Halloween Woo

[realisticphish]

yeah, woo is woo, but I'm willing to let some ghost stuff slide.

However, I was watching the "Ghost Hunters Live!" dealy last night, and it was astonishingly stupid. When they can't edit out the excruciatingly boring stretches, it's really bad. Like, 4th graders making their own movie with a webcam bad.

[TZ]

1. I actually watched a little of that

There were some astonishingly stupid people too. The were talking about female hauntings of Fort Delaware? And the guy was like well they didn't have women in the army back then so how could there be women..and then someone else patiently talked about the officers wives or women how worked in support of the army...I mean it was such a vapid conversation. I don't get how this show is popular?

[Orrex]

3. But they had the ECW guy. Doesn't that give it some cred?

[Orrex]

2. I've watched a few episodes during the series' run

The interplay between Grant and Jason is usually worth watching, but the show itself is horrible. I can't remember who first described it this way, but you have a bunch of people using scientific equipment on which they haven't been formally trained, and they're using it for purposes other than what it's designed to do, and from this they're drawing conclusions about the supernatural? Puh-leeze!

What really kills me is that even when they get a piece of seemingly provocative evidence, they never go back to inspect the scene or corroborate what they found. So an astonishing blip on the FLIR is left unexplored, but they're still happy to say that it points to something significant.

[TZ]

4. The other thing that puzzled me

was I saw them running some instrumentaion over an old circuit box..and when it chirped they seemed to think it was significant. Umm I'm thinking that unless we are now calling electricity "ghosts" that was kind of meaningless...

[Orrex]

5. The two lead guys are comparatively solid

And they're more than willing to point it out when an EMP blip can result from overhead wiring or the like, but the support crew is less thorough.


Brian in particular is (or used to be) obsessed with "orbs." You know, those things that look like little bright spots on the tape, or an unexplained "ball" of light? He'd jump out of his skin whenever he saw one, even though Jason and Grant would always shut him down.

Incidentally, my mother went through an "orb" stage, too. She still uses film rather than digital, so when a picture would come back from the photo center, she'd always try to read something into the apparent "orb" over the cat's food dish, or the like.
:eyes:

[dawgmom]

7. Reminds me of somebody at work who freaked over pictures I took of my house interior before I bought

I shot some pics of my house interior when I was buying it, and one of the pictures of the Great Room (which has these two huge skylights) had two huge orbs in it. One of my co-workers freaked out when she saw it, wanted to know wasn't I afraid there were spirits in the house, blah, blah, blah. She had already told me she would never feel comfortable living as close as I do to Antietem and Gettysburg ("too many restless spirits wandering the earth there.")

Uh huh. Riiiiiight. The only thing I ever hear going bump in the night are mice in the attic.

[onager]

6. Good link on a famous "haunting."

I used this in a Lounge thread, when somebody said they were scared to death by the flick "The Amityville Horror."

Which was a complete hoax. The lawyer who helped the Lutz family cook up the hoax confessed. The house has been occupied continuously since the Lutz family of hoaxers moved out. (And still is. Though one resident replaced the famous "eye-shaped windows," to keep the tourists away.) No one has ever seen anything weird since the Lutzes moved.

Apart from the usual Legions of the Gullible, the only person still insisting it happened is George Lutz. Because the story is his meal ticket.

Yep, he's just a Joe The Plumber of the supernatural. Although the Amityville house did have a horror story connected to it. The same horror story many Americans are living right now--the Lutz family simply couldn't afford the place.

One of my favorite goofs in the Amityville yarn: the night the family was driven out of the house, Lutz claimed they saw cloven hoofprints in the snow. But the easily-checked weather records for Amityville that night proved that it didn't snow.

This link is to a guy who believes in paranormal phenomena, which makes his debunking of the Amityville story even better:

http://chatanuga.org/Amityville.html