I propose a new Internet Law aimed specifically at the claims of paranormal believers.

Lou’s Law: One cannot invoke Quantum Mechanics in an argument or explanation unless one can show at least a basic, layman’s understanding of Quantum Mechanics. For example, one might explain what Planck’s Constant describes or the idea behind the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or even list the “flavors” of Quarks.

This comes from hearing Quantum Mechanics mentioned in The Secret, bizarre explanations of how Astrology works, and a host of other paranormal crap. Specifically, I came across it again in reading this interesting article on the paranormal radio/phone called Frank’s Box.

Jason Sullivan of Midwest Haunts finally has cleared up my lingering doubt about ghosts. He is the first Ghost Hunter I’ve heard define a ghost.

His definition is at 3:17 and is this: “When a person dies, they turn into a new form of energy.”

That’s it, no citation, no support, no evidence, and no facts. Just a statement.

I could say “When a person dies, they turn into a marshmallow” and have just as much factual support for that statement as he does for his “energy”.

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….

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.

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.

I came across this question on a real estate forum:

Do real estates know if their [sic] selling you a haunted house?

just wondering because don’t they do reasearch on the house?

I don’t think they could reveal if it was haunted. How do they really know if they haven’t lived there. Some people swear the Amityville Horror house is haunted and the people living there at the moment swear it isn’t.

I came across this blog posting that seriously discusses what you should tell your kids if you live in a haunted house.

The really mind-boggling thing about the advice given is that the writer basically says to give as many natural explanations as possible for the natural occurrences ghost phenomena to the children so that the children will not be scared by the superstition knowledge that the house has ghosts. Basically, the author is saying that you should lie by giving natural explanations. Here look:

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.

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.

When I first read this article, I thought it was talking about a community college. I was going to go off on a rant about how this stupidity was bringing down my respect for local colleges. But, after reading it over, I realized it’s a “Community Learning Center”. This is more of just a loose conglomeration of any “class” that people from the community want to offer. If enough people sign up for it, then the class is held.