Why Give a Free Pass?

Recently, as I finally came out of the closet as an atheist, I began to assess my laissez-faire approach to many things in the paranormal world. Much like religion - a parallel I've often drawn - paranormal belief often enjoys a status whereby to question it is to be seen as harsh or mean.

But really, if I am to question such silliness as religion is it not equally important to question its step-child, paranormal belief, which also has no scientific underpinnings? As I've often said here, waving around an EMF meter or looking at something with an Infrared camera is not science anymore than assembling a balsa wood and rubber band airplane from a kit is aeronautical engineering.

Even more to the point, I have been guilty of handling certain people and ideas in the field with kid gloves because of a personal connection - in some cases very tenuous and in others quite solid. Like so many, I have been afraid of hurting feelings. In some cases I have shied away because, let's face it, adherants to paranormal belief rarely, if ever, can have a civil debate on the merits. Most understand their premises are flawed at the outset so cover by resorting to ad hominem attacks, threats, and deliberate misuse of science. But, is that any reason to remain quiet and allow them to fill minds with utter drivel and perpetrate outright fraud and fakery?

More to the point, is it proper to withhold criticism and allow guillible people to be swept up in this pseudo-scientific/quasi-religious mania by joining these ghost hunting groups, becoming fans of these television shows and thereby never having the opportunity to understand that what they are being told is utter hogwash 99.99% of the time?

So, it is time to stop tip-toeing around the issues whether groups are "amateur" or "professional." It is time to lay the arguments on the table and call it as I see it whether that hurts feelings or not. This especially goes for egomaniacs who run their little groups perpetrating utter nonsense with an eye to enriching their bank accounts and personal notoriety either from gullible "clients" or a gullible public eager to consume their fantasies. Let me be clear here that I am not talking of folklorists and other collectors of tales and fables, but those who tell people that their home or business is "haunted" on the basis of  EMF or EVP or whatever the gadget du jour happens to be.

With that in mind, I recently watched a mash-up of some of the most "astounding" moments from the Ghost Hunters show since its inception. What immediately struck me when I watched each of those events back to back was that every single one appeared staged.

I realized that taken one at a time I had suspended my disbelief over the years as with any good theatrical production and accepted them as plausible. But, when viewed one after the other my eye quickly picked out insconsistencies in the movements of objects supposedly caused by "ghosts."

For example, in every case of movement of small objects such as picture frames the movement is quite unnatural. By that, I don't mean paranormal. Let us assume (big assumption) that what these people say is true and a "ghost" is moving the picture. We have to ask ourselves why a ghost needs to move the picture? Is it trying to get a better look? Is it just bored and needs something to do? Surely, if it is wanting to bring attention there would be more noticeable ways - especially when no one is bothering to look except a camera. So, let's assume the "ghost" wants to view the picture better. It reaches out and turns the picture frame. Yet, the movement caught on camera is quite unnatural and not what would be seen if someone actually moved the frame with their hand. The frame slides from the bottom corner and drags the entire frame with it eventually as though the angle of something pulling from behind has straightened. Furthermore, the frame does not move until something has overcome the friction of the table. In other words, it is a rather jerky motion indicating it is being pulled across the surface by a line of some sort bysomeone afraid to apply too much pressure lest the illusion be shattered. It is an obvious fraud when viewed in this light.



There are a number of highly skeptical sites out there who weekly watch these shows and point out the fraud and fakery. Many lay out excellent cases and even reproduce the phenomena a la Penn & Teller. So, I won't be doing a weekly rehash here of all that.

What I will be doing is no longer handling anyone with kid gloves be they eager amateurs down the street or professional charlatans like those infesting the airwaves. When I see bullshit, I will call bullshit and if you are one of those guilty to it be prepared to have your findings and beliefs dissected.

All content © Buck Bannister.
Buck's Ghost's and Hauntings
All Rights Reserved.

Early Morning Philosophy

Philosophy early in the morning can be quite energizing. This morning I ran into a former ghost hunting colleague on Facebook who is also pre-disposed to thinking deep thoughts about philosophy and psychology and the implications for paranormal studies. I’ve missed our chats about such matters and was pleased to have the chance to discuss things with him again.

Our chat ranged from the mundane to a consideration of Pascal’s Wager and in between we talked about the Thalbourne Scale and the implications of belief on investigators. It’s a topic that greatly interested me and one of those ideas I wanted to pursue while with my former group. Of course, the idea that belief influences perception of “evidence” was one that went over like a lead balloon with most people in the group.

I’d always wondered whether investigators’ beliefs and where they fell on the Thalbourne could be quantified to show that such beliefs could be an indicator of what types of and how much “evidence” they found in data for an afterlife.

My idea was that the further toward the “sheep” or believer end of the scale a person fell the more likely they were to  interpret things as proof of an afterlife and that this could be used to qualify findings.

Personally I fall closer to the skeptic or “goat” end of the scale while not testing out as a hard core skeptic. As I thought more about that test though and my initial responses I began to consider one of the typical questions about PSI phenomena. The questions asks whether you have had episodes of knowing when a phone was going to ring to knowing who was calling before answering (obviously written before the advent of Caller ID).

I’d always said “yes” to that question based largely on an episode when I was a child. Let me detail that event and see if you can spot the fallacy in my early belief it is “proof” that PSI phenomena exists.

When I was fairly young, the phone rang one night while I was sleeping on the sofa. My mother answered but I did not wake up. The call was about a cousin whom we did not see very often. It turned out she was pregnant and it had been a very closely kept secret. She was in labor and having the baby.

My mother woke me up to tell me they needed to go to the hospital to visit my aunt and uncle who were waiting. Immediately, when I awoke I said: “Oh ____ is having a baby!” My mother was taken aback since I had been fast asleep.

I also took this to be evidence of PSI phenomenon. But was it? What did you think?

If you fall over halfway toward the believer in you probably nodded your head and said, “Yes, how interesting!”

But, at this stage of my life I realize very easily how that was far from “evidence” of PSI phenomena. This knowledge came from working in surgery for many years.

I know that patients in surgery who were not given amnesiac drugs often recalled conversations in the OR while supposedly unconscious. The mind was still able to hear and process information while seemingly asleep. It is the same concept as hypnosis.

There was no PSI phenomena involved in my stunning revelation to my mother upon waking. The phone had undoubtedly roused me from deep sleep and my mind that was slowly making its way toward full awakening processed the conversation I could hear my mother having on the phone. While I was not conscious of this information my subconscious processed it and upon waking I blurted out the reason they were leaving before she could tell me. Not paranormal or psychic at all.

Indeed, throughout my childhood and until I began working with surgical patients I assumed this was some type of psychic phenomenon. Now I know better and would need to review my responses on the Thalbourne and it would edge me closer to the skeptic end of the scale.

Such is the problem with paranormal investigation and research, often our own ignorance of disparate factors influence our belief and that belief by extension then influences how we perceive events we classify as paranormal. I think this could even be extended to “serious” parapsychological research where often investigators become so wrapped up in their subjects that they develop a belief system that then influences their further data gathering. I sometimes call it the “New Age Guru” effect and it is distressingly common even at universities where skeptical analysis of data does not bear out the conclusions of the researchers who have become believers and invested in “proving” that their ideas have merit.

All content © Buck Bannister.
Buck's Ghost's and Hauntings
All Rights Reserved.

Calling Out the Spirits of the Uncreative...

NOTE: The website in question has removed the content stolen by Ms. Branning. According to their publisher they had no idea that the content was stolen and Ms. Branning plagiarized it. They were very apologetic about the situation and their apologies are appreciated. According to their webmaster, they have severed their relationship with Ms. Branning and she will no longer be associated with them. I am pleased this matter has been concluded and they have shown themselves to be a reputable site. 

Some of my fellow writers and I were having a discussion/rant on Facebook about plagiarism. I made the bold statement that since I'd gone after a few "feed farms" for stealing my RSS feed, I hadn't had any real problems. But, then I thought "I'm relying on referrers to really know that."

In truth, plagiarists aren't usually going to link back to your site so how did I really know someone wasn't ripping off my content? I decided to turn to Copyscape, that I'd used in the past to check.

Surprise, surprise... well, not surprising.

I found entire articles I've written here copied for "answers" on forums and "ask the community" type sites. But I also found regular folks plagiarizing my articles. And... I'm going to call them out on it.

Debe Branning lifted my "Paranormal Safety" article and pawned it off as her own. Not only does she lift the points and structure but entire phrases and paragraphs as well. Debe Branning actually has the gall to sign her name to the article! Now to be honest, I'm not sure if she ripped it off directly from this site or from Sonoran Paranormal's website which has permission to reprint it with a link. It was also syndicated in my column on Unexplained Mysteries so it's possible she grabbed it there as well, I suppose. But either way it's not nice and doesn't say much for this "investigative" group with which she works. But in any case... all she did was rearrange a phrase here and there and cut out things that questioned the use of "rituals" and then signed her name to it. Bad form, Ms. Branning.

Again, this points out the level of intelligence among amateur ghost hunting groups as Branning, a self-proclaimed psychic, heads up a group called MVD Ghost Chasers out of Mesa, AZ. You'd think a psychic might be a little leery of theft of content because of Karma and all that stuff. Guess not, though.  She is also the "Arizona Haunted Sites Examiner" from what I understand.

Well, Cullan, I suppose I wasn't as immune to plagiarism as I claimed. What's worse is that it's plagiarism by someone who lives with 50 miles of me! And, yes, letters have been sent.

The sad part of all this is had I been asked I would have probably given permission to reprint the article with my usual request for a link and attribution. However, Ms. Branning decided to steal the content and put her name on it.

All content © Buck Bannister.
Buck's Ghost's and Hauntings
All Rights Reserved.

Random Thoughts…

I don’t really have a “post” per se on any of these topics. None of them quite seemed to warrant their very own post on the blog so I decided to lump some recent random thoughts together under a single post. Pardon the mish mash.

I realized recently that almost everyone I meet anymore has a ghost story of some type. By ghost story I don’t mean they know a traditional folklore type story but rather their house, their parents’ house, a friend’s house, or a hotel they stayed at is haunted. What once was a fairly rare event, the personal ghost encounter, has become as commonplace as seeing a homeless person in a big city.

Over the past year or so at parties I’ve had or events I’ve attended when people find out what I used to do with SPI they begin to recount their own ghostly encounters. It seems that no matter how mundane the event it is ascribed a “paranormal” cause with the adamant disclaimer that it can’t possibly be anything but a ghost because they watch Ghost Hunters and they have thoroughly checked everything possible ergo ghost.

I can remember growing up that hearing a first hand ghost tale was quite rare. In fact, in high school I did a paper on a local haunting (from a folklore collection angle) and had to really hunt for someone who had actually experienced the haunting personally – although it was quite famous regionally! Today, were I to undertake the same task I’m sure I would hear dozens of first hand stories. In fact, it might make an interesting exercise.

Ghosts have become extremely popular in our culture through the media and substitution for traditional religious beliefs (just read almost any psychic’s website and you will find a theological cosmology as intricate as any envisioned by a Medieval church council). Thanks to this popularity everyone seems to want to be in on the act. Whether it be telling you of “Uncle Joe” who haunts them and moves their keys or peppering you with questions about your own experiences and beliefs, the desire to be part of this synthesis of religion and pop-culture seems to be irresistible.

Of course, this often puts me in a rather awkward position as I don’t fit into their notion of this world based upon television shows. When I tell people that I, personally, do not believe in ghosts within the construct of dead people wandering around chatting us up, they are often struck speechless. After all, surely anyone who studies and thinks about this stuff must have to “believe” in the traditional paradigm of ghosts as souls stuck on Earth for some reason. Honestly, that bit of information has caused more than one person to put me at arms length because I wasn’t their idea of a “ghost hunter” they could show off as a friend.

So, moving on…

My new guilty pleasure in reality TV has become Storm Chasers on Discovery Channel. I started watching it last year simply because I caught a rerun late at night. Tornados have always fascinated me because they can be both beautiful and horrible at once. As a teenager I had a close encounter with one just before my high school graduation when a series of tornados ranging from (old style) F-2 to F-4 swept through my hometown. I narrowly missed being in the worst of it thanks to a migraine. Still, I got to see one touch down in the field across from my house as my father was speeding us toward my sister’s house because she had been on the phone when one of the tornados hit her side of town. She was fine, just tore the porch off her house and threw a 200 year old oak tree into the living room of a neighbor.

Anyway, I’ve been watching that show and Michael has gotten hooked as well. A couple weeks ago in an episode the pros were trying to chase a storm and kept running into roadblocks of sightseers and amateur chasers. There were hundreds parked along roads, creeping down narrow highways, milling around in the middle of the highway with binoculars and cameras.

I couldn’t help but think that storm chasing might be the next ghost hunters fad. As the pros cursed the amateurs in the way I wanted to say, “well, this is what happens when you’re on TV today.” See, everyone thinks that if they watch something on TV they can do it. It’s that dumbing down of America. Just like most amateur ghost hunters out there they only know what was on TV last week. They don’t read, they don’t study, they have no training in anything remotely useful in research. Because Jason Hawes proudly proclaimed that being a plumber qualified him to be a ghost hunter because he knew the difference between a leaky toilet and a ghost – everyone in the country thinks “paranormal research” is a piece of cake. No, ghost hunting is a piece of cake. Collecting stories and scaring each other is a piece of cake. Research is hard, long and requires…. education.

So, here are people with Ph.D.’s trying to collect data on storms and every thrill seeker in the state is clogging roads and putting people in danger because they see people chase storms on TV and figure “Hell, I can do that. All I need is my laptop, GPS, and the local weather page!” Because in anti-intellectual America… education is unnecessary!

Next up…

I have not watched the show and will not subject myself to the torture of watching the show. I’m speaking of “Ghost Lab” which is Discovery Channel’s entry in the every expanding basic cable “we must have a ghost show!” lineup.

I’ve only seen the ads for the show and admittedly, the people who make ads for this stuff are usually the most simple of the simple. However, it appears this show centers on a couple of brothers in matching T-shirts and hats (of course) who use all manner of lighted gadgets to hunt down ghosts. Now, it might be interesting if the “Ghost Lab” actually included some type of lab work but it appears it’s just the usual stumble around in the dark formula with a spotlight on gadgetry.

In the latest commercial airing they are knocking around what appears to be some fort or castle in a storm. Their purpose is to “prove” that “paranormal activity” increases during a storm. Ahh, how nice. Of course, they still need to prove paranormal activity exists, but let’s let them have their day. Anyway, in this commercial they are correlating lightning strikes with EVP and happen to get an EVP around the time of a lightning strike. It is their “A ha!” moment as they conclude that this proves paranormal activity is related to electrical energy.

Of course, to anyone with half a brain it would “prove” that coincidences do happen. To “prove” their belief would first require they prove paranormal phenomena and in particular EVP does exist outside the normal construct of the physical universe. Then they would have to show that there is statistical evidence that this newly found physical phenomenon occurs more often at moments when lightning strikes the vicinity. This would require years of study under all sorts of storm conditions.

But, it’s so much easier to find a coincidence and declare to your public that you have “proved” something. And the sad part is…. the ghost hunting groups will believe it.

All content © Buck Bannister.
Buck's Ghost's and Hauntings
All Rights Reserved.

The Function of Ghosts

I noticed earlier today one of the search terms someone used to find this site was: “Can one convince a non-believer in existence of paranormal?” It was the perfect entre to conclude the discussion of R.C. Finucane’s Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation.

I’ve now finished the last chapters of this excellent work that dealt with the 19th and 20th centuries. As we have seen, in each era ghosts undergo transformations that reflect the attitudes of the society at large as well as religious and philosophical belief.

During the 19th Century the movement away from purposeful ghosts continued as it had begun in the 18th Century when the Enlightenment began to drive a wedge between traditional religious belief and naturalistic ideas of religion as well as science. Ghosts in the 19th Century began to become strangers to those who perceived them. Rather than asking intercession, delivering warnings or other messages, the ghosts became mute specters wandering around houses. With the exception of the 19th Century spiritualist movement that was predicated on communicating with ghosts through rapping, Ouija boards or mediums ghosts had stopped being concerned with the affairs of the living.

Of course, the large majority of the Spiritualist ghosts would prove to be false and the result of fraud and trickery designed to separate people from their money.

The 20th Century saw ghosts continue in this vein. After the demise of Spiritualism after the First World War, it would be a long time before ghosts began “speaking” again. Finucane’s book was written in the mid 1980’s before the heyday of television shows and the resurgence of communication through electronic voice phenomenon and its attendant devices and gadgets (amazingly similar to early 20th Century Spiritualist attempts).

Finucane makes the case that ghosts throughout history have served a single real purpose: to assure fragile living humans that “we” continue after death.

It is a valid observation since it is almost impossible for us to conceive that we simply cease to exist when our life is done. This even applies to atheists and  those rejecting spirituality and religion out of hand. In our self-centered existence we have great difficulty in wrapping our minds around the idea that our personalities which define us as individuals don’t continue to exist when our bodies die.

This leads me to the search term today that asks: “Can one convince a non-believer in the existence of the paranormal?” It is a question that harkens back to the most fundamental reason ghosts exist in our culture – to reassure us that we continue. To remind us that death is not the end of “us” as individuals but rather that we go on in some form forever. The exempla of the early Catholic church that listed ghost stories for use by clergy to reinforce both the belief in an afterlife and also the dogma of purgatory continues today in our search for ghosts and “proof” that we continue. The church used these stories to “prove” the error of heretics who rejected Purgatory or even the existence of the soul. Later, the Protestants would continue in the folklore vein to “prove” to deists and atheists that the human soul was eternal.

Today, those who hunt ghosts and who believe in the existence of disembodied souls continue to use these stories and now their requisite EVP’s, EMF’s, photographs and other technological advancements to “prove” to non-believers that we are eternal. Today’s psychics bearing messages from departed loved ones or seeking justice continue this age old reaffirmation of religious belief in the personality as soul.

When viewed in this light it goes a long way to understanding the almost religious mania attached to ghost hunting by those doing the hunting and those seeking “proof” that they are haunted. Indeed, the paranormal has always been closely tied to religious belief and ghosts and how they haunt us have shifted along with those beliefs. Is it any wonder that in the “Technology Age” we have eschewed mediums for tape recorders, IR cameras, FLIR and other devices to assure ourselves that we go on? Should we be surprised that the 19th Century séance has given way to “EVP Sessions” where ghosts are asked to perform the same feats?

Can a non-believer be convinced? It’s a question as old as ghosts themselves and at its heart is the entire function of ghosts in our society and culture.

All content © Buck Bannister.
Buck's Ghost's and Hauntings
All Rights Reserved.