| For Curious Skeptics and Grounded Believers |
I have never followed the paranormal field, including ghosts. I always used to find the topic silly. I like a good ghost story (such as what might come from the hand of Shirley Jackson or Richard Matheson), but ghost stories as told by a next door neighbor or some tourist attraction with claims of a skulking "blue lady" (how many "blue ladies" are there, anyway?) have never interested me in the least. I have always waved all this off as over-active imaginations.
So when Sci Fi Channel started running this series, I'd flip right on by it. I saw a few of the commercials and snickered to myself. I have seen way too many set-up "reality" TV shows. Take for example one of the earliest: Divorce Court. The host would whisper into the microphone during transitionary moments to explain what is going on, as if he was standing in a real court room during a real session. And they would presume to show you a real court case unfolding. It was all phony. It was not a court room, it was a set on a sound stage at a studio lot. The host was reading from queue cards, and all the participants were actors and the entire audience were extras. How do I know for sure? Because I was there, on set around 1986 or so, watching them tape the show (I believe it was at the Burbank studios). I watched take after take. Whether it was based upon a "real" case or not didn't matter, the show itself was an act. Fiction.
And not to rain on anyone's parade, but most reality shows are set-ups. Some more than others. But don't fall for everything that proudly calls itself "reality."
I figured Ghost Hunters featured a crew running around rigging things OFF camera so that they could make a big deal about it ON camera. I figured it was all phony, trying to pass as real.
So I missed many episodes, until one day, in early 2008, I just happened to stop on an episode while flipping by. My finger poised over the channel button. There was something that captured my interest: They were proving that a house was NOT haunted. Huh???
Slowly my finger left the channel button. Slowly I set the remote aside.
This was opposite what the previews made it seem. These guys are trying to DISPROVE hauntings, not prove them. Jason's philosophy is that if you rule out every possible realistic explanation and you still can't explain it, you *may* have evidence for paranormal, and in more extreme cases, a haunting.
Now that makes sense, and it's very interesting. So I kept watching.
I watched a few more episodes, and a few more. Fast-forward a couple weeks, and my DVR had recorded back-to-back reruns, and I was staying up late after the kids went to bed to sneak in a few more episodes. I bought their DVD's and Jason's book. I was hooked.
I do not like the Sci Fi production itself: they use too much "spooky music" and introduce flashes of silly ghost images in the editing. I think this not only hides the more interesting native sound from the camera, which would give us a "baseline" for the environment, but the distracting images and cheap FX which are intended to entertain are just irritating and dumb the show down. None of this has anything to do with Jason & Grant and their crew however.
So after being mostly a pure skeptic and having no interest in this kind of show, I am now a fan of Ghost Hunters and I'm on the fence as to what these guys are capturing. It is impossible for me to really cross the line and *believe* without actually being there to debunk myself. There are lots of questions I would ask that I don't hear asked on the show, and scientific experiments I would like to see conducted that aren't. Probably because time constraints simply edit a LOT of things out. I have to put some faith that these guys are doing the best they can.
Every now and then they bring in someone who uses divining rods, or practices some pagan craft, in order to evaluate a possible haunting, but I'm not sure what this really accomplishes toward debunking. It seems to serve only to entertain the serious paranormal believers watching the show, but I'm not that audience, so I try to look past these sidekicks. I have lots of doubts about "sensitives," I think most of them are attention junkies. It's the attempts at debunking that make the show, especially when they've tried their best to debunk and simply couldn't explain something they caught on camera or on digital audio. A chair moves, a shadow blocks the light, etc.
Another aspect of this show that seems wanting is that everyone on crew is a believer. Most of them are grounded, yes, but they are believers in ghosts, no question. It'd be nice to have a really serious skeptic on the show, perhaps someone who is skilled at magic or cons -- a James Randi type of person. (Not that Jason & Grant can't detect a con -- they easily found several, but, as the old saying goes, you can't trick a trickster, and magicians are pros at it.) It would be chilling for a skeptic of this discipline to say, after a thorough inquiry and analysis, "well, that was weird, and I just have no reasonable explanation."
I am especially interested in all the EVP evidence, as that seems to be the most abundant, and I've never heard this kind of thing before outside of fiction. The causes are pretty limited:
a) hoax / tampering
b) possible radio frequency interception (very doubtful, based on what I heard)
c) re-used tapes (bleed from previous voice recordings, also doubtful considering all the surrounding noise and the timing of some of the answers)
d) legitimate disembodied voices.
Out of those possibilities, (b) and (c) are too weak to support. As for (a), if all these EVPs are tricks -- purposely made for the show -- someone on the "inside" is going to spill the beans sooner or later and that'll be the end of Jason and Grant. They just don't seem like the kind of guys would want to take that kind of risk, not with all their fans now watching. Unless someone is pulling the wool over their eyes, unbeknownst to them -- but how could that continue for so long without them catching on? They seem to have a sharp eye for skulduggery.
That leaves (d) as the strongest possibility: It's real. Which really clashes with my traditional sensibilities.
I recommend this series if you are a curious skeptic or a grounded believer. If you're a hard-core skeptic, forget it -- you'll never believe anything no matter what; and if you're a hard-core believer, what's the point? You'll believe every creaking door is a ghost entering the room. For the rest of us, open-minded and logical, this is a worthy show to study. |
4 Rating
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