Oh hey! This Friday our friend Hemant Mehta¹, The Friendly Atheist, will be speaking at Carnegie Mellon, hosted by CMU’s AHA group. Pasta will be served!

More deets at the AHA’s Facebook invite and also at Hemant’s site.

Oh hey Part Two: Internet podcast talk show host The Infidel Guy interviewed local “paranormal investigator” John Lewis² who appears to have a physical aversion to questions. He apparently came down with the flu in the middle of the interview and his wife came on the line, apologized, and hung up on the call.

Here are links to IG’s show notes and to the archived show.

It’s official, folks. Miller Auditorium is haunted. But the good news is, they’re friendly ghosts.

“Almost everyone on our team had personal experience,” Mr. Lewis, owner of Titusville-based Baelfire Paranormal Investigation, said yesterday at a news conference in the theater lobby. “I pretty much feel this place is haunted.”

On Feb. 28, he and his 11-member crew spent the night in the auditorium looking for evidence of paranormal activity. Free of charge, they set up infrared video cameras and had digital and 35mm still cameras and digital, analog and micro-cassette audio recorders.

Eleven hours of audio and video and 758 photographs later, they believe to be true what professors and students have suspected for years.

In addition to personal experiences, investigators captured inexplicable digital images of a thick, neon green mist in that same backstage area — the scene shop — and heard voices.

You got that folks? Inexplicable digital images. Not only does that mean it must be ghosts, it is clearly the truth because it says so in the Post-Gazette.

An "inexplicable digital image" taken from Baelfire Paranormal Investigation site. Figured out what causes this, yet? Take a stab in the comments. Bonus points if you recreate the effect yourself and send it in.

Forget science, friends! We’ve been wasting our lives. It only takes some people who know how to take bad photos and a lazy reporter to prove it.

“Inexplicable digital images“, writes L.A. Johnson. Did you ask anyone other than the folks who took them?

Oh, and my previous post about this nonsense has conjured head honcho of the spooky squad himself, Mr. John Lewis, right here to Steel City Skeptics. His comments offer up some new insight into the story, where I am no longer comfortable making light of the potentially mentally ill.

My original post was more about shoddy journalism reporting on unscientific poppycock and adding credibility to professional swindlers, like psychics and ghost hunters, anyway. These folks are free to believe that they’re doing something meaningful, but society at large does not have to humor them. It is irresponsible and dishonest of the local news outlets to do so.

So, I’m going to stick with knocking bad journalism. L.A. Johnson, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette? I’m looking at you.

A few believers in a theater reinforcing each other’s beliefs does not equal “investigation” — it’s a sleepover party. It sounds like these folks had a fun time and that’s great, but it’s not news.

From the Are You Kidding Me files (via several alert readers), may I direct your attention to the following links:

• WPXI news item — Who You Gonna Call? Ghostbusters To Search For Local Univ. Ghost
• Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article by Craig Smith — Ghost hunters plan spirited investigation
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Anya Sostek — Paranormal investigators scrutinize Slippery Rock theater (subhead: University staff have a haunting suspicion)

Velma says WTF?

Not a note of skepticism, or a hint of anything other than credulity in the whole bunch. Is it laziness? Is it all some lame publicity stunt for a spooky production in the works by SRU? Is it just standard hopping on the trendy ghost hunting train to get viewers and readers to stay tuned after these words from our sponsor [insert commercial for The Ghost Whisperer here]? I don’t know because Craig Smith and Anya Sostek didn’t ask these questions.

A quick google search turned up the ghosthunter’s Paranormal Investigative Team’s website, Baelfire Paranormal Investigation.(According to the second Google result  it is hosted on Angelfire. You remember Angelfire, right? Like Geocities only more Angely. But also with Fire, so totally cool.) It has animations and is very stylish and professional. And I am completely convinced, as someone with several years of past work experience in a color photo lab, by their photographic evidence of paranormal energy spikes that could in no way be examples of light leak, a common cause of red and pink streaks across photos due to hairline cracks in camera bodies, or poor film handling, that this crew knows what they are doing. I can totally see why this exciting developing story is being followed so closely by our local news outlets!

I have started and deleted many drafts of a letter to the editors several times over the past week but I cannot muster anything that is more polite and respectful than I typically am. I am not the best person for this one, so I will stick to making fun of it here, and hopefully inspiring folks with more judicious balance of respect and smacktalk to write the letters, and maybe after Mr. Lewis’s two-week deliberation over whether or not the theater is “officially haunted” the local news will try the story again with a bit more professionalism, and I won’t have to.

If you are interested in a more rational approach to all-things-spooky, have a look at this excellent 2006 Skeptical Inquirer article, Ghost Hunters, written by Joe Nickell. (Thank you, Lauren!)