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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."
Get your relatives copies of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
- Less of a nut job than you think
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
An interesting thing I read a while ago suggested that some of the supposed symptoms of "hauntings" are actually mundane, infrasonic phenomena. To wit, if a location has a source of sound waves not far below the boundary of audible frequency (machinery, pipes, ducts or even just free flowing air through the right structure) people and animals will react to the noise with alarm, even though we can't hear it. This has been suggested as one possible mechanism whereby certain animal species react in advance to seismic phenomena. It's possible a person could enter a room with a sustained infrasonic hum and attribute their instinctive sense of alarm to a malevolent presence.
So I'd suggest that guy who asked slashdot get microphones and recording equipment that can pick up on sound below 20 Hz. I've no idea where or how you'd get this equipment, or whether this would be a viable option for an amateur sceptic on a budget, but it's worth looking into.
If you find a recurring sound in a location where supposed "hauntings" have occurred, try to locate the source. It might be the problem can be solved by calling a plumber instead of an exorcist.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
From what I've read (Google finds some stuff) infrasonic vibrations cause feelings of fear and 'of being watched'. They can also affect vision to cause blurs or 'ghostly images'. I don't have any direct experience, but it's been the explanation that seems to make the most sense to me.
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.
Progress= People have to be scared of less things, feel too cold or too hot less often, get a comfortable amount of sleep, can satisfy their various primal hungers (food, water, sex, knowledge) with less effort and consequences... everyone gets to explore their own concepts of the universe without artificial limits or interference from authority(as long as its not hurting someone elses... this gray area will always be there), you and you're loved ones dying less often (or never except due to extraordinary circumstances). The idea of an Utopia may be unattainable but didn't come to be out of nothing. (Progress= more like the star trek universe.) I'm not being facetious here. I really believe what I just wrote.
If you see something you can't understand or explain, science to the rescue -- that is, if you can come up with a testable hypothesis, which is damned hard in these cases.
I've seen a "ghost" twice, both in very old houses. As Scrooge told Marley, "you could be a bit of undigested beef", but in the first case that was impossible. I was still married and the kids were babies, we were poor, living in a tiny house right next to a railroad track. Something woke my ex and I up at the same time, and a dim light seemed to come down the hall. Both of us saw a thin woman with dark hair wearing an antique dressing gown.
We thought it was a burglar. She ran in to check on the kids, and I went down the hall after the woman -- who was gone, simply not there, and there was nowhere she could have hidden. There's no way two people are going to hallucinate the same thing at the same time; that's even more far fetched than the spirits of the dead walking the earth.
The second time I was home alone sitting on the toilet, and a woman walked up to the bathroom door, startling the hell out of me. The odd thing was, I seemed to startle her as well -- then she vanished.
The second could have been a trick of the light, digestion, etc, but the first was inexplicable. Maybe sometimes one can see into a paralell universe, or into a different time or something? maybe a wormhole opened up? There's really no way to tell.
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