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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
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.
Bring some common fucking sense, and a stick to hit those who didn't bring any?
John
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.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Try here and here.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
...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.
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).
Get your relatives copies of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World".
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
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
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...
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.
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..
- Less of a nut job than you think
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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'
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.
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
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?
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?
OK, well then go ahead and bring some common types of detection gear. Bring a digital camera (DSLR would be best, but bring the most sensitive you've got.) If you can find one, bring an EM detector. Perhaps bring a multi-band radio, one that has a manual squelch so you can hear the static, and with a portable antenna. Maybe an optical distance thermometer. And bring a video camera.
Also bring some experimenting supplies. Aluminum foil and wire would be good. Duct tape and some tripods will be useful, as will a few ordinary tools (a multi-tool knife/pliers thing would probably suffice.) Various clear plastic bags. If you can, get different color LED flashlights to look at things under different colors of light. Plain white paper. A box to put stuff in.
Go over how each of the things you brought detects something, then amplifies the results so you can see it. The camera detects light with a CMOS sensor, and does so in 1/60th of a second; the EM detector detects lines of magnetic flux with a coil of wire, etc.
Explain how every sensor has its limits. For example, a light switch is a sensor of human fingers. It doesn't switch itself, a person has to push harder than the internal spring to toggle the lights. The light switch can't detect humans that don't press hard enough, but the lack of flipping doesn't prove there's no human there. Note also that the lack of flipping doesn't prove there IS a human there, either. Then take out the camera and explain how the CMOS sensor has a similar threshold, and requires a certain amount of light. Anything below that threshold proves only that there wasn't enough light.
If a camera sensor has no light at all when you press the shutter, you'll find that the sensor is not perfect, and not all the cells are exactly pure black. The differences in the individual cells will show up as variations in black.
Set the camera to RAW mode, or to the highest resolution possible. Change the ISO setting from "Auto" and set it to the highest possible value. Set the aperture as closed as possible (high F stop) and set the shutter speed as fast as possible. Fully obscure the camera lens with aluminum foil and take a couple of pictures, then magnify one of the pictures on the computer screen until you can clearly see distinct pixels. Notice how even though no light should have reached the lens, some of the pixels are brighter than others. Compare this to the other pictures you took of the covered lens, and look for differences between them. They might all be the same, or there might be some variations.
Then take the still-foil-wrapped camera and put it someplace cold for a while, and take another couple of pictures of blackness once it chills. Finally, warm it up to body temperature and take another set of pictures. Compare all three temperature pictures, and look for differences. You might find something like the cold sensor pictures have a more consistent level of black, while the warm sensor pictures have less consistent black. Or the other way around.
When you're bored of the camera, pull out the EM meter. Make various coils with the wire, and see if they affect the readings. See if having one end of the coil grounded makes a difference. See if grounding both ends makes a difference. See if having a person hold one end makes a difference. See if it makes a difference if the person is also running a video camera. See if it makes a difference if your cell phones are on or off. If you find a spot in the house with a strangely high EM reading, make a shield of aluminum foil and hook the wire to it and ground the other end, and see if that can change it.
Try various things to reproduce anomalies you may have seen on the TV shows. Come up with hypotheses, and create experiments to confirm your suspicions.
John
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.
Yeah, imagine if misinformation got mixed with politics!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
Things that exist have EVIDENCE.
Actually, proving or disproving that statement is pretty much the crux of this whole debate. Can you prove or disprove that everything that exists must have evidence of it's existence, without falling into the circular logic of simply saying that the evidence is what demonstrates existence?
The whole deal with the supernatural is that the scientific method falls down, because the believer can always either 1) claim the force at work is only detectable by "sensitive readers", not giving off any normal measureable forces, 2) claim the results of the tests were manipulated by the forces at work, or 3) claim the force at work was aware of being measured and, for whatever reason, refused to show. This is what the GP and others are trying to point out; stating that there has never been evidence for a phenomena isn't, strictly speaking, evidence against it. Whether that's because we're looking in the wrong place, looking in the wrong way, the tests are being subverted by the thing being searched for or the thing we're looking for isn't there is, again, the crux of this debate.
For what it's worth, I'm a skeptic, and think ghosts are about as likely to exist as the good old flying spaghetti monster. But lets try to distinguish between what we believe, what is likely, and what is scientifically provable/disprovable. So put aside the fact that the idea of ghosts is a bit silly, and move to the more interesting topic of how we can prove/disprove them, or if indeed it's even possible to do so.