South Africans will be able to watch a local version of “Ghost Hunters” sometime soon.
I’m not sure how soon “soon” is, and I suppose it all depends on if and when the SABC sorts itself out.
Anyway, the ghost hunting team is S.P.I.T.S.A. and they have an intro of the pilot show up on YouTube. See http://www.youtube.com/v=Bk0YbSDEdX8#
I’m sure that creative editing, such as in the U.S.A. Ghost Hunters series, will prevail and not a single sceptical point of view will feature.
Let me just add some background to my interest in SPITSA. I’ve been looking at doing a couple of posts about the paranormal on my blog, after a discussion a while ago about ghosts - I also live near the area where the “Walkerville Ghost” is supposed to haunt a lonely stretch of road. So I decided to go onto SPITSA’s website and have a look at some of their investigations. There were a few things that stood out for me…
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They claim that their investigations are scientific.
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There were a lot of discrepancies in the investigations - for eg. they use orbs as a means of detecting ghosts, but in some cases where orbs were found, they claimed that there was no paranormal activity, and I wondered why.
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They claim a high “strike rate” in terms of successful investigations
So, I contacted them via email and asked some questions.( I also wanted to try and get myself invited on one of their investigations and hopefully get one or two of you -fellow sceptics - to come along too.)
They were quite prompt in their reply and, perhaps I misread them, but they didn’t seem too keen on having a sceptic along. Although they said that they welcomed observers - for reasons of transparency- they were concerned that I may not accept their findings as definitive proof and that I may “tarnish” their reputation with what I had to say on my blog. Not that I was going to mention them by name on my blog, I was just going to talk about my experiences with some ghost hunters and about how an investigation was conducted. Perhaps I still may get lucky and be invited after I replied to their concerns this morning.
With regard to their investigations being scientific, I asked whether they thought it was scientific because they used technology. Every single member of the team talks about having had a paranormal experience, so I felt the investigation couldn’t be all that scientific seeing as it was being conducted by “believers”. I was told that in fact the team were all sceptics “in their own right” and that that’s how they conducted their investigations, but reading through their cases it’s very obvious that each investigation is approached from a believer’s point of view.
I’ve gone through all the evidence they’ve compiled in each investigation, most of it is photo’s of orbs, EVP’s and more recently, thermographic imaging - and very flimsy as evidence goes. However, one EVP stands out - I’ll link to it as soon as I find it again - it is either an outright hoax or the clearest ghost voice I have ever heard caught on tape.
If anyone is interested in reading the correspondence between me and SPITSA, I’ll post it on this thread.