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:

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 came across this interesting article called, “Creating a Monster” on the randi.org page.  It briefly discusses the fact that different cultures view common supernatural beings or myths in different ways. The example given is that the traditional Japanese style of ghost has no legs. In the Western world, we have traditionally depicted ghosts with legs. These cultural norms then shape our perceptions. So if someone has an event occur in which they assume they have seen a ghost, they are most likely to report the look of the ghost to match their cultural expectations.

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 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: