Brandy & Robb started this investigation off in the stables, where a stable boy was allegedly seduced and murdered by a young woman.  Of course, they were trying to contact said boy and Brandy was speculating that now he may despise and distrust all women. While they were talking there was a sound, as if someone shut a door, but nothing much happened otherwise.

Outside Barry & Dustin decided to try debunking shadows seen in the "Blue Room". Parts of the castle server as a modern academy of sorts and students walking through the grounds often report seeing a shadowy figure walking around in the upstairs windows of the "Blue Room" even though there is no one there. Barry noticed a peculiar play of light during their walkthrough tour and managed to reproduce a shadow moving about by the windows (and visible from the ground) from a good distance away. He suggested other students were unknowingly casting the shadows seen by those below in the courtyard.

Interestingly, while Barry was working in the Blue Room Dustin reported seeing shadows and lights moving in another second-floor window towards the center of the building. Not only was no one from the team in that second room at the time, but the room in question doesn't even have a floor, it having collapsed some time ago — so no one could possibly walk past the window.  I am curious if what Barry was doing to create the shadows in the Blue Room might have also created shadows in these other windows; without knowing the internal floor/wall layouts we can only speculate but unfortunately there was no video of the activity in this other room anyway, so we can't even be sure Dustin's eyes weren't just playing tricks on him.

Not to dwell on it, but this kind of struck me as odd and disappointing.  I mean, Dustin is outside with video camera and camera crew, and everyone is recording the front of the building to see if Barry can reproduce shadows in two of the windows.  How is it that no one had a wide enough shot that they could see the other windows Dustin was talking about (just a few windows down from where Barry was) — or were they just not recording at all for some reason?  It's annoying enough when someone sees/hears something and it's not recorded, but in this particular case it seemed to me they had to have recorded it.  I wonder if they did, but on review there wasn't anything in the window, so rather than undermine Dustin they chose to say "we didn't catch it".

The stables were added in the 18th century, but one corner of them lies at an intersection with the original 16th century section of the castle and during the removal of one of the beautifully carved stone water troughs that were built into the wall a crawlspace was discovered that no one had apparently ever been into (at least in the past century!)   Andy Andrews, investigator extraordinaire, couldn't resist and climbed through the small opening with the thermal camera.  I thought it was an odd choice — there wasn't much room to move around in there, much less see temperature anomalies, but as it turns out it was a good choice because it led Andy to discover an opening in the floor that had been covered with loose rubble.

I particularly appreciated Andy's antics, as climbing around in tight spaces and that feeling of exploration (like caving) is just something I really enjoy. Andy managed to take it to the next level and climbed down into the opening he'd discovered in the floor.  The shaft led directly to the basement, which led to speculation by the local historian if perhaps it had once been used to get important documents and records quickly to and from the stables (in order to move them).

The investigation climaxed with Dustin & Robb doing an EVP session, much like Brandy & Robb were at the beginning of the night. They both heard a sound which Dustin believed came from near the front door. What made this time different was that Barry was outside snapping photos with the full-spectrum camera.  Not only that, but he was actually taking photos with a regular camera simultaneously side-by-side.  This is a terrific technique that I applaud.  If only they'd do stuff like that more often, like have the DVR and the thermal camera rigged together so we could compare any thermal anomalies with the standard video footage of the same area.

…but I digress.

What Barry's regular photos showed was exactly nothing, but in one of the full spectrum photos (which the team believes was taken around the time Dustin & Robb heard the sound by the door) there is a streak of light that appears to be moving near the front door of the building.  It is in only a single full-spectrum photo — not to be seen in the one before or after.  As I mentioned, there's no such anomaly in the standard photo so it difficult to explain.  Neither camera was operating with a flash.  We do see the building looks much better lit on the right-side in the full-spectrum shots because there were IR illuminators over there, it's possible some IR (or UV) light hit something reflective by the front door briefly, but I'm not sure there is even anything there to reflect off of, the object seems to be freestanding ten feet or so in front of the building.

It's certainly not solid evidence of anything in particular, but it's one of those things that (for the moment) seems to defy explanation and that makes it curious and intriguing, at least to me.  Overall I thought this was a fair investigation and perhaps even one of the better ones they've done.

]]> http://www.skepticalviewer.com/2008/08/26/ghi-bannfy-castle/feed/ http://www.skepticalviewer.com/2008/08/25/mq-giant-rats/ http://www.skepticalviewer.com/2008/08/25/mq-giant-rats/#comments Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:40:28 +0000 Logisti http://www.skepticalviewer.com/?p=126 Out of the plethora of MonsterQuest episodes I haven't written up, why pick "Giant Rats" to write about?  Well, because although they're not terribly interesting, their situation is: namely, lots of people report seeing them — yet there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support their existence… until now! Just kidding, there still isn't.

The Monster Quest team had a really neat idea: put a camera on a rat and let it go down into the rat-hole (literally) where it lives to see if maybe there are "King Rats" lurking deep under the city (you can guess which city they conducted this investigation in). There were only two problems with this idea: the cameras stuck out too much and wouldn't fit down the holes, and the rats were able to get out of the camera harness pretty much whenever they felt like it.

One thing they were able to confirm was the existence of piebald, or black-and-white rats. These were rumored to be the offspring of escaped laboratory rats (typically albino rats) which mated with wild rats. The result is a rat that has a two-tone coat of fur reminiscent of a cow. One rat exterminator that was working with MonsterQuest actually managed to catch one of these (alive) and showed it on-camera.  That was kind of cool.  It wasn't the mythical creature we were looking for, but it was a kinda-sorta myth confirmed.

No investigation of giant rats would be complete without interviewing homeless people who live in abandoned subway tunnels and storm drains, but how to arrange the interview?  MonsterQuest actually found a guy who is an "Urban Explorer" — basically, he goes into crawlspaces and explores areas where new buildings were built on top of old buildings, etc.  It's pseudo-modern-anthropology/archeology and mainly just something kind of interesting, exciting (and somewhat dangerous) to do.

This particular urban explorer apparently stopped and spoke to the folks he ran into in his explorations, which is kind of cool.  He introduced the MonsterQuest crew to one guy in particular who, although on the surface not the most reliable-seeming witness, seemed quite genuine when he spoke about the size of the rats he sees on a regular basis.  Basically, he said he saw rats the size of a small dog.  As outrageous as that seems, this is coming from a guy whom rats have likely tried to turn into dinner more than once. As other homeless folks mentioned, if you're showing any exposed skin while you're sleeping (and sometimes when you're not) rats won't hesitate to take a bite or three out of you.

In the end, of course, no giant rats were captured on film. What surprised me though, is that no one mentioned the potential culprit that I had in my head throughout most of the episode.  I live in a suburbs outside a major city known for rats (all of them are, actually; just ask an exterminator) and I know there are opossum around here. I've seen them dead on the road, occasionally. I've seen them in my yard, rarely. Once I found one that had fallen into my garbage can and couldn't get out.

These animals can look quite ratlike, especially the ones I've seen living in more urban environments. They're not rats, in fact they are the only marsupial (a word most often associated with Australia) naturally found in North America. It seems to me they would be the natural explanation for what people are actually seeing when they think they're seeing a giant rat — but for some reason MonsterQuest didn't explore this possibility.

How this works is the team splits into three groups and each group goes to a different part of the castle and records for an hour. Next, they review each others recordings and pick the place with the most suspected activity to focus all of their energy on as a collective group. That's not exactly triangulation from a technical standpoint, but in this case kinda-sorta is close enough (I guess).

Out of the three recordings, only one of them had anything odd on it — and after the team focused all their energy on that one spot, nothing happened. In fact, when they went back and reviewed the recording they initially thought had potential EVPs on it, turns out all the sounds were readily identifiable as local animal or environmental noises, like falling rocks and vampire bats. I'm kidding. Vampire bats don't make noise.

Unfortunately, that's the best I can do to spice this one up. Somehow, despite obviously conducting this investigation some time before it aired, Pilgrim decided to save it for the season finale. In fact, they decided to make it a "2nd-halfer", the twenty-minute investigation long-time viewers know is doomed to be utterly boring the moment they see the team pulling up to a new location when the episode is more than half over.

I guess Pilgrim was counting on keeping viewers riveted with the whole "OMG, They're investigating DRACULA'S CASTLE!"  Bravo, Pilgrim.  You got me to watch and now I hate you more.  At least put the boring stuff up front next season. If I'm bored 15 minutes in but I see they're already up to the reveal then I can have some reasonable expectation the rest of my hour won't be quite as painful.

This is one of those situations where I don't fault the GHI team at all (yes, it happens sometimes) — they did what seemed to be a pretty good investigation and even tried something new and relatively scientific that could have increased their chances of catching something. "No evidence" is a completely respectable result, the problem in this case is that we're watching it on television expecting to be entertained. As the production company, that's Pilgrim's job and I think they fell short on this one — and considering how often they bear criticizing (and how this was supposed to be the exciting season finale) that's kind of annoying.

Bannfy Castle, which was the investigation that aired in tandem with this one (Bannfy airing in the first portion of the episode) was a much more interesting investigation — don't worry, we'll get to that one in the next few days! — but if I was cutting these episodes and the production schedule forced me to air these two investigations together as the finale, Bannfy would have been a much more worthy note to leave off the season on, and I'm going to reprogram my brain to remember it that way because otherwise I might not be able to turn on the premiere next season

Like any good story, what's going on with the family PRS is trying to help out in this investigation unfolds slowly over time. The family is clearly traumatized by something and to say they're "reluctant" to speak about it would be an understatement. They flat-out refused to even come close to discussing it for quite some time, and as it turns out, quite understandably so.

The house had apparently recently undergone renovations (which is often thought to kick up spirit activity) but the reported activity goes back further than that, apparently. The family's teenage son Jimmy  was the most candid about discussing his experiences, one of which involved looking in a mirror and seeing a man with white hair and a distinct mustache standing behind him, and another where he was taking a shower in the upstairs bathroom and he looked out and saw a woman watching him.  The second floor of the house, and especially that bathroom clearly creeped him out.  He said he felt that if he went up the stairs at night without turning the lights on first, he wasn't going upstairs alone.

His mother did not discuss any personal experiences she may have had, but she was very clearly supportive of her son and said she too thought there was something supernatural going on in the house. Jimmy's dad was of a different mind. He felt bad that his son had been scared and was uncomfortable, but he was certain this was a matter of eyes playing tricks and whatnot.  This seemed to drive a bit of a wedge between father and son, since Jimmy seemed very affected by these experiences and felt he couldn't talk to his dad about them.

Penn State's Paranormal Research Society started out in-line with their usual methodology: Ryan brought in a psychic.  In this case, CJ Sellers, who promptly seemed to generate impressions about a "little girl", "man with a mustache", a suicide and the upstairs bathroom. Also, she said the spirit that was giving her these impressions was a woman who described herself as "the grandmother".

Well after the family heard this all hell broke loose. Jimmy's dad basically lost it, ran outside and started flipping out in a "what that %&$# is this $&#* ??" kind of way.  After he (I am guessing) came to the conclusion that there is no way CJ could have "guessed" that information or found out ahead of time some other way, he seemed to accept that maybe there really was something to this psychic thing after all.  I must say, I was a bit impressed as well.

So after this he decided to open up and apparently what the family hadn't wanted to discuss was that his mother had killed herself in the upstairs bathroom with a firearm when Jimmy was just a infant (or thereabouts).  Jimmy had no memory of her and there weren't any pictures of her in the house, so he had no way of identifying if this had been the woman he'd seen in the bathroom.  In fact, I sort of expected the father to pull out a dusty old photo album so Jimmy could make just such a determination, but that didn't happen.

What did happen was less impressive: CJ Sellers was shown a single photo of the husband's great-grandfather (who had white hair and a dominant mustache) and basically said, yep that's him.  Way to go, Ryan.  You've come a long way from that first episode where you showed that kid a photo of an entire wedding party and he was able to pick out the one guy who used to live in the house and later committed suicide.  One picture?  Seriously?

Later that night they did "Dead Time" at 3am, as is customary for PRS. During that time they asked for any spirits to come forth and show their presence and a circuit-breaker flipped causing the part of the house they were in to lose power. This seemed fairly significant to the father, who generally seems the pragmatic type and noted that nothing new had been introduced onto that circuit and they hadn't had problems with the circuits before.

Ultimately, there was no firm resolution for this family but CJ Sellers said that the grandmother was sorry and wished she'd been around to see her grandson grow up, and that seemed to be enough. Jimmy's dad said he felt much better, he seemed to connect with his son, and for his part Jimmy told the PRS team he didn't get scared around the house anymore.  No banishing ceremonies, no Lorraine Warren, it was a banner episode for Paranormal State.

Regarding evidence, as usual on this show there was none — or extraordinarily circumstantial evidence at best, but that's all right because they didn't over-sell it.  They weren't claiming to "prove" anything.  What's got me the most interested though, as usual, is the psychic.

Obviously, we could look at her results (or the edited-for-tv version thereof) and say that's circumstantial evidence that she's really psychic.  It's certainly not "hard" evidence though, not to impugn her character at all but scientifically we can't be 100% certain she didn't have some sort of information, somehow, ahead of time, no matter how many assurances other people give us to the contrary.  Turning it around though, if one were to come up with those results in some "non-psychic" way, how could it be done?  I mean, Ryan's team apparently didn't even know about Jimmy's grandmother.

I suppose if you were going to pull out all the stops you could hypothesize that someone might cross-reference the address with newspaper articles and police reports from the last twenty years, seeing if there was a likely candidate for a person or tragedy anywhere in the public record, but then you're still stuck with the mustache — and as vague as "man with a mustache" seems that's still a helluva thing to pull out of thin air. Even knowing the entire history of the family and the property, there wasn't anything we were told that could really be used to single out that guy as the second ghost-on-campus.

The only chink in the armor I see is I believe CJ did mention a "little girl", which I don't think came to anything.  I'm sure there are "good" reasons a "real" psychic might get impressions that are either false or not relevant, but one might also suggest it could indicate "fishing", for instance if there was a little girl that was listed in public records as also having died on the property.

I'm stumped.  Your thoughts?

Whether this is true or not, what we can be fairly certain of is that Elizabeth Bathory was an enormously prolific serial killer who, from her position of power, would sometimes deceive families into parting with their daughters by saying they would be given positions of honor and/or good jobs in faraway lands.  Sometimes her victims were kidnapped outright. It would appear that some of her servants were not only "in the know" but had actively assisted in gathering young girls for their Countess' horrific purpose.  Estimates of these murders range from 80 to 650 young girls and women.

Now, one might expect that in an essentially feudal society a minor noble can get away with quite a lot, but serial murder might be overreaching. In fact, apparently Elizabeth's husband had loaned a large amount of money to the King in order to finance a war that was ongoing and some suspect that when these matters came up after her husband's death that she was given a lot of leeway by the crown, lest she start calling in some of that debt.

Later, when the matter finally became too pronounced to ignore (after she'd been at it for 25 years) she was arrested, tried and convicted of 80 murders, but since the standard punishment (execution) would have caused a scandal (since she was, of course, a noble) she was instead confined to one room for the rest of her life.  This also became, apparently, a convenient way for the King to get out of paying back those loans — if only he'd thought of that earlier! 

With all of this background, it's bound to be an interesting night, right?  Wrong!  This investigation got the short end of the episodic stick, so we suspected it was going to be a lame duck right out of the gate, and it was.  They came up with absolutely no evidence — which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Some might argue it's preferable to listening to a half-dozen so-called EVPs that all sound like they either aren't voices at all or else perhaps the camera guy whispering to the sound guy about how badly he'd like to go grab a pizza.

No, not a bad thing to come out of an investigation and have no evidence of anything unusual going on — but I'm still angry.  Oh yes!  As usual, the reason for this takes us to the "Reveal" and specifically to Robb.  Normally, on a case like this Jason & Grant might tell their host that this doesn't mean they're saying the reports are false or that nothing's going on — it just means that weren't able to back any of those reports up with evidence, and since "Ghosts don't perform on demand" well, that's okay. Right?

Actually, no.  It apparently is not okay with Robb, who flat-out told their host that visitors who report seeing a woman walking among the ruins of the castle are "seeing what they want to see".  If I had to choose which riled me up more: Someone who strongly believes something despite a total lack of evidence and perhaps even evidence to the contrary, or someone who seems to change their beliefs situationally, I think it would have to be the latter every time.

Seriously, it's one thing to come away from a place and say, "The evidence we collected proves this place is haunted" but it's an entirely different thing to walk away saying, "The lack of evidence we collected proves this place isn't haunted, and by the way therefore all the people who tell you they saw something are lying, crazy, or otherwise unreliable witnesses."  Logisticians will tell you it's impossible to "prove a negative".  Atheists will similarly tell you it's impossible for them to "prove God doesn't exist," but apparently Robb has crossed this logic barrier.  His services will be in demand by great minds worldwide   (:rolleyes:)

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