I’ve been interested in the paranormal for a long time and have seen my fair share of shows where people go to a supposedly haunted locale with their EMF metres, infrared cameras and digital recorders and attempt to collect “evidence” of ghosts. I’m an advocate of investigating alot of weird stuff including phenomena known as ghosts but it’s hard to watch any of the programs without finding problems. Some of you may say “Well, the main problem is that there’s nothing to investigate” which is probably true most of the time. But I don’t think you can dismiss everything and that a well organized investigation could yield some evidence. First we have to eliminate the problems, as I see them.
Bringing ” Psychics” Along
Although I’m also interested in psychic phenomena it isn’t proven yet so bringing along someone who purportedly can sense the ghosts is just silly. It’s a great help in leading the other people involved in the investigation by making them interpret normal sounds as something paranormal because the psychic has told them he or she senses the presence of someone. Once you give people an impetus for thinking something is there it’s not too much of a stretch for them to begin seeing and hearing things and interpreting them as coming from an otherworldy source.
Having A Seance
Once again this suffers from the fact that these things aren’t proven to contact the dead and that there is even something to contact.
Electronic Voice Phenomena
Human brains have evolved to find patterns in nothing, just look at the clouds sometime and figure out what sorts of things you can see. We’re great at picking things out, especially when we expect to hear or see something so for the most part you have to discount all EVP unless you can correlate it with something or if all of a sudden you can make out a crystal clear conversation or something. Or if questions are asked and you receive clearly distinguishable answers, until then don’t bother.
What Should Be Done
Paranormal investigations seriously lack controls, mainly because you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s had any experience with the scientific method in a team of investigators. I’d like to see someone sent in to the so called haunted locale who has not heard anything about what is supposed to go on there and have them take baseline readings using an EMF metre, copious readings if possible. I’m still not totally convinced that EMF is all that reliable and the fluctuations in the earths EM field are probably causing alot of the incidences where investigators think they are detecting ghosts. I’d also like to see investigations of houses that aren’t supposed to be haunted done with several different treatment groups:1) So called paranormal investigators given a story about the house being haunted and 2) not given a story 3) newbies( people who had enever done an investigation before) given a story about the house being haunted and 4) not given any information at all. I’d be interested to see what results were obtained, what people heard, what they thought they saw.
I’d love to see all this but whether it would actually happen is another story. I think to a certain extent these people are doing this because it seems fun and exciting to them and they think they’re exploring the unknown. Introducing rigourous controls and things like repeated sampling, all that fun scientific stuff, might destroy the buzz these people get. But until then you really can’t trust what these people find.
Let me know what you thought of this. Hopefully my writing style will suck less in future posts. Like it? Hate it? Suggestions for other stuff you’d like to hear about? Let me know.
