I <3 Brian Dunning.

inFact: Ghost Hunting

Listen to this awesome podcast (embedded at the end of this post) from the guys at HowStuffWorks discussing ghost hunter equipment in a real life, I-actually-understand-electronics-and-science way. Oooooh, this made me sooooo freakin’ happy.

Here is a text article to go along with it:  Ghost Detecting Equipment

I found this goodness via Ryan Johnson’s article on Skepticblog. Let me quote from him quoting them:

I found some really great videos by YouTuber HauntedHoax. He is all about the ghost busting, debunking and hoaxing for educational purposes.

The nice thing is that his videos are also entertaining. A lot of skeptic videos that try to be funny usually fail. I don’t know why, but the humor is just lame. This guy does it right.

Check out his channel here for all his videos:  http://www.youtube.com/user/HauntedHoax

I’ll embed two of my favorites below:

First a funny one:

And a serious debunk:

Update Jan 20, 2010: The sexy ghost photo story has been revealed to be a hoax perpetrated by the Ghost Tour company in collusion with the guy who took the photo. Full story here: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1002032/tour-company-knew-truth-behind-ghost-photo

Original post follows:

I’m late to the party on this story. I saw the original story in my news feed and put it off to the side to review in-depth later.  Before I could, the whole thing got debunked.

I remember back in my days of being a credulous youngster reading the “true ghost” books. They would include a section on poltergeist phenomena and invariably mention that such occurences often seem to focus around a child or teen living in the house. The books would state that the poltergeists must be somehow attached or attracted to the kids or that the kids somehow exuded the poltergeist energy.

In retrospect, it makes WAY more sense that events of flying plates and broken windows will naturally center on kids because the kids are throwing the plates and breaking the windows. There are all sorts of reasons why a child would be destructive. I’ll leave that discussion to child psychologists. For the purposes of this post, let’s just talk about the Czech poltergeist.

The Wem Town Hall “ghost” photo has been famous for years. I remember seeing it in “true ghost” books that I had as a kid.

This Forgetomori post contains some video and fascinating discussion about research into the negatives of the photo that indicate it might be a hoax.

I honestly don’t know if the Girl in the Fire photo is a hoax or not. The program raised some good questions, but it didn’t seem to me (for the information given) to really be an overwhelmingly clear case of fraud.

But, this is what makes sense to me:

I just came across the very neat blog Bad Ghosts. The blog has a very good post carefully investigating a ghost photo sent in by a civil engineer who is highly impressed by it. The ghost photo in question is over here on the left.

It still blows my mind that anyone would think the photo shows a ghost. It takes about 10 seconds of looking at it closely to figure out what is going on.  The guy who submitted the photo refers to himself constantly as a civil engineer, which apparently is supposed to show that he’s smarter than your average cameraphone user.

The Daily News Online ( a local newspaper in NY state) published this story today:

Seen a ghost? I think so! by Virginia Kropf

The story is fairly long so I’m going to cut and past sections of it here. I encourage you to read the whole thing to make sure I’m not cherry-picking.

The photo on the left is from her article. Click on it to see a larger version.

The text below in italics are by the newspaper wrtier Virginia Kropf. The regular text in between are my comments.

I really like this ghost sighting. You can’t do much better than a recent headliner tragedy involving a mega-star.

What might modern TV cameras catch in the mega-star’s empty mansion? Perhaps his ghost? His shade? Oh wait, maybe just a shadow.  *watches again*  Yep, just a shadow.

Here is the awesome video:

And here is the whole thing debunked on the great Forgetomori blog.

I don’t get why ghost hunters continue to get excited about orb and mist photos. Seriously, even other ghost hunters don’t believe in them anymore.

Look at these posts from people who actually believe in ghosts:

This is from Troy Taylor who wrote The Ghost Hunter’s Guidebook: