Posts Tagged "ghost"
When ghost hunters cross the line
I just read this news story from the US about some teenagers who were caught trespassing in a Hubbard Park in Connecticut which is near the former Undercliff Sanatorium for children.
They were found by police, and the group of “amateur ghost hunters” set off on foot to try and escape the police. Instead, they fell off of a cliff and became trapped at the bottom, seriously injured.
It really annoys me when I hear stories like this, as this sort of behaviour gives “ghost hunters” or paranormal researchers a really bad name.
I know of groups here in the UK who trespass on private land to get their fill of ghostly thrills in the dark and there are two major problems with this sort of selfish and destructive behaviour.
1) It is dangerous.
There are horror stories of people who have gone “ghost hunting” being really hurt. The story I linked to above is a good example, and another would be the girl from Toronto who fell from a roof to her death in 2009, or the girl in Ohio who was shot in 2006 when she trespassed on somebodies land because it was supposed to be haunted.
I honestly do not understand how the need to get scared or spooked in a haunted park or building can be greater than the need to be safe. Is it really worth putting yourself and other people at risk by placing yourself in dangerous position, in locations that you shouldn’t be in the first place?
Not in my opinion.
2) It is unlawful
To enter property that doesn’t belong to you, or that is closed off to the public (derelict buildings, graveyards that have visiting curfews etc.) is classed as trespass to land. The term ‘trespass to land’ refers to the “wrongful interference with one’s possessory rights in property”. While most trespasses to land are intentional, British courts have held liability holds for trespass committed negligently – but if you were to intentionally enter a location to look for ghosts, that’s not tresspass through negligence.
Several locations are aware of the fact that people trespass on their land to “ghost hunt” and it causes bitter relationships between those locations and all paranormal researchers.
I recall my co-founder being told to ‘fuck off!’ when phoning one location to enquire about the apparent haunting because of the trouble that location had experienced with unruly “ghost hunters” in the past.
I will never understand how people who hunt for ghosts and go thrill seeking in haunted places without the owners permission can justify doing so. It isn’t that hard to gain entry to locations with permission, and if a location says no then people should just deal with it.
It isn’t difficult to research paranoral phenomena while staying safe and within the law. You just have to be able to control yourself and know your limits and it’s a shame that so many people don’t.
Paranormal television
For nearly as long as I can remember there have been television shows where people go to a haunted location with a night vision camcorder or two, turn off the lights and get scared and then call it a paranormal investigation. Bit of a misrepresentation, but there we go…
These shows have always been very entertaining even though some people think they are exactly what a paranormal investigation should be like. Many paranormal research teams are modelled from shows such as ‘Most haunted’ or ‘Ghost hunters’ which is a shame because such shows aren’t always as straight forwards as they may seem.
An interview I conducted for the Righteous Indignation podcast a while ago with Barry Fitzgerald from the show ‘Ghost Hunters International’ revealled that what goes into one of these shows can take up to a week or more at the location in question.
Not only this, but in the past ‘Most Haunted’ which is a very popular show here in the UK have claimed to be filming in one location when in fact they were in a similar derelict building in a completely different location.
You can read more at Tony Youens’ website. He has done extensive research into ‘asylumgate.’
Also, on ‘Most Haunted Live’ scenes have been filmed prior to the live broadcast. These scenes are then tinged with a green colour to make them look like they’re being filmed in nightvision to give them the feeling of being live.
A classic example would be the ‘Mary loves Dick’ incident. Click here to read about it on the Badpsychics website where they wrote a really insightful article on what happened.
All in all, what we can be certain of is that these sorts of programmes are fun to watch and should not be taken seriously despite the fact that on ‘Most Haunted’ Yvette Fielding often insists that everything that happens on their show is real.
Perhaps she genuinely believes that? I couldn’t possibly speculate…
It says a lot for a television show though when everyone involved in paranormal research (no matter how woo) denies watching the show incase it gives a bad impression of themselves. To watch Most Haunted must make you a bad ghost hunter…
Why am I writing about this? Well, there has been recent speculation online that Antix who produce Most Haunted are parting ways with LivingTV. You can read about it all on the badpscyhics forums. Everyone seems to think that this is the end of Most Haunted, and even if it is (which I don’t believe it is) so what?
What about all of the other television shows that take their inspiration from Most Haunted? Ghost hunters? Ghost adventures? Dead Famous?We even have the amateur shows like ‘the paranormal five’ that was aired in my local area – it’s cast were a local paranormal team who were what I call ‘carbon copy investigators’ who are rip-offs of the Most Haunted team.
Even if Most Haunted stops broadcasting there will still be shows that air in it’s place. There will always be people who are allowed air time to spread pseudo-scientific bullshit to the public and there will always be members of the public willing to take what these television shows say as facts. For as long as that continues to happen it doesn’t matter if Most Haunted might be stopping.
The shows always use the ‘entertainment’ get out clause which is fine when the audience realise that means the show is meant to entertain and not teach, but they don’t.
I have the ‘Ghost Hunters’ book written by Yvette Fielding & Ciaran O’keeffe who are both from TV’s Most Haunted. In this book they advise that the best places to look for ghosts are:
- Cemetries (especially graveyards with people who have been murdered.)
-Places of mysterious, violent or untilmely death
- hospitals and nursing homes
- scools (old & in operation)
- prisons and concentration camps
It annoys me that people take this sort of crap from these entertainers seriously. I mean, concentration camps?! Have these people no respect?
It’s normally the teams or the investigators who strongly point out that they don’t watch Most Haunted because it is fake and suspicious who then go on the rip off the show, or hang on every word that the presenters say (such as information in the associated books etc.)
Such a shame that their skepticism of the show doesn’t spread to the other information that the show presents to people. Perhaps their skepticism of the information that spawns from paranormal television shows is selective in the sense that they’ll deny it if it doesn’t fit in with their beliefs in ghosts… but if it does, they’ll hold onto it?
So to conclude, Most Haunted might be ending but that doesn’t make a difference in the bigger picture. I hate paranormal television. It’s vile.
Holier than thou?
I have just finished watching another excellent episode of Derren Brown investigates that focussed upon a chap called Lou Gentile and his beliefs in ghosts, possesions and demons.
He worked with exorcists and referred to himself and a demonologist and truly believed he had proof that ghosts existed in the form of filmed posessions (more likely to have been pseudoseizures known to be brought on by stress), Electronic voice recordings (more likely to be recognisable as answers or words due to audio pareidolia and a will to believe), and ghost photography that to me appeared to consist of lots of illusions.
It made him seem silly, and it made me want to laugh and a year ago I would have and I would have said he was stupid. However I wouldn’t say such a thing now because in the last year my involvement with the Righteous Indignation podcast has taught me one very important lesson that I will take to the grave with me, and that is that nobody is safe from fallacial thinking and leaps of logic. Nobody.
I came away from watching the episode with three pages of notes I had made that proved to me that in the last five years as a researcher I have developed my ability to think rationally about what I am presented with.
I called the autogain circuit, the pseudoseizures, the priming before it was even mentioned on the show because I’ve allowed myself to open my mind up to the bigger picture of what is actually happening around me, rather than what I would like to be happening around me.
However, in 2005, Hayley Stevens was a very different person who would have taken Lou’s side against Derren. It’s incredible how we, as people, can learn and adapt if we put our minds to it.
It’s difficult though when you have so much invested in your beliefs being right, to just drop them. Which is why when I hear of a pseudoscientific paranormal researcher making really outlandish claims I think about how easy it is for anyone to make leaps of logic because they’re desperate for their beliefs to be validated and I usually don’t mock them (unless they’ve proven themselves to be ignorant.)
Perhaps Lou Gentile was ignorant despite having the facts placed in front of him. Perhaps he was just misguided and hopeful.
I’ve been pretty disgusted to see some comments posted by people I respected as paranormal researchers that are extremely disrespectful of Lou’s position and beliefs.
If we were to take away the fact it was Lou they were talking about and were to place their comments with anyone out there who believes EVP are ghost voices, or that posessions really are demons it crosses the line from being an ethical, respectful investigator to being someone who comes across as having a “holier than thou” attitude.
That’s not an attractive attitude for a skeptic to have. It’s not proactive in any sense and achieves nothing.
Sure, I know I regularly make sarcastic comments on Righteous Indignation about people and the claims that they make, but I’m always willing to see things from their perspective because I’ve been the believer who had nonsense ideas.
We interview some people on the show whose theories and ideas are completely out there but we never mock them for it unless they prove themselves to be truly ignorant because we know that anyone can mess up with their way of thinking rationally at any moment.
We wouldn’t like to be mocked, in fact we’d probably become instantly defensive of the illogical position we took and wouldn’t listen to a word that people who were skeptical of our beliefs said.
So for people I respected as researchers to openly mock Lou for his beliefs despite the fact that at the end of the show it comments that he sadly passed away between filming and broadcasting the show has really made me lose my respect.
Sorry, but if you call yourself skeptical and yet your actions lose you the chance to explain your stance to people who aren’t as rational then you’re doing more damage than good.
How greaseproof paper will fool the hell out of a ghost, and other things…
Did you know that all it takes to confuse a ghost is a piece of greaseproof paper?
Well, if you were at my talk in Bristol on June 30th you will already know this because you were in the very wonderful audience that I gave the tip to but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read on.
Actually, firstly I should take a moment to say thank you to the Bristol Skeptics and everyone who attended my talk for such a wonderful time. It was really, really fun to do the talk and you all laughed in the right places (Henry VIII anyone?)
Back to the ghosts and how greaseproof paper is their nemesis…
As many of you may know, a lot of ghost groups who claim to investigate the paranormal conduct very odd, old and debunked methods to “communicate” with the ghost that is supposed to be haunting the location they’re visiting.
These methods include table tipping, glass divination and ouija board sessions,
There are, of course, lots of other odd methods used, like scrying and seances but I have focussed on the first list because the methods all have two things in common.
1) They all require people to touch something, this something being the thing that will be “moved by the spirit” to communicate.
2) All of the mentioned methods will not work when you introduce greaseproof paper to the equation.
“Greaseproof paper?” I hear you ask, “what the hell is she on about?”
The greaseproof paper acts as a control and to be fair, it doesn’t just have to be greaseproof paper because a great control to use with ouija boards or glass divination (where the people involved place one finger on a glass or planchette) is a round piece of playdoh putty covering top of the glass or planchette.
The putty should be at least a centimeter deep (you can roll some out and use the glass or planchette to cut the perfect piece out by pressing it down on the putty!)
The people then place their finger on the putty and if they’re doing anything more than just resting their finger lightly, there will be a lovely finger imprint to show that they were pushing hard on the glass.
A good and fun control to put in place when people are conducting a ouija board session is to blindfold them and turn the ouija board around so the letters are in different places, or put a square board where a round board was. As you can imagine, the planchette travels to the place that a certain letter, or the yes or no answer used to be, even though it’s not there anymore.
You can watch this happen at about three minutes in to this video from Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! programme on ouija boards.
The greaseproof paper is better when used with table tipping, you simply take a large piece of greaseproof paper, or tracing paper and you cut it to size so that the top of the table you are using is covered to the edges with the paper.
The paper has to be a light, crinkly paper – not writing paper, or heavy-duty wrapping paper – which is why I suggest greaseproof paper, tracing paper, or even cooking foil which can all be bought cheaply at your local supermarket.
Once the paper is in place, the people taking part in the session place their 
fingers upon the paper and go about the table tipping session as normal. IF anyone pushes the table surface more than they should be then the paper will scrunch up and reveal that pressure is being added that shouldn’t be.
These simple controls rule out two things:
1) people around the glass/table/board purposely faking movement
2) people around the glass/table/board accidentally moving the table
It is very well-known that sometimes when people conduct things like glass divination, ouija sessions, dowsing or table tipping they can influence the movement of the object in use without realising it. This is called the ideomotor effect or the ideomotor response. By introducing the simple controls that I have mentioned above, if somebody accidentally moves the object being touched they’ll be aware of it, and be aware that they’re moving it which will stop them from doing so without realising it.
That is how greaseproof paper fools the hell out of a ghost.
P.s. Many people who use these methods will say that the people have to be touching the table or the glass or the planchette so that their energy fields can be transferred for the spirit to use.
This is a flawed logic and shows a huge misunderstanding of how energy works.
Now, ghost hunters, go and have fun with your greaseproof paper.
I support…
