Let me recuse myself right off the bat: I believe in
ghosts. I believe in faeries. I believe in entities which are not and never
have been human but which co-exist with us.
This is why I don’t mess around with them.
But I enjoy watching stories of people who do. So I watch Ghost Hunters, My Ghost Story,
Celebrity Ghost Stories and other documentary type shows on the
supernatural. For the record, I believe
that Ghost Hunters is the best show out there for paranormal
investigation. They’re tough on their
evidence and not too credulous.
I believe but I think some people out there are a little too
eager to find “evidence.” Most of the
time when I listen to EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena), I just hear
static. I look at photos and see motes
of dust and lens flare where others insist there are ectoplasmic orbs. Humans are incredibly good at finding
patterns and we tend to try and make random images and noises into familiar
patterns: faces and voices. It’s a
phenomena called matrixing and it’s been proved scientifically. So just because you think you see something,
it doesn’t mean something was actually there.
Aside from over-eagerness, I also wonder at some of the
evidence captured. I was watching one
show which had put a night-vision camera in a woman’s bedroom while she
slept. As she’s sleeping, a creature
jumps onto the bed out of the electronic “noise” at the edge of the image. I have cats and it looked exactly like a cat
jumping onto the bed but misjudging and sliding off. The show claimed the woman didn’t have cats
or any other pets. Okay. But the fact that the image jumps out of the
noise also makes it a little suspect to me.
Of course, I’m also willing to accept that supernatural activity does
seem to play havoc with electronics, so perhaps the “noise” is the result of
the paranormal. But I don’t think that’s
it.
Another too-good-to-be-true image captured was found with a
set of cameras set up by paranormal investigators in the house of an elderly
man and woman who had been having frightening experiences. In the footage, you see a solid dark figure
walking across the open door in the hallway.
It pauses, comes back as if to peer into the bedroom, walks back across
the doorway, pauses again, then continues on its original path and goes down
the stairs. The image is very low
resolution. I have to wonder if it was
faked, someone in the house in dark clothing.
It seems too solid and interacts with the floor just like a regular
person would.
Sometimes when I’m watching these shows, I will start to get
creeping tingles crawling up my upper arms and my back. It’s an entirely subjective opinion, but I
believe those goosebumps tell me when I’m seeing something which is actually
paranormal. In a standard show with four
or five stories, I might get the goosebumps for one of them. Neither of the two examples above gave me
goosebumps. I’ve noticed a trend with
them. I’m more likely to get goosebumps
with stories where the people involved don’t have very clear physical
“evidence.” I don’t think it’s easy to
get physical evidence. I think the
nature of the supernatural prevents it.
The guys from Ghost Hunters talk about different types of
ghosts and hauntings and their definitions make sense to me and match my own
experiences:
Residual hauntings: where an image or apparition repeats the
same action over and over, without interacting with people. These aren’t conscious, more the psychic
equivalent of a snapshot or video clip.
Ghosts: a spirit which is able to interact with the
living. These are the ones which make me
sad because the thought of an intelligent sentient person being trapped without
being able to communicate or escape is terrifying. It would be awful.
Non-human spirits: a spirit which interacts but does not
appear to be human. I’m of two minds
about this. It could be non-human, since
I don’t think we’re the only sentient beings in the universe. Or it could be a spirit which has been
disembodied so long that it has forgotten being human. These spirits are often very agitated and
seem to feed off fear.
I don’t claim to be a particular expert in this field but
there are things which just make sense to me.
I believe there is more in this world than we understand. And I think we ignore it or turn it into
party games at our peril.
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