Anyways, back to your "Further research in the area, after this much overwhelming evidence, is useless" comment, So what if it's useless? What if the so called haunting turns out to be some plumbing in bad shape and the investigation find it before it ruptures and ruins the entire house. What if it turns out to be a pedophile sneaking in and watching children sleep and they simply haven't been able to catch him because he hides his tracks so well so they blame it on being haunted. Surely if his investigation turns anything remotely like that up, it wouldn't be useless.
Well, what this really is a chance for him not to so much apply the scientific method but rather to teach the scientific method. He already has a hypothesis: his family is full of crap. What he needs is for his family to come up with the testable hypothesis. Have them do the work to prove the ghosts. Set up controls, double blinds, etc., etc. The goal is not to prove the non-existance of ghosts, but to make the family shut up about it. And it's totally possible to work with them in such a way that it sucks all the fun out of the make believe and teaches them that, really, they cannot prove their claims even to themselves. He, however, should stick to trying to help them prove what they believe. But they have to be able to articulate what they believe in some way. But that is their problem, not his.
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.
Slightly funny anecdote, but childrens' belief in Santa and the Tooth Fairy is entirely scientific. Every time, they conduct a falsifiable experiment (put out a cookie / tooth that might not be consumed / taken) and every time they come back with a positive result. They even do peer review, asking their fellow peers (children) what their results were (what they got from Santa), and even validate the experiment with respected and more experienced experimenters of the past (their parents, who swear blind that the results are genuine). They are only thwarted because there really is a grand world-wide ongoing conspiracy to interfere with their experiments and falsify their results.
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.
While I personally agree with you, that line of reasoning will not convince believing friends and family that the house isn't haunted.
That's okay, though. Because a thorough scientific investigation will not convince believers either. The slightest wobble in any of your readings will be read as a haunting. Lack of wobble in the readings will be read as a haunting. A complete failure to find any evidence of ghosts will be taken as evidence that the ghosts do not want to be found.
And then there's a good chance that your work and or words will be taken out of context in a way that seems to support ghosts, but will be worded in such a way that a FORMER SKEPTIC now BELIEVES!
Basically, don't do it.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Great, you understood my point. It had to be someone wasting their time on something that didn't have any 'scientifically valid positive result' in order to get the first one.
No, not at all. They are one in the same at one point in time. Someone notices some behavior that was different, instead of saying that's not possible and forgetting about it, they explored it, created some things, and bamm, magically we have a TV in our Toaster. Don't confuse understood and meaningful results that are seen important after we are used to how they changed the world with the process in which they were discovered.
Lol.. Yea, because all the Sasquash go potty in the same spot of the same set of woods and it's all distinguishable enough from other piles of shit that any 4th grader poking it with a stick would know it came out of bigfoot's ass. The problem is that the likely hood of finding bear shit in the woods when you don't know what to look for is near impossible and they are way more common then sasquash are supposed to be.
And your point about ghosties is even more insane as they supposedly don't even obey the laws of physics. So how are you even sure that the scared idiot who saw them, who also ended up having a camera recording at the same time, and was able to point and click without missing, would even capture and image or video of something that doesn't obey the laws of physics as we understand them.
Do you really think legends that haven't been validated or invalidated yet, is on the same grounds as Hollywood movie creations? I mean these legends are products of stories that were around long before you or I was ever a glitter in daddy's eye. Some of these span centuries. I would certainly think that stories this old who have crazies popping up every so often validating them by supposed personal experiences deserve much more credit then something known to of been invented. As a matter of fact, anytime someone says they just made something up, I would give it a lot less chance of being something real then something people swear was real at some point in time.
Chances are the events are actually natural and feeding an active imagination as apposed to supernatural in nature.
I guess the point is that the person claiming those people are delusional is probably working with even less information then those delusional people are. In other words, he doesn't know if they are delusional or not, and his premise of it being so is based all upon his belief structure not any physical facts. At least most of the people who claimed to see ghosts actually saw something. He's saying because he doesn't know about it, it doesn't exist and then claiming that's scientific.
Part of the scientific method is to give up after a while.
Where, exactly, in "observations, hypotheses, predictions, and experiments" does it say "give up"? Until a phenomena is explained, you aren't following the method if you give up.
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.
See, this is where you don't understand "scientific method". The hypothesis in this case comes from the poster's family:
This was based on observations. What the poster wants to do now is predict and experiment. The iteration of these processes is called "the scientific method".
There may or may not be anything supernatural happening in the house, but without following the steps, no one will ever know exactly what is happening in the house (if anything). In particular, if the observers are not delusional, then something is happening in the house. Whether it is supernatural or not can only be determined by (drumroll, please)...the scientific method.
To be more accurate, you both *remember* seeing the same thing at the same time.