GHOSTBUSTERS

A while back I came across a notice for a presentation at my local library by a group calling themselves the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee (PIM).  The notice indicated that the group would be discussing their investigations of places that were suspected of being haunted.  The presentation was open to the public, and I decided that, as a skeptic, I needed to check it out.

I wasn’t sure what to expect—whether there would be just a handful of attendees or a large crowd, whether the presenters would be naive or skeptical, whether I would be asked my point of view.  I needn’t have worried.  The meeting room was filled with perhaps 40-50 attendees, a large majority of whom were evidently firm believers in the paranormal, and the presenters were sophisticated in their hour-long presentation.  For the most part, I was impressed.

PIM is set up as a nonprofit organization, and the speakers made it clear that they were not looking for financial support.  My guess is that the half dozen or so members conduct their investigations of possible hauntings at their own expense out of a genuine interest in paranormal claims.  Their hour-long presentation was sophisticated and polished, and for the most part I was impressed.

The presentation included a display of the equipment they use in their investigations.  The speakers pointed out that in their view, still photos are largely worthless, because they can be so easily doctored.  But they did use a variety of other specialized equipment, including sound recording devices, video cameras, including those specialized for night vision, as well as motion and vibration detectors.  These were not toys.  

Much of the presentation was devoted to a description of a number of their investigations.  They only considered locations where they thought the anecdotal evidence was serious—generally conducting a handful of investigations each year.  These involved a vetting of claims, the setting up and running of equipment, and an analysis of the results.  Analysis means reviewing hours of video and sound recordings.  They then write up a report of their investigation which is posted on their website.  For anyone who might be interested in checking out PIM’s website, here it is: https://paranormalmilwaukee.com.  The reports are detailed, thorough, and well written.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the sophistication of PIM’s equipment and procedures, their “success rate” for finding evidence of hauntings has been low.  As stated above, for the most part they do not rely on still photography, and they generally have been unsuccessful in detecting anything notable with video and motion and vibration equipment.  The few “hits” they pointed to have mostly been through sound recordings.  A fair portion of the presentation included playing snippets of sound recordings that they interpreted as one or more unexplained voices.  Frankly, I found the recordings to be ambiguous at best, even after the presenters had told the attendees what the voices were supposedly saying.

And this was when my native skepticism kicked in.  There was no doubt in my mind but that the members of PIM were relatively careful in their investigations, and, based on the amount of time they would spend on an investigation, they clearly were dedicated.  However, it was evident that they had bought into belief in the paranormal and their goal in each investigation was to determine whether paranormal phenomena existed at the location under investigation, not whether paranormal phenomena existed at all.   And that raised a couple of questions.

First, the existence of paranormal phenomena has not generally been accepted by the scientific community.  The longer history of claims of the paranormal is populated with proponents who were either delusional or deceptive or that involved case studies that, from an experimental design point of view, were poorly designed or poorly executed.  More recent efforts to detect paranormal phenomena have also suffered from design flaws or have simply failed to demonstrate the existence of any such phenomena.  Based on that history, what led the PIM investigators to come to their sanguine beliefs or to maintain those beliefs, even though their investigations generally failed to uncover any such phenomena?

Second, what would it take for the PIM investigators to conclude that paranormal phenomena simply do not exist?  It is fundamental to science that any point of view should be held tentatively; every hypothesis should be subject to disconfirmation.  In most of the group’s investigations, their conclusion has been that they did not find any clear evidence of paranormal events.  In most cases the investigators interpreted unexplained sounds as having a prosaic source:  A sound of something hitting the floor was concluded to be plaster falling from a deteriorating ceiling.  A howling was interpreted as that of a coyote in the neighborhood.

Science has succeeded in assuming that events can be explained without reference to causes outside the operation of natural laws, that is, without resort to supernatural phenomena.  This represents an application of Ockham’s Razor.  That does not mean that the paranormal does not exist, but the standard for concluding that it does should be set at an especially high level.


© 2019  John M. Phillips