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Ghost Hunters

The Lone Bolt said:
I checked this out. He does some impressive work. I'm sold on at least one debunking -- the statuette that is assumed to be an apparition. I think that one is proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

Still not convinced that TAPS are frauds, but these debunkings are certainly food for thought.
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Wow, thank you for that, The Lone Bolt. It wasn't just Dreamsinger's work, but also reading Jason's ranting and disrepect for people who dared to question his credibility. It was quite a show for a while there. Fawning 'bleevers' were welcomed on the the TAPS forum, skeptics were ridiculed and could not get a conversation past how great the Ghost Hunters were. :boggled:


Apology said:
No, I haven't been there, but I'm reading his work right now and it's fantastic. Thank you so much!
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You are so welcome!


Apology said:
I taught my nephew some of the basics of logic and debunking while watching Ghost Hunters. He went from being a fan of the paranormal to a fan of skepticism over two seasons of watching the show.

We also watched a few other shows that were even worse, and as a result, he positively hates "psychics", because I pointed out to him how they influence everyone else in the room to be frightened, start imagining cold spots and mysterious noises, etc. Once someone points out the suggestive power of the "psychic", it's pretty easy to spot, and becomes an eye-rolling event.

There was an episode of a show (I think it was Most Haunted) where the homeowner's dogs were supposed to be terrified of the home and neighborhood pets "mysteriously" disappeared. We noted that the homeowner was becoming more and more excited, nearly hyperventilating, and speaking more loudly and rapidly as she approached the house with the dog. The faster and louder she talked, the more nervous the dog became. It was obvious that the dog was becoming upset because the owner was upset, rather than sensing any arcane presence in the house. In addition, the home was located on a very busy two-lane road in a semi-rural area, and most of the homes in the neighborhood had split-rail fences, so it wasn't hard to figure out where the local pets were disappearing to---doggy heaven :( Somebody eventually got a good deal on that house, provided that they either properly fenced it in or refrained from having pets that would run into the road.

Good times. :popcorn1
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Yes, I remember the dog show. Anyone with a dog should recognize the dog reacting to its mistress. When someone knocks on the door, my dog will immediately start barking, running around my legs saying "somebody is here!"
If I am glad to see the person, she will stop barking, and wait to be acknowledged. If it is my daughter's boyfriend (bleck!) or the angry postman (bleck again) she will continue to bark at them, a little sharper and snappier.
:whistling

The worst offenders in this genre IMO are the ones who stoke the fire's of some poor souls' fears and possible mental illness. If there were a hell, I think everyone involved with "Psychic Children" should go there right now!

Ah, yes, the forum board wars. Great fun! :p
 
I have occasionally popped into the TAPS chat room. Last week I was on there, asking a few (fairly benign) skeptical questions. I logged on this week, said hello, and was immediately banned.

The rules of the forum say you will be banned for "disruptive behavior". In more skeptical or balanced chat rooms, that means things such as abusing people, spamming, and the like. But in this room, "disruptive" seems to mean saying something that might question their expertise, plant a skeptical seed in the minds of other chatters, or otherwise disrupt their belief system.

I find that very telling.

On the other hand, if they have become that sensitive to even mild skeptical views, it could be a good sign that the questions continue to come, and are building, and they are having an increasingly hard time responding to them.
 
StarTrekLivz said:
I have seen oodles of tv shows featuring TAPS and other ghost hunters, they lurk in basements ("I feel cold down here!" -- duh, you're in a basement!) and other idiocies. Today the Sci Fi channel (redubbed SyFy) did a full day marathon of people in haunted houses.

I would love to see a bunch of people, especially including TAPS, put into an old house where none of the inhabitants had noted "ghostly" activity, especially if that house had been within the same family for multiple generations. And let them "discover" all sorts of "spiritual influences" which none of the residents detected. and result from the psychological problems of the "experts" rather than anything "spiritual.

My own house is 100 years old, and some people want to include it on a "ghost tour," and I reply, "Why, there are no ghosts here?"
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I actually did the "haunted house with a control experiment"... hilarity ensued...

Psiload said:
I posted this on a woo woo board, and I thought I'd bring it over here and share it with you good people... just for poops and giggles:


I lived in a haunted house for two years. At least, they told me it was haunted.

The history of the house was about as good as you're going to see for haunted house potential... as good as any Hollywood screenwriter could come up with.

Southampton, NY... on the East end of Long Island. My wife and I lived in "The Topping House", which was directly across the street from Southampton Hospital, and WAS the original hospital. Here's a little history for those who are interested...

http://www.southamptonhospital.org/hospital/history.php

history-2.jpg


Ninety years later... my wife and I set up housekeeping in "The Topping House", which was still owned by the hospital, but had long since been turned back into a residential house. The place was creepy... Hollywood creepy.... the quintessential "haunted house" big, old, a little rundown, and it came with a confrmed history of death and dying. Hundreds of people had died in the house... this is no ghost story, this is fact, a matter of record. I saw the names and the records with my own eyes. Many of the locals in town, and a bunch our neighbors told us that the house had a long reputation of "strange goings on", and some of them came right out and declared that they were worried about us living in what they were sure was a most certainly haunted house. There were some people who refused to step foot in the house. My sister-in-law refused to sleep in the house when she visited after I told her the history of the house. She stayed at a hotel. The living room in which I would drink my Guinness, scratch my butt, and watch the boob tube, had been the Operating Room... as evidenced by the metal brackets on the ceiling on which the gas-powered OR lamps had once hung. The bedroom in which my wife and I slept had been a TB ward... the oversized tile scrub sinks were still in the bathroom. There was an "ice room" in the basement that had once served as the morgue. That's were I stored my Guinness... perfect temperature for stout. There were many other creepy things about the house... like the stairway to nowhere. You opened a closet door, and there was a dark flight of stairs that went up, turned a corner, and then ended at a blank wall- a dead end. Creepier still... one day I was storing some stuff in the "stairs to nowhere" closet, and I noticed a bunch of rolls of paper stuck in a little niche below one of the steps. They were old, yellowed grave stone rubbings... of children's graves, dating in the late 1800's. FYI... gravestone rubbings for those not familiar with the... hobby?:

http://members.aol.com/TombView/rubbings.html

Pretty Creepy, huh?

I lived in the house for two years and here is a list of the "paranormal" phenomena my wife and I experienced:

1- Doodley squat.
2- More of the same.

Nothing, Nada, Zip... seriously. No rattling chains. No appiritions. No disembodied screaming or moaning... unless you count the time I ate 4 microwave burritos in one go... my wife may have heard some moaning coming from the john that night. Sure, it was an old house, and it creaked and groaned, but no more than any other old house that I've been in, and a lot less than some. My dog never acted strangely... well, no more strange than it usually does. I hear tell that animals are supposed to be more "sensitive" to the types of things, but my dumb mutt just layed around all day and stunk the place up, same as she does in our new house.

My wife was a busy obstetrics doctor in private practice, and I spent MANY nights alone in the house... not once did I ever feel scared, threatened, uneasy, etc...

In two years... nothing. No blood-belching toilets. No glowing-eyed pigs, No Native American spirits come back to wreck vengence on me for having desecrated their sacred burial grounds. It was kind of a disappointment. What? I wasn't good enough for the spooks? They were too busy causing a ruckus over west on the LIE at that house in Amityville?

I once met a "psychic medium" at a dinner party, and after telling her the curious history of the "haunted house" I was living in, she fairly begged me to let her tour the house.. I agreed, and she visited about a week later with five other "intuitives" from her "prayer circle". They confirmed everything I had told her... the living room had been the operating room, the "ice room" had been a morgue, etc... They felt "cold spots", and "the memory energy of death" all over the house, yada, yada, yada...

One small problem though... they weren't in The Topping House. I had actually taken them to a friend's house down the street. The house had been built in the 1960's. My friend's family had built the house, and lived in it ever since. No one had ever died in the house, and it certainly had never served as a hospital. :rolleyes:

During those two years, I never once saw a haunted house... but I saw plenty haunted heads.
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We all know there is no such things as ghosts.

We all know everyone involved in that show that puts forth the possibility of ghosts is full of poop. Clear thinking means a number of people on the Syfy site channel we can clearly call full of poop. SyFy rascals are full of poop.
 
The Lone Bolt said:
I checked this out. He does some impressive work. I'm sold on at least one debunking -- the statuette that is assumed to be an apparition. I think that one is proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

Still not convinced that TAPS are frauds, but these debunkings are certainly food for thought.
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If I am the first poster, on SyFy GH forums, after a newbie asks a question that has been answered 5.000 times, I just type in the link to Dreamsinger's site or tell them to click on the links in his siggy. It works when someone has questions but if the Kool aid is still flowing in their veins, it's useless to attempt to inject common sense.

OK. So, what about the "Soldier in the Locker"?
Is it Grant?
Firefighters use thermal cameras because they do not "see" smoke but do see solid solid objects. Ghosts are not usually described as solid.


Originally Posted by Psiload View Post
"One small problem though... they weren't in The Topping House. I had actually taken them to a friend's house down the street."

Please update this and tell me you had their faces on video when you busted them.
 
Would an eyewitness account help?
http://theouijaboard.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/a-second-helping-of-gumbo/
Lone Bolt:
"I was unaware that they did not allow skeptics to post on their forum. Can you cite an example of that?"
Wendypan was banned:
http://forums.syfy.com/index.php?showtopic=2336800&st=0&p=6485158&#entry6485158
Why don't you see how fast you can get banned? It should not take more than a minute or two. I keep my fingers away from the keyboard when I read over there.

It was Eastern State Prison and not Eastern State Hospital and the "ghost" was wearing white tennis shoes, running by a curtain, and the footage speed was two times faster than normal speed.

"Well the skeptics here are claiming that TAPS are faking evidence. The burden of proof is on them to present conclusive evidence to that effect. I have not yet seen such conclusive evidence, so I don't see how your post is relevant."
At least one poster tried to tell you that your thinking is/was backward.
You can't prove a negative. The person or persons making a claim has to prove that the claim is true. Court works the same way.
 
Try the TAPS chatroom sometime:
http://www.the-atlantic-paranormal-society.com/communicate/chat.html

Especially if "Stef" (or some such spelling) is the moderator at the time.

I'm amazed there is any activity left, with all the banning I've seen occur there.

Including of myself: I was "lifetime" banned when I said "Hello", and was immediately held in suspicion because I connected around the same time as another troublemaker.
 
John Jones said:
Has there ever been a haunted hospital? It seems like more people die in hospitals than die at home.
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Waverley Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, KY. An old TB hospital. I visited because I was interested in the medical history of the building. I had no paranormal experiences, I even stood in some of the places the tourists were warned about. "If you go to the bottom of the body schute, we are not responsible for what may happen" I always make it a point to visit the rooms where people have been "assaulted" by spirits.

I was out $100, quite an expensive tour of an old hospital that only interested me for it's medical history. But I have an avid interest in the history of medicine. Not one strange or unusual incident.

My question is this, if you believe the Ghosthunters are really hunting for ghosts, why are they hiding?

And for the record, I think Grant is adorable, but I don't buy into his ********.
 
MaryCBW said:
Would an eyewitness account help?
http://theouijaboard.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/a-second-helping-of-gumbo/
Lone Bolt:
"I was unaware that they did not allow skeptics to post on their forum. Can you cite an example of that?"
Wendypan was banned:
http://forums.syfy.com/index.php?showtopic=2336800&st=0&p=6485158&#entry6485158
Why don't you see how fast you can get banned? It should not take more than a minute or two. I keep my fingers away from the keyboard when I read over there.

I just went there, was there about 2 minutes and a mod was called for, I only said "hello" that's proof enough for me. May have been easy though because I am not incognito.
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One more post and you'll be toast.:)
I think I know more banned posters than current TAPS18+ posters.:D
It truly is hard not to say exactly what I'm thinking but I like to know
what is being said over there.
I stopped posting in another forum because I never did convince the
TAPS fans that Jason and Grant were not doing the show for free.
 
makaya325 said:
Care to elaborate on your opinion?
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Sure, people have been trying to prove there are ghosts for thousands of years. What's the best evidence ghost believers have come up with to prove the existence of ghosts? Grant the Ghost Hunter's collar being pulled back by fishing line as seen on Youtube :rolleyes:

Maybe an orb in a graveyard? Mumbled EVP's?

With the explosion of phones that take video you would think someone by now would have gotten video of something compelling that seems to be commonplace if you listen to the people who say they live in a haunted house.
 
John Jones said:
Has there ever been a haunted hospital? It seems like more people die in hospitals than die at home.
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Hospitals have the equipment to bottle and sell your life force hence shipping it off site.

Stacy Head said:
Waverley Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, KY. An old TB hospital.
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An old TB hospital was rumoured to be haunted when I was a kid. I suppose they tend to be isolated and now abandoned. Good spook factors.
 
Senex said:
Sure, people have been trying to prove there are ghosts for thousands of years. What's the best evidence ghost believers have come up with to prove the existence of ghosts? Grant the Ghost Hunter's collar being pulled back by fishing line as seen on Youtube :rolleyes:

Maybe an orb in a graveyard? Mumbled EVP's?

With the explosion of phones that take video you would think someone by now would have gotten video of something compelling that seems to be commonplace if you listen to the people who say they live in a haunted house.
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Well, since ghosts are alleged to dissapear at any given time, it would be incredibly difficult to capture a photo or video. A video does not prove anything either
 
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