I've been watching MonsterQuest on the History Channel for some time now, but haven't gotten around to discussing any of their episodes here, which is a crime because I find that show to be simply fantastic. They do a thorough job getting the best arguments from all quarters and putting all of it in front of the viewer in a coherent manner. When I saw the show broadcast this past week was on Ghosts, I just had to do a quick write-up.

First off, the way MonsterQuest often works is they not only go out and collect evidence and interviews from relevant people, but they also send out a team of relevant experts to conduct their own investigation on behalf of the show. Most impressive is how well the MQ teams always manage to cover all their bases when planning and setting up their investigations. For this episode they had a team investigate the Lizzie Borden house, and though I felt that was kind of a tired subject it turns out they made it entirely worthwhile.

Their setup consisted of the highest resolution, most advanced FLIR camera, operated by an expert on FLIR cameras and reviewed by another thermal imaging expert; dual recorders for EVP work (I did not actually see this, but it was mentioned twice so I probably just missed the second recorder, or else they placed it elsewhere in the room); they even had a voice recognition expert — apparently among the first to authenticate Osama bin Laden's voice on a 2002 audio tape after the al-Qaeda leader was initially suspected to have been killed in bombing and missile strikes — listen to the EVP recordings and attempt to authenticate them as actual voices and not just background noise.

I mean, this was an all-star team. This is how these investigations should be done — not that everyone has the money to go all out like this, but when someone does then it's a real treat for those of us who thirst for research done with practically unimpeachable credibility, and the corresponding results.

On the interview side of things, one of the experts they interviewed extensively was Jeff Belanger, whom I'd like to give a shout-out to. Jeff was chief editor of the humor magazine at my college and was just crazy enough to publish my story about a very bloody elf revolt in one of the Christmas editions. While hardcore skeptics may not find Jeff quite skeptical enough for their tastes, I think his insight is a valuable addition to any discussion of the paranormal and it's to MonsterQuest's credit that they spend the time to get the opinions of serious researchers like Jeff rather than some of the more well-known (and oftentimes less credible) personalities of the paranormal investigative arena.

MQ had experts review a number of different pieces of evidence, including the famous blue gas station "ghost" footage from a couple of years ago, and a 2001 piece from Gettysburg that I'd never actually seen. On the gas station, the show did not conclusively claim the image was a bug sitting on the lens, but they put forward enough evidence to suggest it very likely was. The Gettysburg footage was another matter entirely, though.

This footage, I thought, was really interesting. At first there appear to be human figures moving from the left-central, bottom portion of the frame as if walking up a slight incline to the left, then figures are seen moving to the right, as if there was a switchback in the trail and it continued to the right, also at a slight uphill slope. The video I linked to appears to be the original, but MQ and their experts enhanced the footage and the images seem even more clearly to be the outlines of people walking.

The most interesting aspects of this video are that there appear to be a fair number of people, meaning we get a fairly good and repeated look, which helps to rule out a lot of possible electronic or visual anomalies, but there also appears to be an odd repetitiveness, as if watching something on a loop. The man who took the video was interviewed by MonsterQuest and he asserted that there were a number of other visitors behind him, but no one in the field in front of him.

I was considering the possibility he was simply mistaken about nobody being in the field — because in the enhanced video it very clearly looks like there are people (more than a couple of them) in the field, but oddly the explanation favored by the MQ expert who reviewed the footage was that this might have been done by putting a pane of glass between the camera and the field and then projecting a repeating image onto the glass in order to make it appear as if there were figures moving in the field.

I believe the reason he favored this explanation over an actual group of real people walking up a path in single file is because the daylight footage of the area shows the land there is rather flat and therefore the figures must have been elevated off the ground (therefore they couldn't be real) but the idea of this guy staging such a complex hoax, with his family and little kid, in front of the other tourists that must have been nearby, to me that seems almost as far out as claiming the footage is definitive proof of ghosts, so I'm not sure what to believe.

Because the repetition was not exactly the same each time and because it appeared only in a couple of distinct places it occurred to me perhaps the breeze was making a couple of branches sway and the light happened to catch the leaves in an odd way that made it look like someone was walking uphill, but while that's the best "normal" explanation I've got, it still seems like it's reaching a bit, even to me.

The Lizzie Borden House investigation turned up a couple of interesting pieces of evidence: On the FLIR there was a trunk that one team (a couple of years back) had placed a camera on and twice in a row something made the camera turn left about 45 degrees.

The MQ team was not able to reproduce this, but they did notice on the FLIR that the bottom of the trunk seemed to have a temperature anomaly. It did not feel warm to the touch, but it registered on the FLIR as significantly warmer than the rest of the trunk or even the floor below it. The thermal imaging expert noted that there was a brass rim around the bottom of the trunk which could be reflecting heat from someone standing in front of the trunk (similar to the heat reflections we've discussed extensively in the podcast and other articles on the site) but because it was so completely uniform, even as the cameraman moved, he wasn't entirely comfortable with that explanation and said he couldn't offer any conclusions.

There were also a number of possible EVPs that were picked up by the team. I should say that as much as I admire MQ for going out and getting a voice recognition expert to review their audio, I do question how useful his conclusions are. After all, he is an expert at determining human speech, but as someone once pointedly asked me, since when are we assuming ghosts have vocal chords?

If the EVP phenomenon is actually an attempt at communication by a disembodied entity of some kind then it stands to reason that it is accomplished by manipulating interference to approximate a voice. In other words, it's not actually a voice — which is why a true EVP is not audible to the human ear and even why it is theorized that it should only show up on one recording device (the one being interfered with by the entity).

Still, the voice recognition expert lent some interesting scrutiny to some of the audio, and one piece in particular piqued his curiosity. There was only one piece he could not confirm wasn't a human voice, and it occurred as the crew was wrapping up their recording session in Lizzie Borden's room. There is some discussion between crew members and investigators when we hear what seems to be a voice whispering, "Sooooooo….."

Because it had no pitch (since it appeared to be a whisper) it couldn't be clearly attributed to a human voice, but the pattern (especially the 'Ssss' sound in the beginning) seemed striking enough that even the expert said it was obvious to him it was a real sound in the room and quite possibly a human voice. He also pointed out that because how loud something is on tape is proportional to the inverse-square of the distance, he believed the source of the sound was very close to the recorder.

Interestingly, there is video footage of the room when the sound occurs, and the recorder is plainly on the bed with no one standing within anywhere near it. Equally worth noting, the sound actually appeared on a second recorder — which confirms the notion that it was a real sound, but it was nearly as loud on the second recorder — which was nowhere near the first recorder, making it nearly impossible for this to have been a human voice.

They didn't really go into this on the show, but from the volume of the recordings, as well as where the recorders seem to be in relation to each other, I'm going to make a few rough estimates. First off, the comparative volumes lead me to believe the source of the sound was significantly closer to the main recording device on the bed, the second recording seemed less than half the volume. For argument's sake let's suppose if the distance from the audio source to recorder #1 was X, then the distance to recorder #2 was roughly X * 2.

Now, the two recording devices, from how far the crew seems to be standing away from the bed, I'll estimate were about 6 feet apart. It might be more, it might be less, but I think 6 feet is a fair estimate; this is more of a thought exercise than real science anyway. Assuming that's accurate, then the voice would be about 2 feet from R1 and 4 feet from R2. Listening to the R1 recording, to me it sounds like the whisper (if that is what it is) must come from within 6 inches of the microphone. This new estimate using R2 as an anchor point doesn't just place the source 4 times farther away than that, but because of the inverse-squared relationship it makes the sound about 16x louder than a human whisper should/could be.

…and even if you want to revise the results to be as conservative as possible and cut my distance estimates in half, then the sound is still 4x louder than makes sense, and we're still left with another unspoken issue: No one in the room seemed to react to it despite everyone being gathered in a circle that enclosed the presumed source of the sound, and the fact that it was clearly audible on a recorder (R2) one of them was holding. Does this mean it somehow existed on two recorders without actually being audible, or does it mean it was a normal sound that everyone in the room naturally dismissed at the time, but didn't remember or recognize during playback?

As usual, I've got no answers, but it's absolutely fascinating stuff and a real pleasure to have a highly controlled, extremely well documented situation like this to review because it gives us so much more to look at, compare and contrast. I hope to give MonsterQuest more write-ups going forward and I highly recommend the show to those of you who's interests extend into cryptozoology, which is the primary focus of the show.