I don't know if any of you watch (or pay attention to) the TV show Ghost Hunters but I end up watching it when there's nothing else on (which is always). I like Jason and Grant's approach, although their definition of "scientific investigation" leaves much to be desired. At least they don't go in there with "sensitives" who claim the ghosts enter them and tell them things. Puleeeeeeze!

It's not that I don't believe in ghosts. I belief in an afterlife. I believe in an immortal soul. And I definitely believe that where bad things happen, residual negative energies remain and those things can make people uncomfortable. There is a TV show where they take this man to all these places where bad things have happened and they don't tell him where he is (even what city he's in) and he sees things that cannot be denied are indicative of the events that happened in that place. This I believe (mostly because the way they don't tell him anything about the site) constitutes a blind test and that is a kind of proof.

But I don't believe what the TAPS team are recording is evidence of ghosts. They recently did an investigation at Fort Mifflin. This is where Britt and Bob and I were at an event in early November. We've slept there many times. They tell all kinds of ghost stories and I've never had anything happen to me and I've been down in the catacomes and all. I've felt like I was pushed off the slate sidewalks there too, but it's easily explained by the broken and uneven slates. And those noises you hear? Let's not forget that 747s are taking off and landing over your head. Sometimes you hear a sound when there are no planes around. But a plane passed just moments ago. Guess what: the speed of sound is slower than the speed of light! And there are a lot of sounds that follow something that big splitting open the air like it does, sometimes long after it's landed. Not to mention how it makes the windows shake...

It's really just panic if you ask me. People work themselves up and then a change in the sound of their own breath because of being in an enclosed space freaks them out. I've had it happen to me too! And when there is more than one scared person in an enclosed space, the fear multiplies.

Funny how they turn on the lights or the sun comes up and the ghosts all stop being "active". Hmmm... Premordial human fear of the dark perhaps?

I've long said that the EVPs (Electronic Voice Projections) that they catch on digital recorders sound to me less like voices and more like the residual sounds from recording and rerecording over the same media multiple times. You see, the voice they hear on the recorders all sound alike. They always classify it as a child or a woman (dependent on the stories they've heard from the staff or owners of the building being investigated) and they come up with some words it's saying, but I hear nothing but muffled noise. I think just like the "face" on Mars, we make the sounds into English words because that's what we want to hear. Funny how when they investigate in Europe, the ghosts there speak modern AMERICAN English too, huh?

So I think it's an artifact of the digital recording process -- something like the "bleed through" you used to get with tape recording. I don't know much about electronics, but I've experienced this phenomenon myself on multiple ocassions.

And this morning on BBC News, I heard this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7318180.stm Shockingly, it sounds just like an EVP. Hmmmm...