Why do ghosts wear human clothes?

Magical Realist:

Right. I haven't been saying that.

No. Try to keep more than one idea in your head at a time.

Think about how the police go about investigating a crime by an unknown perpetrator. Ideally, they don't decide who did it first and then set about collecting evidence that that person is guilty, while ignoring all the other evidence. What they do is that they gather all the available evidence, they follow leads. They develop multiple hypotheses about what might have happened and who might have committed the crime, and then they whittle them down to one by looking at the available evidence.

Similarly, when I examine one of your ghost videos, I form multiple working theories that might explain the video. One possibility is that it really is a ghost. Another is that it has been faked. Another is that it doesn't show what it appears to show, because we're making some incorrect assumptions when we watch it. Usually, the video on its own will not be enough to sort out which of these explanations is correct, which is why, ideally, we need other evidence.

If insufficient evidence is available in respect of a crime, the police can't charge anybody - even if they suspect that a particular person probably did it. A court won't convict somebody if guilt isn't established beyond reasonable doubt. Similarly, if insufficient evidence is available regarding a ghost story, then we can't validly conclude that it is ghost, or that it isn't. We just have to conclude that we don't know (for now).

Your approach, Magical Realist, is like the cop who is determined to get his man for the crime, regardless of the evidence. You've decided from the start that ghosts are real, so you go around collecting your videos and your ghost stories and you assume they are all real. You ignore all evidence that points away from the conclusion that there's a ghost. And yet you imagine you're objectively looking at the evidence. The fact is: you only ever have one working hypothesis: it must be a ghost.

All of those are hypotheses. Any or none of them might be true. What will decide whether the wind sounded like a voice, etc. is the evidence, if enough is available. The same goes for people telling lies.

I do not start with the conclusion that somebody is telling lies. But that is always a possibility, because people do tell lies for personal gain. You know you've done it yourself. Everybody does it from time to time.

Wishful thinking is to make your mind up at the start. I have not, for example, concluded that Telly Savalas was lying. That is just one possibility, and I have mentioned other possibilities regarding his story. Multiple working hypotheses.

Why do you think I keep asking for more evidence and information? Because the only way to narrow down those many possibilities to a single conclusion is to look at the available evidence. A big problem with just about everything you post is that there's usually only one piece of evidence provided. No corroboration. No expert examination. No proper records of things. No physical evidence. And so on.

How you think you can conclude that a video shows a real ghost when the only evidence you've looked at is the video itself puzzles me. Well, actually it doesn't puzzle me because you've said that you already "know" that ghosts are real. You've made up your mind before you even start watching the video.

No. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I make no assumption that the paranormal does not exist. But if it does exist, that will be extraordinary, so I want to see convincing evidence for it.

What have I made up? Can you point to anything I've made up in my comments above?

I have said "Well, it could be A. Or it could be B. Or C is a possibility." And on the other hand you've said "It can only be a ghost." Now, which of is is making up shit we couldn't possibly know? You tell me.

Correct. Now you're starting to get it.

I agree. It is, however, plausible that an actor would get paid to present a ghost story in a "compelling" way for TV.

...

I'll get to the rest of your posts later on. Have to go now.

 

Magical Realist:

I've never seen any "making things up" in anything I've read from one of Joe Nickel's investigations, and I have not "made anything up" here, either.

But maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean when you say "making things up". See, I think that "making things up" means inventing a story that contradicts known facts. I certainly haven't contradicted any of the facts you've presented in your videos here, though obviously I dispute your conclusions. But maybe for you "making things up" refers to forming any kind of hypothesis to explain the accepted facts.

When I write something like "It could be a bug crawling on the lens", I'm not "making stuff up" in the sense of contradicting known facts. It has not been factually established that there was no bug on the lens. But I am "making stuff up" in the sense that I'm putting forward one possible explanation for the apparent ghostly image on that video. I'm imagining something that may or may not be true, which you might call "making things up".

But when you say "That's a ghost on that CCTV footage", aren't you equally "making things up" in the sense of imagining a story that may or may not be true about the video?

So, when you laugh at me for "making things up", are you also laughing at yourself for the same reason?

Nobody would ever be sent to the gas chamber on the uncorroborated testimony of one witness.

Yes I do know. People tell lies. It's a fact of human life. It's something that should always be considered, especially when the stories being told are on the face of them incredible.

No. That will never be enough. It's like claiming that just one scientific experiment is enough to prove a scientific fact. It virtually never is, except in the most obvious of cases that nobody in his right mind would question anyway.

The collusion is missing. The collusion is what makes a conspiracy. People have to get together and agree not to tell the truth and/or to tell lies.

It would be great if that was actually the case, but sadly it is not. There are countless "ghost orb" photos to be found on the internet that are, more likely than not, dust particles. And yet they are touted as ghost orbs.

I agree that there may well be some honest and skillful paranormal investigators out there somewhere, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule among self-appointed investigators of the paranormal. Mostly such investigators are just believers who have given themselves a fancy title to try to legitimise their pseudoscience.

Not by me. Certainly by Joe Nickell, and many others.

I agree, and I have made no such claim.

Mostly not, but in some cases they are.

I don't think it will be a good use of my time in this discussion to go hunting for a list of proven frauds. If you don't think there have been many, I don't really care that much right now. The fact is, when we're judging a particular video (say) it doesn't much matter how many other videos have been shown to be fake in the past. What we're interested in is this particular one. On the other hand, if this one was posted by somebody with a past record of fakery, then that is certainly a relevant thing to keep in mind...

I agree. That's why I haven't claimed any of the 3 videos I've referred to have been faked (so far).

So bugs must be big and they must all move in a particular way, must they? No small bugs, then? No bugs of different shapes and sizes that move in different ways? Seen one, seen 'em all?

I've only personally seen an interview with one of the rescuers, not the other three. So I don't know whether the one is making it up or not. How about you?

I don't believe the ghost happened (at least, not so far, based on the evidence I've seen). I have no good reason to doubt that the car crash happened or that a baby was rescued (so far).

Your two statements don't follow from one another. Even if we accept that he was a hardened skeptic before he thinks he saw a ghost, it does not follow that therefore he couldn't possibly have a false memory.

Also, how do we know that he didn't believe in the supernatural until after this experience? Again, we only seem to have his word on that. If the story as a whole causes us to question his credibility, why should we trust the part of it where he says he was a skeptic?

I don't think you have the foggiest idea of what kind of evidence there is for the Higgs boson. The existence of that particle at a particular energy has been established to what is known as a "5-sigma" confidence level. That means that so much evidence has been collected to show its existence, that the probability that the data pointing to its existence is just noise or whatever is incredibly low. And note that this isn't a vague "guess at the odds" - it's a precisely calculated uncertainty level based on statistical analysis of the collected data.

Trust me, nothing like the effort that went into establishing the confidence level for the existence of the Higgs has ever been remotely contemplated in paranormal research.

All I can say is that this is not what I see from you here.

That would be a very cynical view to have. I hope I'm never so jaded about other people that I get to the point of taking that kind of view.

 

(continued)

I think that when it comes to the genre of TV shows that promote the paranormal, there's an almost unspoken expectation that people will exaggerate their stories and embellish the truth to make things sound more exciting and strange than they really are. I don't think that many producers of such shows are very concerned about whether what they are putting out there is true or not. They aren't interested in probing their celebrity guests too closely about their stories. The fact is, they want those people to come back and do the show again. And if a celebrity gives a good performance, that is good both for the show and for the celebrity.

I raised that as a possibility. If you read what people have to say about the entire series of the show that he appeared on ("The Extraordinary"), you'll find many comments that the stories became harder and harder to believe as the series went on. The producers were willing to let all kinds of things go through with little to no critical examination. This is not unusual in these kinds of shows, either. They are made for entertainment. They are not documentaries - even if they are sometimes dressed up that way.

Yes. It is not uncommon for people to conflate real past memories with some fantasy elements, thus creating false memories. A few days ago, remember, you were denying that it was possible for people to have a false memory.

If a false memory is a kind of delusion, then people with false memories are, in that sense, delusional. However, it does not follow that they are generally delusional, in the sense of being out of touch with reality or something like that.

Once again, it looks like you're creating a false dilemma. You're effectively saying that either a person is the epitome of sanity and normality, or else they are mad as a hatter, and there's no in between. No light and shade. The human mind is much more complex than you think it is.

Another false dichotomy. A person doesn't have to be either a lying scumbag or a truth-telling saint. A person can be generally honest, yet still lie about certain things. Or the person can be generally dishonest and yet unwilling to tell an untruth about certain things. Or a person can be generally honest and only lie in certain specific circumstances, for example. Shades of grey again.

I freely admit that I am biased against ghosts, and I have previously told you why in some detail.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and there just isn't any for ghosts.

Given a choice between a plausible mundane explanation for a ghost video and the actual existence of ghosts, the default option must be the mundane explanation, because ghosts are such an extraordinary explanation that do not fit with anything else we know about the world. It is only when there is no plausible mundane explanation that we should start to wonder about possible non-mundane explanations.

This doesn't just apply to ghosts, by the way. It applies to all the kinds of woo.

Good for you.

I am inclined to agree that a shadow in the location filmed by the CCTV camera seems an unlikely explanation. A shadow in the location of the mobile phone that filmed the CCTV screen is a better option. But I think the bug-on-the-lens option is probably the best of the explanations I have suggested so far.

By the way, what happened to that written statement by the security guard that you said you had? Why haven't you posted it?

Wait? Who are you talking about here? The security guard? Telly Savalas again, or who? Why don't you post the firsthand accounts (or a link to where I can read them)?

Compelling to you is not compelling to me, as we have established. I require a better standard of evidence than what you have managed to provide so far.

I don't see a figure walking across the landscape in the Dover video. I see a blur that moves across the camera, in approximately the way a blur might move if a bug crawled across the camera lens. I showed you a similar example - the service station "blue blur" video.

I wouldn't be too worried if I were you. Gullible believers like yourself will always vastly outnumber skeptics like me. You even get the lion's share of the airtime on commercial media. There are probably entire cable channels dedicated to putting out the believer point of view.

The person believing it's all true right here and now (i.e. you) wasn't even there either. And yet, you're utterly convinced it's all real. You complain that I have no evidence, when all I'm doing is asking sensible questions about your evidence (or lack of it).

That's right. That's why we should always be on the lookout for fakery and misleading reporting. On the news, it's more often a problem of how the story is spun (which facts are reported and which are not) rather than a question of outright fakery of the "facts", unless you live in North Korea. On the other hand, from time to time, photoshopped material does make it into the mainstream media - often as a result of a journalist not checking the facts rigorously and therefore being fooled by somebody's scam. But you shouldn't trust other people to do your thinking for you.

If those firsthand accounts are outrageously implausible (like some ghosts stories are), yes.

You're right that skeptics probably have a harder time making friends than people who will suck up to a person and unquestioningly support them in whatever nonsense they have to say. Everybody likes to be flattered and indulged. However, the kinds of friends you get through such indulgence and flattery are not necessarily the best friends to have in the long run.

 

Magical Realist:

You say that's what they all do, and it would be great if they did actually do that. I wish you'd do that yourself. But all indications are that you, in fact, don't do this, and I know of other self-appointed "paranormal investigators" who don't do it either.

You're starting to talk the talk, so maybe we're making some progress.. Let's hope you also start to walk the walk soon.

I agree that to claim something is faked there must be evidence of fakery. Obviously.

But it's a question of what should be the default position on claims of ghosts. The default position on examining a ghost video (claimed to be a real ghost) should, in my opinion, be that the video does not show a ghost. We then systematically work to eliminate all the ways that it couldn't be a real ghost. Once we've eliminated the mundane, then we can conclude that it's a ghost. But if there's simply not enough evidence to eliminate one or more mundane explanations, the best we can conclude is that it might be a ghost or it might be one of those mundane explanations.

No doubt you will respond that the default position should be that every video does show a ghost, unless and until it is proven not to be a ghost. That is, we should trust the makers of the video and every person in the video unless have definite proof that they are faking or lying or something. If it turns out that we can absolutely prove a fake, then it's a fake. Otherwise we give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it's the real deal.

It comes back to this: which is the extraordinary explanation here: ghost or not-a-ghost? Which explanation would be miraculous if it were true, and which would be mundane?

Now ask yourself: should the miraculous, extraordinary explanation be the default, or the run-of-the-mill mundane explanation?

What do you think? I want your honest opinion on this.

Ideally, you're right and I agree with you. In practice, it doesn't quite work that way. Juries, for example, tend to make judgments about whether people are reliable witnesses or not, based on a whole lot of different factors. And most cases are not decided based on the testimony of just one witness. So a jury can often weigh up one person's evidence against another's and decide which is more plausible and trustworthy.

I guess what I'm saying is that you can't just look at the nitty-gritty details of a thing. You also need to look at the bigger picture.

Reasonable doubt can be established in lots of different ways. It is, in fact, perfectly valid to make up scenarios that fit the other available facts in order to cause reasonable doubt of a witness's testimony. That is commonplace in legal proceedings.

That you don't know this suggests to me that you're in no good position to judge my likely aptitude as a lawyer.

Are you saying these videos are representative of what you consider to be the best evidence for ghosts? Oh dear. You're really going to have an uphill battle convincing me, then.

I don't have unlimited time, but I will try to look at a couple more.

 

Magical Realist:

Why don't you want to get to the bottom of the videos we're already talking about? Are you worried that if we really start examining them carefully they just won't be so compelling any more? Or are you already not finding them so compelling, based on what I have suggested to you about them? You want me to start from scratch with some new ones so you can forget about the other ones.

What happened to the first-hand accounts you said you'd post, like the interview with the Dover Castle security guard you said you had? Do you actually have those interviews, or don't you?

What are you talking about?

I asked you what seems to me to be a straightforward question. I wrote:

"It comes back to this: which is the extraordinary explanation here: ghost or not-a-ghost? Which explanation would be miraculous if it were true, and which would be mundane?

Now ask yourself: should the miraculous, extraordinary explanation be the default, or the run-of-the-mill mundane explanation?

What do you think? I want your honest opinion on this."​

And your answers seems to be, for you, that "the mundane is not always a default position". So how about you tell me what your default assumptions are when you see a ghost video, so I can understand where you're coming from?

I don't really understand what you're talking about. I agree there are a lot of "ghost tropes", that is, commonly-agreed indications of ghostly presence. Feeling cold or uneasy, unexplained sounds, shadowy things that give the impression of human figures, electromagnetic "detections" or fluctuations, etc. These things all appear in pop culture depictions of ghosts - film, TV, books etc.

Just because these tropes exist, it does not follow that every unexplained sound that a person hears must be a ghost.

None of these things require a paranormal explanation.

Old buildings, especially, have all kinds of "unusual" sounds in them, all the time. Take an old wooden house, for example.Different parts of the house heat and cool at different rates, so the wood expands and contracts a bit in different places. It can creak and snap and produce sounds that sound like bangs or footsteps under the right circumstances. Also, animals often live in old houses - rats in the walls, squirrels in the roof, etc. They make sounds of their own. Some can even sound like screams under certain circumstances.

People often imagine things like voices in "haunted" locations, or interpret other sounds to be voices or words when they are not.

And those "EMF meters" that the ghost-hunters love so much - what do we know about them? What settings are the they using for the detection? How much "EMF" will make one of those things spike? How is a "real" signal distinguished from random noise? I suspect that in many cases those things are set so sensitively that they will respond to the user's sweaty palms, or to interference from other electrical equipment nearby (e.g. cameras used the film the "investigation"). We're never specifically what these "meters" are or how they are used. They are often just a sciency-looking prop that give the impression that the "investigation" is somehow scientific.

I have already discussed the "orbs" so often captured in photos of ghostly places (especially the dusty ones!)

Scratches, bites and tugs on investigators? We mostly just have the investigators' say-so about those. Physical evidence after the fact usually isn't shown. Then again, if you're running around in an old house in the dark and you snag yourself on a protruding object, chances are you might get a scratch. Or be bitten by a bug that lives in the house. (Bugs again!)

 

(continued...)

If anything, these latest four are even less "compelling" than the other ones. Here are my thoughts:

The "Haunted Office"

I didn't watch the whole video, because it all just seemed to be the one guy telling ghost stories. No footage of any ghostly thing is seen. It's just one long anecdote and a rather uninteresting guided tour through a normal-looking office area at night. I suppose you think I should just believe everything the guy said about ghosts, just because you're ready to believe everything he said.

How long will it take you to appreciate that anecdotes are the weakest kind of evidence?

Celebrity - Rue McClanahan

I have no idea who this particular "celebrity" is, but maybe she is well known to Americans.

But, just like in the "Haunted Office" clip, there's nothing in this video except another anecdote than is not backed up by anything other than the interviewee's word. Again, next to useless. It's about the weakest evidence for ghosts you could get.

DH Store plate-falling-off-counter video

This is another very blurry clip, which is again typical of videos purporting to show actual ghostly activity. And in the 3-minute clip, all the "action" takes up about 2 seconds of real-time video. The rest is padding, voice-over, replay and nondescript footage of employees walking around the store.

So, what do we see in those 2 seconds? We see a glass plate of some type (it's described as a "pie plate") apparently sliding off the counter unassisted and smashing on the floor.

What don't we see? We don't see exactly where the plate started from - at least I have trouble spotting its starting location. It seems to be behind some papers and other jars until it starts moving, so we can't see all of it. In fact, when it starts moving it seems to disturb a piece of paper that is apparently partly lying on top of it. We don't see smooth motion either - the footage is more like a series of snapshots - like on a webcam. This is not surprising if this is digital CCTV footage, but poor quality doesn't help us work out what happened.

The plate appears to move in a straight line while it is on the counter. I can't tell exactly, but it seems possible to me that it actually lifts up off the counter a bit before it clears the edge, then it falls to the floor. Spooky, eh? Maybe the ghost lifted it a bit - if it was a ghost, that is.

It seems unlikely to me that the plate was pushed, but pulling seems like a definite possibility. I ask myself: suppose I wanted to create a faked video like this in that particular location. What would I do? Here's one way I can think to do it. Get a piece of very thin line - like fishing line, perhaps, or a long thin thread. Tie it around the plate (it won't show against the glass, given the quality of the video), or just sticky-tape it to the edge of the plate (the sticky tape won't show, either). Now, take the string, run it around some fixed object on the wall on the right-hand side of the picture and then over the counter. Now hide. Crouch down behind the counter at the back of the picture (or behind the wall near the back that leads to the other room), holding the other end of the string. When ready, give it a good hard tug, and - viola! Call the press.

At the start of this video the reporter asks "Is this a ghost or a publicity stunt?" Let's ask ourselves: which explanation would be extraordinary, and which would be mundane? Is it completely implausible that the store owner (or whoever he is being interviewed) would pull this as a publicity stunt? I don't think so, based on the evidence I have so far (which, as usual with these videos, is not much). The default position is that this isn't a ghostly event, unless we can actually rule out fakery.

So, is this evidence for ghosts? Maybe, but it's (as usual) very low quality and unconvincing. Again, I ask the question: what other evidence is there concerning this event? Is there anything else, apart from the video itself and the store owner's testimony? Do we know anything about the store owner? Is he an honest man? Is he a prankster? Has any other ghostly manifestation ever happened in that store, for which there is evidence (and independent witnesses)? etc.

I'm confident your response to these questions will be to say that I should just take the guy at his word, because you've decided to trust him for no particular reason other than that his story props up your existing belief in ghosts. And you won't produce any extra evidence. You'll quickly tire of examining this incident, and will want me to look at yet another "compelling" incident that has just caught your attention.

Queen Mary Ghost

Instead of the old creaky house I talked about earlier, here we have an old creaky ship. All the "action" in this video is actually audio - we might as well toss out the video for all the value it offers.

So, what can we say about the audio? Firstly, typically, it is low quality. I can barely hear the "ghostly" voice, and I can't make out what it is supposed to be saying. Apparently nobody else can either, because the makers of the video find it necessary to prompt an interpretation by actually writing the words on the screen. That is, they are trying to set us up to hear what they want us to hear, rather than giving us room to make an unbiased judgment for ourselves. When you're told you're going to hear somebody saying certain words spoken... well, that sound did sound a bit like those written words on the screen, sort of, didn't it?

There are claims about complicated "audio analysis" work being done to compare the "voice" in two different videos, and we're told "it's a match", but this is just a claim. Where can we read about the analysis? Who did it? How did they do it? What factors indicated a "match"? We don't know, and I suppose we'll never know.

This video (or two videos if you like) would, of course, be even easier to fake than the plate video. All you'd need is somebody making some sounds (put on a "ghostly voice" for good effect) in an appropriately echoey part of the ship. Would the ghost hunters in the video be motivated to fake a ghost? Who knows. What do we know about them? Anything? Not really. Or, at least, nothing about them has been presented to me so far. I don't know if these guys are honest or not.

But would fakery be necessary? Are we really sure those sounds are a voice? Forget the text we're told we should hear. Close your eyes and just listen. Are you sure it's a human voice (a little girl)? Think about what else it might be. I can think of a few possibilities.

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So, all in all, these 4 videos are unconvincing. The two anecdotal ones are of virtually zero value in establishing that ghosts exist. The store one is no doubt an effective one to convince the believers, but my strong suspicion is that it is faked. And the ship's ghost? If I had to guess (which I do, because the evidence is lacking at this point) I'd say we have a confirmed case of creaky-old-ship syndrome.