lol, good one blinddog.

I can just see it now: Grant claiming Dyer and Whitton hoodwinked him and when the camera is pointed in the opposite direction, the faucet one foot to his right suddenly turns on and Grant exclaims "Holy frig! That faucet just turned on by itself! What the fedge is goin on here?!"

Then, in a year or so, the exciting spin-off show will debut.. Ghost Hoaxers International.

Looks like since Brian left there was nobody to pick on. So now you want a "lets pick on Grant" topic.

For shame.

J. said:

That was just me and blinddog joking.

Just because we're skeptics doesn't mean we have no sense of humor.

But "The List" of suspicious events surrounding Grant I do take seriously.

So, what sounds like Grant bashing was just kidding around?

And "The List" of events….do you take the events seriously?

Just wondering if I'm not getting the concept of the topic. I hate misinterpreting these things.

Page one was all seriousness. At the top of page two was just a couple of jokes by me and blinddog. If you wanna call that "picking on Grant," well, ok. Everything else besides those two jokes is serious though.

And yes, I take what seem like potential hoaxes by a paranormal investigator seriously. Take a look at the evidence and videos and decide for yourself.

What episode was that Shannon and is there a youtube video of it?

Do you guys & gals think that the door opening then shutting and the EVP Stephen mentioned should be added as #12 to the list?

The opening and closing door part of the episode is on youtube here at 2:24 in if you want to review it.

Thanks go to Stephen for sharing the link with me.

* Because I think the suspicious people aren't the bulk of their audience, and certainly not the ones they're targeting. Although their show is sciencey enough to appeal to the likes of us, I think their real target demographic isn't that different from, say, Crossing Over with John Edwards.

I have a four-tiered system for potentially paranormal events as they relate to Grant:

Tier 1: An event where there is clear reason to be suspicious and the most likely suspect is inarguably Grant. Examples: Moving Chair (Race Rock Lighthouse), Moving Lamp (Myrtle's Plantation); in both these cases there is clear reason to be suspicious (someone/shadow standing in the stairwell, lamp power cord has clearly been moved/pulled) and in both cases Grant is the closest/most likely suspect by a longshot. These aren't the only two such incidents, just clear and convenient examples.

Tier 2: An event where there is no immediately obvious reason to be suspicious, but if we consider Grant at-all under suspicion (from Tier 1 events) then we have to include these too. This would be stuff like the faucet turning on while Grant was by himself standing three feet away and his camera man and Jay were up in the attic. The moving picture frame (when Grant was alone in a room with a tape-fed camera) also falls into this tier. Basically, if we accept that ghosts might exist and might be able to do such things, these events don't seem outright suspicious — except that we know for a fact that Grant could have faked it were he so inclined.

Tier 3: This is where I would personally draw the line with a list like this. These would be events like the door opening/closing in the Iron Island Museum, and also the sounds (and speak n' spell) Tango & Kris heard in that Library whose name escapes me at the moment. Basically, any event where there really isn't any particular reason to suspect Grant, except that we already suspect him in regards to other events and we don't know where he was at the time these events occurred — so by default, we can't rule out Grant-as-hoaxer but it could just as easily been someone else (or perhaps not a hoax at all).

Tier 4: Any event that we can, with some confidence, declare Grant could not be reasonably suspected of hoaxing would fall under this tier. Unfortunately, there aren't all that many events which I would consider "impressive" that fall into this category. Off the top of my head one that stands out is a certain basement where Jay & Grant were told a room was haunted. Jay went into the room and seemed to be a good distance in (we couldn't see him) when the door suddenly slammed shut on him. The camera shot clearly showed Grant and the entire exterior of the door and there was no way anyone pushed it shut.

In that case we still have to at least consider the possibility of Jay pulling it from the inside, but we can at least clear Grant of any suspicion. I'm certain there are a number of other impressive incidents that could be considered Tier 4 as well, but Tier 3 becomes a large problem because if something happens with Grant in the area then it's the rare camera angle/event combo that allow us to definitively say there's no possible way Grant could be responsible. Similarly, if something happens while Grant is not in the area then we immediately have to wonder where Grant is unless the team immediately radios in to Jay and we see Grant is with him.

So since Tier 3 is basically the "Suspicious until proven innocent" tier I would say that it wouldn't be fair to include all those events. I'd just keep it to incidents where there is a clear reason to single Grant out.

I think Grant is just a "magnet" for these occurrences and one day we will all be believers. (I have to admit I have a "thing" for Grant, so yes, I am biased).

I missed Wednesday's show but just from reading the reviews and posts, I can actually see it in my mind. Joe Chinn was back, eh?

Hi Barb!

I'm with you on this: Grant is innocent until proven guilty. Despite plenty of circumstantial evidence, we still haven't found a smoking gun. Since TAPS and Pilgrim have complete control over what we get to see, we'll probably never see unmistakable evidence of hoaxing, Grant's or otherwise.

What we're doing is investigating. If there's reason to believe that Grant is hoaxing evidence, I want to know. Without a smoking gun, the best chance we have is for a preponderance of evidence. If all of the unambiguous, hoaxed-or-haunted footage comes when Grant and Grant alone was in a position to have created a hoax, then that pattern needs explaining.

If Grant really is a magnet for hauntings, as Handsty believes, then that's an important thing to find out. If he could do it under controlled conditions, he could win the JREF Challenge or perhaps a Nobel! That doesn't seem the best fit for the facts, however. These things seem to happen not just when Grant's nearby, but when he's in a position to create a hoax unobserved.

To be more objective, we should start a non-Grant list– a list of incidents of similar magnitude and quality of evidence that happened when Grant was not in a position to cause them (Logisti's Tier 4, above). At present I can't think of anything to compare with the Moving Chair or Moving Picture Frame, though. The closest I've got is Jay's broken glass, and even that is pretty ambiguous.

I don't know Grant. I don't have any reason to bear him ill will. He looks like a pleasant, trustworthy guy. If he has been hoaxing evidence, it's possible that he has a reason, or believes he does. Whether Grant is good or evil is not my concern. I just want to know what he's done, if anything.

Barb, those offerings certainly do qualify for events that were not likely to have been hoaxed, much less by Grant. I'll discuss them in a moment but first let me say that if you examine any of the incidents where we suspect Grant of possibly running a hoax you'll see that in every case it's entirely plausible that Grant could have done it himself without anyone else seeing or knowing about it. In fact, for me that's a primary test: if it doesn't look like Grant could have easily done it without anyone else knowing then in my mind that clears him of suspicion.

The thing is, there are a lot of situations where nothing happens the entire investigation until suddenly Grant is left alone in a room and something happens in that room, or some similar scenario where the only time something occurs is the during the same time Grant would have had an opportunity to somehow cause it. That's the primary issue. Off the top of my head I would say there are actually fewer incidents like the Eastern State Prison apparition wheree something occurs, it might have been a hoax by a single person, but it could have been anybody, and many more incidents where something occurs, it could have been a hoax, the Grant is the only one nearby. That alone seems odd and it's another reason we get suspicious.

To the specific points you mentioned, we've actually discussed all of those although I believe some of the discussion isn't in posts but rather in our podcast. I'll go over our verdicts in brief:

St. Augustine Lighthouse: I thought this was the single most impressive body of evidence they'd captured on film, but Stephen pointed out that a the "dark figures" not setting off the motion sensors could potentially (and accidentally) be caused by Grant's mini-flashlight and the weird way shadows cast on the inside of a lighthouse. The first figure we see lean over the railing halfway up looks solid, and probably is. Jay & Grant tried to figure out where they were when it happened and decided they must have been on the floor just below — maybe they miscounted and maybe it was actually one of them and they didn't realize it.

For the shadow at the top, it could potentially be the flashlight casting a shadow of someone on the stairs below on the lighthouse roof. From the straight-up camera angle, we can't really tell if it's a small shadow leaning over the railing or a bigger shadow on the ceiling that just happens to look like it's a person leaning over the railing. It's not definitive by any means, but it's a potential explanation that I have to admit is plausible and that's one more potential scientific explanation than I'd had going into my conversation with Stephen.

The sound guy being knocked down at the armory is problematic because when the bag lifts up the camera angle is in tight and low. We can't really see anything to Frank's left or right because of the darkness and the people standing in the foreground blocking the view (Frank himself is in the background), and the camera is panned down so we can't even see Frank's head, shoulders or the top of the bag. This basically means we can't tell if maybe the bag got caught on something or if one of the other crew members played a mean trick on him.

We'd probably be able to tell one way or another if we had a better camera angle of this, and we know a wider shot exists because we see Grant looking at it on a small screen during the investigation. The shot we have is from Brian's handheld, presumably the other shot is from a production camera but for whatever reason they've never aired a good shot of that footage so we've never been able to actually see whether there was really nothing there to make the bag jump like that, or if there was something there after all, so again — not conclusive, but after some review I'm far less impressed with it than I was before it really sunk in how the existing footage gives us no perspective at all on what's going on around Frank and that bag.

The Charlie Chaplin studios was one of my favorite moments, because it looked to me that Jay & Grant were able to really lock down exactly where the FLIR camera had been pointing when they saw the "woman" heat signature, which is important because often they're waving that thing around so much I'm certain when they catch something and try to recreate it, more than half the time they're trying to recreate it in the wrong place. This time there were good landmarks to zero in on the exact spot, and then to realize the actual figure was standing in a spot where they must have been three feet off the ground also added (in my mind, at least) to the credibility of this evidence.

I believe Stephen and I discussed this briefly in a podcast but he hadn't seen the footage so he wasn't able to suggest any possibilities. If he's seen it since then maybe he's got one to offer. Otherwise, this is one thing that I would label as "impressive" — meaning that it was almost certainly NOT J&G's reflection or some other misunderstanding and I would say there was definitely someone or something there that was no longer there a few moments later. It also fits the criteria of Grant being clear from any suspicion. Now, this isn't to rule out the possibility of a hoax or simply the possibility of a misunderstanding, but I agree as the matter stands I haven't yet seen good potential explanations for either of those theories.