Source : indiewire
If you believe in ghosts, you are not alone; Cultures around the world believe in spirits who survive death to live in another realm; In fact, ghosts are among the most widely believed paranormal phenomena – millions of people care about ghosts and thousands read ghost stories on Reddit every day. It’s more than just entertainment; A 2019 Ipsos poll found that 46% of Americans say they actually believe in ghosts (the nation recognizes its belief in the undead; only 7% of respondents said they believe in vampires).
Appears in countless stories, from the Bible to “Macbeth”. It even spawned a folk genre: ghost stories. Belief in ghosts is part of a larger network of related paranormal beliefs, including the near-death experience, the afterlife, and spiritual communication. Faith offers comfort to many people who do not want to believe. That our loved but deceased family members do not care for us or are with us in our need?
Humans have tried (or claimed) to communicate with spirits for centuries; In Victorian England, for example, it was fashionable for upper-class ladies to hold seances with friends in their salons after tea and scones. Ghost clubs were formed at prestigious universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, devoted to the search for ghostly evidence, and in 1882 the most famous organization, the Society for Psychical Research, was founded, the investigator of which was a woman named Eleanor Sidgwick (and more late President ) this organization. In America in the late 19th century, many psychic mediums claimed to speak to the dead and she could be considered the original ghost hunter female.
Hunting has become a widespread interest around the world. Much of this can be traced back to Syfy’s successful cable TV series “Ghost Hunters,” which aired 230 episodes and found no good references to ghosts.
The show has spawned dozens of by-products and imitators, and it’s not hard to see why the show is so popular – the premise is that anyone can hunt for ghosts. The original two stars were regular guys (plumbers in fact) who chose to seek evidence His message: You don’t have to be a sober scientist or even have a scientific or research background, all you need is some free time, one dark place and maybe some gadgets from an electronics store. If you look long enough, any inexplicable light or sound can be a clue to ghosts.
This vague criterion for ghostly events is one reason why myths about the afterlife are more alive than ever.
Ghosts: Science and Logic
One difficulty with the scientific evaluation of ghosts is that ghosts are ascribed a surprisingly wide variety of phenomena, from the closing of a door. alone, to missing keys, to a cold area in a hallway, to the sight of a dead relative.
When interviewing ghost experimenters for their 2016 book, Ghostly Encounters: The Hauntings of Everyday Life (Temple University Press), sociologists Dennis and Michele Waskul found that “many participants weren’t sure whether they’d encountered a ghost or themselves were not sure whether such phenomena were possible, simply because they saw nothing that came close to the conventional image of a ‘ghost’.
Therefore, many people who claim to have had a ghostly experience have not necessarily seen what most people would recognize as a classical “ghost,” and in fact they may have had very different experiences, the only common factor in which is that personal experience is one thing, scientific evidence is another.
Part of the difficulty in studying ghosts is that there is no generally accepted definition of what a ghost is. dead who for some reason “get lost” on their way to the Other Side; others claim that ghosts are telepathic beings that are projected into the world by our minds.
Others create their own special categories for different types of ghosts, such as poltergeists, residual ghosts, intelligent ghosts, and shadow people. Of course, everything is made up, like speculation about the different races of fairies or dragons – there are so many types.
There are many inherent contradictions in the idea of ghosts, for example ghosts are material or not, or they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors and throw objects across space. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and wear lifeless (presumably soulless) items such as hats, sticks and clothes, not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and wagons?
Ghosts are the ghosts of those whose deaths have not been avenged, why are there unsolved murders since it is said that ghosts should be able to communicate with psychic media and identify their killers to the police? About ghosts provides a rationale for doubt.
Ghost hunters use many creative (and dubious) methods to detect the presence of ghosts, often including clairvoyants. Because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, infrared cameras and sensitive microphones. However, it has been shown that none of these devices actually recognize ghosts. For centuries, people believed that flames turned blue in the presence of ghosts. Few people nowadays accept this part of the tradition, but many of the marks taken as evidence by today’s ghost hunters are likely to be considered centuries equally false and out of date.
Other researchers claim that the existence of ghosts has not been proven because we simply do not have the right technology to find or discover the spirit world, but again this cannot be right: either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world ( and therefore can be recognized and recorded in photos, films, video and audio recordings) or not. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically recognized or recorded, we should find strong evidence that if ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically recognized or recorded, then not all photos, videos, audio, and other recordings are considered to be evidence of ghosts they can be ghosts. With so many conflicting basic theories and so little scientific effort, it’s no surprise that, despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere over the decades, not a single piece of evidence has been found.
And of course, with the recent development of “ghost apps” for smartphones, it’s easier than ever to create scary pictures and share them on social media, making it even more difficult for users to separate fact from fiction.
Why Many People Believe In Ghost
Many people believe that the existence of ghosts is supported in a science no less harsh than modern physics. It is commonly claimed that Albert Einstein proposed a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: If energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes shape, what happens to the energy of our body when we die? Could it somehow manifest as a ghost?
It seems like a reasonable assumption until you get down to basic physics. After the death of a person, the energy of his body goes to where the energy of all organisms goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat and the body is transferred to the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals when we are not buried, or worms and bacteria when we are buried) and the plants that ingest us. There is no physical “energy” that survives death that could be discovered in the popular ghost hunt equipment.
While amateur ghost hunters like to introduce themselves to the cutting edge of ghost research, they really get into what folk folks call the glitz or the stumbling of legends. It is basically a way of acting where people “act out” a legend, often with ghosts or supernaturals. In his book “Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live“ (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), folklorist Bill Ellis notes that ghost hunters often take the search seriously and “challenge supernatural beings, deliberately dramatizing them in an a Way, then return safely.
The stated purpose of such activities is not entertainment, but a sincere effort to test and define the limits of the “real” world, then their existence (like all other scientific discoveries) is discovered and verified by controlled experimentation by scientists, not ghost hunters on weekends roaming through abandoned houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights.
In the end (and despite () mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos), the evidence of ghosts is no better today than it was a century ago. There are two possible reasons ghost hunters fail to find good evidence. The first is that ghosts do not exist and that ghost accounts can be explained by psychology, misperceptions, errors and delusions. The second possibility is that ghosts exist, but that ghost hunters do not have the scientific tools or the mindset to uncover significant evidence.
But ultimately, the ghost hunt is not about the evidence at all (if it did, the search would have long been abandoned).Instead, it’s about having fun with friends, telling stories, and pretending to be looking for the edge of the unknown. After all, everyone loves a good ghost story.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- The Skeptical Committee of Inquiry promotes scientific investigation, critical inquiry, and the use of reason by investigating controversial and extraordinary claims.
- According to an article published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, experiments show that children can distinguish fantasy from reality, but they tend to believe in the existence of fictional creatures.
