gman26 said:

 All you need is a video cameraa digital voice recorder and a digital camera for taking pictures. If you are gonna catch something it will be on one of those. Any thing else just a gimmic and wastes time.

 Are you so sure ?   Ghost Hunters has hundreds of hours of videos taken in the supposedly hottest areas, with little to show for it, yet the team reports seeing shadows, appiritions and faces with their own eyes all the time.  In this latest episode at the theatre, they reported seeing something that should have been caught on video, yet for some reason wasn't.

There must be millions of hours of survelience video shot each year, so where are all the ghosts ?

Maybe Casper just can't be caught on video.

Old or new posts–we still love to discuss them all (well, most of them!).

The problems with the Manson episode and the K-II has been discussed here often but it's worth talking about again.

The K-II meter is nothing but a blinking ouija board.  A lot of us here are very skeptical about how easily it can be manipulated and I'm sticking my neck out but think I speak for the majority when I say that we think it and the answers it gets are bunk and probably being controlled by outside sources.  In fact, someone here made the very astute observation that whenever Joe Chin answered his walkie-talkie it made his K-II light up like a Christmas tree.  Also, the guy who introduced it, Chris Fleming, has a dubious reputation at best. 

I don't for a minute think they contacted anyone in that episode, and probably in no other episode as well.  The Ouija Board has been disproven as a device that is subconciously (or deliberately) controlled by those holding the planchette.  The K-II meter responses are "too good to be true" and seems to point at trickery on somebody's part. (There's some excellent threads here on this very dubious piece of equipment.)

As skeptics we try to look at worldy explanations why something seems to elicit a response.  I understand your point about trying different methods as this field is really wide open when it comes to finding a way to determine if something truly unusual is going on. Perhaps fluctuation in energy fields might provide some kind of insight into hauntings, but the only instruments that would be worth anything would be those developed by actual scientists from various fields like physics and engineering who have a clue as to how the physical world works.  Without knowing that first, people can be easily drawn into producing such idiotic devices as the Telephone to the Dead and the now famous Parabot.  Which of course unfortunately just makes all serious investigators look silly.

The answers will, I'm sure, one day come from science, but not these amateurish methods by those who have no real training or background and don't even understand the instruments they are currently using (like the FLIR, for instance, which GH doesn't even know how to properly calibrate, thus nullifying anything they may pick up on it).

So your thinking is right, but so far all we are seeing are attempts by people literally fumbling around in the dark without the necessary knowledge to know just what they are doing.

The Manson K-II session was so fake it reeks. All questions (bar one) were deliberately asked to get a yes response and 2 flashes.

Now the K-II has a thumb switch which is overly sensitive to the slightest movement. Breathe on it and the K-II then goes into a reboot sequence which is – 2 flashes. Every yes question Chris Flemming asked was answered by a reboot caused by thumb movement, not a ghost. I timed it against mine and it is a perfect match.

This switch weakness in the K-II was later addressed by either a modified switch or a coin jammed against the plastic pressure pad. But by then they figured out that the K-II can be set off by radio transmissions and the monkey business continues.

Ghostbusters101 said:

   It worked so well a couple of times, it would flash even before they asked a question.

Yeah it does that too. The ghost is obviously precognitive!