The Thorne and District Gazette ran a story recently about how a reporter for the paper spent some time with ‘professional ghost hunters’ at Cusworth Hall which is rumoured to be haunted. When reading the piece and watching the accompanying video it becomes clear very quickly that the alleged professional ghost hunters are, in fact, a ghost tourism organisation called Simply Ghost Nights.
I call them a ghost tourism organisation as it’s difficult to find another way to describe groups like Simply Ghost Nights because, although most ghost tourism organisations present themselves as paranormal research teams or present their ghost hunts as a form of paranormal research, what actually occurs when they’re at a venue is anything but research or ghost hunting.
Such groups tend to focus on presenting evidence of ghosts to their paying public. Their approach is closed minded… and it has become increasingly popular.
When I first started ghost hunting in 2005 there was one ghost tourism company in the UK who made it clear their events were for entertainment. In recent years the dozens of ghost hunting teams who have branched out into tourism events have muddied the water substantially with their claims of being serious researchers while running ghost themed entertainment evenings.
You can often ‘book’ onto events without being members of their ghost hunting groups, yet often it will be the same people who attend the events as a way of spreading the cost of visiting popular venues that charge. Either way, their time spent at supposedly haunted places is not an investigation of any sort, and is a thrill seeking ghost adventure in which popular paranormal television shows such as Most Haunted and Ghost Adventures are re-enacted. These groups tend to enter a venue with their mind already made up about the haunting and just want to communicate with ghosts while playing the role of ‘investigator’. There is limited time at the venue and so they have to make the most of what they’ve paid for.
I was a ghost hunter for about two years before I learned the errors of my reasoning (I’ve been working to improve myself as a researcher ever since.) Our ghost hunts never resembled what seems to be the norm of today. We very rarely paid (only when visiting the premises of a charity, to help cover staffing costs etc. incurred because of our visit), we very rarely visited locations that others had investigated, and when we did there had only ever been one or two teams there previously. We also didn’t wear combat boots (more on that later.)
Today ghost hunting has morphed into something weirder where adventure and bravado seems to be at the core of what many modern groups do. It never used to be normal for ghost hunting groups to also host ghost hunting events for the public but it seems almost mainstream for that to happen now which surely causes a conflict of interest? How can you claim to conduct unbiased research if you’ve got members of the public who have paid for a night of thrill-seeking?
It’s all about the utility vests…
Ghost hunting shows hold a huge influence over modern ghost hunters and their methodology, standards, approach and even how they dress, which should indicate what their priorities are. Your priorities are either decent research with good methodology and a code of ethics, or visiting the popular locations like everyone else, taking the general public with you for a cost, using the popular gadgets, and looking the part in your matching clothing and utility vests. The image above, for example, shows the Ghost Adventures team from US television to the left and on the right a British ghost hunting team The Ghostfinder Paranormal Society who claim on their site to be ‘an experienced group of professional ghost hunters and paranormal experts that operate across most parts of the United Kingdom investigating reports of hauntings, poltergeists, residual energy and all forms of paranormal or supernatural phenomena’ while also hosting a range of public ghost hunting events.
Ghost Hunters of Stoke on Trent’s science-y equipment demands respect!
The equipment and methods used by ghost hunters to help them find ghosts and to communicate with them are also inspired by television shows who promote which equipment works best. A while ago I bought a Ghost Laser Grid as a joke after it was featured on the US television show Ghost Hunters and yet ghost hunting team after ghost hunting team uses the device as part of their “research”. The same can be said of the Ovilus device which it is claimed translates Electro-Magnetic fluctuations into messages from spirit. This device is often used on Ghost Adventures, and as a result is extremely popular with ghost hunting teams.
Neither of these devices (nor the dozens of others) are actually able to contribute to paranormal research and instead simply feed into the biases of those using them. After all, a meter will only read what it is designed to read – it’s how the person who uses the devices interprets the reading that makes the difference between it being considered normal or abnormal.
The picture to the right shows some equipment used by the Ghost Hunters of Stoke on Trent. None of this equipment does what ghost hunters and ghost hunting television shows claims it does in the search for evidence of ghosts. I presume that this team search for evidence because there is also an automatic writing board on the table and that has no place in unbiased research. From their website equipment page you can also see they have a Spring Ouija Board – one of the latest pieces of equipment to be released.
I don’t believe it is possible to act this way – to follow pop-culture trends – and have a scientific methodology at the heart of what you do, yet this is what so many of these teams, groups and organisations claim. It’s fine to want to be like your heroes from television, but television tends to be for entertainment purposes. Paranormal themed television programs are marketed towards those with a vested interest in paranormal subjects and will tell the audience what they want to hear so that they carry on watching the show.
As a result, the science presented in these shows is often not accurate and is distorted to fit with the core message of the show – that ghosts/monsters/aliens/fairies exist. When people re-enact what they see on television without realising that it’s a parody of actual science because they haven’t thought to conduct some research into the claims from the shows it furthers the problem of psuedo-scientific paranormal research. It saddens me that when people think of paranormal research they think of these ghost hunting groups instead of the decent multi-disciplinary research being conducted into all sorts of strange phenomena across the globe.
Last year I wrote a blog post called ‘The Ghost Hunters are alright‘ after I attended the Seriously Strange conference and saw first hand how many paranormal researchers present wanted to be good researchers with sound methodologies. I concluded that the ghost hunters were alright and that progress would come from within the paranormal research field when it came to improving standards.
The researchers I spoke of were not these Television Clones who halt that progress. The television clones are not alright.
Television Clones: When Ghost Hunting Goes BAD!
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