Why Do Ghost Hunters Do That?

(**Don't forget, tonight is "Lonely on a Friday Night." Join me here 7 pm EST onward and jump on and off and chit chat**)

I get asked a lot of questions about the logic or pseudo-logic behind some of the techniques for ghost hunting. Here's the chance to discuss them.

Why do we hunt at night?

I can tell you a lot of reasons why. One reason cited is that ghosts come out when folks have calmed down for the night. They know when the museum is not taking visitors anymore, they know when the family is in bed. Sort of like animals that stalk at night when humans aren't around, ghosts have a cautious schedule.

Another popular reason for ghost hunting at night is the reason I personally have: Less stimuli. We can turn off power to the building which will help us to not have sounds created by air-conditioning or EMF spikes from active power strips and such. Without cars passing outside, noisy humans rushing about, and the darkness that allows us to see the difference between shadow and light, we can notice any sound, see any moving entity. This is simply sensory deprivation and it does work. I know it seems creepier to hunt at night and I guess for some it is (I personally love the dark), but the reasons are actually very practical.

What are some disadvantages of going at night? The biggest one is that if you use your camera with flash, you will get orbs which can distract you from any promise a picture might hold. As well, the use of IR, although helpful can cast shadows of the people standing in front of them and cause false shadow people pics. The simple fact you can't see well at night makes it possible to miss things and to run into overhead beams and have close calls in dangerous places. It also means that, if an animal got into the building, we might not see it whereas in the daytime we would have seen that scampering shadow for what it was, a pesky raccoon.

What's with EMF meters and why are they so important that hunters walk around staring at them?

I wish I could answer this one. It's like an Old Wives tale that gets passed along in the community. Everyone wants a gadget that can get it, find it, know it's there. There are no instruments that tell us for certain that ghostly activity is occurring. The reasoning behind an electromagnetic field detector is that there is an assumption that spirits have to gather energy (thus the incidental and occasional battery drains) for it to form and therefore these fluctuations show up on a meter. The only problem is that random sources can provide us with EMF spikes and we have absolutely no way using that instrument to know what the source is of that spike. It's like trying to capture radio waves with a butterfly net. People say EMF spikes when ghostly things occur, but that's kind of like saying, because Bigfoot is seen with trees, then when we see trees, there must be a Bigfoot!

If you notice on the ghost hunting shows, when they get an EMF spike, they get quite excited, but not a damn thing happens. When they're sitting around not paying attention to the meters, things happen. The meters don't help them locate anything more than EMF changes. Who is to say a ghost wouldn't utilize a radio wave or microwave frequency? Until we know how they manifest, we're just taking a temperature with a volt meter. Without a shielded controlled environment, it's like picking up a radio station's signal in the middle of the desert, it's going to happen unless you build a shield to keep waves from your location. Those crazy radio waves are everywhere. Those damn electromagnetic fields are everywhere.

Why are ghost hunters hearing voices on EVPs when all I hear is noise?

If you go into a building to look for ghosts, any sound is likely to be called a ghost, anything you get in photos or video, you are likely to attribute to spirit formation and any sound you get on your digital recorder, you're likely to chalk up to a ghost trying to communicate. It's one of the "Trinity of Relevance" I wrote about in my book "Was That a Ghost?" Context. It absolutely affects outcome. Women know this one well. We can have a conversation with a man and pick up all kinds of subtext that we extracted from the encounter because we went into it believing he was interested in us, or he was lying and cheating. He could say the same thing, "I just need to think about this," and she could take it as, "he's falling hard and fast and is scared, poor thing," or "he needs some time to come up with a new lie."

Class A EVPs are extremely rare. They are ones in which it is obviously a voice and what that voice is saying is obvious to everyone who hears it. That they even listen to what are obviously either mechanical sounds or environmental sounds and hearing a language in it amazes me, but then it also doesn't surprise me that much because there are lot of folks seeing faces in orbs, so anything is possible when one wants desperately to believe.

The fact is, finding evidence of ghosts is not that easy and the shows have made us believe that they get evidence every time they go to a site. It is the single most boring hobby of all time. That anyone found that it might entertain enough for TV surprised me a lot when "Ghost Hunters" came out, but then there is a lot to be said for people getting to see the inside of some dark scary places. That alone is probably exciting enough, but the jumping and startling and long boring pauses in EVP sessions don't mean a damn thing at the end of a case. Sometimes, all you have are some droning sounds on a recorder and if you try real hard and want it real bad, you can make it sound like anything when you've listened to it about 50 times.

If you have more questions, feel free to share them and perhaps I'll do another installment of "Why Do Ghost Hunters Do That?"