November 8, 2007
GH: Harrington Home
This was another kid-centric investigation where Jason & Grant are altruistically motivated by the fact that little children are getting scared by strange goings-on. If what the mother says is true, I'd make it a priority too. Unfortunately, this house seems to be a little more Amityville than usual.
Apparently one of the previous owners shot himself in the head in order to prevent police from arresting him, and although the mother claims she has kept this information from her young daughter, the daughter says that two strange men come into her room (on separate occasions) and one of them showed her a "boo boo" on his head and his brain underneath. Freaky stuff.
The other man is unidentifiable but does appear to be a separate "entity" from the man who shot himself. The mother reports seeing a man in the hallway walk past her bedroom door in the middle of the night towards her daughter's room. She thought it was her husband only to realize he was still in the bed with her. The daughter also seems to have made a clear distinction between this man and the other.
While Jason & Grant had the FLIR in the bedroom they briefly captured a shadow which appeared to be sitting in a rocking chair. They caught this while panning the room and it seems to me that the shadow moves in sync with Jay swinging the camera from left to right and back but they claim they debunked the possibility of it being a shadow. I'm not entirely convinced. The kicker would have been if Jay had kept panning the camera to the right instead of swinging it back to the left. If the FLIR had continued a little further to the right we would have seen Grant's shadow too — or not, if the first one really wasn't Jay's IR shadow. Ultimately, I think this evidence is rather weak, although TAPS seems to disagree.
While J & G were in the basement Jay apparently was looking over at Grant's shadow and noticed a second shadow approach from the darkness outside Grant's light. He opened his mouth and said something like, "Did you–" and Grant, who appeared oblivious that Jay was about to say something, cut him off and began saying it was suddenly freezing over by him, like someone opened a freezer door. To me this is more interesting because it would appear that two people actually experienced the same event independantly from one another and in different ways — always assuming this wasn't planned ahead of time and staged, I am left to conclude that something odd did in-fact happen. Unfortunately, we don't have any evidence of it captured on film or audio.
Shortly after this event they both said they heard something that sounded like someone was coming down into the basement, although no one was there. Considering they had just had an "encounter" I'd like to suggest that perhaps they had it backwards. If something was indeed down there with them, maybe those footsteps were it leaving and going up the stairs. In any event they rattled some pipes in the hopes it would sound like footsteps and they could attribute the experience to normal phenomena but no luck, the pipes didn't sound anything like footsteps. The real shame here is that I don't think they even caught the footsteps sound on audio to begin with, so the audience once again has no evidence to review.
Reviewing all the recordings afterwards yielded two potential EVP's. The first is said to sound like a little girl, but the owner said she has never experienced anything to suggest there was a female spirit in the house. Personally I think the recording sounds like it could be something mechanical or even a cat. To me, it's the right pitch for a female voice but other than that it doesn't sound like a voice at all.
The real coup de'grace was the second EVP, which does sound something like an old man sitting on a porch humming to himself — as Grant described it. My problem with this — and of course I have one, but seriously I really wish I didn't. I'd love some real solid evidence one of these days — is that Grant was alone in the room with the recorder when it was captured. He went upstairs to the kitchen to rattle some pipes and you hear him speak, then a moment later you hear this "voice". On many EVP recordings the voice overlaps someone else who is talking or at least there are two people in the room, but this one was recorded in a room alone with Grant.
Having one person in the room with the recorder (who knows it is there) is enough to make the material questionable, but this is Grant we're talking about. Grant was alone when a sink turned itself on. He was sitting alone at a table when it "jumped". He walked down out of an attic moments before his chair moved (as if pulled slightly towards the stairs). He was sitting next to the lamp that moved of its own accord — or was that "of its own cord" ?
The list goes on. I'm sure some people are going to come out saying, "How dare you!" — If you think Grant is the most trustworthy guy in the world and that I'm a jerk for even suggesting the possibility that his integrity may be questionable, please allow me to apologize pre-emptively. I am sorry, I just cannot share your faith. I think that there are too many events that seem to happen only around him and that would be fine if it weren't for the fact that each and every one of those events seems just a little suspicious.
I'm not saying he's done anything improper, but if I were to line the entire cast up in order of how much I'd trust them to be 100% objective and honest about their paranormal investigations, he'd be at the end of the line. That's just the way I feel, your feelings may differ.
Filed under Ghost Hunters, Posts by Logisti
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Comments on GH: Harrington Home »
tracy @ 11:16 am
first i want to write how much i really enjoy this site/forum. i have been on the SciFi forum and they just don't seem to go over all of the points of the different episodes the way you do here. so, thanks!
earlier this week i thought i was very done with this show, but i did want to watch this week's reveal show, so i did do that and it kind of rekindled my feelings for the crew and show and, at first, redeemed itself for me. but after thinking about it for just a little while, it went right back down in my opinion.
it was a creepy investigation for me and i liked that about it, but the evidence was real crap. the IR footage looked so much like Jason that when it was first shown, i immediately thought it was him. i didn't know how they would have faked it, but you explaining that it could be a shadow, Logisti, makes it come together for me better.
i felt the same thing about both EVPs as you wrote above, except i didn't realize or put together that Grant was alone in the room with the recorder for the second one. what i did think was that it sounded like the stereotypical ghost sound we make. you know, the "whooooooo….wooooo…oooo!" it totally sounded like that to me and i listened to it over and over. i have to say that i have been a huge Grant fan - he just seems so sweet and genuine (and he's so cute!) - that it is hard to know that he could be the biggest culprit of the fakings on the show. very disappointing to me.
my other problem is that they never catch the "personal experiences" they have. the footsteps on the stairs is a good example. the background music wasn't on in this case, and they were very quiet when this happened, so it should have been on the audio. why didn't we hear it? and why couldn't Jason catch the shadow he saw? maybe i am asking too much on this one.
and one more comment - i promise - the homeowner said that she's never told her daughter about the man who shot himself (i should hope not!), but that doesn't mean that the daughter didn't hear it somewhere. i know my daughter hears things and really remembers them and holds onto them. even if she just overhears a conversation that she is not supposed to be hearing.
i lied - i have one more thing to say! i really think they should spend more time on these investigations. like at least a week. they can come in and investigate, leave cameras and audio equipment if they can't stay, and so on.
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Logisti @ 4:30 pm
tracy, all of these little points hit me and you and probably a lot of other people the same way and leave us asking how they let all these details slip through the cracks. It really lowers the quality of the show but it would seem the most likely conclusion is that it's deliberate — because if they addressed all of these problems they would have even less "evidence" and the show would be less interesting.
But in their defense, as far as spending a week on investigation goes they only have about a week to get each episode completed from pre-production to post-production so they couldn't realistically do that — just like they can't put more cameras and audio recorders because they don't have time to review all of it. These are the sorts of limitations that I can understand — still, it's no excuse for some of the shoddy investigating and bizarre conclusions that could be vastly improved without spending really any extra time.
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Stephen @ 2:17 am
When I first started watching TAPS, I was anxious to find out: were the TAPS guys honest, possibly self-deluded investigators, or were they frauds?
After watching three season's worth, I've come to a firm conclusion: I just don't care anymore. I'm kind of sorry to say that, because it provided me with much of my reason to watch the show, but aside from reading their minds, there's no way to know. As with so many things, the proof may be somewhere in between the two extremes.
But actually I'm posting to talk about EVPs, the Rorschach blots of ghost hunting. Looking at some EVP sites, I found that the tool of choice appears to be IC recorders– relatively inexpensive digital recorders designed to record memos. I found a fascinating article by a member of Southern Wisconsin Paranormal on the importance of backup recording.
In this article, a paranormal investigator compared EVP recordings made on an IC recorder with a recording of the same time and place made on a standard cassette recorder. To her surprise, the cassette recordings, with few exceptions, revealed the EVPs to be standard background noise– investigators muttering to one another, etc. She stresses that all EVPs should be checked against a backup cassette recording– something which TAPS never is shown to do.
A danger with IC recorders (not explored in the article) is that, even in high quality, they do not record to an uncompressed wave format. Instead, they typically record to a proprietary format optimized to store the human voice. That means that any compression artifacts *will sound like strange, hard-to-understand voices*.
Then, bear in mind that the audio we hear has been "cleaned up"– amplified and filtered. If you're certain that there's a voice in the noise, it's very possible to create the voice you're looking for without even intending to do so.
So that's why I don't accept EVPs as proof of anything. Skeptic Joe Nickell pointed out that many new camera types, from the original Polaroid to the modern consumer digital camera, were accompanied by waves of new paranormal "evidence" when they first appeared, but before consumers became aware of their limitations. EVPs seem to be the audio equivalent.
As the prices for high-quality digital audio recorders go down, perhaps EVPs will start getting rarer. When that happens, I'm absolutely sure that we'll go searching somewhere else for a source of ambiguity that enables us to keep seeing shapes in the clouds and hearing voices in the wind.
We'll find it. Humans are amazing.
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Logisti @ 10:31 am
Stephen, I knew most supposed EVP's were likely to be non-paranormal background noises, but I did not realize that the digital recorders changed the character of the sound so much through compression. It would seem that makes them wholly inadequate for conducting conducting any sort of scientific investigation.
Mind you, while this is news to me I have always written off anything that sounded "sort of" like a human voice as something worth ignoring but this article may pull a few more people off the fence. Leaving the issue of fraud off the table, fewer than half of the EVPs TAPS puts forth as evidence *really* sound like someone speaking — and that includes many of the recordings they actually put words in the mouth of.
Getting back to the possibility of fraud, this site exists under the assumption that there is no "grand conspiracy" — partly because one would hope an audio guy would step forward if such a conspiracy existed, partly most of the TAPS folks *seem* trustworthy, but mostly because if there was such a conspiracy then there would be zero point in watching the show and trying to decipher what is actually going on in some of these recordings.
I guess what I'm saying is that the main reason I'll work under the premise that most of the people working on Ghost Hunters are honest folks with integrity is because there wouldn't be any point in discussing the show otherwise — and I want to discuss the show. That aside, I hear exactly where you're coming from and I've given up trying to figure it out too.
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Logisti @ 2:10 pm
This Ghost Hunters debunking video was just brought to my attention. It's a bit on the long side and they guy leaves unnecessarily large portions of the original episode in, but he makes an extremely strong case that the reflection Jason and Grant said was sitting in the rocking chair was actually being reflected in the mirror. Jason claims he didn't pan that far, but as the debunker in this video points out, the evidence suggests he did.
Three main points:
1) At the speed the camera turns it seems clear Jason panned a good distance past the rocking chair. This is demonstrated with a 3d reconstruction of the room.
2) The ceiling light in the room would still have been hotter than room-temperature from being on earlier and if the shadow we see is actually Jason and it's actually reflected in the mirror (not the wall behind the rocking chair) then the ceiling light would be exactly where we see the dark spot above the shadow's head. (Remember, dark is hot the way this camera was set up).
3) The most damning piece of evidence is Jason's own words. He sees the dark spot over the shadow's head and tells the woman it's the picture she has on the wall, which is their basis for placing the shadow in the rocking chair. Jason and Grant know their camera reads heat and since the picture should be the same temperature as the rest of the wall, you should not be able to see the picture at all — and in fact we don't.
Jason & Grant should know this but either forget or deliberately ignore the fact of how their camera works. In fact, if we *had* seen the picture in the thermal view they should have gotten excited and suggested it in-itself might be evidence of the paranormal. The fact that they just used the "picture" as a landmark shows that they were either trying to find a way to "prove" the camera never panned to the mirror, or because they still don't understand how to use their own equipment and interpret the recordings.
Either way, disappointing. Thanks to Michael for the tip-off and the link.
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Stephen @ 2:29 pm
Now *that's* what I call investigating! IRLabs uses some great techniques there. I had been wondering if one could use 3D modeling software in conjunction with IR and regular cameras.
My problem with TAPS here is not that they made the mistake. My problem is that they stop debunking after a token effort. If they put the same kind of thought and effort into debunking it as IRLabs (who isn't getting paid for this) then they might actually gather some useful evidence.
Instead, they're proving the comics right again:
http://cectic.com/060.html
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mark @ 1:21 am
After seeing the *debunking video* i think TAPS needs to find a video expert to add to there team just so they dont look foolish. I am very disappointed after seeing this but not surprised. Kind of embarrasing if you ask me.
Maybe they should let the guy who checked out the " Ghost Adventurer's" video check theres, he seemed credible. His name was *Slim Pickins* i think, (that cant be right,lol).
And why has TAPS not investigated *GOLFIELD HOTEL* in nevada one of the top ten scariest places on earth. The owner probaly wont let them in there.
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bill kelly @ 12:16 am
I grew up is the town this episode was shot. i was in college when the man shot himself so i emailed several family/friends to ask who the guy was. very few in fact remembered the shooting, even a cop in town. so the daughter learning about it from someone other than her parents is nil. plus she is very young and i doubt kids that age are gonna talk about a shooting.
my nephew knows the owners and has been there when abnormal things happen and very little scares him.
if they truely are fakes at TAPS, why did they debunk the bed incident on the Queen Mary? why was the live halloween special at Waverly Hills weaker compared to the Stanley Hotel? i agree there's stuff we can debunk, but compared to most out there, these guys are at least more believable
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Logisti @ 10:06 am
Here are the best answers I can offer:
1) They didn't debunk the Queen Mary, their brand new (at the time) trainee did. If you watch Grant during that scene you will see he actually *denies* that it's been tampered with the first time Dave shows him the evidence. Finally, *if* one intended to deliberately defraud an audience, disproving a few hauntings goes a long way to make the ones you don't disprove seem more impressive — also it builds trust with your audience.
2) Waverly Hills and Stanley Hotel were both LIVE Halloween investigations — the only two such investigations so far — where we saw a lot more of the normal humdrum that goes on during an investigation. That kind of puts them in a league by themselves for the moment — with each other.
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bill kelly @ 6:16 pm
i can agree with #1 but Grant is a plumber while Dave had video experience. my college roomie was a film major and showed us tricks that none would have picked up without knowing.
2. Waverly had far less "happenings" than Stanley as i wrote yet Waverly sells tours, promoting it as one of the scariest places in America. so if they wanted ratings for the live show, they could have staged things.
i'm not saying these guys are as legit as they claim, but the more skeptics there are, the more these guys better be honest or else they'll be snaking toilets fulltime again.
i think i disproved some questions about this post on the harrington house. at thanksgiving i did some investigating as i was a reporter for 13 yrs and other than evp's, i feel confident with what i wrote.
i'm skeptical of tv shows too, but i have had my own experiences with death - almost dying myself aided in that - so i know there are things beyond what we see out there
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ContraryMary @ 10:15 am
Two thoughts and both are a little random.
1.) this is by far my favorite episode. my main reason for watching GH is for a good scare, like listening to ghost stories.
and
2.) am I the only person who finds Kris Williams annoying? If she has too much air time in an episode I just turn it off. blech.
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