Clarifying my points on ghosts & ethics

Posted by Hayley on Jan 15, 2012 in paranormal, Skepticism | 1 comment

Yesterday I spoke for the ‘Centre for Inquiry UK’ at their ‘Beyond the Veil’ event alongside Chris French, Richard Wiseman, Paul Zenon and Ian Rowland (who has cemented in my mind the idea that glass tastes minty.)

I felt compelled to write this piece just to clarify something said during my talk that was then challenged by an audience member during the short Q&A afterwards.

In my talk I spoke a bit about ethics within ghost hunting and how the field is largely unregulated which allows for all sorts of problems to arise (that often go unquestioned or aren’t dealt with).

I mentioned that the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) don’t have a formal code of ethics, and this was challenged by somebody in the audience who took umbrage at several things I had said.

The fact is that the SPR don’t have a formal code. They do consider ethics (and I didn’t suggest they didn’t). There are committees in place who oversee different areas of research and a lot of their published research is done through universities who will have their own codes of ethics in place for research, but there is no formal code in place within the SPR that members have to comply with. This means that exactly what is and isn’t acceptable isn’t always very clear.

The point I was making by discussing this (and other cases) with the audience at Conway Hall is that ghost researchers are largely unregulated – and only self regulated in those instances where they do opt-in to work with a code of ethics in place.

Some amateur paranormal research teams do have their own ethical codes which shows a good awareness of the vulnerability of the people they may encounter in their research and investigations, but quite often paranormal researchers don’t consider the impact their behaviour may have on vulnerable people (such as the recently bereaved, or those with mental illness). This doesn’t necessarily make them bad people, just bad researchers.

The same audience member also accused me of trying to make ghost hunters sound bad by implying throughout my talk that the majority of ghost hunters believe orbs are paranormal and that the dodgy methods mentioned (such as EVP, table tipping and talking to ghosts through EMF meters) were more widespread than they were.

I do not have statistics of how many ghost hunters do believe orbs are paranormal in nature compared to the number of this who do not believe this, but I know from my own experience that despite evidence to the contrary a lot of ghost hunters still do believe orbs are paranormal in nature – or that some orbs are paranormal in nature.

I didn’t intend to make it seem that this was what every ghost hunter believed, and I didn’t say that, and I hope nobody took that from my talk. The methods I demonstrated and the things I covered in my talk are things that come from the world of modern ghost hunting. They are things done and created by modern day ghost hunters, and for as long as those methods are used by anyone entering a private home as a ghost hunter who is providing some sort of service or expert opinion, then that is a problem. That is the point I made.

Lastly, the SPR member questioned whether or not I had gone from being a closed minded believer to a closed minded non-believer. I haven’t because I’m always willing to weigh up the evidence when and if it is presented to me, but as I stated, the evidence I have seen to date hasn’t stood strong against skeptical scrutiny.

I hope this clears up any misconceptions anyone may have taken away from my talk (not that I believe anyone other than this one person did).