by Logisti

For this 20-minuter 2nd-half investigation we've been shorted one Steve Gonsalves and Dave Tango, ostensibly due to their Ghost Hunters Academy investigation (which premiered right after this episode, coincidentally) but never fear: Britt Griffiths and Dustin Pari are here to fill in!  Britt & Dustin are familiar to long-time fans of the Ghost Hunters.  Britt is the one with the awesome-cool name, a creative outlook on scientific evidence gathering and the occasional new electronic gadget he's dug up or created to that end. Dustin is the ironic narcissist who often wears a visor-cap in a completely ridiculous manner, I assume to make his narcissism all the more ironic.

The investigation began with Kris & Amy (and us at home) hearing a number of loud noises that might suggest someone else was in the building with them. Due to the small-ish size of the building Jay & Grant had specifically stated only one group would be in the building at a time, so they should be alone… so what is making the sounds? These intrepid investigators were unfortunately not able to determine the source or cause of the sounds.

Jay & Grant were slightly less successful, as they tried to debunk one report: An employee said the front door opened and she saw a child-sized shadow walk into  the room and head towards the back. In typical fashion J&G speculated wildly about how someone might see a shadow in the room if a person walked by outside, or if someone was on the roof, or something to do with a mirror — I was completely lost by the end, and it was only thirty seconds long so that's saying something. Jay, of course, said they couldn't be sure if any of these things actually caused what the woman had seen — absolutely! We also can't be sure it wasn't the Loch Ness Monster astral projecting or perhaps a drug-induced hallucination brought on because she had accidentally smoked peyote that morning instead of her normal cigarette.

Maybe I'm just really dumb — or maybe I'm a super-genius that has unrealistic expectations about what average intelligence is — but it seems to me if we're going to unscientifically speculate about non-paranormal explanations for this woman's experience, the most obvious one is this: A child opened the door and came in, the employee's view of the child was obstructed by a shadow from the afternoon sun or some such thing, and the child walked right back out the door while the employee — by trick of the shadows — thought the figure had continued into the building. I mean, I just made that crap up but isn't it much more sensible (and obvious) than the made-up crap Jay & Grant were coming up with?

This is a major sticking point because if these guys can't even try to come up with a scientifically plausible explanation without going off the deep end and leaving the most obvious and reasonable conclusions rotting on the dock, how can they expect anyone to take them seriously when they start in with their paranormal explanations? One would expect the difference between a debunk and a confirmed haunting should be 'fairly solid scientific' vs 'semi-scientific and logical (but not scientifically provable)' explanations, but instead it's far more arbitrary: more like 'wild speculation that is remotely possible but doesn't necessarily make sense' vs 'completely made-up stuff that sounds like it might sort of make sense, the way they explain it'.

If you watch enough of these investigations you will undoubtedly come across scores of examples where similar evidence is found on different investigations, and sometimes they claim it's paranormal, other times they say it's not and offer some pseudo-scientific explanation. Whether a particular piece of evidence  (like EMF fields) is labeled paranormal seems to have more to do with the context of  the investigation (did investigators have "personal experiences" or did they capture some other odd things on video or audio?) than anything else, and that's just plain unscientific.

Moving along… as I watched Dustin (visor-less tonight) and Britt trying to coax any nearby spirits to pull books off a shelf they were staring at, I thought to myself about how many times these folks have done exactly this or something just like it and never, ever, ever, ever gotten a result. Sure, we've seen investigators ask for and seem to get responses in the form of knocks, EMF spikes or other less tangible ways but not once ever (in years and years of investigations by TAPS, GHI and so many other less exposed groups) seen two investigators coaxing an alleged spirit to move an object that had been reported to move, and then seen the object actually move. Putting roll-able objects on non-level floors doesn't count.

Rigging flashlights to turn on with the slightest vibration doesn't count. The reports were books coming off the shelf, or in the Buffalo Bill Museum it was Kachina Dolls coming off a shelf, or a chair being moved, or any of the night-infinite number of other reports of significantly weighty objects moving in significantly impressive ways and no one has recorded it happening once. Unless of course you count stuff like a picture frame or folding chair moving in a suspicious manner (as if pulled by fishing line!) when Grant is or was recently the only one present. And those weren't even objects that had been reported to move. I don't want to see a table lamp move just because the power cord is opportunistically tuggable from a nearby chair. I want to see the objects that supposedly move all the time, move. On their own, in clear view of the camera and with as little possibility for trickery as reasonably achievable (wider camera angles, etc).

Without one such piece of evidence in so many investigations I'm left to reason that either ghosts do not actually exist, or ghosts may exist but do not actually move objects as these reports claim, or ghosts may exist and may move objects as claimed but do so extraordinarily rarely (far less than the claims suggest). The only remaining possibility is that TAPS is statistically unlucky to an implausible extent.

…oh, and TAPS didn't find anything for this particular investigation — for those who were wondering