Posts Tagged "ghost"
Bath Chronicle write about my complaint
This morning, the Bath Chronicle have written a piece covering the complaint I made to the ASA about ‘Healing on the Streets’ Bath. They mentioned that I blog here and I am sure many people may find my blog as a result.
I would ask that anyone who does come here as a result to read my account of why I made the complaint by clicking here.
Anybody wishing to get in touch with me can do so through the ‘Contact’ page here.
Thank you
A face at the window?
Quite a lot of people have been in touch with me about a recent ghost photo that has been doing the rounds. At first I wasn’t going to write about it at all as I’ve seen it covered elsewhere. However given the amount of people getting in touch via my site I’ll share my thoughts here.
The BBC recently ran a piece on a photograph thought to show the apparition of a ghost with a feature on their site titled ‘Raised spirits on demolition site in Cumbria’. A photo was taken of a building about to be demolished by those who were conducting the work, and when the demolition worker returned home and uploaded the photos his wife spotted the apparition that many believe to be the spirit of a deceased woman who used to live on the site.
You can see what is thought to be a white face with some sort of white collar near the neck, and darkened shoulders too. I am more convinced though that this is more likely to be an illusion than anything significant.
However, because the building has been demolished we will never be able to conduct any further study of this, so speculation is all we really have.
It’s clear to see the windows have a fair amount of condensation on them meaning that the inside of the building is quite distorted. Through the window to the right and behind the apparition you can see the darkened outlines of a doorframes – and to the very left there looks to be a window further back in the building that is letting light in. Or perhaps a door with panes of glass in it. Apart from that there isn’t much interior detail at all.
The first thing that came to my mind was how tiny the ‘person’ was. If you compare their height to the doorways behind them ‘they’ reach about half way up. I would expect an adult to be at least a foot or two higher. Not only that but the hair starts about half way back on the crown of their head and they have a flat face.
We don’t have any interior photos of the building to hand to make comparisons with and so are unable to try and rule possible causes for this out.
Dave Armstrong, of Kendal contractors Cox and Allen, told The Telegraph:
“There was only a black wall behind the window, we had taken everything out – there were no visible features or anything with a skin colour.”
If we are to go on his word it would suggest that there was nothing in the room to cause what appears in the photograph. However we know that memory can be flawed and that things can be misremembered and without any other photos or footage to make comparisons with it’s just impossible to be 100% sure. It could be furnishings they don’t remember being in there, it could be a person, it could be something on the window itself… without anything other than testimony we simply cannot be sure either way.
I do not want to be quick to just dismiss something as an illusion, but I also don’t want to be quick to claim something must be paranormal, when in fact there’s no justification in reaching such a conclusion.
At first glance this looks human, but when you zoom in there are things that just don’t look at all human to me… It’s never simple, is it?
Subscriptions
I recently moved my website over to a wordpress.org self hosted site instead of the wordpress.com one I had previously. This means that the people who subscribed to my blog through email updates and RSS feeds would have lost the connection to my blog posts.
I tried to put out a post on my old blog (http://www.ratherfriendlyskeptic.wordpress.com) about this but I’m not sure if it got through to the feeds and emails or not. I thought I would just post to say that if you used to subscribe to my blog you will need to re-subscribe (by clicking the ‘follow’ button on the bottom right of this page).
I found a way to transfer over the majority of email subscribers (so if you found this blog via an email update… that’s why…)
Sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused, I do think the move has been worth it though.
What can grassroots skeptics do about ghost hunting?
I’ve often been asked how grassroots skeptics and grassroots skeptic organisations (such as ‘skeptics in the pub’ groups) can deal with pseudo-scientific ghost hunting teams on a local level. This was also a point raised by the lovely Andy Wilson who hosted the ‘Ghost Investigations Today’ panel at QEDcon in February 2011.
There certainly is potential for such groups to get involved on a local level but the key is taking the right approach, and knowing what to look for. That’s why I’m writing this post in the hope that it can help those wanting to approach ghost teams, or deal with the nonsense and associated fear they often spread.
Ghost Investigations Today
Back in February I was on a panel with Professor Chris French and Trystan Swale at the QED conference in Manchester. The panel was called ‘Ghost Investigations Today’ and that was exactly what we were talking about.
Check it out…
