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The Problem With British Ghosthunting

DrPaulLee

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Aug 7, 2002
Messages
1,993
An interesting read, posted on the ASSAP facebook page:

This article posits that contemporary 'ghost-hunting', even the more respectable brand beyond 'legend-tripping' and TV spook chasers, has taken a wrong term and abandoned the more reliable approaches of those who pioneered the field. The author believes that today's ghost-hunters are bound by unspoken assumptions of the Paranormal TV genre and that these assumptions are unnecessarily limiting:

READ IT HERE:
https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2019/07/28/who-ya-gonna-call-the-problem-with-british-ghosthunting/
 
I recall reading of a U.S. Govt report on PSI (released under Freedom of Information) although I cannot find it now. Basically, it admitted that PSI was an effect, but one that they could not understand the mechanics of. As such, they could not harness it and therefore it was of no use to the U.S. military.

This, to me, is a failure of science to even bother trying to understand things that could change our world forever.

How does someone go about investigating such things with no theories to go on, to be proved or disproved? I love the idea of such things being investigated, but some kind of framework needs to be built so that serious researchers can sing from the same hymn sheet.

How much knowledge do we have since Arthur Koestler wrote The roots Of Coincidence? That is a genuine question and not a rhetorical one.
 
I agree with Swifty! (Sorry, INT21, you bearded, book-reading codger!) This article brings up points relevant to many aspects of present culture. Definitely worth a separate thread, IMHO. I gave up quickly on the other GH threads because they centered on the TV programs and the personalities on them more than figuring out as much as possible about what was going on. I don't want to watch TV (especially anything that so obviously tries to exploit a viewer's appetite for cheap thrills) because it's a waste of time designed to keep people inert so advertisers can brainwash them into buying crap they don't need.

Two things really stood out for me in this article:
1) How television has shaped people's understanding of the world and their approach to exploring it (dispense with your critical thinking, just try to look cool, don't let anyone become cooler than you are); and
2) reports of haunting, etc, are so widespread that something must be going on, so what it that "something"? It doesn't further science to simply dismiss these phenomena as imagination, lies, misinterpretation, hallucination, whatever—something truly weird is happening, and it would be really interesting to rigorously gather data and try to figure out what it is!
 
I'd started my post before Escargot did which is why her post shows up after mine I assume. I've offered my humble opinion—I'd love to hear what others got out of this article!
 
Right, again. If you want a thread/post moved/merged, you only need to report it or send a message to a moderator. There is also a dedicated thread in Website Issues.

No criticism of those who did so, but please don't post a comment asking for us to do these things on the thread itself.

Multiple reports are not a problem, so don't worry about guessing whether others have already told us.

All such requests/debates now deleted from this thread.
 
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I've mentioned before in another thread that experimental 'ghost hunting' is very similar to fishing .. you wouldn't take a long cast rod with a feather fly on it to go sea fishing or a sea rod to try to catch a trout in a lake ..

Some places we visit are regarded as typically producing weird sounds so we focus on our sound equipment more at those locations .. other places have historically more reported incidents of visual phenomena ..

30 East Drive has the reputation for marbles being chucked around which is why I've bought about a dozen glow in the dark bouncy balls which will be numbered with a sharpie pen. These will be placed apart from each other around the house and the location of each one recorded using a pencil on a sheet of A4 paper on a 3D sketch of the property.
 


Lots of stuff I bought up on the ghosthunting thread is there in the article, but if anything I think I'm missing the point with ghost hunting.

If anything people "investigating" need to actually stop what they are doing and ask themselves what they are trying to do?

I think most youtube groups/posters haven't even figured that out. Also, the "celeb" status of random types, who lack even basic methodology is comical, and yet are considered experts

Ghost hunters are still working on vague models invented during Price's day and yet it's never challenged to see if it's now relevant. Let's face it the old models of ghost hunting have given us f all.

The article doesn't go far enough at all and people need to come up with a new way.
 
Right, again. If you want a thread/post moved/merged, you only need to report it or send a message to a moderator. There is also a dedicated thread in Website Issues.

No criticism of those who did so, but please don't post a comment asking for us to do so on the thread.

Multiple reports are not a problem, so don't worry about guessing whether others have already told us.

All such requests/debates now deleted from this thread.
All I wanted was some hints about what the link entails. I don't click on links I know nothing about.
 
All I wanted was some hints about what the link entails. I don't click on links I know nothing about.
Hi
That wasn’t aimed at you. There are six posts that have been removed which is what Yithian was referring to.
And yes people posting links should indeed give an indication of what is in the link so people can know what they will find there.
 
What I didn’t fully understand is how popular these ‘haunted’ venues are.
30 East Drive looks to be booked for 12 nights this month alone at £60 per person.

You might think that this is not the smartest of business plans, but the waiting list is long and the house is booked solid up to a year in advance as avid ghost hunters clamour to spend the night in the property and get the chance of their own encounter with the black monk.

https://www.hauntedrooms.co.uk/30-east-drive-pontefract-poltergeist-house

I somehow thought these haunts were largely disused but this location looks like a very popular Ghost Tourist venue. What effect this constant stream of strangers has on the house I don’t know. But if I was a spectral resident, I’d be really pissed off nightly and twice on thursdays. The website prompts the visitor with stories of Fred liking marbles and keys. If you’re taking a bag of marbles along, I think you’ve already gone a bit beyond the point of neutral objectivity and are potentially falling into a trap of developing a narrative before you’ve even gone into the place.
 
And I'm not in the habit of posting links to click bait, spurious or scam sites. The title of the thread summed up the contents of the link adequately.

Your contributions here are many and valuable, Paul.

No need for anybody to get into an argument here.

I'll tidy it all up when I get to a real computer.

(Edit: summary sketch added to original post).

Calm blue oceans.
 
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What I didn’t fully understand is how popular these ‘haunted’ venues are.
30 East Drive looks to be booked for 12 nights this month alone at £60 per person.



I somehow thought these haunts were largely disused but this location looks like a very popular Ghost Tourist venue. What effect this constant stream of strangers has on the house I don’t know. But if I was a spectral resident, I’d be really pissed off nightly and twice on thursdays. The website prompts the visitor with stories of Fred liking marbles and keys. If you’re taking a bag of marbles along, I think you’ve already gone a bit beyond the point of neutral objectivity and are potentially falling into a trap of developing a narrative before you’ve even gone into the place.
To be fair though about your marbles point, that's like saying because a team of fishermen take a certain type of bait to a certain type of water where good catches have been recorded using this type of bait before then that would be a flawed approach .. although fish are scientifically proven to exist.
 
And I'm not in the habit of posting links to click bait, spurious or scam sites. The title of the thread summed up the contents of the link adequately.

'who-ya-gonna-call-the-problem-with-british-ghosthunting' doesn't express anything much about the site.
 
Ghost hunters are still working on vague models invented during Price's day and yet it's never challenged to see if it's now relevant. Let's face it the old models of ghost hunting have given us f all.

I hope that I have always challenged it. I think I have. However my point in the article is that we no longer pursue the methods of Price etc, but since 2000 most ghosthunters are influenced by TV.

The article doesn't go far enough at all and people need to come up with a new way.

Yes. This is exactly what I say: we need to devise new methodologies.
 
IbisNibs,

Hey, no worries.
I was only suggesting that the ghosty things all be in one place.
No harm intended.
I just go with the flow. Cool, ....and all that.

INT21 :)
 
. Let's face it the old models of ghost hunting have given us f all.
At the north weald ghost hunt, i was sitting in a carriage listening to the two "sensitives" rambling on, talking to the spirits, and i thought " ooo shut up ffs, what kind of evidence have you ever produced?" the evil side of me instantly came back with "the exact same as you"

The article doesn't go far enough at all and people need to come up with a new way.
But what way? Hilary evans once wrote if truth about ghosts still eludes us because we are asking the wrong questions, but what are the right questions?
Yes. This is exactly what I say: we need to devise new methodologies.
Again, what can they be? i am perfectly happy sitting quietly, voice recorder running and note book at hand, only concerned with getting a personal experience, but for those interested in the bigger picture how can they employ new, improved scientific methods?
 
I have argued until I'm blue in the face that Ghost hunting methodology is totally wrong and is just copied from what people have seen on TV. My main gripe is night vision IR cameras, EMF meters and Zoom/Digital recorders.

Can any one person tell me why we do ghost hunting in the dark? With an IR camera? The arguments I have heard so far is that the camera can pick up things happening in the IR spectrum as well as the normally visible so it's easier to see ghosts. Says who? Anyone who has ever reported a ghost sighting or encounter did so with their own eyes under various lighting conditions, not sitting in the pitch black for 6 hours, fatigued and peering through the lens of a Sony Camcorder with a built in IR illuminator.
 
To be fair though about your marbles point, that's like saying because a team of fishermen take a certain type of bait to a certain type of water where good catches have been recorded using this type of bait before then that would be a flawed approach .. although fish are scientifically proven to exist.


Well at least do it with the correct scientific gear....

1564437572244.jpeg
 
Zoom/Digital recorders.
surely the only kit that could be useful/trusted ?

we did a paranormal night @manchestermuseum, mentioned here ... and a digital recorder i placed on a stairwell in one of the main exhibit spaces (which everyone then vacated for elsewhere in the building) seemed to capture a discarnate breath, full inhale/exhale, 4 minutes into a 20 odd minute take

i kept in touch with the group in an effort to obtain the recording (shouldve just taken it home) but they showed hardly any interest in it, and i bet erased it !
 
2) reports of haunting, etc, are so widespread that something must be going on, so what it that "something"? It doesn't further science to simply dismiss these phenomena as imagination, lies, misinterpretation, hallucination, whatever—something truly weird is happening, and it would be really interesting to rigorously gather data and try to figure out what it is!

I've long speculated that 'what is going on' is the same thing that brought a boom in U.S. spirituism in the 1860s, the explosion of ghost stories and the birth of psychical research in the UK is the late 1880s and early 1990s and a surge in the membership of spiritualist churches in Europe in the 1920s: crises of faith. Only today's crisis extends not only to dwindling church congregations but to 'faith' in almost all of the institutions and authorities that society is constructed around: the government, the media, education, the church, the courts, household brands, the rich, the wealthy and the famous etc.

On the one hand, ghost-hunting is seductive as pure escapism, while on the other people yearn to uncover something fundamental, something that cannot be sullied or washed away as 'all that was solid melts into air' as the modernists have it.

Controversial, I know, but I've often wished for a statistical survey of interest/creedence in the (various branches of) supernatural according to race, class, wealth and religion. I have a sneaking suspicion that in the first-world we may be looking at a surprisingly niche and disproportionately amplified concern. Those who come from religious backgrounds currently in more bullish form will, I think, be found to have less time for such interests and pursuits, and there will, of course, be a strong correlation between these backgrounds and racial ethnicities. At the same all groups should still be susceptible to the kind of secularised crises of trust I sketched above, so the overall picture won't be a simple one.

I could probably express this all in simpler terms, but I don't want my words stripped of their caveats and presented as being: ghost-hunters are twitchy and unfulfilled whites while the less effete religions of the blacks and brown societies already serve up their fill of grotesque yet reassuring marvels.

It's a bit more nuanced than that.

But we are all neurotic.

Even the less-neurotic of us.
 
Well at least do it with the correct scientific gear....

View attachment 19248
Zoinks

edit .. marble caught on camera being thrown from the far side of an empty room in 30 East Drive .. the angle it travels from seems to rule out fakery/ someone hiding behind the door unless it was a ricochet .. for some reason she's uploaded this vid with the timing going backwards so keep watching to what is shown as minus 13;40

 
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What I didn’t fully understand is how popular these ‘haunted’ venues are.
30 East Drive looks to be booked for 12 nights this month alone at £60 per person.

The factious part of my brain never shuts up. When I read :
dating app.jpg

I immediately thought "there's a dating app in there!" (if it hasn't already been made and marketed).
And don't forget your Scooby snacks!
 
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I've long speculated that 'what is going on' is the same thing that brought a boom in U.S. spirituism in the 1860s, the explosion of ghost stories and the birth of psychical research in the UK is the late 1880s and early 1990s and a surge in the membership of spiritualist churches in Europe in the 1920s: crises of faith. Only today's crisis extends not only to dwindling church congregations but to 'faith' in almost all of the institutions and authorities that society is constructed around: the government, the media, education, the church, the courts, household brands, the rich, the wealthy and the famous etc.

On the one hand, ghost-hunting is seductive as pure escapism, while on the other people yearn to uncover something fundamental, something that cannot be sullied or washed away as 'all that was solid melts into air' as the modernists have it.

Controversial, I know, but I've often wished for a statistical survey of interest/creedence in the (various branches of) supernatural according to race, class, wealth and religion. I have a sneaking suspicion that in the first-world we may be looking at a surprisingly niche and disproportionately amplified concern. Those who come from religious backgrounds currently in more bullish form will, I think, be found to have less time for such interests and pursuits, and there will, of course, be a strong correlation between these backgrounds and racial ethnicities. At the same all groups should still be susceptible to the kind of secularised crises of trust I sketched above, so the overall picture won't be a simple one.

I could probably express this all in simpler terms, but I don't want my words stripped of their caveats and presented as being: ghost-hunters are twitchy and unfulfilled whites while the less effete religions of the blacks and brown societies already serve up their fill of grotesque yet reassuring marvels.

It's a bit more nuanced than that.

But we are all neurotic.

Even the less-neurotic of us.

A bit woolly but I see the point. On the subject of culture, I once started a thread here on the scarcity of French ghosts. A French friend told me they did away with all that sort of thinking in the Revolution. A brief look at French ghosts will point out that pockets of supernatural belief still hang on around the northern, more celtic areas but traditionally it’s thin fare. French forum members, feel free to correct me on all this.

Anyway, I found this while looking for french ghost shows...

The “ghost show” concept is quite unknown in France. Once in a while we see French versions of well known North American series, though none on French national channels and none on Region 2 DVD. The French people are therefore not very familiar with this type of program. It is a type of entertainment that is unknown in France, but with the success of films such as Paranormal Activity and “found footage” movies, French people are ready to appreciate these types of documentaries. It was the perfect time to create the first French paranormal show.

http://www.deadcrossroads.com/press/4567281535

Although this quote is from 2012, it’s worth remembering Most Haunted had been going since 2002.
 
Zoinks

edit .. marble caught on camera being thrown from the far side of an empty room in 30 East Drive .. the angle it travels from seems to rule out fakery/ someone hiding behind the door unless it was a ricochet .. for some reason she's uploaded this vid with the timing going backwards so keep watching to what is shown as minus 13;40



Where is the trajectory of the marble caught on film? I missed it. Iooked at 13:40, couldn't see it.
 
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