There’s a new program on the SyFy Channel called Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files. Here’s a description of the show from the SyFy web site:

“Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files revolutionizes paranormal programming by investigating the evidence witnesses post on the Internet every day. Have you ever seen a photo or video online and wondered, ‘Is this real?’ This is the show that will answer that question. “

Each week, the team of investigators examines “viral” videos they snagged off the Internet. Sparing no expense, they go to some really extreme measures to recreate whatever it is they see on the videos. But what does this prove, really? If you can recreate something you see on video tape, does that mean it never happened? I don’t think it does. In these days of Photoshop magic and special effects, virtually anything can be reproduced. For this reason, I think when you are trying to gather evidence of paranormal events, photography will always be your weakest link. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a photo or video that was faked from photographic evidence of a very real paranormal event.

Just because you can fake something, this doesn’t mean it is fake!

Of course, it could be, but not necessarily. This is the problem I see with debunking. If someone can find a way to explain away your evidence by demonstrating that it could have been faked, people automatically assume the original evidence must be fake. This just isn’t true.

I expect this show will fade away as fast as SyFy’s other like-minded show, Proof Positive Evidence of the Paranormal from 2004.  Any of these programs that attempt to explain away age-old mysteries in one short episode are doomed to fail. In the end, Proof Positive attempted to explain away everything by subjecting the witness to a lie detector test. I guess when it comes right down to it, this is the only thing we can question – the integrity of the witness. Real or faked? You have to take their word for it.

Move over, iPad. A new (and MUCH cheaper) tablet computer system being offered by Shogo could be transformed into a useful ghost-hunting tool. The tablet runs on the Linux operating system, meaning the whole thing is open source and quite hackable. Anyone with a bit of HTML 5 experience should be able to write some aps for this thing. The tablet contains a built-in web cam with motion sensor and ambient light detection capabilities. It also contains a built-in accelerometer. Geeks like me will rejoice, but what does this mean for the average ghost hunter?

Motion sensor and ambient light detection

Both of these capabilities would enable you to write an ap that would detect differences in ambient light. So what? Well, what is a shadow person? Isn’t it just a dark area in the room? Motion sensors detect any variations in ambient light, and so anything that would make the room darker or brighter would trip a motion sensor. Are you starting to see the possibilities? An ambient light sensor would make the job even easier.

Accelerometer

Detects movement of the tablet. So what? Creating an ap for the accelerometer, you could use the accelerometer to detect movement in the room. Place the tablet on the floor, table, or chair, and it would be able to trip an alarm when it detected any vibration. Are you hearing footsteps? Use the tablet to determine whether or not something is physically causing the sounds.

You could also create aps that would store all of this information for later.  You could check your evidence when you got home to see what you may have missed. The possibilities are amazing. The Shogo is built for special applications, so why not turn a bunch of them into specialized ghost-hunting tools?  If someone else doesn’t jump on this idea, I may give it a try, provided I could come up with some venture capital. (Ha).

Check out the video. The excited French guy will tell you all about it. Other companies are working on similar tablets, all running Linux and the Freescale i.MX37 processor. None of them are ready for comsumers yet, but it should be soon – probably in the fall.

The house made famous by the 1970s Amityville Horror film has gone on sale in Long Island, New York, with a price tag of $1.15m (£800,000). The five-bedroom house at 108 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, gained notoriety through the film based on the story of the Lutz family, who moved in in 1975. The Lutzes say they soon discovered that the house was haunted.

Several months earlier, six members of another family had been shot and killed as they slept in the house. The family’s eldest son, Ronald DeFeo Jr, was convicted of the 1974 murders. A book and a series of films based on the events described by the Lutzes followed. The high asking price of the house – a Dutch Colonial style home overlooking a canal – is based on renovation work, reports say. It has had several owners since the 1970s. The address has been changed from the original 112 Ocean Avenue in a effort to keep onlookers away.

People in Ohio who may be looking for an even MORE notorious house may want to consider buying the former Ruppert house in Hamilton where James Ruppert slaughtered 11 members of his own family on Easter Sunday in 1975. I hear it has been on the market numerous times.

Last night, Henry from The Paranormal View invited me to investigate a haunted farmhouse near Hamilton, Ohio. Several of us spent about 4 hours poking around and trying to see what we could find. Unfortunately, I didn’t pick up any EVP and my batteries died before I could really get to use my motion sensors. I took a photo of this Pilates ball which Henry says has been known to rock back and forth on its own. We sat in the room for a while and tried to get the ghosts to move the ball, without success. At least three ghosts are believed to be haunting the house and the renovated barn behind it – a little girl, a woman, and an older man. There was a cat following me constantly from room to room. I tried my best to get some EVP (I recorded about an hour of audio) but there was just too much background noise for me to determine whether or not I got anything. I had a great time though and it was nice to meet some other investigators. I hope I can get out again soon for another investigation.

A lot has been written lately about so-called Black-Eyed Children. These children are reported to act very strangely and will try to get your permission to enter your home or car. Some people believe these children to be demonic. But are they, really? There is a common medical condition called Mydriasis which will cause the pupils of your eyes to completly dilate, giving a person what is sometimes referred to as a blown pupil. The condition is caused by head trauma, disease, or drug use. Before you report sightings of demonic children, this may be another explanation to consider.

With the current wave of paranormal groups popping up all over the country, not to mention the flood of new TV programs about the paranormal, it’s not surprising that people are coming out of the woodwork to promote their “haunted” inns, houses, and other establishments. It’s a sure-fire way to generate some cash. Advertise that your place is haunted and wait for the cash to come in – if it’s haunted, they will come.

Got a bed & breakfast? Business is a little slow? Just mention on your brochure that the place has ghosts and you’ll get customers. All you have to do is mention that a few of the guests or employees have seen shadowy figures or heard unexplained sounds in the night. There seems to be no end to the number of people who will pay you money just to wander around with their camcorders and EMF meters. Got an old house you’re trying to fix up but you’re slightly strapped for cash? No problem. Offer “ghost hunters” the opportunity to wander around the place… for a fee.

Every town seems to offer ghost tours these days. People are more than willing to pay good money to follow you around and listen to spooky stories. Especially if you dress in a cape and carry a lantern.

Everyone seems anxious to exploit the current interest in ghosts and hauntings. Hell, even me. I wrote a book. Color me guilty. I just wonder where it’s all going though. The exploitation seems to reaching epidemic proportions. It reminds me a lot of the Spiritualist Movement which swept the country after the Fox sisters started claiming to hear bumps and scratches in their home in 1848. Suddenly, mediums, psychics, and spirit photographers  popped up all over the place. Most, if not all, turned out to be frauds and I suspect the same is true today.

Are ghosts real? I believe they are, but I also believe that there are more than a few people out to make some easy money by making false claims. If you’re planning to go on a ghost hunt or a ghost tour, and if you’re not expecting anything more than just a laugh and a good time, then by all means go! However, if you’re serious about this kind of thing and you’re after some hardcore evidence of life after death, maybe you’d better shy away from the ghost tours and strike out on your own.

The land along the Little Miami River in Ohio is known for a number of important prehistoric American sites. One of the most important is the Turpin Mound area in Anderson Township (named after the Turpin family farm on which it stood). Much of the area, including an area to the southwest known as Sand Ridge, is believed to be of Fort Ancient origin, according to surveys carried out in the 1870s and early 1880s. The mounds may have been created around the years 700 – 1500 AD. Other later surveys made note of many more sites.

One of the mounds in the Sand Ridge area is reported to have had a circle of large standing stones surrounding it, much like some prehistoric sites found in Great Britain.

For months, the Turpin area has been raided by amateur archaeologists looking for artifacts. This is now against the law, and police are currently looking for people who robbed a section of the site just last week (and left behind their car and cell phone as they ran off into the woods to escape arrest).

This just illustrates how urgently we need to work to protect prehistoric sites like this from further destruction. The sites have already been desecrated by earlier excavations, with most of the artifacts taken to the Peabody Museum in Boston. The artifacts taken by the famous team of Squier and Davis were eventually sold to a private collector and then taken by the British Museum in London. I think there should be some sort of action taken to get these items and to return them to Ohio where they belong. It’s a disgrace that they were removed from mounds and earthworks in the first place but since they have already been removed, we could at least put them in a museum in Ohio where people could see them and learn about the cultural and spiritual history of the land they live on.

Robert Bess’s Parabot Containment Chamber

The other day I wrote an entry about how it may be possible to use the general idea from an old Outer Limits episode to create a contained system that would make it possible to provide an environment conducive to paranormal activity.  You thought I was joking, right?

It seems that several other people are thinking the exact same thing. I didn’t even realize it but a man named Robert Bess has designed what he calls a “Parabot Containment Chamber” in order to capture spirits. This sounds a lot like the contraption called the “Cube” which was featured in the remake of the movie Thirteen Ghosts (photo below).

The Cube from the movie Thirteen Ghosts

Robert Bess’s Parabot got a field test last night when the Ghost Adventures crew investigated the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. Bess’s contraption sputtered and made a lot of noise as it appeared to attract spirits with it’s  built-in Tesla Coil.  According to Bess,  this is how the system is designed to work:

“If the EM sensors on the chamber detect an energy field, its doors open, and it moves in the direction of what it senses. Once it captures the energy in the chamber, the doors will shut and the massive 8-foot Tesla coil inside the unit produces 1.4 million watts of energy, “feeding” the EM field until it cycles at a far faster or higher rate, rendering the spirit visible.”

So in other words, it’s a ghost trap designed to capture spirits just like the Cube device in the Thirteen Ghosts movie.

Bess’s Parabot did seem to be doing SOMETHING last night. One of the investigators captured photos of what appeared to be  a ball of plasma. This would make sense, since the Parabot is cranking so much energy into the environment. A plasma is a gas that has been energized to the point that some of the electrons break free from, but travel with, their nucleus. Gases can become plasmas in several ways, but all include pumping the gas with energy.

There were some dramatic moments in last night’s investigation, like when Bess claimed to have been punched or pushed. In one highly suspicious moment his EMF meter flew down the hallway as if it was knocked violently from his hand.

If the Parabot was indeed drawing in spirits, it didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of containing them. Maybe he should have lined the walls of the Parabot with a bunch of “containment spells” like those written on the cube from Thirteen Ghosts.

Anyway, these ideas tie in with what I had in mind, but my idea was not to contain anything. I don’t think it’s ethical to try to capture someone’s spirit, any more than it is ethical to hold a live person against their will.  What I had in mind would be more of an open system through which spirits could manifest, without constraints.

I guess if things went wrong though and you happened to attract a particularly nasty entity, you would wish you had a real containment chamber.  Something like the guys had in the Ghost Busters movies. Seriously though, I think it is possible to build some kind of system that would make it easier for spirits to manifest. Providing a ripe environment by providing them with lots of whatever kind of energy they need, may lead to some real advances in the field of paranormal research.

In the very first episode of the popular science fiction TV program The Outer Limits, a radio station engineer has built a phone booth sized machine in order to communicate with a being from another galaxy. They don’t go into a lot of details about the workings of this fictional machine, but it seems to be based on the idea that three dimensional radio waves (in the frequency of TV signals) can be manipulated and tuned in order to provide an interface through which the “galaxy being” and the radio operator on Earth can communicate.

There are a lot of flaws in this idea, but the idea has stuck with me over the years. I am beginning to think that this general technique could be refined and used as a way to communicate with ghosts, or spirits if you prefer the term.

Most paranormal researchers agree that if ghosts exist, they exist as some type of energy, an intelligent energy that can somehow move in and out of our range of perception. We pick up tiny fragments of conversation with EVP recording techniques, but what if we could finally find a way to hold real conversations with people on the other side? Instead of seeing brief shadowy apparitions, what if we could provide an artificial portal through which spirits could be seen clearly or even travel?

Several researchers are working on the assumption that if you pump a large amount of energy into a room, it charges the atmosphere and makes the environment conducive for paranormal activity. In recent episodes of the TV programs Extreme Paranormal and Ghost Lab, we have seen people use a Jacob’s Ladder and a Van De Graaff Generator to pump energy into the environment. Joshua P. Warren has long proposed that using an electrostatic generator to fill a room with charged ions, like the Ghost Lab crew did with their Van De Graaff Generator, would enhance paranormal activity. Actually helping a spirit to materialize.

I don’t think these activities are taking it far enough. The radio engineer from The Outer Limits may have been onto something. I think that if we create the right environment, it may be possible to finally communicate in a better way with entities in the “paranormal” world. I don’t think that setting up a Phone Booth Spirit Communicator Contraption in a scientific lab would be helpful, but if we could set up an apparatus like this in a location we believe to be haunted, maybe we would get some interesting results.

This is an artifact I found on a sandbar in the middle of the Great Miami River, near Cincinnati, Ohio.  I think it may be a pendant or amulet of some kind from the time of the Adena culture, which would mean it could  be 2,000 years old! I cranked up the contrast on this photo to try to reveal some surface details.

You can’t really tell from the photo, but there are a few engraved gooves on each side of the object. The hole was obviously drilled by a flint or stone drill.   I plan to take this somewhere soon to get an expert opinion, but it really does seem like it was created to be a pendant.  One of the bottom corners is broken, but you can still tell it must have been carefully crafted.   It is almost exactly 1 1/2 inches long and 1 inch in width.