Working in the fields, Sharon Leong packs a digital camera, a thermometer, and an electromagnetic field meter. She's not a private detective or an electrician. Leong, a lawyer by day, transforms into a zealous ghost hunter by night.
Armed with these and many other hunting supplies, Leong travels to supposedly haunted houses, battlefields, bars and hotels, collecting what he believes to be evidence of the existence of the otherworldly world.
Searching for ghostly evidence has been a popular pastime for centuries. Nowadays, instead of Ouija boards, ghost hunters are using increasingly advanced equipment to aid in their search.
These ghost hunters use digital equipment to document potential signs of haunting. Cameras and voice recorders capture eerie sights and sounds, and handheld devices measure electromagnetic radiation and strange temperature spikes. Wetsuits like those in "Ghostbusters" aren't necessary, but pockets and fishing jackets allow you to stash everything on the go.
Hobbyists like Leong find equipment at electronics stores or online specialty retailers like Ghost Mart, which specialize in "deals on paranormal equipment." While most of the equipment is more for everyday use, others, such as a magnetic field meter known as a "ghost meter," are specifically designed for ghost hunting. Prices for a complete set range from $250 to as much as $2,000.
"We'll probably look medieval to people in the future with our cameras, but we have to start somewhere," says Leong. "Something is causing these devices to go haywire, but we're not sure why."
Leong traveled to famous haunted sites like Alcatraz Prison with members of the San Francisco Ghost Society. It's one of hundreds of paranormal groups operating in the area, with tens of thousands of members across North America. The International Ghost Hunters Association has members in over 90 countries.
The internet allows enthusiasts to share their footage instantly and anonymously, allowing them to find like-minded individuals without fear of ridicule from outsiders. Ghost Village is the ultimate hub for this community, attracting 80,000 visitors each month, twice as many as during the entire Halloween season.
Web 2.0 tools allow ghost hunters to engage with large communities like MySpace and niche ones like "I Am Haunted." Chat rooms, blogs, and videos attract over 30,000 visitors each month and dozens more each day. Some ghost websites offer live streaming of "haunted cameras" placed in known haunted locations. YouTube has become a repository for tens of thousands of videos purportedly showing ghosts and other apparitions.
The craze has also reached iPods; Apple's iTunes catalog contains over 1,000 paranormal podcasts. Among them are recordings of talks at the San Francisco Ghost Society, led by group founder Tommy Netzband. He and his associates investigate a house they believe is haunted in one of three ways: "residual," "intelligent," and "inhuman."
"Ninety-nine percent of these phenomena have a reasonable explanation," says Netzband. "When people call me and say, 'I'm being chased by a shadow,' I automatically think they're crazy. We don't support people who think this is some glamorous job. I've experienced shadow people, other hauntings, and been tricked by spirits, but it took me many years."
Netzband argues that most hauntings fall into the "residual" category, defined as impressions of past events that remain rooted in a location and recur in the present, like a blocked record. These can be emotional traces of highly emotional moments in someone's life, such as a last breath, a song, or the scent of perfume. For example, Netzband toured the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, specifically a sidewalk that has supposedly been haunted by the sound of footsteps since a teenager shot himself to death there in the 1970s.
Netzband and other researchers say paranormal entertainment has exploded in popularity in the last decade, driven largely by situation comedies like NBC's Medium and real-life shows like Ghost Hunters on the Sci Fi Channel, which attract millions of viewers. MTV produces Celebrity Paranormal Project, and the Discovery Channel airs The Hauntings. The Travel Channel's online version of Most Haunted offers tips on how to transform your cell phone into an electromagnetic reader.
Ghost hunters, both on television and in the street, use digital cameras that can capture infrared and ultraviolet light, which regular film can't. Other hobbyists prefer special Polaroid cameras that can print photos—printed images are more valuable to investigators than pixels. Sharon Leong, on the other hand, uses a 5.1-megapixel Canon PowerShot camera that can film a speeding dot. She recommends using a wide-angle lens and a tripod, allowing the camera to be left on for hours.
However, in the field, ghost hunters rarely capture images of stereotypical shadowy figures or white women. Instead, they receive photographs of moving balls of light, the most common sign of ghostly presence. The presence of such bodies is usually not caused by a flash or dust on the lens. Netzband, however, believes that certain light water droplets represent real "ghost shit." This type of discharge, otherwise known as ectoplasm, can appear as a beam of light or vapor.
Many ghost hunters claim that hauntings are related to changes in the electromagnetic field, and that ghostly activity increases on sunny days or during a full moon. Therefore, Netzband, Leong, and their colleagues use handheld EMF detectors and Geiger counters to gather information about radiation levels in a haunted location. Crank-powered or battery-powered Faraday flashlights are handy until the ghost drains the batteries. Old-fashioned compasses and modern infrared thermometers are also useful.
Ghost hunters claim that other hauntings are merely a transient holographic flashback from another dimension or time. However, they also believe that the "intelligent" class of hauntings, more than just echoes from the past, may speak of people and events in the present and therefore require different equipment.
The dead, however, apparently need technical assistance. The $70 Belfry Bat Detector detects infrasound. More common are cassette tapes or digital voice recorders used to record ghosts' whispers. Some ghost hunters prefer low-quality devices, claiming the entities use white noise to create their voices.
The conversation can sound one-sided when researchers ask the spirits questions, but ghost hunters swear they hear words and phrases, known as electronic voice phenomenon (EVP), when they play back the recordings, turn up the volume, and clean up the audio on a computer. Experimenters have edited many of the recordings using software like Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit - Ivellios) or Audacity and uploaded hundreds of EVP sessions to websites.
Lisa and Tom Butler say they've been communicating with the dead through voice recordings for 16 years. The husband-and-wife team runs the Association for Electronic Voice Phenomena, a nonprofit organization whose website receives 2,000 visitors daily. The Butlers claim to achieve audible results in nearly a third of all sessions, enough to warrant some significance.
"This is much more serious than ghost hunting," said Lisa Butler, a retired psychologist. "We have people reaching out to their loved ones through both audio and visual means. Some people are skeptical about it, but it's something you can do for yourself."
Electromagnetic field meter, also known as a ghost meter
A handful of people claim to have invented "dead-phones," a concept first conceived by none other than Thomas Edison. Sharon Leong saw one this spring at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. However, she has no interest in calling the dead.
"As with Ouija boards, at this stage of development, using this device carries certain risks," says Leong. "First of all, how can we be sure that we're hearing the voice of a deceased person, or some demon imitating the voice of a deceased relative?"
Skeptics argue that there are no other concerns besides a waste of time and energy. Benjamin Radford, managing editor of the journal Skeptical Inquirer, has seen phasmophobia, or fear of ghosts, triggered in families by creaking noises in their homes. If ghosts are seeking out true wrongful deaths, Radford wonders, why don't we see more hauntings?
"This whole country is a giant Indian graveyard," Radford says. "People have lived on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, and probably everywhere you step, someone has died at some point." Radford believes that evidence provided by ghost hunters, such as EVP recordings, only misleads impressionable people.
"These are all ambiguous sound stimuli, the equivalent of faces in the clouds. 'I hear someone saying, ' Free me !' Someone else might have said they heard, 'A baby kangaroo!' It's not a message from the other side."
What about the orbs? "They're all reflections of light," Radford says. "As for EMF meter readings, there's no evidence that ghost detectors are picking up anything but EMF readings, which scientific studies have linked to psychological hallucinations, not ghosts."
Throughout history, humans have developed seemingly magical new technologies in a mystical pursuit. During the 19th-century spiritualist movement, fraudsters created double-exposed portraits of self-translucent "spirits." During séances, mediums set up devices in living rooms that tapped out primitive messages in Morse code under tables. In the 1930s, people recorded such sessions on gramophone records.
"In recent years, you have to be very careful with it because spirits communicate on different wavelengths, so people think that if we could pick up infrasound or infrared light using the right devices, then we would hear spirits," says Mary Roach, author of "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife."
Her study found no mainstream scientific research to support the ghost hunters' claims. Still, one-third of Americans believe in ghosts, according to a Gallup poll that found a surge in paranormal activity in the 1980s. Whether the popularity of ghost hunters is fueled by television or not, Roach emphasizes that the trend is both amusing and dangerous.
"These shows are airing on channels like the Discovery Channel, which were originally associated with science," Roach says. "The people who produce these shows are billed as researchers, but they're really just amateurs. I can't stand their work being presented as legitimate, satisfying, and truthful endeavors."
Jeff Belanger, administrator of GhostVillage.com and author of seven books on the paranormal, agrees that ghost hunting denigrates something that can't be measured. "It's like some organizations and individuals trying to strip away the esoteric and spiritual and elevate it to a level of pure science, which isn't always possible when you're looking for something that's beyond our understanding of the universe," Belanger says.
Belanger, however, considers ghost stories valuable for historical scholarship. He believes that interest in the otherworldly increases after catastrophic events. For example, the spiritualist movement coincided with the US Civil War. More recently, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the war in the Middle East may have encouraged more Americans to imagine the afterlife.
“We interrupt the news to broadcast an important message: how we die, and what happens afterward, is one of the greatest mysteries in the universe,” adds Belanger.
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz