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Another ghost tour and another ghost photo making the rounds of the press. You would think they would have learned their lesson from the Sexy Ghost Hoax, but no.  Instead of two ghost cans, we have two ghost kids.

Kid’s ghosts ‘haunt’ St Mark’s cemetery in Picton

The family who took this picture while on a Picton ghost tour swear there were no children inside the St Mark’s Cemetery south of Sydney, the Daily Telegraph reports….

Local legend has it that the two children are David Shaw and Blanche Moon, who died 60 years apart….Renee English, the woman behind the lens of this mysterious photo, said she was “a sceptic” before undertaking the ghost tour on January 9….

Ghost hunter turned away in Buchanan

Commissioners vote down request to search cemetery for paranormal

By STAN MADDUX
Tribune Correspondent

BUCHANAN — Officials in Buchanan have turned down a man who asked permission to go into Oak Ridge Cemetery and hunt ghosts.

Some of the city commissioners were open to the idea but voted this week to oppose the request.

One fear was any findings of a haunted graveyard would not be good for the city’s image and draw people to the cemetery for seances and other paranormal related activities.

Arwin John, a 20 year old in Malaysia, made the local news with a rather long story about his ghost hunting club and activities.  The kid talks about seeing his first ghost at 10 years old and being hooked on paranormal investigation from then on. His parents finally buckled to his whining and got him some “equipment” and now let him stay out in local cemeteries. He has the usual tools for detecting dust, random noise, and nothing at all:

His research gear include thermal cameras, motion detectors, voice recorders – cassette and digital – and video-cams.

Dealing with news stories about hauntings is difficult. There is an ongoing complaint from skeptics that I think is true; reporters and editors will do stories about hauntings with no critical treatment at all because they view the stories as fun, human interest entertainment. The problem is that this gives an air of fact to the stories and makes them seem to be real.

I think this trend is worsening because of the prevalence of the ghost hunter TV shows. Those are seen to be entertainment, but still “reality TV”. It’s very misleading and it encourages the public to accept stories of hauntings and ghosts as fact without applying any critical thinking at all.