Gadgets For the Ghosthunter 345
Zothecula sent us a sad story about the gadgetry scammers use to take money from people who believe in the pretend: "In a survey conducted by CBS News in 2005, it was found that 48 percent of Americans believed in ghosts. Other surveys have put the number at anywhere from around 20 to over 50 percent. While such figures certainly don't imply that ghosts are real, they do suggest that belief in them is relatively common. When someone does suspect that a ghost is present in their home or business, they will sometimes call in "experts" to ascertain if that is, in fact, the case... and what sort of gear do these ghost hunters use to detect said spirits?"
Re:Only Thing needed (Score:3, Interesting)
I have, as a semi-captive audience, been subjected to many hours of ghost hunters. I usually do my best to bury my attention in something else but, its not always possible. A few things of note:
1. They do seem to try reasonably hard to find normal explanations for things. Reflections from car headlights, nesting animals, that sort of thing. I have even seen them fiddle with doors to determine how easily they swing or how much force is needed to dislodge them. They often concluded that what they have found doesn't show paranormal activity.
2. Often their "clients" are people with historic buildings or houses who want their activity "verified" for various reasons, not limited to, tourism value.
The other thing of note is, some people, like my roomate who is enthralled with it, are believers. She has said, many times, that she would like to put a kit together with EMF meters etc and go doing her own "investigations". It is hard for me, in the face of this, to claim that ALL such investigators are scammers out for a buck.
I think my biggest complaint about them, aside from the foolishness of the whole deal, is that they always play music over the so called "EVP" sessions. I have yet to hear anything but static or random noise, but, I do have to say 90% of the time, music obscures the sounds that they are listening to. Not that I expect to hear anything really. Though, people hearing voices in static shouldn't even be considered unusual. Intepresting the occasional random sound as a voice is pretty damned common.
Re:Only Thing needed (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to live in a haunted house, you insensitive clod!
[lol]
That said, No, really, I really did. I don't know how such phenomena could be explained without some very tortured rationalisms, given what I have personally seen.
Anecdotes are not evidence, and I don't expect you to believe me, or to change your opinion. If you are truly curious about the things I have personally experienced on this matter, I can entertain you for a while, but not in this post.
As for most professional ghost hunters, I find fault with some of their equipment, for purely geeky reasons. Such the use of digital personal voice recorders for collecting EVPs. This is bogus to me, for the simple reason that digital voice recorders use internal lossy (Lossy as hell, in fact!) codecs to store the audio data they collect. EVPs are supposed to be stored in "Inaudible" audio spectrum, which is EXACTLY what these codecs chop out to make the stream smaller. If you want to collect EVPs, get yourself an old fashioned reel to reel tape recorder, then digitize later with FLAC or PCM with a high bitrate. If anything, the artifacts left by lossy compression on those portions of the auditory spectrum are likely to cause FALSE POSITIVES than to detect genuine EVPs, should they happen.
I do have some interesting ideas for some elaborate ghost detection equipment of my own though, but given the shoe-string budgets that most of these "paranormal investigator" teams operate on, they would never be able to afford the PARTS, let alone the training needed to use what I have in mind, or to interpret the resulting data. (basic grasp of wave mechanics would be needed to evaluate some of the datasets in order to screen out the interesting data from the boring kind-- one of the devices I have in mind would make use of electromagnetic interference with various reference signals over a broad spread of the EM spectrum, not just visible and IR light. The device would basically emit a precise calibrated waveform that is a phase conjugate with the other frequencies being probed (they are all multiples of each other, so they do not interfere on their own, but instead have wave reinforcement.) The device measures any deviations from this ideal reference waveform from particle interactions. Since ghosts are presumed to emit/absorb electromagnetic energy, they should cause such perturbations in the reference signals by interacting with them.. Multiple frequency bands would help to constrain what kinds of interaction are (possibly) taking place, or if they are happening at all. Ideally, it would have receivers in both Near and Far field areas to record both kinds of interaction. The test rig would fill a whole room. This is just one of the theoretical devices I have in mind. )
When it comes to the validity of any "findings" that such teams come up with, I groan. Any data collected is only as good as the equipment and rigor of the team collecting it. It is VERY easy to find false positives and false trends in very noisy (eg, poorly calibrated/downright bad) data. Given the issue with the EVPs above, and the rather linear and simplistic tools that they use to collect such data, (Such devices are NOT meant for scientific research, but instead for simple domestic repairs, and to hunt down EMI radiation from wiring.) I can't help but groan when I watch them on TV.
I guess that makes me a walking contradiction-- I have personally experienced paranormal activity, but demand data. Maybe that is why I come up with ideas for instruments?