Work and personal projects have kept me away. I hope to update more soon. In the meantime, check out this article on the famous “21 grams” experiment.

http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/3445/soul_catcher.html

I’ve been aware of this experiment for quite some time now and I don’t understand why ghost hunters don’t refer to it. It would seem to be great evidence for the existence of a human soul. That is, until it’s revealed that the original experiment suffered from serious technical problems with the instruments being used to weight the body of the patient/corpse.

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:

This is a really great video explaining skeptical thinking. It’s kinda dry, but the info is spot on:

So awesome, so very very awesome:

This is a good post by Bryan Farha on the Smoke and Mirrors blog about ghosts and ghost phenomenon that I wanted to pass along.  I’ll excerpt a few good parts below:

Why some murder victims would stick around for eternity to haunt a place while others seem to evaporate is one of the great mysteries of the spirit world.

Scientists who have investigated haunted places account for both the temperature changes and the sounds by finding physical sources of the drafts, such as empty spaces behind walls or currents set in motion by low frequency sound waves produced by such mundane objects as extraction fans.

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.

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.