WHO YA GONNA CALL?
Ghost hunters can be divided into two main types: those who try to obtain evidence of a haunting, and those who try to disprove claims by looking for real-world explanations for why, say, footsteps are heard in the attic. If the investigators can’t find a rational explanation, then they say a place “may” be haunted. If you’ve ever seen Ghost Hunters on the SyFy Network, then those words are familiar—it’s the methodology of the lead investigators, Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes, founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). Though not scientists, they attempt to take a scientific approach to investigating. But because so little is known about the “other side,” Hawes admits, “there are really no experts in this field.”
According to ghost hunters, the first hurdle that the serious investigator must overcome is his or her own imagination. As humans, if our eyes don’t receive a complete picture, our brain will attempt to fill in the rest, usually with something already familiar. This is sometimes called matrixing. It’s for this reason that paranormal investigators have come to rely on an array of electronic gizmos that act as objective observers and recorders. But there’s a catch: One of the main tenets of the scientific method is that in order for a hypothesis to be proven, the results must be reproducible in a controlled setting. With a haunting, that’s virtually impossible. “Sometimes ghosts appear; sometimes they don’t,” says Hawes. That one caveat alone will keep any scientist who values his or her reputation from stating that the existence of ghosts has ever been “proven.” That’s why, instead of proof, ghost hunters look for “evidence.”
THE GHOST HUNTER’S ARSENAL
So if you have an extra few thousand dollars lying around, here’s some of what you’ll need in order to gather evidence of a ghost’s existence in such a way that no scientist or skeptic could ever deny your claim. That, by the way, is the “Holy Grail” among paranormal investigators…and it hasn’t happened yet.
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Size of the U.S. national debt in 2010: $12.4 trillion. (If you’d spent $1 million every day since the year 1 A.D., you still wouldn’t have spent even $1 trillion.)
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• Digital video recorder (DVR): Because paranormal activity is most often witnessed between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., when the lights are off, investigators use an infrared camera with a night-vision setting. The more DVRs, the better, because apparitions usually appear for a second or two, and moving objects are difficult to document with a still camera. If there’s a room you think is active, just place the camera on a tripod and let it record all night.
• Digital still camera: Ghost hunters will take hundreds of photographs of a location and scrutinize every one for anomalies, mysterious shadows, mist, apparitions, and orbs. (More on this on the next page.)
• Digital audio recorder: Investigators use recorders to try to capture voice phenomena. There are three kinds: direct voice phenomenon, when a ghost speaks loud enough to be heard by the naked ear (such as “Get out!”); radio voice phenomenon, when it uses TV or radio static to amplify its voice, also referred to as white noise; and electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), when a recorder picks up ghostly voices that are so faint that our own ears can’t hear them. “Is there anyone here that would like speak with us?” asks the investigator. When he reviews the audio later, there just may be an answer.
• Electromagnetic field detector: This device, most commonly used by electricians to find live circuit boxes inside walls, is used by paranormal investigators to find EMFs—or pockets of free-floating energy—that may be the result of an entity.
• Thermal imaging camera: By drawing energy from a room, spirits can make the air colder or warmer. Sometimes they even leave heat signatures, which these cameras can record.
• Proton packs are wearable particle accelerators that, when fired, create a charged proton stream which can be used to snare a negatively charged ectoplasmic entity (a ghost) and then safely contain it. (Just kidding—that’s what they used in Ghostbusters.)
ELECTROMAGNETIC FRAUD DETECTORS
In his article “The Shady Science of Ghost Hunting,” Benjamin Radford, managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer, writes, “The uncomfortable reality that ghost hunters carefully avoid—the elephant in the tiny, haunted room—is of course that no one has ever shown that any of their equipment actually detects ghosts. If a device could, then by definition, ghosts would be proven to exist.” Wilson and Hawes share this concern, and are frustrated by all the inexperienced investigators who chalk up anything they “capture” as a “ghost.” These erroneous reports are called false positives. Here are the most common examples.
• Orbs: As we told you earlier, orbs are flying balls of light that are believed to be basic spirit forms. About 99% of orb photos and video can be dismissed as lens flare, a spot on the lens, dust, or an insect. (When an illuminated piece of dust or a bug is close to the lens, it can appear in the photograph or video as a round ball of light.) Other common causes are using a flash or shooting toward the sun, a streetlight, or any other light source. There are also countless photos posted online that show a “vortex”—a strange, white stream of fuzzy light crossing the frame. Skeptics have another name for this phenomenon: “camera strap.”
• Mist: Most digital camera technology (both still and video) is not yet advanced enough to create a clear image of a dark scene. So the computerized sensor will fill in incomplete areas of the frame with pixilation. This can look like mist—one of the forms a ghost can theoretically take on—and often gets reported as such.
• Electronic voice phenomena (EVPs): “Matrixing” is very common with auditory stimuli, especially when aided by the power of suggestion (such as hearing satanic messages when you play “Stairway to Heaven” backward). When an investigator is listening to hours of static or a hissy recording of an empty room, it’s easy to mistake a random warble for a “voice.” But sometimes the tape picks up discernable voices. Sound waves can travel in odd paths, and the voices of people walking nearby, even outside the building, may have been discerned by the recorder, but not by the investigators’ ears at the time. As a result, nearly all EVPs can be explained.
But like orbs and mist, reports of EVPs are all over the Internet and TV shows—and they make the skeptics’ skin crawl because they’re so easily disproved. This makes it even more difficult for the investigators who do gather compelling evidence—and weed out all of the false positives—to be taken seriously.
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Ben Stiller, Mel Gibson, and Jean-Claude Van Damme all suffer from bipolar disorder.
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“Like most ghost hunters,” writes Radford, “Wilson and Hawes claim to be skeptics but are very credulous and seem to have no real understanding of scientific methods or real investigation. Audiences don’t seem to wonder why these ‘expert’ ghost hunters always fail: Even after more than 10 years of research, they still have yet to prove that ghosts exist.”
SO WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
Wilson and Hawes (and their defenders) claim that there are several pieces of evidence gathered by TAPS that can’t be easily explained away. Though most episodes end with the team telling the business or homeowner that their place isn’t haunted, occasionally the evidence seems fairly conclusive that it is. Two examples:
• In one episode, the team placed two video cameras in a hallway—one an infrared camera, which records only heat signatures, and the other a regular camera. During the analysis, they looked at the footage from both cameras, and at the exact same time, the thermal camera recorded a human-shaped figure moving down the hall…while the regular camera recorded an empty hallway.
• In a home purportedly haunted by victims who were murdered by the Manson Family in the late 1960s, the team used a type of EMF detector to ask a spirit to light up the apparatus and answer yes-or-no questions. The spirit did so repeatedly, and verified that it was Sharon Tate, one of Manson’s victims.
The obvious problem is that there will always
be accusations—leveled at either the investigators or the producers of Ghost Hunters—that they manufacture evidence for better ratings. They all deny it, but the “elephant” that Radford speaks of remains in the tiny, haunted room. (Whether you believe or not, check out one of the scariest ghost stories we’ve ever heard on page 297.)
“As for ghosts, there is scarcely any other matter upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since early times.”
—Sigmund Freud
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The 3 U.S. states with the most ghost sightings: California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
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POLITICS AS (UN)USUAL
The most popular politicians are often the ones who seem like they’re “one of us”—ordinary people. But just like us ordinary people, they sometimes make some very weird decisions.
GETTING A LEG UP
Hajnal Ban, a city councilor in Logan City, Australia, always felt that at 5′0″ she wasn’t taken seriously, either as a lawyer or as a politician. So in 2001, she went to an orthopedic clinic in Russia and paid $40,000 to have her legs broken in four places. Then, over the course of nine months, surgeons stretched Ban’s legs by a millimeter or so every day. After nearly a year of excruciating pain in a foreign hospital, Ban returned to her city council position…three inches taller.
SMOKING SECTION FOR ONE
In Australia, it’s illegal for people under the age of 18 to smoke. But officials at the Department of Education of the Capital Territory (the district that includes the capital city of Canberra) have allowed a 16-year-old student at Stromlo High School not only to legally smoke, but to take cigarette breaks during her classes. The ruling was based on a doctor’s recommendation that the student is “so clinically addicted to nicotine” that she can’t function without constantly consuming it—and that not smoking would make her schoolwork suffer.
HOW STEREOTYPICAL
In 2006 Bonilyn Wilbanks-Free was the town manager (similar to a mayor) of Golden Beach, Florida, when she referred to one of her assistants as “Mammy.” The assistant, whose name is actually Barbara Tarasenko, is African American, and Wilbanks-Free, who is white, was evidently referring to an old racial stereotype of smiling, motherly, African-American maid characters. Tarasenko, visibly offended, wasn’t any happier when Wilbanks-Free tried to soften her first comment by saying, “You know how much I love Aunt Jemima.” A month later, Wilbanks-Free resigned her position.
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It is still technically against the law for a woman to wear pants in Paris.
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DOWN-HOME COOKIN’
In 2008 a heated presidential campaign and a press hungry for human-interest stories was the perfect recipe for…well, “Recipegate.” Presidential candidate John McCain and his wife Cindy—heiress to a multimillion-dollar beer distribution company—were often criticized by their opponents as being out of touch with ordinary Americans. To counter that image, the McCain campaign began posting “Cindy’s McCain Family Recipes” on its Web site. One problem: The folksy recipes were lifted word for word from the Food Network Website—a fact that a New York attorney discovered when she went searching online for a tuna recipe. After news outlets got hold of the story, the McCain campaign quickly deleted the recipes and blamed the “error” on a low-level staffer, who was later “disciplined.”
A POLITICALLY CORRECT IDEA
In 2008 the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent, England, issued a ban on the term “brainstorming” because the term—which means coming up with ideas at a meeting—might be considered offensive to epileptics, whose seizures have been described by doctors as a “storm of the brain.” Instead, the council recommended the terms “thought sharing” and “blue-sky thinking.”
WANDERING COMRADE
In 1995 the Russian presidential delegation made an official state visit to Washington, D.C. The Clinton administration put the party up in Blair House, where visiting dignitaries often stay. But in the middle of the night, Secret Service agents found a man standing in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in his underwear, extremely drunk and trying to hail a cab so he could go get a pizza. The agents returned the man to Blair House after they determined his identity: Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”
—Mark Twain
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Connecticut state representatives were caught playing solitare on their laptops during a 2009 budget mtg.
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MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO
After Uncle John saw the movie The Matrix, he was so inspired that he tried to run up the theater wall. He fell down. But he fared much better than these people…who also tried to copy something they saw on a screen.
MONKEY SEE: Joe Brumfield of Covington, Louisiana, watched an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in which a car thief soaked a vehicle in gasoline and set it on fire so it couldn’t be traced back to him.
MONKEY DO: Brumfield stole a car and then tried the tactic. But as he was dousing the car, he splashed gas on his hands and arms. And then he lit the car on fire…along with himself. He tried to call 911, but couldn’t hold onto the (stolen) phone with his flaming hands. Brumfield ran to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for second-degree burns. Doctors alerted police, who were nice enough to wait until Brumfield was released to book him for auto theft. “Car thieves should not play with matches,” said officer Jack West.
MONKEY SEE: In 2009 Darenell Jones had a lot to drink at a wedding in Farmington, New Mexico. Afterward, he and some friends went to a hotel room to watch Ultimate Fighting Championship’s UFC Fight Night on TV.
MONKEY DO: The friends decided to recreate some of the Ultimate Fighting moves…but there’s a reason why UFC matches aren’t held in third-story hotel rooms. During the “fight,” Jones was thrown against a plate-glass window, which gave way, and he fell out—breaking through the glass and falling 20 feet to the sidewalk below. Paramedics tried to save him, but were unable to. According to police, “It was horseplay, basically.”
MONKEY SEE: According to amateur filmmaker Mark Twitchell’s Facebook profile, “Mark has way too much in common with Dexter Morgan.” Who’s Dexter Morgan? He’s the fictional lead character on the television show Dexter, about a crime-scene investigator (Michael C. Hall) who moonlights as a vigilante who traps and murders rapists and serial killers.
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There are more captive tigers in Texas than there are wild tigers in India.
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MONKEY DO: In November 2008, Twitchell, of Edmonton, Alberta, turned one of Dexter’s plots into a real-life nightmare. After he answered an online personal ad, pretending to be a young woman, Twitchell lured 38-year-old Johnny Altinger to his house. Except Altinger wasn’t a serial killer; he was just a man looking for a date. His body was never found, but police identified enough evidence in Twitchell’s garage—including a script to a “show” that detailed his evil plot—to charge him with first-degree murder.
MONKEY SEE: In the 1999 movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) runs an underground club where men have bloody fistfights with each other. They also belong to “Project Mayhem,” a terrorist cell that blows up symbols of corporate America, including, in one scene, a Starbucks coffee shop. The film has garnered a huge cult following, and one of the biggest fans was 17-year-old Kyle Shaw, who maintained that he actually wanted to be Tyler Durden.
MONKEY DO: In 2009 Shaw started his own fight club in New York City, but fighting his fellow teenagers wasn’t enough. So, following the model of Project Mayhem, Shaw built a crude homemade bomb and set it off in front of a Starbucks in the middle of the night, destroying an outdoor bench. Ignoring the first rule of Fight Club, which is that you do not talk about Fight Club, Shaw bragged about it to his friends, one of whom tipped off the police. (Coincidentally, the jail that Shaw went to had its own version of a fight club, called “The Program.” While he was
on a pay phone, a much larger inmate walked up and hit Shaw in the face, giving him a black eye for his appearance in court the next day.)
DEADLY IRONY
In December 2009, police in North Fort Myers, Florida, responded to a call about a man lying on the tracks of the Seminole Gulf Railway. When police found him, he’d been run over by the train. They have no idea why the man was lying on the tracks, and at press time they had no leads about his identity. All they could initially determine was the cause of death: He’d been struck and killed by the “Murder Mystery Dinner Train.”
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NASA lingo: Mishaps in space exploration are referred to as the works of the “galactic ghoul.”
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MONKEYS INVADE TEXAS!
How did a bunch of Asian snow monkeys come face to face with a Major League Baseball legend? If you can’t picture it, don’t worry—neither could we. Here’s the story.
SURROUNDED
Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan worked out of some serious jams during his 30-year career. But nothing he faced on the mound was quite as unnerving as what he saw near Dilley, a small town in south Texas, in 1996. “There were thousands of them,” Ryan recalls in his signature Texas drawl. “It’s kind of like one of these things you see in Africa—they were all over the truck.” The invaders were two-foot-tall Asian snow monkeys, known for their thick brown fur, long pink faces, and penetrating stare. Dozens of them were peering into the truck, examining Ryan, while hundreds more crowded around. But Ryan wasn’t just a casual observer; he was acting in an official capacity as the Texas-appointed “Snow Monkey Ambassador.” How in the world did he get there?
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy Page 21
