Ohio:  Massillon woman gets up to four years for burning ‘haunted’ house

Ukraine:  Man steals tombstones to build house with

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.

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.

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.