Tag Archives: Paranormal

Unethical ghost hunters play detective

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Murdered Keith Bennett’s remains are still missing decades after he was killed by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. Recently Keith’s mother Winnie Johnson passed away which generated a lot of press coverage of the cold case. Her tireless attempts to discover the final resting place of her son, and the refusal of Ian Brady to tell anyone touched and angered most who heard the story. When Winnie sadly passed away not knowing where her son was buried I told my brother that I doubted it’d be too long before ghost hunters and psychics descended onto the Moors, claiming to know something that others have never known. I didn’t think it’d happen so soon.

The founder of Worsley Paranormal Group – Erica Gregory – claims she has found a spade that could be linked to the Keith’s murder. She told the press

“I had a feeling to search in a specific spot. The detector made a noise and we found the spade covered in grass … I’m convinced it could be linked to Keith.”

Steve Kershaw, who is a senior lecturer in forensic analytical science at Manchester Metropolitan University, has apparently been examining the spade and told the Daily Mail he has been unable to trace its history and that

‘It is very, very corroded. The metal in it appears to be a reasonable steel that pre-dates the start of recycling. ‘There was some vegetation attached to it and was found in an area of peat. ‘The handle had been broken off, but even if we had lots more time, and even if we had established that it was a spade from the 60s or pre-dated the 60s, we would not have necessarily established if it was anything to do with Ian Brady. The only way we would have been able to tell is if it had DNA on it and that is harder to tell with the handle gone, with it being so corroded. Although some vegetation has survived, there is very little chance of DNA having survived.’

The Daily Mail also reported that Kershaw said the spade has now been returned to its finders, members of Worsley Paranormal Group, who had been searching the area for signs of where Keith’s remains lie on the moor outside Manchester, and that the Bennett’s family lawyer said of the find:

‘As far as I was concerned it was going to be subject to forensic tests and until we know whether or not it is relevant there is no comment from me or the family. ‘We are keeping an open mind until the results of the tests are revealed.’

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said it did not have any information about the spade.

I was quite shocked by this because when I initially read that the spade had been discovered by paranormal researchers who thought it could be linked to the cold case of Keith Bennett I presumed they’d handed it straight to the police as potential evidence – a bit like psychics do after having a vision about a police case. However it seems they are still in possession of the spade and I have no idea what they think they’re doing. If they genuinely believed it to be linked to the murder case they should have handed it straight to the police, and Kershaw had no business testing it himself. If their aim truly was to help with the discovery of Keith Bennett they shouldn’t have even removed the spade from the scene and should have left it exactly where it was while calling the police and they had no business contacting the Bennett family directly or through their lawyer. That is down to the police who investigate tip off’s on cold cases. I’ve written before about the unethical implications that the actions of paranormal researchers can have. I believe the Worsley Paranormal Group probably had the best intentions at heart, but because they were keen to help without thinking about their actions rationally and responsibly, they’ve acted unethically.

Unfortunately the Worsley Paranormal Group wont have been the first ghost hunters to have acted in this way, and they certainly wont be the last. In fact, rumour has it that my least favourite ghost hunter – Don Philips, who you can read about here, here and here – already has his sights on the Moors.

Picture reads: Don Philips - This is a delicate subject and will be approached as such, I have been speaking with Becky [his spirit guide] into the early hrs about Keith Bennett. She has given me some information which I shall be going over in the next couple of days them! I, shall decide ho to best approach things which may entail me and the team visiting the Moors in an attempt to locate him. I now have certain information I have no problem in passing onto the authorities tomorrow personally. 

I guess it’s some consolation that the Bennett family are used to false leads, but still, sometimes ghost hunters should let sleeping ghosts sleep and mind their own business.

*update* This quote is from Keith’s brother, on the ‘Searching for Keith’ website

It should be a matter for the police alone. Therefore, we are also strongly against and wish to discourage anyone, however well-meaning, from attempting their own search of the moor, since more harm than good may well be done. We know this from experience – in the past, damage has been done by people who didn’t have the necessary training to conduct such a search. There have also been many paranormal investigations into the location of Keith’s grave but none have proved remotely useful.

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The power of ‘What?’

When presented with a paranormal claim there are two routes of thought you can take.

1 – Dismiss it. Ghosts/PSI/Monsters are unproven so it can’t be that. Case closed.
2 – Explore it. Ghosts/PSI/Monsters are unproven so it can’t be that… so what could it be?

I prefer the second option. Especially when approached by someone who is a bit scared that they might have a ghost in the place they live or work. There’s nothing wrong with people not knowing about the things that can make you think you’ve witnessed something paranormal (e.g. ghosts), and dismissing people and their experiences simply because science dictates that that ghosts can’t exist is closed minded, not useful, and displays a lack of curiosity.

Recently DJ Grothe tweeted a link to an article at Scientific American titled ‘Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?‘ in which John Horgan provides examples of brilliant minds that believed paranormal ideas despite coming from a scientific background. Horgan concluded the article by pointing out that obviously a scientist believing in something paranormal in nature does not make it more of a fact. He wrote

Should the fact that Turing et al. took psi seriously mean that the rest of us should, too? Not necessarily. Brilliant scientists believe in lots of things for which there is no evidence, like multiverses and superstrings and God. I’m a psi skeptic, because I think if psi was real, someone would surely have provided irrefutable proof of it by now.

Despite this paragraph within the article people are still suggesting that the article is just a huge appeal to authority which it doesn’t read like to me. The article at Scientific American asked ‘Brilliant Scientists are open-minded about paranormal stuff, so why not you?’ and it’s a valid question. Many self described skeptics are prejudiced against paranormal subjects, and if you identify as a skeptic, as open-minded and rational, yet dare consider a paranormal subject seriously they’ll not think very highly of you and claim you are being irrational and wasting time that could be devoted to ‘more serious’ subjects. Paranormal themed talks at skeptic events I’ve attended in the past have been described as ‘not important’ or ‘filler talks’, and I once wrote a post on this blog in response to people claiming paranormal subjects got too much attention at the first QEDcon event and that ghosts don’t exit so we should ‘just move on.’

It’s important to not be so open minded that we accept claims uncritically but it’s equally as important to judge every new claim on its merits, and not on the preconceived notion that it must be impossible or not worthy of investigation. Due to the very nature of some claims it is difficult or impossible to assess them in a rational manner and this is where numerous paranormal investigation groups fall foul by irrationally investigating every case that comes their way, but simply dismissing them as impossible would be irrational too.

By asking ‘what?’ or ‘how?’ you can discover insightful information that can help others understand their own experiences. One personal example would be discovering that the ghost caught in a photo on Clevedon Pier was a fisherman. If I had just dismissed the claims that the photo was a ghost because ghosts can’t exist then I wouldn’t have discovered that. If strange experiences got dismissed every time they get reported because there’s no way in which the ‘soul’ can survive after death then we might not have learnt how the symptoms of Sleep Paralysis run parallel with reports of people experiencing ghosts and extraterrestrials when they’re asleep , or that chemicals in the brain might be the reason people experience NDE’s. With a dismissive outlook we might consider such research as pointless because there’s no way the ‘soul’ can survive after death.

Horgan’s Scientific American piece demonstrated some very good points that everyone should take on board. People believe in irrational things because of their personal experiences and perceptions of things that happen to them – even the really intelligent. Their uncritical evaluation of these things demonstrated that they were being too open minded about the subjects in question, but it also demonstrates that they were open minded to these concepts in the first place. Being aware of the way that our minds make us find meaning where there is none isn’t always enough to stop us from doing this. We’re irrational creatures and we all have delusions of one kind or another, but this fallacious thinking shouldn’t stop us from being curious and asking ‘if not ghosts/PSI/monsters then what?’.

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Turning your back on nonsense

In reflecting my previous blog post called ‘When claims of authority fall flat on their face’ I realise I was too quick to judge the Bomber County Paranormal team. Since writing my criticism is has been brought to my attention that Kerry, who is the founder and organizer of the group, is attempting to turn the team into a rational one after splitting from what is described as a less rational former team. I applaud that attempt, however the original blog post was written based on my initial impression of their team website and that’s an impression that unfortunately no amount of good intent can change.

The impression was based upon the claims the team made about being objective and rational coupled with photos of them, and reports of their investigations, demonstrating behaviour that wasn’t rational or objective. For example, on the front page of their website are photos of table tipping and glass divination. This is the problem that is faced by most paranormal researchers who want to change from being belief-led, biased and pseudo-scientific researchers into those who are objective and reasoned in their actions and investigations. I know now that the Bomber County Paranormal Team used the ASSAP logo on the front of their website to say ‘look, we’re trying to do this right’, rather than to say ‘, yeah! Look how good we are!’. Yet all of that effort is undone by those methods used that make no logical sense, that are justified in the name of fair balance and keeping people happy.

I get that. I’ve been there.

In fact, I recently wrote about my own experiences with this transition and about the lies you tell yourself when you try to defend the irrational things you do despite knowing deep down they’re not rational. This is normally done in the name of trying to keep everyone within your team happy and it puts immense, and unfair pressure upon a team founder or leader. It’s like an internal tug-of-war and you know that at some point someone is going to end up falling into the mud defeated. As the founder of a paranormal research team who went through the same transition I have one piece of advice for any team founder trying to make their team into a rational one, but struggling to stop people doing table tipping, séances, glass divination and other such methods: Put your foot down.

I did.

It was ugly because most of my team members left, but I don’t regret it because I wasn’t being selfish by wanting to change the team into a more rational and less unethical team, but those members who left were being selfish by wanting to continue to act irrationally and unethically for the sole purpose of validating their own belief in the paranormal, ghosts and an afterlife. They didn’t stop to consider how their desire to validate their beliefs could negatively effect those they came into contact with.

Although it is illogical and irrational, there’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to do table tipping or a séance in their own home or in private, but it does become a problem when they take that behaviour into property owned by somebody else in the name of ‘research’.

When I explained to the team I formed and ran that we would no longer be doing glass divination, table tipping and séances, nine out of twelve members of the team left and formed their own irrational team (which lasted a grand total of 3 months before splitting).

Sabotage: This text message was sent to a location owner our team were working with by a former team mate with a grudge.

When those nine people left I was called names on paranormal forums and in email. People sabotaged investigations I organised and I was threatened over the phone by people I considered as friends. One ex team mate even attempted to get me fired by telling my boss at the time that I was secretly filming people for BBC’s Watchdog (shortly after the company I worked for was exposed on Watchdog). To this day I get abuse from people I used to be friends with because I turned my back on irrational belief-led behavior and attempted to stop the team I formed in my name from continuing with unethical behaviour.

I wouldn’t change a thing though. If I was offered the chance to go back in time I’d do exactly the same because ultimately the decision to right your wrongs and stop irrational behavior that has a potentially unethical outcome is a good thing.

You should never expect the members of your team to let go of their beliefs, but you’re certainly entitled to ask that they don’t bring those beliefs into your investigations and research. Anyone who cannot respect that is being slightly selfish.

The Wiltshire Phenomena Research team is still going, by the way. We hardly do investigations as a group, but there’s about ten of us on standby should anyone get in touch for advice or an answer. We don’t do investigations every Saturday night like the old team did, but those odd rare cases are still fun and interesting. A successfully rational paranormal research team know that not every case is possible to investigate, that you don’t need more than a few people at a time, that you don’t need to turn the lights off to research experiences, and that the most valuable research often happens over a cup of tea.

I genuinely wish Kerry and any other team founder trying to turn their team into a more rational team the best of luck, if anyone needs advice, you can get in touch via this site. It’s not easy making a change, but trust me, it’s worth the effort.

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The ethics of Ghost Research

When I first got involved in paranormal research as a teenager I thought a good code of conduct looked like the one that can be found here. Most people who get involved in paranormal research do so with good intentions, but sometimes good intentions aren’t enough. There are things I have done in the name of ‘paranormal research’ that were unethical and damaging to the people involved. I should have known better but I didn’t and as time has gone on I have been able to cast my mind back to those instances and see how I would have done things differently had I been more aware of the unethical implications my desire to communicate with dead people could have on others.

There was an instance a few years ago when I was asked to conduct an educational investigation at a reputedly haunted pub in Bristol. The idea was that I would lead the investigation and walk people through the pseudo-scientific methods of ghost hunting. This included using the ouija board, and as we sat around the table conducting a faux ouija board session a member of staff that lived in the pub walked into the room, saw the board and started to panic.

I didn’t know people lived on premises, I hadn’t thought to ask the organisers of the event about such things, and as a result one resident got very scared and I’m pretty sure that would have had a knock on effect. Unfortunately I cannot change the past no matter how much I want to, all I can do is learn from my mistakes and hope that perhaps the lessons I have learnt through trial and error as a paranormal investigator can help others avoid such mistakes.

I interviewed the chairman of the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), Dave Wood, alongside long time researcher CJ Romer about the ethical implications of spontaneous phenomena investigations a while ago and you can read the transcript of the interview by clicking here. Very recently I have observed numerous instances of paranormal researchers demonstrating either unethical behaviour or a lack of understanding about what ethical implications their actions may have on those they encounter. Rather than just name, shame and moan about what I had seen I’ve decided to both transcribe the interview I did with Dave and CJ (as linked to above) and write up a summary about the basic things to consider when it comes to ethical ghost research.

Ethical Ghost Research – the basics

When investigating spontaneous phenomena you will come into contact with all sorts of people who are both involved in the case and not involved in it. As a researcher (whether professional or amateur) the welfare of those affected by your research is paramount. Being guided by your common sense or morality is often not enough to ensure you have considered all possible implications that your presence at a location as a researcher may have on those you come into contact with.  This is why it is paramount that paranormal researcher organisations draw up a code of ethics to which organisation members are to abide by while on location.

Who can be harmed by paranormal researchers?

There are four groups of people that paranormal researchers may come into contact with who should be considered in a code of ethics drawn up by research organisations.

1 – The recently bereaved 

Paranormal Researchers should not work with those who have experienced the loss of a loved one within at least a six month period. Grief can make a person extremely emotionally vulnerable and only those professionals with specialist training in coping with grief and depression should work with those who have experienced such a recent loss.

2 – Children

Cases involving those under the age of Eighteen are an ethical nightmare for paranormal researchers. Some claim that it is okay to work with children, but I personally agree with CJ Romer and Dave Wood when they point out that only those Social Welfare Professionals with specialist training should work with children – and only when called upon to do so in a professional capacity.

3 – Statutorily vulnerable adult

Vulnerable adults may be those with mental health issues, learning difficulties, who are very elderly or frail, or someone who’s recently bereaved. Paranormal investigators should consider very carefully about whether it is appropriate to work with such people. Of people with these circumstances Dave Wood, the chairman of ASSAP says

‘they would fall into the category of statutorily vulnerable and that means they have some kind of care needs and you [paranormal researchers] shouldn’t be working with those people at all because they should already have professional networks of support.’

4 – Non-Statutorily vulnerable adults

Adults who are not vulnerable can still be harmed by the actions of paranormal researchers – the previously mentioned barmaid who stumbled upon the Ouija board session would fall under this label. Many ghost researchers enter a location in the pursuit of ‘evidence’ that ghosts exist, this can not only misinform the people they come into contact with but it can scare them too and cause them to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or scared of their own home or place of work. It’s a sure sign that you need to review your code of ethics when the hunt for evidence takes priority over the well being of those involved in the case – or the well being of those you come into contact with isn’t even considered in the first place!

How can people be harmed by paranormal researchers?

Through the sharing of information

When ghost researchers conduct an investigation they often conclude by writing and sharing a report about the investigation. If no code of ethics is in place, the way in which information is shared by the ghost researchers can have a harmful effect on the people involved in the case being researched.

Occasionally the reports that ghost researchers put together can describe pretty horrific things they believe they encountered as locations, such as being pushed, scratched, made to feel unwell, things being thrown or moved, sounds being heard and things being seen. These things can be upsetting and scary to those who live or work in the location – especially when the paranormal research teams findings may be pseudo-scientific and erroneous.

Not only this but sometimes it isn’t appropriate to name the people involved, or even the location involved as this can bring unwanted attention upon those being named. Confidentiality is something that all paranormal researchers should respect above all else.

Often paranormal investigators will visit locations where they don’t really come into contact with anyone they could cause harm through their actions, but then claim to talk to spirits while at the location. Publishing the details of the spirits they believe they have encountered could also be unethical in the cases where those spirits were real people who may have living relatives who could stumble upon the report containing details about their deceased loved ones.

By acting as a professional in a non-professional capacity

Many paranormal research organisations have members who are qualified in roles that might aid those who are listed above as potentially vulnerable. Some ghost researchers may be psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, grief councilors, GP’s etc. but acting in their professional capacity when on an investigation is unprofessional and may have negative outcomes for the people they advise. Most vulnerable adults and children have a care network in place with such professionals already working for them and so anyone in a ghost research team who happens to have those credentials should not consider it their place to act in such a manner.

By breaking the law

A very big problem is caused by paranormal researchers who gain access to locations without permission from land owners. There have been horror stories of people being seriously injured and killed because they trespassed on private property to look for ghosts there. Even some graveyards have limited opening hours and by accessing the graveyard outside of these opening hours could mean you are breaking the law.

Not everyone who accesses a location illegally is respectful of the location and there have been instances of ghost researchers using locations as a toilet, vandalism, spraying graffiti and littering. I think the unethical implications of such behaviour speaks for itself.

Ethical conduct is a huge topic and the above has hardly scratched the surface, but then this was only intended as a brief introduction to the ethics of ghost hunting. The points made above are the most common mistakes I have seen paranormal researchers make again and again in the few years I have been involved in such research. Keeping research ethical is a big deal for researchers of all disciplines, but sometimes ghost researchers are so desperate to get out there and talk to ghosts that they don’t stop to think that this means them too.

I haven’t written out a list of rules that I think ghost researchers should follow, or a dummy code of ethics. I’ve just listed all of the above as my pointers on what to consider and hope that those researchers without a code of ethics will consider the information I have shared and draw up their own code of ethics.

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