The new horror film "Paranormal Activity 3" features another set of amateur ghost hunters trying to document evidence of paranormal activity through the use of home video cameras.
The twitchy, grainy video images of demons and ghosts have scared up hundreds of millions of dollars in box office gold in two previous installments of the low-budget franchise.
It's all good fun for spooky cinematic scares. But what about in the real world?
Between one-third and one-half of Americans believe in ghosts, and that belief motivates many to look for evidence of the paranormal. Researcher Sharon Hill of the Doubtful Newsblog counted about 2,000 active amateur ghost hunting groups in America. Almost all of them are patterned directly after the hit SyFy TV show Ghost Hunters, which is now in its eighth season of failing to find good evidence of ghosts.
Despite the efforts of thousands of real-life ghost hunters over the past decade, the evidence for ghosts has not improved. Typically the types of evidence offered for the paranormal falls into a few categories:
1) Personal Experiences
Ghost hunters often report personal feelings and experiences like, "I felt we were being watched," or "I felt like something didn't want us there." They also describe, for example, getting goose bumps upon entering a room, or panicking at some unseen presence. There's nothing wrong with personal experiences, but they are not evidence of anything other than that people scare themselves in dark, spooky places.
2) Orbs
Many ghost hunters and books on hauntings claim that ghosts can be photographed, and appear as round or oval white shapes called orbs. Many things can create orbs, including insects, dust, and flash reflections. Orbs may seem otherworldly because they appear only in photographs and are usually invisible to the naked eye. To those unaware of the real explanation they can be spooky, but there is nothing paranormal about them.
3) Ghost Equipment Results
Ghost investigators often use unscientific and unproven equipment and techniques in their search for spirits. Some use psychics to try and communicate with ghosts. Others use dowsing rods, which have never been scientifically proven to find anything (including water and restless spirits). Still others, striving for some semblance of science, use high-tech devices such as electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors and infrared cameras.
These devices are commonly sold as ghost hunting gear, but there is no logical or scientific reason to use this equipment when looking for the paranormal. EMF detectors measure electromagnetic fields, not ghosts; infrared cameras reveal the infrared spectrum, not ghosts. There is no evidence that ghosts have anything to do with electromagnetic fields, infrared images, ions, temperature drops, etc.
4) Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)
Most ghost hunters, including the Ghost Hunters team, use handheld voice recorders in an attempt to capture a supposed ghost voice, or EVP. Often the investigator holds it while standing in the middle of a room and addressing the supposed spirit, or while walking around. They later go back and review the recordings at high volume, listening for any faint murmurs, sounds, or noises, which they may interpret as ghost voices. For example a ghost hunter may ask out loud, "If there's a spirit here, what's your name?"
Often they will get no answer at all; other times, if they wait long enough they'll hear some random sound that could be interpreted as a faint, mumbled name: "Mary." (Or maybe Terry, Kerry, Larry, or Barry—never mind the fact that, as disembodied spirits, ghosts presumably do not have vocal cords, a tongue, or a mouth that would allow them to speak.)
The problem is that microphones are very sensitive, and may record anything from someone whispering in the next room, to wind blowing, ordinary random sounds from the environment, or even sounds from the ghost hunters themselves. There's no mystery about what causes EVPs, and it has nothing to do with ghosts. EVPs are created by a well-understood psychological process called apophenia, which causes people to "hear" distinct sounds in random white noise patterns such as the background static in an audio recording (like hearing the doorbell or the telephone while one is in the shower).
The same way that the human brain allows us to "recognize" random patterns like faces in clouds, our brains allow us to hear words and phrases in random sounds that aren't really there. In fact EVPs can be easily heard and induced in laboratory experiments; no ghosts required.
Read more at Discovery News
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