Not guilty by reason of the paranormal

Did you happen to see this story?  A former police officer in Ohio said in court that he wasn’t aware of a bunch of stolen property found in his basement.  You see, he just never goes down there.  The reason?  It’s teeming with paranormal activity!

“It’s going to sound kind of ridiculous, but we believed that there was some kind of paranormal presence in the basement.  It sounds kind of ridiculous but there was evidence to support it.”

He is definitely right that it sounds ridiculous.  Not just because ghosts defy all laws of physics and most likely do not exist, but most of the items recovered belonged to the county.  One of the air conditioners even had the word “Auditor” written on it in marker!  What a coincidence that a police officer just happened to have this stuff, right?

That being said, I do wonder what “evidence” there was to support his conclusion that his basement was crazy haunted.  The article doesn’t mention, but I can’t help speculating that perhaps he once had a paranormal team out to his home who found a bunch of EVPs, took some blurry photographs, and got some EMF spikes.  Ugh.  Either that, or he just made it up.  Here’s to hoping for the latter.

Back in my old ghost hunting days with Phase 3 Paranormal, we went to a home in Lima, Ohio where a previous team had scared the tenant senseless by telling him they found 75 EVPs in 5 minutes of audio.  75 EVPs!  In 5 minutes!  If that wasn’t bad enough, the ghosts were all said to be uttering things about dying, death, killing, and something being under the floors.  It was weird and infuriating.  We spent over an hour explaining what white noise and apophenia was.

Those are the kind of people that are almost impossible to help.  They’ve already experienced something in their home they couldn’t explain and considered it to be the work of malevolent spirits.  But then a ghost hunting team, who are being looked upon as authority figures, comes out and not only confirms their fears…but stokes them!

Amateur ghost hunting teams aren’t authority figures, folks.  They seldom have any experience or expertise in psychology, physics, engineering, or any related science.  Instead, they’ve copied techniques from television and, without very much education of how their instruments work, they go about taking readings and making recordings and telling people their houses are “haunted.”  I know.  I’ve been there.  I’ve seen it.