Saturday, July 17, 2010

Standing Together

Come one, come all and see the most amazing spectacle of strange phenomena that baffle the ghost hunters and people living with the unseen world! Watch as the dishes fly across the room and feel the forces of invisible hands touch your flesh! Could these be what we call ghosts? Venture in and find out for yourself!

It’s pretty tempting to see what all the commotion is about. There’s that tall dark figure lifting the curtain and pointing in on what we might find to be our worst fears or even a satisfying dose of curiosity. I know if I was you, I’d be trying to take a peek into the darkened room. We all want to. So, what if you do walk in? What if what he said was true? There really is something to all these bizarre happenings that we call ghost encounters. Do I run out in a frenzy, trying not to look back to see if something is following me? Or do I face my fears and look a little longer and harder at what might be looking back? As for me, I’m going in and taking in all I can find out. For all I know all the whole, eery spectacle could be nothing more then smoke and mirrors.

I guess it goes to show just how much of an investigator I want or try to be. Throughout my life, I've spent over 20 years looking to see the invisible wires pulling the sheet down the hall. I’ve always been the type to really want to know how things work. How is it possible and what is the reason for all this? When ghost hunting began in the late 1850’s, it was a case of experience outweighing curiosity. Most ventured off to reenact phenomena they encountered themselves. Some looked for proof to claims that mediums were indeed speaking to the dead. Then their were those checking out the wizard behind the green curtain. Stop! Pay no attention to him, it will ruin the illusion!

When it comes to ghost hunting today, we as ghost hunters have to face that illusion every time. It’s the trick of light, the false impressions and even the lack of education that feed our hopes as well as our fears. So my argument for this month is: Where is the training and education needed to further us along? I find that a lot of groups don’t offer training or don’t constantly feed their minds with new ideas or research old ones. It’s as simple as “here’s a haunted place, lets go!”. With cameras and gadgets in hand, we find that so much can go wrong if you don’t know what the hell you are doing. Come On!! The sad thing really is, there is no standard to what we do as ghost hunters. So how can we help all these groups popping up left and right if we, the more experienced investigators, can't or won't even help ourselves? So many groups do investigating in so many different ways. There’s the psychic ghost hunters, the thrill seekers, the “it’s odd, so it must be a ghost” groups or even the “I don’t believe in you unless you can rip my heart from my chest” type of groups. Each and every one out there has their belief system of how it should be done. But without a standard way of doing things, in all honesty we may never get the chance to advance as paranormal researchers.

Having a standard practice will help us all support our individual evidence. Here we may never have to question one another on how the phenomena was captured. A standard will bring us all on the same page. Here we can eliminate all the human errors that get labeled as ghostly encounters. If we all worked on protocols, standards in reporting and documentation, we as a ghost hunting community would be able to stand together and stand by our own personal achievements. For as I always said, It wont be the work of one or even of some, but of ALL.

1 comment:

  1. It's sad sometimes because I acknowledge the rarity of these things as "evidence" . The scientific community abandoned ghost hunting a while ago as pseudo-science, but it didn't stop the every-day person from experiencing something.

    As the experiences continue, you have the fringe-contingent that is willing to try and quantify what is actually going on.

    The TAPS "dynamic duo" continue to suggest that 80% of cases can be debunked. Of the 20% that's left (probably a smaller margin), my guess (uh-oh, guessing... again) is you can actually quantify less than a percent of it.

    Quantify here means definitively recording the paranormal occurrence in a manner that others too can experience. Of that little sliver, you have to divide it once again to produce evidence from more than 1 source that you can hold up to a skeptic.

    Your reward is that a chip of the sliver that a skeptic reviews and says "I don't know what it could possibly be". At long last, you have THE paranormal. Unfortunately, every dimension of description or quantification beyond that is lost and thus you never get an answer.

    Whether or not it makes a difference here, the scientific community goes after the money. There's no money in determining what happens to our energy after we die or if there's truly something para-dimensional that shares our existence but manages to continually elude perception.

    You're on your way to starting something, Ross. But you need others involvement and buy-in from the rest of the community. You're training people what to do and how to do it, but there needs to be a para-scientific authority to bring the rest of the community in line. The world has been waiting for answers since we became self-aware. It can wait a little longer while the pioneers get their druthers in order.

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