Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (35 page)

Aug. 10:
S’mores Day

Aug. 28:
Crackers Over the Keyboard Day

Sept. 15:
Felt Hat Day

Sept. 22:
Hobbit Day

Sept. 24:
Punctuation Day

Oct. 1:
Fire Pup Day

Oct. 14:
International Top Spinning Day

Oct. 30:
International Bandanna Day

Nov. 2:
Cookie Monster Day

Nov. 15:
National Bundt Pan Day

Nov. 19:
Have a Bad Day Day

Nov. 30:
Stay Home Because You’re Well Day

Dec. 26:
National Whiners Day

Frozen Dead Guy Days and The Emma Crawford Coffin Race are both unofficial Colorado holidays
.

THE GREAT BEYOND

Three strange stories about death
.

A
DEAD RINGER
. Ademir Jorge Goncalves shocked his loved ones when he showed up, very much alive, to his own funeral in 2009. The 59-year-old Brazilian bricklayer had spent a night drinking with friends at a truck stop—and didn’t know he was “dead” until his funeral had already begun. During the night, he’d been misidentified as the victim of a car crash. And, in keeping with Brazilian tradition, the body was buried the next day. “People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies,” police explained regarding the badly disfigured corpse. A niece added: “My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification. But my aunt and four of Ademir’s friends said it was him.” The crash victim was later correctly identified and buried by his own family.

AT LEAST THEY NEVER ARGUE
. When Le Van’s wife died in 2003, the 55-year-old Vietnamese man was so heartbroken that he took to sleeping on her grave. After a year and a half, he decided to dig a tunnel so he could get closer to her. But that still wasn’t close enough, so Van dug up his wife’s desiccated corpse, filled it out with clay to make her look more lifelike, and put her in his bed so he could sleep beside her. Five years later, she was still there, and both Van and his son hugged her every night before going to sleep. Local authorities found out about the morbid arrangement and told Van to rebury her, citing sanitation laws. Sadly, he agreed. “I’m not like normal people,” admitted Van.

’TIL DEATH DO US PART
. James and Lolie Brackin had been happily married for 59 years. On the morning of December 12, 2009, they were sitting together in their Florida nursing home watching television when Lolie matter-of-factly told an aide, “I’m going to die today.” The aide returned to her a short while later and found that Lolie had stopped breathing. Moments later, James, 79, also died of natural causes. “They didn’t like to go anywhere alone,” their daughter said.

For $2,600, Cremation Solutions will sell you a life-size “Personal Urn” shaped like your own head
.

GHOSTOLOGY, PART II

Now that you’ve read the ghostology primer on
page 97
, you may want to start seeking out your own spirit activity…or at least figure out why your car keys keep showing up in places where you
know
you didn’t leave them
.

W
HO YA GONNA CALL?
Ghost hunters can be divided into two main types: those who try to obtain evidence of a haunting, and those who try to disprove claims by looking for real-world explanations for why, say, footsteps are heard in the attic. If the investigators can’t find a rational explanation, then they say a place “may” be haunted. If you’ve ever seen
Ghost Hunters
on the SyFy Network, then those words are familiar—it’s the methodology of the lead investigators, Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes, founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). Though not scientists, they attempt to take a scientific approach to investigating. But because so little is known about the “other side,” Hawes admits, “there are really no experts in this field.”

According to ghost hunters, the first hurdle that the serious investigator must overcome is his or her own imagination. As humans, if our eyes don’t receive a complete picture, our brain will attempt to fill in the rest, usually with something already familiar. This is sometimes called
matrixing
. It’s for this reason that paranormal investigators have come to rely on an array of electronic gizmos that act as objective observers and recorders. But there’s a catch: One of the main tenets of the scientific method is that in order for a hypothesis to be proven, the results must be reproducible in a controlled setting. With a haunting, that’s virtually impossible. “Sometimes ghosts appear; sometimes they don’t,” says Hawes. That one caveat alone will keep any scientist who values his or her reputation from stating that the existence of ghosts has ever been “proven.” That’s why, instead of proof, ghost hunters look for “evidence.”

THE GHOST HUNTER’S ARSENAL

So if you have an extra few thousand dollars lying around, here’s some of what you’ll need in order to gather evidence of a ghost’s existence in such a way that no scientist or skeptic could ever deny your claim. That, by the way, is the “Holy Grail” among paranormal investigators…and it hasn’t happened yet.

Size of the U.S. national debt in 2010: $12.4 trillion. (If you’d spent $1 million every day since the year 1 A.D., you still wouldn’t have spent even $1 trillion.)

•
Digital video recorder (DVR):
Because paranormal activity is most often witnessed between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., when the lights are off, investigators use an infrared camera with a night-vision setting. The more DVRs, the better, because apparitions usually appear for a second or two, and moving objects are difficult to document with a still camera. If there’s a room you think is active, just place the camera on a tripod and let it record all night.

•
Digital still camera:
Ghost hunters will take hundreds of photographs of a location and scrutinize every one for anomalies, mysterious shadows, mist, apparitions, and orbs. (More on this on the next page.)

•
Digital audio recorder:
Investigators use recorders to try to capture
voice phenomena
. There are three kinds:
direct voice phenomenon
, when a ghost speaks loud enough to be heard by the naked ear (such as “Get out!”);
radio voice phenomenon
, when it uses TV or radio static to amplify its voice, also referred to as
white noise
; and
electronic voice phenomenon
(EVP), when a recorder picks up ghostly voices that are so faint that our own ears can’t hear them. “Is there anyone here that would like speak with us?” asks the investigator. When he reviews the audio later, there just may be an answer.

•
Electromagnetic field detector:
This device, most commonly used by electricians to find live circuit boxes inside walls, is used by paranormal investigators to find EMFs—or pockets of free-floating energy—that may be the result of an entity.

•
Thermal imaging camera:
By drawing energy from a room, spirits can make the air colder or warmer. Sometimes they even leave heat signatures, which these cameras can record.

•
Proton packs
are wearable particle accelerators that, when fired, create a charged proton stream which can be used to snare a negatively charged ectoplasmic entity (a ghost) and then safely contain it. (Just kidding—that’s what they used in
Ghostbusters
.)

ELECTROMAGNETIC FRAUD DETECTORS

In his article “The Shady Science of Ghost Hunting,” Benjamin Radford, managing editor of the
Skeptical Inquirer
, writes, “The uncomfortable reality that ghost hunters carefully avoid—the elephant in the tiny, haunted room—is of course that no one has ever shown that any of their equipment actually detects ghosts. If a device could, then by definition, ghosts would be proven to exist.” Wilson and Hawes share this concern, and are frustrated by all the inexperienced investigators who chalk up anything they “capture” as a “ghost.” These erroneous reports are called
false positives
. Here are the most common examples.

• Orbs:
As we told you earlier, orbs are flying balls of light that are believed to be basic spirit forms. About 99% of orb photos and video can be dismissed as lens flare, a spot on the lens, dust, or an insect. (When an illuminated piece of dust or a bug is close to the lens, it can appear in the photograph or video as a round ball of light.) Other common causes are using a flash or shooting toward the sun, a streetlight, or any other light source. There are also countless photos posted online that show a “vortex”—a strange, white stream of fuzzy light crossing the frame. Skeptics have another name for this phenomenon: “camera strap.”

•
Mist:
Most digital camera technology (both still and video) is not yet advanced enough to create a clear image of a dark scene. So the computerized sensor will fill in incomplete areas of the frame with pixilation. This can look like mist—one of the forms a ghost can theoretically take on—and often gets reported as such.

•
Electronic voice phenomena (EVPs):
“Matrixing” is very common with auditory stimuli, especially when aided by the power of suggestion (such as hearing satanic messages when you play “Stairway to Heaven” backward). When an investigator is listening to hours of static or a hissy recording of an empty room, it’s easy to mistake a random warble for a “voice.” But sometimes the tape picks up discernable voices. Sound waves can travel in odd paths, and the voices of people walking nearby, even outside the building, may have been discerned by the recorder, but not by the investigators’ ears at the time. As a result, nearly all EVPs can be explained.

But like orbs and mist, reports of EVPs are all over the Internet and TV shows—and they make the skeptics’ skin crawl because they’re so easily disproved. This makes it even more difficult for the investigators who do gather compelling evidence—and weed out all of the false positives—to be taken seriously.

Ben Stiller, Mel Gibson, and Jean-Claude Van Damme all suffer from bipolar disorder
.

“Like most ghost hunters,” writes Radford, “Wilson and Hawes claim to be skeptics but are very credulous and seem to have no real understanding of scientific methods or real investigation. Audiences don’t seem to wonder why these ‘expert’ ghost hunters always fail: Even after more than 10 years of research, they still have yet to prove that ghosts exist.”

SO WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?

Wilson and Hawes (and their defenders) claim that there
are
several pieces of evidence gathered by TAPS that can’t be easily explained away. Though most episodes end with the team telling the business or homeowner that their place isn’t haunted, occasionally the evidence seems fairly conclusive that it
is
. Two examples:

• In one episode, the team placed two video cameras in a hallway—one an infrared camera, which records only heat signatures, and the other a regular camera. During the analysis, they looked at the footage from both cameras, and at the exact same time, the thermal camera recorded a human-shaped figure moving down the hall…while the regular camera recorded an empty hallway.

• In a home purportedly haunted by victims who were murdered by the Manson Family in the late 1960s, the team used a type of EMF detector to ask a spirit to light up the apparatus and answer yes-or-no questions. The spirit did so repeatedly, and verified that it was Sharon Tate, one of Manson’s victims.

The obvious problem is that there will always be accusations—leveled at either the investigators or the producers of
Ghost Hunters
—that they manufacture evidence for better ratings. They all deny it, but the “elephant” that Radford speaks of remains in the tiny, haunted room. (Whether
you
believe or not, check out one of the scariest ghost stories we’ve ever heard on
page 297
.)