Gadgets For the Ghosthunter

Zothecula sent us a sad story about the gadgetry scammers use to take money from people who believe in the pretend: "In a survey conducted by CBS News in 2005, it was found that 48 percent of Americans believed in ghosts. Other surveys have put the number at anywhere from around 20 to over 50 percent. While such figures certainly don't imply that ghosts are real, they do suggest that belief in them is relatively common. When someone does suspect that a ghost is present in their home or business, they will sometimes call in "experts" to ascertain if that is, in fact, the case... and what sort of gear do these ghost hunters use to detect said spirits?"

Comments

PKE meter

[bigstrat2003]

I mean, duh. How else will you detect ghosts? Also make sure you have your proton pack and trap, to catch them once you find them!

Re:PKE meter

[Locke2005]

And whatever you do, don't cross the streams. It would be bad. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

Re:PKE meter

[Ann O'Nymous-Coward]

And remember, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!

Re:PKE meter

[bigstrat2003]

Important safety tip, thanks!

Re:PKE meter

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Whatever yo do, don't cross the beams!

Only Thing needed

[Sonny Yatsen]

Ghosthunters don't need gadgets. The only thing they need is the desire and ability to separate idiots from their money.

Re:Only Thing needed

[wierd_w]

I used to live in a haunted house, you insensitive clod!
[lol]

That said, No, really, I really did. I don't know how such phenomena could be explained without some very tortured rationalisms, given what I have personally seen.
Anecdotes are not evidence, and I don't expect you to believe me, or to change your opinion. If you are truly curious about the things I have personally experienced on this matter, I can entertain you for a while, but not in this post.

As for most professional ghost hunters, I find fault with some of their equipment, for purely geeky reasons. Such the use of digital personal voice recorders for collecting EVPs. This is bogus to me, for the simple reason that digital voice recorders use internal lossy (Lossy as hell, in fact!) codecs to store the audio data they collect. EVPs are supposed to be stored in "Inaudible" audio spectrum, which is EXACTLY what these codecs chop out to make the stream smaller. If you want to collect EVPs, get yourself an old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder, then digitize later with FLAC or PCM with a high bitrate. If anything, the artifacts left by lossy compression on those portions of the auditory spectrum are likely to cause FALSE POSITIVES than to detect genuine EVPs, should they happen.

I do have some interesting ideas for some elaborate ghost detection equipment of my own though, but given the shoe-string budgets that most of these "paranormal investigator" teams operate on, they would never be able to afford the PARTS, let alone the training needed to use what I have in mind, or to interpret the resulting data. (basic grasp of wave mechanics would be needed to evaluate some of the datasets in order to screen out the interesting data from the boring kind-- one of the devices I have in mind would make use of electromagnetic interference with various reference signals over a broad spread of the EM spectrum, not just visible and IR light. The device would basically emit a precise calibrated waveform that is a phase conjugate with the other frequencies being probed (they are all multiples of each other, so they do not interfere on their own, but instead have wave reinforcement.) The device measures any deviations from this ideal reference waveform from particle interactions. Since ghosts are presumed to emit/absorb electromagnetic energy, they should cause such perturbations in the reference signals by interacting with them.. Multiple frequency bands would help to constrain what kinds of interaction are (possibly) taking place, or if they are happening at all. Ideally, it would have receivers in both Near and Far field areas to record both kinds of interaction. The test rig would fill a whole room. This is just one of the theoretical devices I have in mind. )

When it comes to the validity of any "findings" that such teams come up with, I groan. Any data collected is only as good as the equipment and rigor of the team collecting it. It is VERY easy to find false positives and false trends in very noisy (eg, poorly calibrated/downright bad) data. Given the issue with the EVPs above, and the rather linear and simplistic tools that they use to collect such data, (Such devices are NOT meant for scientific research, but instead for simple domestic repairs, and to hunt down EMI radiation from wiring.) I can't help but groan when I watch them on TV.

I guess that makes me a walking contradiction-- I have personally experienced paranormal activity, but demand data. Maybe that is why I come up with ideas for instruments?

"gadgetry"?

[grub]

about the gadgetry scammers use to take money from people who believe in the pretend:

It's called a "collection plate."

Re:I like that Show (GH and GHI)

[CohibaVancouver]

I'll keep fast-forwarding through each episode, just in case they do stumble upon something.

If they do actually stumble upon something real and get real evidence you don't need to wait for it on the show - It will be front-page news on every newspaper and news site in the world.

Re:Got a place for this?

[f8l_0e]

Apparently 48% of Americans would likely throw it over their shoulder.

Obligatory "Bullshit!"

[JohnnyBGod]

Here's Penn & Teller's take on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09eBzjxlu1s

Re:I like that Show (GH and GHI)

[Locke2005]

Ghost Hunters is just like Monster Hunters -- don't you think if they found concrete proof of the existence of something unusual that news of it would leak out BEFORE they aired the episode???

Re:Religion

[gstoddart]

Many forms of Buddhism believe that the rebirth of those with especially bad karma leads to existence among the living as a ghost. In spite of some recent Western attempts to proclaim a "Buddhism without beliefs" (little more than an attempt to rewrite the whole religion so that it doesn't make us uncomfortable)

If by Western attempts you mean well-known scholars like The Dalai Lama and Thicht Naht Hahn? Or Shunryu Suzuki or Pema Chodron?

Buddha was fairly clear about the fact that it's not intended to be a religion, and that he wasn't some supreme being. He was mortal, and expounded things that mortals should do. The pre-existing gods where Buddhism moved to didn't need to be purged wholesale, and have been incorporated/kept in many places.

Buddhism does not have a requirement in beliefe of a supernatural being, a creator god, or deification the the Buddha. Western Buddhists might differ from Buddhists from Thailand or Sri Lanka, but fundamentally, it hasn't been "rewritten" to appease us. It's fairly malleable to begin with, and if you step away from a specific cultural context, none of that is required for the rest of it.

Re:Religion

[ShakaUVM]

>>Sweet Zombie Jesus!

Please, please, please learn the difference between Animate Dead (3rd level spell) and Resurrection (7th level spell).

Funny thing ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

If the word "Ghost" in the article were replaced by "god", the article would still be correct, but it would have never been posted.

If I say "Ghosts aren't real", I get moderated informative. If I post "That particular Ghost you call god isn't real", I get moderated troll.

Irrational, isn't it?

Re:Religion

[Wyatt Earp]

Islam views ghosts and ghost sightings as pre-Islamic superstition

It is a "corrupt belief to think we will become ghosts after death. After death what will happen, will be exactly what is told by Qur'an and Ahadith."

http://www.sunniforum.com/forum/showthread.php?26432-Muslim-view-on-ghosts

However they believe in Jinn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinn

Paranormal my ass...

[denzacar]

IR camera's can detect heat flows but a heat flow that randomly appears lasts for 5 seconds and disappears is unusual.

I just had some beans. Give me an IR camera and I'll show you a randomly appearing heat flow. Might last longer than 5 seconds in some cases.
You might need to open a window when it appears though. Which would cause a - guess what? ANOTHER HEAT FLOW!
Only that one may not have the "aroma" of the ones I produce.

And you know what all those "haunted" places have in common?
Lots of holes (in walls, floors, door frames, ceilings...) and decomposing organic matter (wood, rugs, wallpaper, dead rodents in the walls...).

Re:One reason people believe...

[cojsl]

Agreed. When someone "experiences something weird", there is an explanation. But that explanation may be beyond our current limited understanding of the workings of our universe and reality. It seems to be arrogant to claim that "ghosts" don't exist, when some limited cases may be phenomena beyond our current ability to measure and explain. Before the discovery of bacteria, we could sense and measure their effects, but were unable to explain the mechanism. This didn't mean that bacteria didn't exist though.