One of the television shows I watch regularly is the SciFi channel's Ghost Hunters.
The premise of the show is simple. Two friends, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, work as Roto-Rooter plumbers by day. At night, they investigate the paranormal.
The show is interesting on a lot of levels. First, Jason and Grant are regular guys from Rhode Island. They approach ghost hunting with the same straightforward simplicity that they do plumbing. You think your house is haunted? They come in with a bunch of gear, stay in the house for a night, and see what they can find out.
They look for a rational explanation where it can be found. Not surprisingly, a lot of houses simply have issues with their plumbing and with their electrical systems. If you feel spooked or paranoid in certain places in your house, it may be as simple as a poorly grounded electrical outlet throwing off large amounts of electromagnetic energy. Knocking on the walls, ceiling, or floors is sometimes the result of loose pipes.
What is unusual, though, is what they cannot explain or debunk. They occasionally catch on film an object moving by itself, or on their voice recorders what sounds like voices from another world. They occasionally find cold spots in rooms that come and go, or weird spikes in electromagnetic energy that have no obvious explanation.
They offer theories about these things, based on their experiences. There is a basic metaphysical or supernatural framework they have worked out for explaining these things. Cold spots are sometimes believed to be from spirits taking energy from the air to manifest themselves. They offer a similar theory for equipment whose fully charged batteries suddenly run low. EMF, or electro-magnetic field disturbances are sometimes caused by spirits. And voices that sound on tape are spirits attempting to communicate. Some haunts are "residual," where a ghost repeats the same action over and over again. Some haunts are "intelligent" and appear to interact with people. While Grant and Jason accept all of these things as working theories, they are always ready to believe that places with "activity" usually have a physical explanation.
The show is also amusing because of the characters themselves. Grant and Jason have a team, which is known as The Atlantic Paranormal Scoiety, or TAPS. This team is composed of technical guys who set up, run, and monitor the equipment, and investigators, who try to interact with the ghosts. The personalities of the team and their occasional infighting or personal issues provide a set of subplots for the show when the ghosts aren't cooperating.
But my question is, what is it these guys are catching? Clearly there are phenomena that occur, and that they seem to be able to capture. If we live in a purely materialistic world, these things undoubtedly have physical explanations. It may be natural for there to be traveling cold spots and wide EMF fluctuations within a house. There may be all manner of background noises too sensitive for the human ear that travel across a vast distance due to anomalies in weather and terrain. There may be ground vibrations from nearby roads or underground seismic activity that can cause a door to open and close itself, or an object to move across a table. It could all be a profoundly cynical act of fakery, done to provide interesting television, though it doesn't seem that way.
I know as a Catholic I believe in the immortality of the human soul, and the realm of the angelic and demonic. Catholic theology, while as far as I can tell not explicitly ruling out ghosts, doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for them either -- one dies, receives one's individual judgment, and joins the realm of the blessed, spends some time in purgatory, or is sent to hell. One of three possible places for a human soul after death. But could souls in purgatory be allowed to send messages to Earth? Could a demon force a condemned soul to accompany it on its travels making trouble on the Earth? Could ghosts be a simple trap set up by the demonic to lure people away from the church into the false beliefs of spiritualism or as a means of tempting souls to open themselves up to the influence of the demonic?
I have occasionally lived in places that were, well, odd. The house I grew up in seemed to have a certain character that manifested itself in the occasional odd noise or sense of a presence in various rooms. All of my siblings had experienced the house's "soul" or peculiarity in different ways. I once, while reading the rather unusual book by C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, had, at the very moment he was discussing the phenomenon of loud knocking in a cabinet, a china cabinet next to me produce two very loud knocks, which was a very disturbing thing.
I also had a strange experience when I began to recommit myself to my religion. I had purchased a crucifix for my second floor study, and the moment I took it out of the box, all the fuses on the second floor of my house blew and the lights went out -- needless to say, the next three words out of my mouth were "Sancta Michael Archangele . . . " I occasionally feel things in prayer that suggest the angelic or demonic are close at hand; a few times I have felt what I describe as "interference" in my prayers, where when I pray the words, I hear a kind of "crosstalk" as if someone is praying against me, which feels a little like when you are trying to hear a radio station and there is another station too close to its frequency that breaks in and muddles the sound. Occasionally, in praying for others who have serious problems, I feel an overwhelming sense of despair, as if someone is trying strongly to suggest that my prayers for that person are of no use.
I have no rational explanation for any of these things, unless it is a simple diagnosis of mental illness. I do not believe I am alone in these expereinces, and neither do I believe that I am in any way a "sensitive," as the New Age term has it. If anything, I would describe myself as an "insensitive."
But outside the context of religion, and assuming the mantle of science, I wonder precisely what is it that the Ghost Hunters are encountering? I've read a fair amount of skepticism about the show, but I don't see anyone in the scientific community trying, in a systematic way, to account for the phenomena as purely natural occurrences, or demonstrating that the equipment they are using is faulty, or that the ghost hunters are frauds. Science, it seems to me, is all too dismissive of the paranormal. The scientific response seems to be 'It isn't ghosts, whatever it is," but that is hardly an answer to the question, "Well, then, what is it?" The tentative explanations of the ghost hunters and their conceptual framework for understanding what they are experiencing are not scientific theories, but they seem like a reasonable starting hypothesis given that science refuses to engage them on the merits.
At any rate, it's an entertainnig show.