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'Ghost Hunting' Shows Are Getting So Bad That It's Beyond Amusing

When Most Haunted started showing, it was new, it was fresh (even though there had been programmes aired regarding Ghosts prior to this one) & the format was different to anything else that had been shown (hence its large following) & I was hooked, but after so many Seasons & it seemed like `same old, same old` it did entertain.

Now they are all over the place, one channel on a Friday has one after the other, after the other showing similar shows but their formats are slightly different.

The American shows seem to repeat the same footage again (& again) with dramatic music to emphasise the point further.

Even though Most Haunted is a bit dated now, its still the original & the best for me, its had some moments which did have you on the edge of your seat in hope that some spook would indeed appear right in front of the lens in a darkened room & in its early days (Seasons 1 - 6ish) the team, Yvette & of course Derek (R.I.P.) had you `hooked` & wanting more with anticipation of next weeks episodes. Then of course there was the live shows - especially the Dover Castle & St Pancras (Hotel) ones.

This show set a president for further shows (UK & US) & I don't think well hit the dizzy heights of these type shows again as we did with Most Haunted.

That's unless someone `catches a ghost`...…….that would be well worth a watch...……...
 
Vardoger said:
Ghost Asylum is OK to watch, but they make a stupid trap which is supposed to trap a ghost in every episode. Once they seemingly did catch something weird in a mirror trap which showed something moving around in the mirrors, including an eye. Can't really take the sequences with the trap building and use seriously.
Click to expand...

There's an interesting little essay here about the 'spookification' of asylums and the cynical/ignorant conflation of the mentally ill with the possessed. In a sense, we never really got away from this, but I--not one for hand-wringing social angst--agree that there's something unsavoury about the re-emergence of the trend.

Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum
By SARAH HANDLEY-COUSINS • October 29, 2015

This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, New York, opened its doors for tours — one day only, with no advance sale tickets. I immediately made plans to make the two-hour drive — after all, for the past few years, I’ve been working on a project that touches on institutionalized Union veterans, and many of my subjects lived, and died, at Willard. The opportunity to see the asylum was rare: the grounds still house a correctional facility, so security on the campus is tight, and most of the buildings sit locked and empty. I was eager for the opportunity see where so many of my old soldiers lived out their lives, and to visit their graves.

I left bright and early from Buffalo and arrived in Ovid with plenty of time before the tour. But instead of getting my ticket, I found myself at a dead stop, just before the asylum grounds, in a line of hundreds of cars. There is nothing else in Ovid (no offense, Ovidians), so it was pretty clear that the traffic was for the tour. Within a few minutes, state troopers arrived to direct traffic, and it became clear that no one was getting in to see the asylum — there were just too many people. I waited in line for half an hour before a trooper turned me around and sent me, grumpy and disappointed, back to Buffalo.

I spent the rest of my drive pondering what on earth had caused hundreds and hundreds of people to show up on a Saturday morning to go on a tour of an old mental institution. I discovered later that nearly 4000 people tried to get tours, up from less than 500 the year before. Visitors had swarmed the grounds, causing property damage and sneaking into areas of the campus that were closed to tours. Were there really thousands of folks so excited about New York State history or local landmarks that they would flood a tiny village to take a building tour?

When I got home, some research revealed what attracted so many to the tour: the paranormal. The Travel Channel’s Destination Fear had run a short segment on the asylum, featuring two employees of the correctional facility campus describing vaguely creepy events, such as the suspicion that the ghost of a red-haired nurse-turned-patient wandered the halls. When the tour of the asylum was announced, news had apparently traveled through local ghost-hunting circles. Most of the folks who had lined up by the thousands to tour the old asylum weren’t interested at all in the history of asylums — they were hoping to see a ghost.

Essay Continues:
https://nursingclio.org/2015/10/29/...not-the-troubling-rise-of-the-haunted-asylum/
 
The shows would be much better if:

1. they never used a "medium" or other bullshit person with "special" gifts.

2. didn't fake evidence.

3. didn't use cheesey music at all in edited investigations they put on tv.

4. stop using xbox kinect as it's bullshit, it's not detecting ghosts, it's a crappy sensor.

5. stop using those "spirit" boxes as all they do is cycle between radio frequencies and occasionally briefly tune to a station to get a word or half a word with the "professional" tools claim is a ghost talking.

6. cancel ghost adventures.
 
tagemoss said:
The shows would be much better if:

1. they never used a "medium" or other bullshit person with "special" gifts.

2. didn't fake evidence.

3. didn't use cheesey music at all in edited investigations they put on tv.

4. stop using xbox kinect as it's bullshit, it's not detecting ghosts, it's a crappy sensor.

5. stop using those "spirit" boxes as all they do is cycle between radio frequencies and occasionally briefly tune to a station to get a word or half a word with the "professional" tools claim is a ghost talking.

6. cancel ghost adventures.
Click to expand...
And a lot of those points could also apply to those who go ghost hunting.
 
tagemoss said:
The shows would be much better if:

1. they never used a "medium" or other bullshit person with "special" gifts.

2. didn't fake evidence.

3. didn't use cheesey music at all in edited investigations they put on tv.

4. stop using xbox kinect as it's bullshit, it's not detecting ghosts, it's a crappy sensor.

5. stop using those "spirit" boxes as all they do is cycle between radio frequencies and occasionally briefly tune to a station to get a word or half a word with the "professional" tools claim is a ghost talking.

6. cancel ghost adventures.
Click to expand...
Zak Bagans will probably continue with Ghost Adventures until he's 90 y.o. Too much money in it.

Does not totally agree on the kinect thing. It's an interesting tool. Spirit boxes are boring. I liked the geo boxes they used on Paranormal Lockdown.
 
Vardoger said:
Does not totally agree on the kinect thing. It's an interesting tool.
Click to expand...
I didn't understand the reason why these items always seemed to show a stick figure until I found out how Kinect works in gaming technology. It is to find the gameplayer and to portray her/his movements onto screen.

Now that I know that, I don't believe it is of any use for detecting anything except points that will connect together to form a stick figure. It's like connecting 3 random spots (no not in a straight line) and, omg it's a triangle!
 
Exactly, someone just hooked it up to a pc / latop and routed the sensor data through some software, the kinect sensor trying to work out if there's a player in the room and failing, does the same thing when hooked up to a console.

it's why it was phased out because it sucked, gimmicky poor mans vr without the vr.

All the gadgets are useless and just invented to rip off people who think they are ghost hunting.

Best and only things worth using are;

1. a camera

2. a voice recorder

3. maybe a temp monitor

but nothing else as it's all unproven / useless tech.

maybe if they went back to the basics they might look less stupid.
 
The Kinect is a bit unreliable, it does not always detect what it should.
When I worked at a digital whiteboard company, developers experimented with one to see if it could be used to control a whiteboard.
After lots of work, the developers finally gave up - because of the inconsistent responses we were getting from the Kinect.
 
Yithian said:
There's an interesting little essay here about the 'spookification' of asylums and the cynical/ignorant conflation of the mentally ill with the possessed. In a sense, we never really got away from this, but I--not one for hand-wringing social angst--agree that there's something unsavoury about the re-emergence of the trend.

Ghosts are Scary, Disabled People are Not: The Troubling Rise of the Haunted Asylum
By SARAH HANDLEY-COUSINS • October 29, 2015

This past spring, the defunct Willard Psychiatric Center (previously known as the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane) in Ovid, New York, opened its doors for tours — one day only, with no advance sale tickets. I immediately made plans to make the two-hour drive — after all, for the past few years, I’ve been working on a project that touches on institutionalized Union veterans, and many of my subjects lived, and died, at Willard. The opportunity to see the asylum was rare: the grounds still house a correctional facility, so security on the campus is tight, and most of the buildings sit locked and empty. I was eager for the opportunity see where so many of my old soldiers lived out their lives, and to visit their graves.

I left bright and early from Buffalo and arrived in Ovid with plenty of time before the tour. But instead of getting my ticket, I found myself at a dead stop, just before the asylum grounds, in a line of hundreds of cars. There is nothing else in Ovid (no offense, Ovidians), so it was pretty clear that the traffic was for the tour. Within a few minutes, state troopers arrived to direct traffic, and it became clear that no one was getting in to see the asylum — there were just too many people. I waited in line for half an hour before a trooper turned me around and sent me, grumpy and disappointed, back to Buffalo.

I spent the rest of my drive pondering what on earth had caused hundreds and hundreds of people to show up on a Saturday morning to go on a tour of an old mental institution. I discovered later that nearly 4000 people tried to get tours, up from less than 500 the year before. Visitors had swarmed the grounds, causing property damage and sneaking into areas of the campus that were closed to tours. Were there really thousands of folks so excited about New York State history or local landmarks that they would flood a tiny village to take a building tour?

When I got home, some research revealed what attracted so many to the tour: the paranormal. The Travel Channel’s Destination Fear had run a short segment on the asylum, featuring two employees of the correctional facility campus describing vaguely creepy events, such as the suspicion that the ghost of a red-haired nurse-turned-patient wandered the halls. When the tour of the asylum was announced, news had apparently traveled through local ghost-hunting circles. Most of the folks who had lined up by the thousands to tour the old asylum weren’t interested at all in the history of asylums — they were hoping to see a ghost.

Essay Continues:
https://nursingclio.org/2015/10/29/...not-the-troubling-rise-of-the-haunted-asylum/
Click to expand...

It's lack of education regarding mental illness which is still ongoing.

I don't think it's the inpatients being scary or horrifying it's more about the conditions they lived in. The lack of any medication except for opioids, chloral hydrate, and then the barbiturates is terrible.

To manage aggressive or agitated behavior staff resorted to horrific, by our standards and probably pretty horrific for the times, interventions. Brute force, restraint, and isolation would have been common practice.

In this environment, the patients get stripped of their humanity and their behavior escalates as a way of releasing the daily horror they are exposed to.

Also, psychosurgery and other bonkers interventions were common.


The quest to be titillated seems to make up a large part of why modern ghost hunters do what they do.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
It's lack of education regarding mental illness which is still ongoing.

I don't think it's the inpatients being scary or horrifying it's more about the conditions they lived in. The lack of any medication except for opioids, chloral hydrate, and then the barbiturates is terrible.

To manage aggressive or agitated behavior staff resorted to horrific, by our standards and probably pretty horrific for the times, interventions. Brute force, restraint, and isolation would have been common practice.

In this environment, the patients get stripped of their humanity and their behavior escalates as a way of releasing the daily horror they are exposed to.

Also, psychosurgery and other bonkers interventions were common.


The quest to be titillated seems to make up a large part of why modern ghost hunters do what they do.
Click to expand...
I wish we had a 90% like option, an excellent post, but the last two sentences are far to sweeping, for some people who go ghost hunting its a search for answers , a never-ending and seldom rewarded quest for a clue in the riddle of life.
 
titch said:
I wish we had a 90% like option, an excellent post, but the last two sentences are far to sweeping, for some people who go ghost hunting its a search for answers , a never-ending and seldom rewarded quest for a clue in the riddle of life.
Click to expand...

I wonder why ghost hunters need to go into old abandoned mental places in the first place?

dead mad people - obviously gonna produce more ghosts.

why's that?
 
Here is a definitive article on why the Xbox Kinect is more than "a bit unreliable". https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-xbox-kinect-and-paranormal-investigation/ IMO, ghost hunters use gadgets because they take advantage of their flaws and use any anomaly to suggest something paranormal, which is absurd, misleading, and the opposite of scientific.

Regarding mental hospitals, there is quite a bit of literature now on how we use ghosts and hauntings as a way to connect to the past, sometimes attempting to understand what awful things were done to people and maybe come to terms with it. It can go to the point of reinterpreting history based on fictitious stories (there are a lot of those associated with haunted places) which is not altogether great, but people are affected by stories.

It does make sense to me that we can get a sense of satisfaction in the ghost stories from these places because they provide a way in which it appears we acknowledge the disgraceful actions and ease the sense of horror associated with this human suffering from the past. For those who believe they can communicate with the tortured spirits, it feels like a vindication that they can sympathize, and even apologize; some think they can perform the ultimate service by then freeing the soul from the place. In other words, it's not about the ghost, it's about us.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
I wonder why ghost hunters need to go into old abandoned mental places in the first place?

dead mad people - obviously gonna produce more ghosts.

why's that?
Click to expand...
If mad people die then come back as ghosts, are they still mad?
Released from their bodies, they are no longer victims of chemical and physical imbalances, so surely they'd become sane?
 
Naughty_Felid said:
I wonder why ghost hunters need to go into old abandoned mental places in the first place?

dead mad people - obviously gonna produce more ghosts.

why's that?
Click to expand...
Well in my case because newsham hospital and orphanage was recommended to me by two separate people who knew of my interest in ghosts, I have been 5 or 6 times and haven't considered laughing at dead mad people.
 
tagemoss said:
The shows would be much better if:

1. they never used a "medium" or other bullshit person with "special" gifts.

2. didn't fake evidence.

3. didn't use cheesey music at all in edited investigations they put on tv.

4. stop using xbox kinect as it's bullshit, it's not detecting ghosts, it's a crappy sensor.

5. stop using those "spirit" boxes as all they do is cycle between radio frequencies and occasionally briefly tune to a station to get a word or half a word with the "professional" tools claim is a ghost talking.

6. cancel ghost adventures.
Click to expand...

Absolutely. I was enjoying the Ghost Chasers' feature about the true crime museum in Hastings and its fascinating association with Aleister Crowley - until the medium started hamming it up.

But has any ghost hunting TV show ever played it straight and relied purely on scientific evidence?
I suspect not, as it wouldn't have much to show at the end of each episode.
 
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Sharon Hill said:
Here is a definitive article on why the Xbox Kinect is more than "a bit unreliable". https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-xbox-kinect-and-paranormal-investigation/ IMO, ghost hunters use gadgets because they take advantage of their flaws and use any anomaly to suggest something paranormal, which is absurd, misleading, and the opposite of scientific.

Regarding mental hospitals, there is quite a bit of literature now on how we use ghosts and hauntings as a way to connect to the past, sometimes attempting to understand what awful things were done to people and maybe come to terms with it. It can go to the point of reinterpreting history based on fictitious stories (there are a lot of those associated with haunted places) which is not altogether great, but people are affected by stories.

It does make sense to me that we can get a sense of satisfaction in the ghost stories from these places because they provide a way in which it appears we acknowledge the disgraceful actions and ease the sense of horror associated with this human suffering from the past. For those who believe they can communicate with the tortured spirits, it feels like a vindication that they can sympathize, and even apologize; some think they can perform the ultimate service by then freeing the soul from the place. In other words, it's not about the ghost, it's about us.
Click to expand...
Ha! That was a very interesting read, 'Sharon.'
Though I would suggest that their word of 'Paranormalists,' be altered to 'paramisinformationalists' given the in depth workings of their so-called ghost detecting gismos and electronic gadgetry!
 
Naughty_Felid said:
I wonder why ghost hunters need to go into old abandoned mental places in the first place?

dead mad people - obviously gonna produce more ghosts.

why's that?
Click to expand...
I wonder why we don't hear about haunted crematoriums? .. peoples ashes are stored there and rarely given straight to relatives on the day.
 
I've been bored and watching Haunt ME on YouTube. It's ok as entertainment, but I am baffled at how they think that they can hear all these words and sentences in garbled noise from evps. It's just hearing what you're looking for. And don't get me started on the spirit box! Maybe they rely on it less in the latest season.
 
HypnosMetis said:
I've been bored and watching Haunt ME on YouTube. It's ok as entertainment, but I am baffled at how they think that they can hear all these words and sentences in garbled noise from evps. It's just hearing what you're looking for. And don't get me started on the spirit box! Maybe they rely on it less in the latest season.
Click to expand...
Aural equivalent of pareidolia.
 
Vardoger said:
Ghost Asylum is OK to watch, but they make a stupid trap which is supposed to trap a ghost in every episode.
Click to expand...

Oh my god yes... myself and my mam used to laugh about this every episode. And the way they often said: 'maybe we caught it and it got out on the way back'. Give me a break. :rollingw:
 
kamalktk said:
The ghosts have already left the body by the time it arrives there?
Click to expand...
I'd imagine so. I follow Caitlin Doherty (Ask a Mortician) on You Tube and have her semi-autobiography "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes"* which is very good. She pointed out that the biggest hurdle to pass was the revulsion of dead bodies. She didn't mention being worried about feeling a tap on her shoulder ... :)

* Available online, highly recommended.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
I wonder why ghost hunters need to go into old abandoned mental places in the first place?

dead mad people - obviously gonna produce more ghosts.

why's that?
Click to expand...

I would hazard a guess that an awful lot of very large abandoned buildings used to be either mental institutions or hospitals.

ie, it's not the use that the buildings were put to, it's the fact that they are large, cavernous, unfurnished and abandoned. Going into an abandoned block of flats would probably produce the same results among the 'ghost hunters' - but blocks of flats tend to be demolished almost immediately. Given the locations of past mental institutions and hospitals (out in the sticks), they can often languish for longer before being put to a new use.
 
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