I was in a large hunt with a group of others and found immediately a phenomena that makes me smile. I don't carry a cell phone for this very reason, it is highly distracting. Meters on ghost hunts are similarly so.
A large group of hunters, heads bent, squinting in the dark at a meter waiting for it show them a ghost is present is a bit like taking photos on your digital camera out you front windshield and using those images to help you drive down the road.
Many times, something would happen and I would elbow someone nearby, “Did you see that?” The dazed hunter would shake her head and I would sigh as her head snapped back down to the meter waiting for it to tell her if something happened.
It was dazzling, admittedly, when TAPS came to our TVs on “Ghost Hunters” and showed us a more “scientific” method to determine if a building was haunted. I was most impressed with their tactics of debunking.
I admittedly went along with them on the use of EMF meters, thermometers, and KII meters in the hopes that they might correlate with activity. The fact is, these electrician's tools do not line up with activity. You can see it as well on the GH show. They will get excited about EMF rises and nothing happens. They feel the temperature go down and nothing happens. They're sitting in a room observing and they see or hear something, no meters indicating it's there. They do not line up. They are not effective. They are like using a rectal thermometer to check electrical current or using a light meter to measure sound. It makes no sense. It is not effective. These tools are useless. I hate to say it, but it's true.
With enough years of working these tools and finding absolutely no correlation with activity, I am doing something that bucks the system. I am lifting my head and studying my environment like ancient ghost hunters might have done.
The fact is, I grew up in a haunted house and these events occur randomly and without warning. You can easily miss them. Your own body is your best meter. It reacts to it just like the way you know someone is staring at you and you lift your head and look directly at them as if you felt their eyes upon you. Your body tells you of a presence, something that does not belong there. Trust it. Do not trust the meters. Do not stare at them like a cell phone drone and miss the life around you.
This does not make me popular, but at this point, it's time to wipe the slate clean and find yet a new technique for hunting that involves the greatest witness of such phenomena, the human body/mind/eye/ear. It is true that anecdotal evidence does not prove phenomenon, but then neither does a jump in an EMF meter in an unshielded room.
I know I piss people off in the field when I say that, but they look more the fools for running around using hearsay and old wives tales to direct their investigations as if Jason and Grant somehow tapped into the other world and know how it works. They don't. They do the same thing the rest of us poor hunters do; they go to reportedly haunted sites and try to witness phenomena. If it depended on their equipment, they would set it up and go out to midnight bowling.
None of this is scientific investigation. If it was, it would be done in controlled and shielded environments, but it's not. We're still shooting in the dark. We took a step up from turn-of-the-century spiritualists and hoaxers to debunkers, but no matter how we tackle it one thing is a given--it's humans who witness this and humans witnesses still trump a meter rising to 3.5 or temperature dropping 10 degrees.
Back to the tables, boys! We need to have a little discussion on where this industry is going. I will be writing about that tomorrow after my Mind Fuck Tuesday entry!