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Post by Graveyardbride on Apr 10, 2015 17:00:08 GMT -5
Why Ghost Hunters Can’t Find GhostsIf you believe in ghosts, you’re not alone. Cultures all over the world believe in spirits that survive death to live in another realm. In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed of paranormal phenomena: Millions of people are interested in ghosts and a 2005 Gallup poll found that 37 percent of Americans believe in haunted houses – and almost half believe in ghosts. Ghosts have been a popular subject for millennia, appearing in countless stories, from the Bible to Macbeth, and even spawning their own folklore genre: ghost stories. Part of the reason is that belief in ghosts is part of a larger web of related paranormal beliefs, including near-death experience, life after death and spirit communication.
People have tried (or claimed) to communicate with spirits for ages. In Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-crust ladies to hold séances in their parlors after tea and crumpets with friends. In America during the late 19th and early 20 century many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead – but were exposed as frauds by skeptical investigators such as Harry Houdini.
It wasn’t until the past decade that ghost-hunting became a widespread interest around the world. Much of this is because of Syfy cable TV’s hit series Ghost Hunters, now in its 10th season of not finding good evidence of ghosts. The show spawned several spin-offs, including Ghost Hunters International and Ghost Hunters Academy, and it’s not hard to see why the show is so popular: the premise is that anyone can look for ghosts. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don’t need to be an egghead scientist, or even have any training in science or investigation. All you need is some free time, a dark place and maybe a few gadgets from an electronics store. If you look long enough, any unexplained light or noise might be evidence of ghosts.
The idea that the dead remain with us in spirit is an ancient one, and one that offers many people comfort; who doesn’t want to believe that our beloved, but deceased, family members aren’t looking out for us, or with us in our times of need? Most people believe in ghosts because of personal experience; they have seen or sensed some unexplained presence.
The science and logic of ghosts. Personal experience is one thing, but scientific evidence is another matter. Part of the difficulty in investigating ghosts is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of “ghost.” Some believe they are spirits of the dead who, for whatever reason, get “lost” on their way to the Other Side. Others claim ghosts are telepathic entities projected into the world from our minds. Still others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual hauntings, intelligent spirits and shadow people. Of course, it’s all made up, like speculating on the different types of fairies or dragons: there are as many types of ghosts as you prefer.
There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. Logically and physically, it’s one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects such as hats, canes and dresses – not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, carriages and ships?
If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders in which ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums and should be able to identify their killers, but fail to do so? Just about any claim concerning ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the presence of spirits, including psychics. Virtually all ghost hunters claim to be scientific and most give this appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. Yet none of this equipment has ever been shown to actually detect ghosts.
Other people take exactly the opposite approach, claiming the reason ghosts haven’t been proven to exist is that we simply don’t have the right technology to find or detect the spirit world. But this, too, cannot be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don’t. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of this – yet we don’t. If ghosts exist and cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories – and so little science brought to bear on the topic – it’s not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
Why many believe. Many people believe that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts: if energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body’s energy when we die? Could this somehow be manifested as a ghost? It seems like a reasonable assumption – unless you understand basic physics. The answer is very simple and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms’ energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat and transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily “energy” that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.
While amateur ghost hunters like to imagine themselves on the cutting edge of ghost research, they are really engaging in what folklorists call ostension, or legend tripping. It’s basically a form of playacting in which people “act out” a legend, often involving ghosts or supernatural elements. In his book Aliens, Ghosts and Cults: Legends We Live (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), folklorist Bill Ellis points out that ghost hunters themselves often take the search seriously and “venture out to challenge supernatural beings, confront them in consciously dramatized form, then return to safety. ... The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment but a sincere effort to test and define boundaries of the ‘real’ world.’”
If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be verified by scientists through controlled experiments – not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark with cameras and flashlights.
In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds and videos), the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago or a century ago. There are two possible reasons for the failure of ghost hunters to find hard evidence. The first is that ghosts don’t exist and reports of ghosts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, mistakes and hoaxes. The second option is that ghosts do exist, but ghost hunters are simply incompetent. Ultimately, ghost hunting is not about the evidence (if it were, the search would have been abandoned long ago). Instead, it’s about having fun with friends, telling stories and the enjoyment of pretending to be searching the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.Source: Benjamin Radford, LiveScience, October 21, 2014.
Photo: TAPS and unknown Photoshopper.
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Post by natalie on Apr 16, 2015 15:28:44 GMT -5
I wonder if statistically, more people believe in ghosts than a god.
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Post by steve on Dec 3, 2023 5:06:37 GMT -5
I'm sure I read this article back in 2015, but I just re-read it and I can't understand why so many people put so much energy into ghost hunting when as of yet, no one really knows what a ghost is. From what I've seen on other sites, most ghost hunters seem to think that ghosts are energy and they can be detected with scientific instruments. But the regulars on this site say ghosts are supernatural and because they do not conform to the laws of science or nature, they cannot be detected. I'd like to know what everyone thinks.
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Post by jason on Dec 3, 2023 13:14:58 GMT -5
I'm sure I read this article back in 2015, but I just re-read it and I can't understand why so many people put so much energy into ghost hunting when as of yet, no one really knows what a ghost is. From what I've seen on other sites, most ghost hunters seem to think that ghosts are energy and they can be detected with scientific instruments. But the regulars on this site say ghosts are supernatural and because they do not conform to the laws of science or nature, they cannot be detected. I'd like to know what everyone thinks. I think there's nothing on God's green earth more ridiculous than a freaking ghost hunter! There's something seriously wrong with anyone who thinks an "orb" that isn't visible to the naked eye is anything other than backscatter, or that so-called EVP are anything other than ordinary noises that can be picked up anywhere. Idiot ghost-chasers spend hours listening to and imagining "voices" that simply aren't there. As for all those photos in which they see "faces" in shadows and reflections, you can look at clouds and pick out similar shapes. It's nothing more than pareidolia, the mind's tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous visual stimulus. |
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Post by aprillynn93 on Dec 3, 2023 15:47:23 GMT -5
I'm sure I read this article back in 2015, but I just re-read it and I can't understand why so many people put so much energy into ghost hunting when as of yet, no one really knows what a ghost is. From what I've seen on other sites, most ghost hunters seem to think that ghosts are energy and they can be detected with scientific instruments. But the regulars on this site say ghosts are supernatural and because they do not conform to the laws of science or nature, they cannot be detected. I'd like to know what everyone thinks. I agree that no one really knows what a ghost is. It's all experimental at this point. For me, I think it is reasonable to think that a ghost would be some kind of electromagnetic energy that we should be able to measure, but that doesn't mean it is. I think our sciences do not know everything possible in the universe, so ghosts may well be out of our ability to detect with any of the instruments we have available. |
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Post by chris on Dec 3, 2023 22:11:18 GMT -5
I'm sure I read this article back in 2015, but I just re-read it and I can't understand why so many people put so much energy into ghost hunting when as of yet, no one really knows what a ghost is. From what I've seen on other sites, most ghost hunters seem to think that ghosts are energy and they can be detected with scientific instruments. But the regulars on this site say ghosts are supernatural and because they do not conform to the laws of science or nature, they cannot be detected. I'd like to know what everyone thinks. I spent a lot of years calling myself a paranormal investigator and believing most of what people on this site call "nonsense." I accepted that ghosts were "energy" just because that's what someone without any evidence of it decided. I believed that ghosts could drain batteries and that they caused environmental changes that could be detected. Although I never believed orbs were ghosts or that EVP were the voices of the dead, I still feel like a complete dumbass. After joining this group, way back when it was on Yahoo, I began to question what I was doing. I'm still interested in the paranormal and I still believe in ghosts, but only a fool would believe that something that doesn't conform to the laws of science and nature could be detected by anything available to investigators at this point in time. |
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Post by chris on Dec 3, 2023 22:17:45 GMT -5
I agree that no one really knows what a ghost is. It's all experimental at this point. For me, I think it is reasonable to think that a ghost would be some kind of electromagnetic energy that we should be able to measure, but that doesn't mean it is. I think our sciences do not know everything possible in the universe, so ghosts may well be out of our ability to detect with any of the instruments we have available. For years I accepted that ghosts were some kind of electromagnetic energy, only because that's what someone at some time in the past decided. Now, I have serious doubts. I think those who say ghosts are supernatural, something beyond our understanding, are right. In all my years of ghost hunting, I never came across anything that convinced me that ghosts were made up of any kind of energy. |
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Post by LostLenore on Dec 3, 2023 23:02:24 GMT -5
I'm sure I read this article back in 2015, but I just re-read it and I can't understand why so many people put so much energy into ghost hunting when as of yet, no one really knows what a ghost is. From what I've seen on other sites, most ghost hunters seem to think that ghosts are energy and they can be detected with scientific instruments. But the regulars on this site say ghosts are supernatural and because they do not conform to the laws of science or nature, they cannot be detected. I'd like to know what everyone thinks. |
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Post by snowfairy on Dec 4, 2023 13:36:17 GMT -5
Who first said that ghosts were energy and that they drain batteries? Of all the crazy things that those who call themselves paranormal investigators claim, the idea that supernatural entities drain batteries has to be the most ridiculous. Ghosts have been around as long as humans have inhabited the earth, but batteries are a modern-day invention, so what did ghosts drain before there were any batteries or electrical appliances?
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Post by jason on Dec 4, 2023 17:12:39 GMT -5
I agree that no one really knows what a ghost is. It's all experimental at this point. For me, I think it is reasonable to think that a ghost would be some kind of electromagnetic energy that we should be able to measure, but that doesn't mean it is. I think our sciences do not know everything possible in the universe, so ghosts may well be out of our ability to detect with any of the instruments we have available. So how many years did you waste calling yourself a "paranormal investigator"? Don't get me wrong: I like a good ghost story as much as the next person -- if I didn't, I wouldn't be in this group. But I can't think of anything more asinine than sitting or walking around in some allegedly haunted location with a bunch of allegedly scientific gadgets trying to record something that doesn't conform to the laws of science. |
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Post by aprillynn93 on Dec 4, 2023 17:46:33 GMT -5
I agree that no one really knows what a ghost is. It's all experimental at this point. For me, I think it is reasonable to think that a ghost would be some kind of electromagnetic energy that we should be able to measure, but that doesn't mean it is. I think our sciences do not know everything possible in the universe, so ghosts may well be out of our ability to detect with any of the instruments we have available. So how many years did you waste calling yourself a "paranormal investigator"? Don't get me wrong: I like a good ghost story as much as the next person -- if I didn't, I wouldn't be in this group. But I can't think of anything more asinine than sitting or walking around in some allegedly haunted location with a bunch of allegedly scientific gadgets trying to record something that doesn't conform to the laws of science. It was more that 10 years for sure...maybe as much as 15. I don't think it was an entire waste though. I did learn a lot. I am not afraid of ghosts anymore unfortunately. It used to be so thrilling. I am still interested in ghosts, but I think I've gotten all I can get out of "paranormal investigating" at this point. |
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