The Ghost Hunters Are Back!
Categories: Entertainment , Staff Picks , Nonfiction , Horror & Supernatural
Hurray! TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society), my favorite crew of ghost-hunting plumbers, is back on the air, and starting June 6 there will be new episodes of Ghost Hunters on SciFi with new investigations! These Ghost Hunters take their investigations very seriously, coming at it from the point of view of disproving it. Sometimes they can't...
Along those lines, I have a little stack of books on my desk about proving and debunking paranormal events.
- The Case for Ghosts (2006): Interesting, my favorite of the bunch, with the appropriate subtitle "An Objective Look at the Paranormal".
- The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal (2005): Well-known phenomena debunked; worthy warning to not make the evidence match our beliefs, either for or against.
- Debunked! (2004): Yes, these are ways to fake it, but that doesn't disprove actual paranormal events.
- Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction (2000): Wordy academic's view of the paranormal in societies worldwide.
There is another group of paranormal investigators on television. Britain's Most Haunted on the Travel Channel follows a group of jumpy investigators and psychics as they look for ghosts in really old haunted locations in England. They were here in the US last week, broadcasting a live investigation of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.
A fascinating book to read is Dancing With the Dark, True Encounters with the Paranormal by Masters of Macabre Fiction. Successful horror writers contributed stories of their experiences with the paranormal to this collection, including among others Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, H.P.Lovecraft and my favorite Ramsey Campbell. It seems that they were profoundly influenced by their experiences.
What it all really boils down to is that you believe or you don't, and until a person has a paranormal experience, you probably don't believe. I believe, but I also grew up on pixies, banshees, and the Windigo. Jones the Elf was the wonderful star of my mother's stories, which I guess I took as fact as a child. I haven't seen an elf, I don't think, but I have seen a ghost. I believe.
