Tag Archives: Ghost

The very amusing “What are you so afraid of?” question

Those not familiar with Don Philips and the GSI Paranormal team can read past posts of mine about them by clicking this link here. To summarise, Don and his team often demonstrate pseudo-scientific techniques on their ghost hunts and make outrageous claims about spirits they encounter and then “exorcise”. Whenever anybody has criticised or questioned such practices and claims, or when it has been pointed out that what this group does has the potential to be very unethical, Don goes on the attack (as you will see if you read back through my posts).

Recent media coverage of Don Philips and GSI’s investigations have set Don on the defensive again after many people have been openly critical of his work, behaviour and the claims he and his team members make. Criticism from people who believe and don’t believe in ghosts alike. This defensiveness is behaviour that many have come to expect of Don who refuses to consider anything said critically of what he and his team does.

Today it was pointed out to me that on the GSI Paranormal UK Facebook page the Admin (who I presume is Don) made the following post:

GSI are happy to put our working practices / evidence out in the public domain for all to see, some may like it others may not but after all we have nothing to hide and as such are totally transparent. But for those few who like to criticize other groups including those who claim to have been paranormal investigators themselves who now don’t believe:I, have seen lots on your blogs and websites about how scientific & great you are and indeed that you may be, but unfortunately apart from lack of anything other than the odd photo of you on location with some equipment or pics with buddy’s & lot’s of writing, there does seem to be a distinct lack of any video’s of you actually doing an investigation. A cynic may therefore conclude you either fail to produce anything worthwhile, or maybe your concerned of letting others see and comment on your own working practices & conclusions, after you have been so free with your comments towards others.

I presume (possibly incorrectly) that this is aimed at me as well as others, as did the person who sent me the link to it. I’m not sure of any other non-believers that Don Philips so openly dislikes. I know of many people who don’t identify as non-believers that he dislikes – The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, the Society for Psychical Research, Steve Parsons of Para.Science and many others, for example. With that in mind I felt it was only fair to be able to respond to the accusation that I may be too scared to share my research.

Firstly, I work with quite a few eyewitnesses who are scared or confused, but you wont find anything in the public domain about this because I respect their privacy before anything else. You’ll only find my research regarding public cases (those that have been in the media, or are already documented publicly) written about on my websites.

Secondly, I’m quite fussy about cases I take on. Possibly too fussy, to be honest. If I can’t replicate things or I don’t have a good idea of what might be happening then it’s likely I will decline the case or ask for assistance from someone with more experience. I am always aware of how easy it is for my conduct as a researcher to become unethical so that is always at the front of my mind.

Thirdly, you can find writing about many of my cases here, here, here and here. You can ask me about others if you are that interested. The idea that I have something to hide is humorous, to say the least.

Fourthly, the idea that you have to visit someones house under the cover of darkness and spend hours at a time there and provide videos of you doing this to successfully investigate a paranormal claim is nonsense.

In another post on the Facebook page I noticed that Don Philips wrote an open invite to Professor Chris French, Professor Richard Wiseman and Derren Brown to work with the GSI team. He wrote:

I & my team will be doing many more investigations this year, Id like to invite, Professor Chris French, Dr Richard Wiseman , Derren to join me in an attempt to find / offer an alternative explanation or debunk my spirit replies, you will be made most welcome and work together as a team.

I can only hope that these respected individuals do not work with Don and his team for fear that they would give these ghost hunters credibility that they do not deserve. If there was one piece of advice I could give to Don that I knew he would listen to, it would be to listen to his critics, but that will never happen. Instead I predict there will be a condescending blog comment left in 5… 4… 3… 2…

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ThinkCon Interview

An interview that I did at ThinkCon on March 16th has just been published. I was interviewed by Andrew Holding about ghost hunting and the themes that featured in my talk and you can listen to the interview here.
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A big thank you to Andrew and those who make ThinkCon happen – it was a great event with a whole variety of talks throughout the day at no charge for those in the audience. My talk focussed on the reality of modern ghost hunting – it’s a talk I will be delivering for London Skeptics in the Pub on May 13th.
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Keep Calm & Haunt on.

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Rouislip Community Centre Ghost Footage

*update* I may have been a bit hasty with my opinion on the CCTV ghost reported in The Metro. Bob Dezon has pointed out that a similar effect can be created using Adobe After Effects as demonstrated in this tutorial video that he sent to me. 

‘Ghost’ caught on CCTV video at ‘haunted’ community centre in South Rouislip’ claims The Metro newspaper in big bold letters. Underneath is a video that supposedly shows the ghost in question on footage taken from a CCTV camera, accompanied by an account from the Caretaker of the Rouislip Community Centre who says

I was sitting inside the hall and noticed a figure on the front CCTV camera,‘I looked up at the screen and thought I saw a person but wasn’t sure so went out to check. I went outside and no one was there but I thought they might have quickly walked around the side of the building into the park so I just went back in. After downloading the CCTV footage I was surprised to see that the figure had been recorded onto the system. I can’t explain this.’

The effect seen in the video is possibly caused by something called ghosting, or ringing as it’s called by professionals in the film and CCTV industry. Basically, what we could be seeing is a replica of a transmitted image that is super-imposed on top of the main image. Some systems use one screen to show numerous camera feeds and this can be a product of such a set up sometimes. Ghosting can be caused by mismatched impedance on communication channels which causes reflections in analogue systems, or on digital systems when interlaced video is wrongly deinterlaced for output devices.

Wiki Answers has a great piece on Ghosting here.

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Unenlightened spirit communication – ‘yes or no’ devices

As part of the talk I deliver to Skeptics in the Pub groups I often touch upon how modern ghost hunters are often just upgraded seance participants of the past whose main aim is to talk to ghosts. The only thing that has changed is the medium they use to communicate with them through. In times gone by that medium would be a table (for table tipping perhaps), a seance circle, a Ouija board, a person who claimed to have the ability to communicate with spirit, or perhaps a glass that the spirit would push around a surface (this was sometimes replaced with a top hat or similar).

Although people still use such Spiritualist methods today, ghost hunting has become much more hi-tech in the last few decades with devices being used to both rule out naturally occurring causes for phenomena witnessed, and for pseudo-scientific reasons such as detecting fluctuations in Electro-Magnetic Fields alleged to be caused by a ghost manifesting. Yet, there’s another purpose these devices are used for that doesn’t set modern ghost researchers apart from the antique ghost hunters of the Victorian Seance Parlour.

When EMF meters don’t find anything interesting they are sometimes turned into what I like to call a yes or no device, as are any other devices that light up or makes a noise. The idea is quite simple – you place the device on a table or the floor and ask questions that can be answered with ‘yes or no’. You might ask ‘Did you die here? Make the EMF meter light up for yes’, or ‘is your name Elizabeth? Make the device beep to answer yes’. Devices such as the K2 meter (a type of EMF meter, pictured above right) that have a selection of coloured lights are often used to detect a ghosts strength with ghost researchers asking the spirit to ‘light the meter up as far as you can’. The more lights lit, it seems, the stronger the spirit.

I can remember taking part in a ‘vigil’ with some ghost researchers I’d never met before in a pub in Devizes, Wiltshire. After a number of hours of trying to experience something ghostly and failing the other people present got a torch (or flashlight) out of their bag and unscrewed the bottom of the torch, which you would normally do to put new batteries in. The bottom part remained loosely in place and they then placed the torch on a bed in one of the rooms and began to ask questions of the ghost, asking it to light up or turn off the bulb in the torch in response. The light did go on and off occasionally- sometimes seemingly in response to a question, sometimes in response to nothing at all, and sometimes when the alleged ghost was asked to turn the torch on or off,nothing happened. However those occasions when the torch seemed to respond to a question were noted as spirit communication and the times when the light turned on or off without command, or didn’t respond were overlooked completely.

Many ghost researchers who use these techniques fail to acknowledge the huge flaws in their thought processes. For example, ignoring the times the torch or the EMF meter don’t respond to a question but making a big deal out of the times the device does seem to respond is a form of  cherry picking - a form of Selection bias, as is Confirmation bias which sees humans favour information that supports their beliefs or hypothesis e.g. that ghosts exist.

Believing that a yes or no device is responding to their questions is a conclusion ghost hunters reach with no supporting evidence and based only on hearsay from other researchers and their own positive experiences. There is nothing that supports the idea that a ghost can and does effect these devices and there is nothing to support the idea that ghosts cause/have an energy that they can manipulate to interact with an EMF meter or the bulb in a torch. On the other hand we know that EMF meters detect naturally occurring (and naturally fluctuating) Electro-Magnetic Fields, and that if you loosen up the connection between the bulb in a torch and the batteries used to light it, the bulb will flicker because it does not have the constant power source it needs to stay lit. Ignoring these demonstrable causes for the effects experienced when something is turned into a yes or no device is irrational and desperate.

A member of the BSPRI team recently sent me a link to an experiment they did with this method of spirit communication, during which the torch appeared to light up and turn off as they commanded which demonstrates how easy it might be to believe there is meaning to the random behaviour of the device.

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