Augusta Free Press
Do you believe in ghosts?
Chris Graham
chris@augustafreepress.com
6/25/06
 
What do you think? Do you believe in ghosts? Weigh in with your opinion
at the end of this story.
 
Brenda Gordon didn't want to admit to herself that she believed in
ghosts.
Being confronted with evidence of their existence will tend to make a
believer out of anybody, of course.
"I moved into the house that my dad lived in, and he's been dead since
1997, and the doorbell started ringing - and there would be no one
there. And it started ringing on dates and times that made us really
believe it was him trying to contact us," said Gordon, who lives in
Greenville in the southern part of Augusta County.

"We checked out the wiring and checked out everything in the area -
there are no houses near us, we're out in the county. It just made sense
that it was him," Gordon said.
"When you see something with your own eyes, it really is different than
just hearing about it or hearing other people's beliefs. When you see
something yourself, and you can't deny it, it really makes you a
believer," Gordon told The Augusta Free Press.

Gordon is a member of the Waynesboro Paranormal Research Group that
investigates reports of ghost sightings and hauntings across the
Shenandoah Valley and across the state of Virginia. River City resident
Wayne Harrup founded the research group last summer while recuperating
from a stroke that he jokes made him interested in ghosts "since I
almost became one of them."
"I'm not trying to make anybody a believer or a skeptic. What I'm trying
to do is present what's out there as it is - here's what we have, and
you can pick and choose whether you believe or you don't believe,"
Harrup told the AFP.

Ghost hunting is certainly getting a lot of play in popular culture
these days - most notably through the Sci-Fi Channel hit "Ghost
Hunters," which is helping to bring the so-called science of the
paranormal into the mainstream.
The "CSI" aspect of "Ghost Hunters" plays well on television - but does
purchasing high-tech gadgets like electromagnetic-field detectors and
electronic-voice-phenomenon meters and infrared cameras and using the
term science to describe what they're doing with them make the ghost
hunters of the 21st century any different from the ghost hunters from
other epochs?
"We are not wide-eyed believers. We are not fanatics. I will try to go
beyond the pale to prove that there's a natural explanation for
something," Harrup said.

"We do use scientific instrumentation - as much as we can afford it,
anyway," Harrup said. "We have EMF meters that detect electromagnetic
fields. We have laser thermal detectors so we can detect cold spots.
"We approach it from a scientific basis," Harrup said.
"Real science," counters James Randi, a professional magician who
founded the James Randi Educational Foundation, which investigates
claims of the paranormal from a decidedly skeptical point of view, in
1996, "demands evidence."

"All the rest of it is blind faith - and there are two kinds of faith,"
Randi told the AFP. "There's faith in things like how Sophia Loren will
not be at my doorstep when I come home tonight - that's based upon past
experience and good common sense. Evidence-based thinking is a totally
different thing altogether from faith-based thinking.

"There are all kinds of systems for looking into this sort of thing -
but they've got to adopt some standards, to start with. You've got to
have standards. You've got to start making definitions and establish
your baseline from which you worked. They haven't done that - because
they take anything that they come up with as being significant. They
don't have standards that they work with - and if they don't, they don't
have a science. They like to believe that they're active scientists
because they have instruments with them," Randi said.

"A lot of times what they're doing is they're going around, and they're
pretending to understand the science behind it, and they're using
scientific tools, but they're misusing them," said Benjamin Radford, the
managing editor of The Skeptical Inquirer and the author of several
books shedding light on how those who investigate the paranormal go
about their business.

"It's like if you give someone a ruler, and they're using it as a pry
bar, well, the ruler works as a ruler, but it doesn't work for
everything. And so in the same way, if they're taking all this high-tech
equipment around, it's not that the equipment is necessarily faulty, but
the science comes from the user, not from the equipment," Radford told
the AFP.