March 20, 2009
GH: Star Island
The first thing that struck me about this investigation was how puffy Jay's face looked when he and Grant met with Kris to discuss the case in their Rhode Island office. To faciliate spending more time examining the investigation and less on the investigators I decided to restrict my speculation to the hypothesis that Jay could be developing an allergy to staged scenes. Dare to dream.
Jay did mention during the scene that Kristyn Gartland would be joining them for the investigation. This is relevant for a few reasons, the most significant of which is that Kristyn and Joe Chin both seemed to be in the same boat: GH but not GH, called in on seemingly random investigations. We knew Joe Chin had moved on to become a regular with GHI but Kristyn's status was unclear. She does have a child and that would certainly explain why going over to GHI wouldn't likely be workable for her, but now it seems we have confirmation that her status remains unchanged. I guess we can expect to see her randomly throughout the season.
Unfortunately, while Kristyn herself contributed significantly to the investigation, her presence reminded me of an ongoing annoyance with TAPS. To put it gently I might say "Boy's Club" but a less tactful word is sexism. GHI has the entire team, sans the two lead investigators, reviewing evidence after an investigation. TAPS has the entire team, minus Jason & Grant, and minus any females. That leaves GHI with literally double the throughput — in other words, they can review twice as much evidence in the same amount of time because they have twice as many people looking and listening to the evidence they've collected. For whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be a consideration for TAPS.
Beyond that, they always have the girls investigate together. TAPS always had rules about investigating in teams but when there was no other girl to pair Kris Williams with they started sending her off by herself (with a camera operator, of course). When Kristyn Gartland was on the show she might have been paired with Joe Chin a couple of times (hey look! the outsiders!) but otherwise she was always paired with Kris Williams. Amy Bruni joined the core TAPS team and now she is Kris William's full-time partner during investigations, but now when Kris Williams, Amy Bruni and Kristyn Gartland are all on the same investigation they put all three of them together. That just seems wrong to me.
Now, I'm sure some people would argue that maybe the girls don't want to be involved in evidence review, and to them I say, "Too bad". Sexism goes both ways, I don't care whether the perception is that they're being treated better or worse because they're women, the point is they're being treated differently, and not in that "get a good closeup shot of her butt" kind if differently. I can accept that, and obviously Victoria's Secret isn't going to start hiring guys to model their bras either, but here we're talking about people we're expected to take seriously as investigators. I don't know whether it's Jay & Grant's fault for holding them back or if the girls just wanna have fun, but one way or another it's difficult to take them seriously when they're just showing up for the "fun part" of the job and they're isolated from the rest of the team even then.
Where was I? Ahh, the investigation at Star Island. The editors decided to give us a little gold early on with an incident involving Jay, Grant and a thermal camera (yes, another one). They caught something on the camera that turned out to be just a heat signature reflecting off a piece of laminated wood and Grant had the decency to explain to the camera that the unfortunate thing about the FLIR imager is that heat signatures from people in the room "will reflect in a window or a mirror". This brought back memories of the Oak Alley Plantation investigation last year, when Jay saw a heat signature in a window. He had Grant go stand outside the window and was unable to pick up Grant's heat signature through the glass, therefore he and Grant reached the conclusion that the heat signature still must have come from someone standing on the other side of the glass, but that entity must have been supernatural (since Grant's heat didn't show, it must have been magic heat).
…and before anyone thinks "Well, live and learn" I should note that Jay & Grant have been doing this for years and they know all about thermal reflections. The fact that they conveniently forgot about them for one investigation, allowing them to trump up what they sold to the audience as a convincing piece of evidence seems only to be further evidence of their disingenuity and a larger dedication to sensationalism than integrity; but I digress.
Getting back to the girls, their claim to fame for the evening was the review of a staircase where people have reported feeling pushed or tripped. Some may think it was awfully convenient that Kristyn Gartland had a pocket-level with her in order to make the determination that the stairs were crooked, perhaps even suspiciously convenient. Maybe, but it's also possible she read the reports of problems on a staircase and decided maybe she should bring a level to check it out. Unlike Amy & Kris, Kristyn isn't on the show to attract the Male 18-24 demographic and I'm sure she's aware of that. It's entirely possible that she's actually a competent investigator. I know that may seem like a foreign idea to many long-time viewers, and putting all the girls together to get maximum effect when they scream and run from cockroaches and spiders certainly doesn't help, but we might at least consider the possibility.
Actually, Kristyn, Amy and Kris did have one other interested moment during the investigation. Kristyn asked if anyone else had just heard a faint scream. Both Amy and Kris said they hadn't but Amy had a recorder going so she went to rewind and review but the batteries died. Just as she was saying how odd that was, the batteries in Kris' camcorder also died. Funny how we never hear reports of any of the production crew's batteries dying. I guess they just remember to charge their equipment — or maybe the ghosts are afraid of them. Alternatively, and not at all the fault of the girls, they said it was very cold and the batteries in their equipment are consumer grade (not as heavy duty as the stuff the production crew uses) and susceptible to low temperatures. It does seem odd that both batteries would go at once though, but coincidences do happen.
Steve & Tango also didn't get much airtime during this investigation, but they also contributed a valuable piece to the puzzle: rodents in the attic. The reports of guests at the hotel were of hearing furniture moved overhead — that seems a pretty tough sell to pin on "rodents" but then again we have no audio of the sounds themselves, but thanks to Steve & Dave what we do have is video evidence of rodent droppings and even skeletal remains of one. In my book that means it's a worthy possibility to explore as a potential explanation.
Jay & Grant had their own interesting debunk in the Doctor's Cabin, where they noticed pots and pans rattling in the kitchen, seemingly in response to some provocative questions Jay was asking of an alleged spirit that haunts the grounds. As it turned out, the floor boards transmitted movement and any small shift in weight on the couch by Jay or Grant could set the kitchenware rattling.
Not so easily debunked was a thumping sound Jay & Grant both heard from around the area of a fireproof walk-in vault where some artifacts were kept safely locked away. Jay & Grant were both hearing the sound, which they described as footsteps, but they both thought the sound was coming from where the other was (just was up in the attic, and Grant was on the floor below). It turned out the sounds were coming from an area in between them both, which seemed to correspond with the vault. Interestingly, they had the key and went inside but found nothing. My "gut" feeling though, is that it was just a heating pipe banging, or a shutter on the outside of the house flapping in the wind, or something of a more mundane origin. Can't prove it though.
While they were on the steps investigating this there was another noise, this time of a door closing — the door right at the top of the steps. During the evidence review they caught video of a door downstairs opening and closing, with some force, but surprisingly (to me, anyway) Jay wrote it off as "the wind" which was reportedly very violent on the night of the investigation. In the case of the attic door however, Jay insisted it could not have been the wind because the entire place was boarded up and there was no air movement in that area whatsoever. He also was excited by the fact that they had the FLIR camera up there pointed at the door.
What struck me as most off though was that during the evidence review Tango found what he thought was the corresponding footage but Jay explained what he was really seeing was the door opening because the camera was parallel to the door, not perpendicular (and thermal images are hard to interpret sometimes, obviously). The thing is, they never came up with the footage of the door closing, and they didn't seem too excited to have footage of the door opening on it's own either. I'm left to wonder if perhaps the door didn't open on its own (maybe if Dave kept playing the video we'd see who had opened it) and maybe — just maybe — the door didn't close on it's own at all. After all, Jay was sure they had video of that door closing and yet we didn't get to see it. Odd.
The most compelling piece of evidence from Star Island was what seemed to me to be a child's voice. Jay saw a drawing of a baby on a door and said that it was the "creepiest looking baby" he'd ever seen. On the recording there is another voice, which seems to be responding to him, possibly saying something like "it's not that creepy" or something with the word "creepy" at the end. This, I've got no explanation for. It doesn't sound like it was added later, it sounds like a voice that's in the background of the room with them, but it didn't appear on the production audio, only on the handheld. By definition, this could be an actual EVP, it really does sound like a voice and it also sounds like it's responding to what Jason said. I couldn't come up with any rational explanation for it.
Leaving that mystery for discussion, I wanted to close by commenting on the game of "Telephone" and remind everyone why eyewitness testimony sucks. What Jay actually said on that recording was "creepiest looking baby" but when Steve heard that and was setting the EVP up for Tango to listen to he tried to put it in context and suggested Jay must have seen a doll — entirely reasonable but we know this wasn't the case, and more importantly Jason knew this wasn't the case. When he and Grant came in to see what Steve & Tango had come up with Steve set up the audio clip by saying we'll hear Jay saying it's the "creepiest looking doll" he'd ever seen. Then he played the recording and of course that's not what Jay says. He said "creepiest looking baby". Then, when Jay & Grant visit the client for the Reveal, Jay gets ready to play the clip for the client and he says, "At one point I said something about, it's the creepiest looking doll I've ever seen".
Seriously, how bizarre is that? There was never any doll, there was just a drawing on a door. Despite knowing he didn't see or somment on a doll, and despite having heard the actual clip a number of times, Jay still set the clip up for the client by saying he made the comment "creepiest looking doll" he'd ever seen. Somehow a reasonable (but completely wrong) assumption made by Steve and mentioned in casual conversation over-wrote Jay's memory of what actually happened. I'm sure a psychologist (or perhaps an Anthropologist) could explain that our brains are developed to irrationally overvalue the opinions of people we like over cold hard facts, but whatever the cause it's clear we can't always trust what we think we know is true.
Filed under Ghost Hunters, Posts by Logisti
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Comments on GH: Star Island »
Nosfer @ 3:43 pm
I think this is the first time I've seen anyone haul a level around on an investigation. Smart thinking, but it seemed a little suspect to me that she just happened to be carrying one!
Pleased with Jason's recognizing of the wind being the culprit opening the door, especially when it could easily have been passed off as something else (even though it was pretty obvious).
I have to admit that even without prompting I actually heard something that sounded like "creepy" in the "EVP" even before they said it. Doesn't mean anything really, but that's one of the first EVPs I've been able to make out BEFORE being told what it said.
Don't get me started on the Batteries Incident, though!
Given when this episode took place, it does make me wonder if they are on a "Let's get our credibility back by debunking" tour, though. If so, I'm glad of it.
CrowTRobot @ 4:03 pm
Yea, the "I've got a level." nonsense…..please.
The EVP: What I heard, think I heard, was something like, "The baby's not creepy." ; "Don't call the baby creepy." ; something like that. I really thought I heard the word 'baby'. ANYway, it would have been a much better EVP than the one TAPS came up with. As I mentioned on another website, I'm beginning to think maybe TAPS isn't in on all the hoaxing on GH. If they are, they sure aren't doing a good job of interpreting their own hoaxes.
Other than that, I don't recall anything of interest. I'm sure Logisti's review will jog my memory a bit.
alicat @ 4:35 pm
I agree with both of you about actually hearing the "creepy" comment, especially CrowTRobot's statement: "The EVP: What I heard, think I heard, was something like, "The baby's not creepy." ; "Don't call the baby creepy." ; something like that." That was what I thought as well. My feeling was that it was a crew member or maybe even G making the statement under his breath agreeing with J.
The Doctor @ 6:08 pm
I did a little digging into the sound – It seems there are at least 4 "syllables" in the same tone before the "it's not that creepy" There might have been more but Jason's voice covers them before that.
Since we also have production audio at that time, I clipped it out and compared the two – curiously enough there is a sequence of sounds in the same tempo as the syllables in the audio caught by the hand recorder.
I can't make out just what the sounds are, but they could be rustling of the infamous "collar pull" jacket that Grant appears to be wearing again.
Oubliette @ 6:30 pm
Hate to break it to you, guys, but all us gals carry little levels around with us. You never know…
I did like the location. Wouldn't mind spending a week in the little cottage just getting away from all the craziness.
Hal @ 6:50 pm
Greetings, fellow skeptics. Happy Vernal Equinox to anyone who cares!
For the first time ever I actually took notes during this latest telecast of our plumber friends so as to remember important points for comment later on. I am only commenting on the first-halfer, so here goes . . .
At the Star Island Hotel the hostess escorted the usual "Three Amigos" from TAPS, J, G & Steve, around the Island grounds as per planned protocol, pointing out all the areas having reported paranormal activity. One odd part, however, was when she explained to the gang that the usually locked door to the attic in the building that houses her office, a door she claims to have the only key for, would sometimes open and close on its own. Unless it was stupidly edited out of the scene, I thought it very unprofessional that not a single one of the TAPS amigos bothered to ask her something like, "Do you mean the door would open and close on its own while LOCKED?!!" At least I would consider that an important point. Instead, they just kind of "ho-hummed" it and asked her to show them other areas. FCOL!!
On a positive note, contrary to what some have already mentioned, for probably the first time ever (or at least in quite awhile) the three TAPS ladies on the investigation, Amy, Kris & Kristen, did some good debunking when they checked out the stairs in the one building with a leveling device and determined that all or most of the steps were crooked at various different angles and, therefore, could likely explain why people sense they're being attacked by unseen forces when climbing or descending these stairs.
Back to J&G in the attic region of the admin. building. At one point J. heard a banging sound which the Pilgrim audio picked up clearly. I heard it at least twice and after a brief pause I heard it again, but only once. It was sort of like, "Bang, bang . . . bang." For whatever reason, though, a short time later Jay refers to these noises as footsteps. "What?," exclaimed I! They didn't sound like footsteps to me at all. They sounded more like the bangs you would get from the wind blowing a tree branch against the outside wall of a building. Duh!! Then, even later, Jay calls these same sounds a type of scratching!! WHAT THE . . . ?!! How the hell can he not tell the difference between a bang and a scratching sound? I can.
The only other comment I have applies to the Three Amigas later in the night when they suffered that occasional battery drain problem with a couple of their instruments (You know, when a spirit is gobblin' up their juice in an effort to manifest itself.) while, as always, the Pilgrim camera's batteries continue functioning normally! So, once again, what's up with that "shtuff?" And, please friends, no excuses this time like, "The spooks aren't allowed to mess with the camera crew under union rules!"
Liz M @ 8:10 pm
Again I cringed as they opened up the vault where all the artifacts are held and manhandled them. It looked like they were perusing old books with bare hands! Ack!
I definitely heard some kind of comment in the EVP that included "creepy". But their translation did not seem to correspond to what I was hearing. Maybe The Doctor's sound analysis gives us a hint – maybe someone did whisper the creepy baby comment which could explain why they seemed to be so confident of what was said in the EVP. Or, finally a ghost decided to leave an EVP on Pilgrim's equipment as well.
Hal – I agree, those sounds did not seem like footsteps at all. Definitely banging.
Lar @ 8:15 pm
As soon as I heard it, you could tell someone off camera, maybe on a walkie, responded. The word creepy sounds more like "baby."
EVPs rank withtheir too frequent (bogus) personal experiences. They're just
"HEAR SAY!"
blinddog50 @ 9:15 am
Batteries, batteries, batteries,
Hal, please allow me to vent on this 'theory'.
If you go to your car in the morning and it won't start, do you attribute it to being a bad battery or that maybe a ghost drained it overnight while trying to manifest itself.
Walk out the door at your local mall, do you see manifestations taking in the parking lot with all those 750 cranking amps batteries out there.
At the battery rack at the drug store do you hear spirits commenting "WOW, they have 9 volter's here, we're so there dude".
On the way home do you see a 'gaggle of ghosties' hanging around the transformer on the corner?
NO?
That's because this a another theory that has been regurgitated enough times that it has some how become accepted as a fact.
There are no facts concerning ghosts. None. Nada. Zip.
There are no successful 'professional' ghost hunters, only amateurs that wing it with their 'theory' of the week(even if you have your own weekly show).
I apologize for ranting like this, but as I'm typing this I am setting next to some 'ham' HF radio equipment and probably suffering from EMF delusions.
Another 'THEORY'.
Learjet @ 9:56 am
Blinddog, I'm afraid to say you're hallucinating from all the EMF. See Amy's comments at Kimball castle.
Can you imagine what the ghost hunters would say about a Ham shack and the fear cage theory?!
Cheers from VK4.
blinddog50 @ 11:22 am
Learjet,
Hmmm, Ham shack EMF and fear cage,hmmm, you may have answered some questions about some HAM's I know.
Now if I could get Grant to stand in front of the yagi or log periodic I have to test his K2. POOF!
73's VK4.
Leslie @ 6:06 pm
A lot has been said that I agree with, so I just want comment on the draining batteries. In this case I think that it's safer to say that the cold had something to do with this problem, but not so much with the batteries as with the equipment. Cameras and recorders will stop functioning in very cold temps., and I believe that I heard Jason say that it was 10 degrees out that night. That is MORE than cold enough to stop a camera from working, especially if it has been exposed to it for any lenght of time. I've had malfunctions at 30 degrees after only an hour of exposure.
dr_peter_venkman @ 7:51 am
I agree that attributing moving furniture to rodents is difficult. However, if they were ROUS's (Rodents of Unusual Size) it's quite possible. Do you know if there is a fire swamp on the island?
Oubliette @ 9:02 am
Amy Bruni bothers me, though why she does is something I just can't quite figure out. Maybe it's her always hinting that she's from California (i.e., I'm not used to this cold or something like that). Also she seems to come out with the dumbest statements.
I guess Kristyn is OK but it's hard to get past her personality sometimes. And some of her actions off camera (see YouTube for that one; I'm not going to go there) reveal parts of her personality that aren't exactly ladylike and IMO reflect badly on TAPS-if that is possible.
Joe Chin is under-utilized, as usual.
The discrepancy between Jay's "baby" and Steve's "doll" does illustrate, as Logisti pointed out, the problems with eyewitness testimonies or anything that includes individual interpretations. Mention has already been made elsewhere how often Steve gets details of a story wrong if he is not present at the client's briefing of Jay and Grant. But this is human nature and reveals how easily stories change in the telling.
It was a good evp if that indeed is what it was. But as always, there are alternate explanations. At least it didn't sound like the computer generated voices GH has been trying to put forward as being authentic.
I like Star Island but, given its location, I think a lot of the stuff people have heard is due to being offshore and subject to winds etc.
In all, this episode was a step up from last week's, which would have put all but the most die-hard fan to sleep.
Hal @ 10:07 am
Logisti: Your comments re: the video footage of the opening or closing door got me to thinking. It would make more sense, which is probably why we will never see it happen on this show, if TAPS would investigate suspicious doors by placing cameras on BOTH sides of a door to see if it really does swing on its own with no human help. At least that way they would have to get way more sneaky if they wanted to fake it for the cameras and likely get caught in the act, so to speak.
Nosfer @ 10:25 am
Excellent plan of operations Hal. It must be quite complicated though or you'd think we would have seen something like that already. cough! cough! I'd like to take that one step further and add that I'd like to see time-synced and time-stamped redundant cameras in ALL aspects of the investigation. Make sure that each camera picks up the other camera and that between both of them (or more) that an ENTIRE room is covered. Might just possibly eliminate any controversy over the origins of the flight path of something like, oh, maybe a hanger (just as a random example). It would also likely have prevented the Queen Mary incident from taking place at all.
I made the redundant camera suggestion at least a year ago in a place that will remain nameless…but apparently they are too busy to visit their own forum lol
Maybe NV cameras are too expensive and the show can't afford any more. Heck, I'd loan them one or two of mine for a start!
Logisti @ 10:50 am
Hal, in this particular case I believe they were told that any door in the place might open and/or close randomly on its own, so they weren't expecting the attic door in particular to move — because of the lack of airflow they probably figured that would be the LAST door that they should expect to close on its own. That aside, they did have coverage from both sides because the camera operator was with Jay just outside the door. While he didn't have the camera aimed at the door when it actually closed, we could see when he turned the camera that there was no one between him and the door and he hadn't been close enough to pull the door closed himself.
The "coverage from both sides" idea has been floated since their investigation at Bruce Deville's home, and it's a good one but in this case I think we can settle on
"not paranormal" just from the fact that we never even got to see the one side that had good coverage. For all we know at that point in time Jay may have been on the steps alone with the camera operator and Grant may have been in the attic — and Jay may have initially been excited, thinking they really had footage of a door closing on its own, only to discover they actually had footage of Grant partially in-frame on the thermal pushing the door shut with a stick and hoping he was out of frame.
Of course I'm just making that scenario up, it's entirely possible that when Dave found the footage of the door opening (which he thought was the door closing) he may have deleted the rest of the thermal footage, not thinking it was important, and inadvertently erased the actual footage in question. No matter what the reason is for the footage to be missing though, the fact that it was never shown seems more noteworthy to me than if they'd actually shown us thermal footage of what appeared to be the door closing on its own. The latter might convince some while others would speculate it might have been hoaxed. The former should raise questions in everyone's mind.
Nosfer @ 11:12 am
There is one drawback to multiple cameras that I can see. If they double the cameras, that's twice the amount of footage to review, and you know what that means:
Kris or Amy or Jason or Grant or the other Kris would have to (gasp!) pull "review duty" Can't have that now, can we!
Well, here's a thought which has the added benefit of giving more credence to the findings…have a neutral, OUTSIDE party do the evidence review. Win-Win
alicat @ 11:38 am
"Kris or Amy or Jason or Grant or the other Kris would have to (gasp!) pull "review duty" Can't have that now, can we!"
So very true Nosfer. I'm guessing it would be Kris, Amy or the other Kris. I seem to remember one or two occasions when J&G took Steve and Brian to task about the speed with which they were reviewing the tapes. J&G got very ticked off and, if I remember correctly, reviewed the tapes themselves and, ironically, came to the same conclusion as Steve and Brian. I do understand they are the bosses and we don't know what has gone on off camera, but they made it quite clear (on camera no less) they were not happy campers and felt it was beneath them. I also find that interesting considering they promote TAPS as a happy, long time friend and family atmosphere.
CrowTRobot @ 12:20 pm
alicat said, "…but they made it quite clear (on camera no less) they were not happy campers and felt it was beneath them (J&G). I also find that interesting considering they promote TAPS as a happy, long time friend and family atmosphere."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yea, I think they need to drop the whole 'family' thing. It was probably true at one time; but it's obvious it's now all about J&G, and even THAT relationship seems a bit stained at times.