Paranormal Investigators and the Mystical Technology

It’s 8 o’ clock at night, and the local Mariot is awash with people. Almost everyone is in groups, including myself and my two traveling companions. A woman in a black pseudo-victorian dress approaches us and asks if we’re here for the ghost tour and, upon confirming we were, assign us to our guide, John. John is clad in a more understated outfit, and the electric lantern he was supposed to guide us with is broken. He cracks jokes with us as he explains what we’ll be doing, and informs us that the other two groups were led by a psychic and ghost hunter, respectively. John, however, is an actor, and while he didn’t believe at first, he had seen things that cannot be explained. Early on, he asks us to take out our phones, and begins to instruct us on how to take photos of ghosts, specifically “orbs”, balls of energy, or “full body apparitions”, silhouettes of people — we cannot see these spirits, but cameras can. Take as many photos as possible, move slowly, and look carefully. If we can see the orb through the live viewport, it’s most likely just a lens flare, a false positive. I ask about audio recording, and he says to make sure the volume is high, to listen carefully, and to make sure at least five people can hear what you hear. “I burst a lot of bubbles, that’s most of my job.” He says. “A lot of what you find is explainable.”

Ghost hunting, or paranormal investigation, is a relatively new phenomenon that has gained popularity primarily in North America and the UK. The practice follows somewhat in the tradition of spiritualism, a cultural fad categorized by communal seances and spirit communication, specifically the spirits of dead humans (as opposed to angels, demons, and the like). However, unlike spiritualism, ghost hunting is just that: a hunt. Whereas spiritualist practice revolves around a psychic medium summoning a spirit via their own will, ghost hunters enter allegedly haunted spaces in an attempt to make contact and “prove” a haunting. To do this, the investigators make use of cutting-edge technology, with innovations made to this day.

There are a myriad of instruments used by the ghost hunter: thermal cameras, motion sensors, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors — all forms of data collection and observation, capturing spirits in their “natural habitat.” In order to communicate, however, audio must be recorded. The Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), an unheard voice that can appear only through recording, can be done on any audio recording device, with higher quality recording making for better EVPs, so as to allow for the most noise reduction and leave less room for false positives. There are also Spirit Boxes, a machine that rapidly cycles through radio channels at random that can be manipulated by spirits in order to create a vocal collage to substitute the spirits own voice.. The practice of ghost hunting is popular entertainment, the subject of dozens of TV shows, such as Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters, and web series like Buzzfeed Unsolved. The use of technology to find spirits is compelling in a way that traditional mediumship isn’t, and so the question arises: what is it about machines that grants them spiritual power, and how does it assist in the goals of their users?

Much like spiritualism, paranormal investigation is mostly secular, or at the very least vague on specific religious ties. Concepts such as demons do exist, but deities are hardly ever spoken of and are never believed to be haunting a space (or at least, I cannot find an example of this). Most vernacular is based around vibrations, energies, feelings. Psychics and various New Age religious practices are commonly associated with ghost hunters, but it is more of a utility to the practice, rather than the basis or reasoning behind it — ritual is not the goal, but an instrument for which to achieve another goal. As noted by anthropologist Missy Bastian, most ghost hunters consider the practice a hobby, an interest developed not from religious beliefs but some sort of earlier paranormal experience that they wish to understand. (Bastian 5) The practice has more in common with bird-watching than it does the Ghost Dance; there are no promises or desire for any physical or psychic change in the self, and the ghosts being searched for rarely have any personal connection to those hunting them. There is no concrete goal to ghost hunting aside from communication, observation, and the finding of “poof”. While the occasional exorcism may be performed on a spirit deemed demonic, ghost hunters, as Bastian says, mostly seek to listen, to “console and commemorate.” (Bastian 5) Yet, there is clearly more to it than a desire to speak with the dead — ghost hunting is an almost competitive venture, where one gains renown based on the amount of observable evidence they can receive. While there is a desire to communicate, there is also a desire to capture, to take what cannot be reached and make it visible (or audible) to us.

For as long as recording technology existed, it has been connected to death. In the same way that ghost hunters search for evidence of their experience, people saw the use of recording as a way of proving that something once lived in a specific moment of time. One of the first record companies, His Master’s Voice, was named after a painting of a dog (named Nipper ) listening intently to a phonograph playing a recording of his deceased owner, with the piece acting as a primary form of advertising for the company. (Sterne 302) This was a primary focus to the general public — the idea that one’s base instinct (symbolized by the dog) would be so convinced by the recording that they’d believe their late loved one to be captured inside it. This is also where the term “canned laughter” comes from — the laughter is thought of as a literal capturing of voices in a can, as if the record is a receptacle rather than a reproduction. TV writer Larry Gelbart once stated, “It’s a standing joke, of course, that most of those people on the laugh track are dead now…they laughed those laughs years ago and they’ll never be allowed to stop, never.” (Smith 534) It is worth nothing that decades after audio recording became commonplace, the job of “laugh box operator” was still a distinctly unwanted job due to its apparently disturbing nature (Smith 534). Even knowing that these things are reproductions, the primal mind cannot seem to shake the idea that the ghosts of the past have been placed inside machines to haunt us. Even the staunchly atheist Freidrich Nietzche has said “The voice, formerly invisible and irretrievably lost as soon as uttered, can now be caught in its passage and preserved practically forever.” (Sterne 298) Nietzche here seems to come to the crux of recording technology’s power — while writings or paintings may allude to one’s existence, recordings allude to temporality, an interiority existing not at present but at the time of recording.

Ghosts have an odd place in temporality as well as space. Hauntings by nature do not have a temporal end point, yet they are almost always associated with an event, a period, a solid moment in time — this is called a “residual haunting”, according to my ghost tour guide, a spirit that exists in a specific space, yet frozen and unmoored from time. These residual hauntings are characterized by tragedy, that, to quote John the guide, “something so horrific or tragic happens, it brands itself onto a place, and repeats itself over and over again, almost like a looping video tape, and by repeating itself, it hopes for another ending, a better one, but it never comes.” This is made clear from the tour: every location is the site of piracy, murder, and slavery, now made into shopping centers or sports bars. Nagle theorizes that hauntings may be attempts to immortalize tragedy in a way that is impossible to sanitize, that “ghosts and haunted ruins ensure that public space can never be programmed in comprehensive ways that simply affirm the power of the state and its neoliberal partners. Ghosts and hauntings, are notifications of what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment.” (Nagle 2) No matter how much a government or land owner tries to change or erase the spaces past, it’s existence in that certain set of coordinates ensures that it cannot be taken away. It is a brand, a scar, a looping video tape. In a way, the ghost itself is a form of recording, a moment in time and interiority captured in a certain space, replaying indefinitely. They are unexplainable, existing in a place outside of the human world, yet invariably made of and influenced by it. This is where technology and spirituality meet, and this is what the ghost hunter has an interest in. Whereas psychics can supposedly summon the spirit of a loved one from any space, the ghost hunter only finds authenticity in hauntings. Life after death is recorded in space.

Halfway through the ghost tour, when the guide told a story of a little boy with a ringing bell, I saw a blue speck float across my phone screen. I was mystified for a moment, thoroughly enraptured by the incomprehensibility of what I was seeing. I quickly ran to the guide, who examined the photos and my phone. He quickly concluded this was a lense flare or reflection — it did not change its position on the lens, and followed the camera as it moved. Some time later, another tourist presented a photo, one with the exact same blue speck as I had seen. Our guide asked her if she could see the speck on the viewport in real time — she couldn’t. This, he decided, could very well be a true spirit. It was at this moment that I noticed my fellow tourist, like myself, had an iPhone, though hers was an older model than mine. I wondered if perhaps the blue speck, for whatever reason, could not be picked up by the phone’s inferior camera viewport, making both of our photos false positives. I couldn’t know this for sure, however. I didn’t know what the blue speck was, or how it connected to my phone. In fact, I knew next to nothing about my phone at all; I could explain it to a rudimentary degree, sure, but it’s inner workings, its material makeup, its programming, was completely unknowable to me. As unknowable as a ghost.

The internet doesn’t exist in a certain place. It is everywhere and nowhere, a realm that encompasses both everything and nothing. It is, in essence, a gigantic archive of recording which is accessed via various mediums, and like all recording, is unstuck in time and space. It can be accessed, theoretically, at any time and in any space. It is a recording that is constantly updated, sometimes with a mere millisecond delay from the real world. The realm is populated by avatars, transformed people — anonymous, unknowable, yet intelligent. They are not human, entirely, but they are records of humans — ghosts in the machine. One can never be sure that there is someone on the other end, but the communication works due to that belief. This is why technology is used to capture the spiritual — in a way, they both live in the same proxy-world, in layers outside of reality that we cannot reach or understand.

The concept of technology as a spiritual space can be seen most clearly in the advent of “chain letters” and “creepypasta”. Not soon after the creation of email, the chain letter came into vogue. The idea is simple: a user receives an email that supposedly contains some spiritual power, and a good or bad outcome depends on whether or not the message is sent to others. While these chain letters can be benign, they often include threats of curses, specifically by evil spirits. Creepypasta, a portmanteau of “creepy” and “copypasta”, a term referring to a text that is copied and pasted across the internet, is a similar concept. While creepypasta can be used to encapsulate any and all internet-borne urban legends, many specifically use the internet or other technology as a haunted space. In fact, a large subset of creepypastas are accounts of haunted video games possessed by demons or dead loved ones. Much like earthbound ghosts, internet ghosts haunt specific “space” (i.e. video games, emails), but unlike its older brethren, this space can be spread and accessed anywhere.

Before paranormal investigation, hauntings and mediumship came from eyewitness accounts and oral tradition. One had to believe what the medium was telling them, or feel the spiritual inside of them. That isn’t to say a “mechanical” medium never existed: spiritual fetishes have existed for as long as human history, and talking boards like Ouija were in vogue around the same time as the advent of recording. Ouija does, in some way, mirror the use of a technological medium — it is an object granted power via some unknown means, and allows for an observable form of communication. It is also, like the ghost hunters arsenal, a secular item — it can be created by anyone, and is most commonly made by Hasbro, the same company that makes all manner of childrens toys and board games. The Ouija remains popular to this day, and is sometimes used by ghost hunters, but almost always in conjunction with a camera to prove authenticity, and only used in the haunted space.

This is perhaps the other reason why technology is the premiere form of mediumship — while the Ouija may serve a similar purpose of a machine working in mysterious ways, it works in ways that are considered mystical or magical. The knowledge of the inner workings of the ghost hunter’s arsenal is about as advanced as that of the ouija board, but there is a distinct difference: where the inner workings of Ouija is “magic”, the inner workings of technology is “science”. Magic has, at this point, been considered fully inauthentic by modern (read: first world, mostly english-speaking) society, yet the belief in spirits and the supernatural remains essential for both the comfort of the bereaved and the preservation of dark, endangered history. Hauntings must remain in order to keep history immutable, and so in the absence of magic, a new authenticator must be made. Technology is just as mysterious to the laymond as magic is to the uninitiated, exists in the same unmoored state as the ghost itself, and most importantly, is believed. Technology is the maker of miracles in our modern world, and is known to be categorically true. Thus, in order to keep the concept of the afterlife and hauntings alive, it must be made secular, scientific, based on proof.

This change, of course, cannot be perfected. Ghosts are beyond us by nature, and thus any attempt at fully explaining or “proving” their existence relies on a certain amount of pre-assumptions and pseudoscience. For example, one must assume the spirit box talking is the result of the ghost somehow manipulating the spirit box, rather than chance. This further reveals the technology-as-mysticism mentality of ghost hunting. The output of the machine is seen as proof, but the inner workings of the machine are an unexplained given. There is no question as to whether or not the machine works, only if it picks up on something. The efficacy of Ouija is never in question to its user, only if an output is received; this is the same for ghost hunting tech. Medium-machines work in mysterious ways, but as long as something observable comes from it, it works. This mentality alone proves that ghost hunting is not a new phenomenon but an evolution of an old one, a changing of the guard made by necessity.

The phenomenon of the ghost hunt is proof of both the psychological importance of hauntings, and the strange niche technology occupies in the lives of people. If one follows Nagle’s theory, this is an optimistic development. In a time where religion becomes less relevant and surveillance states more prevalent, the haunted space continues to be an efficacious form of protest. Haunting has even begun to evolve into the virtual space, marking itself on virtual atrocity as well as physical. In a time where information is at its most available and most easily changed, hauntings continue to fascinate the world, and continue their utility as a preservation of atrocity. News can be made fake and information can be purged, by the ghosts in the machine will always remain.

Work Cited

NAGLE, J. (2018), Ghostly Specters, Haunted Ruins and Resistance to the Amnesiac and Exclusivist Divided City. City & Society, 30:. doi:10.1111/ciso.12149

Bastian, M. (2016), What do Ghosts (and Ghost Hunters) Want?. Anthropology News, 57: e10-e15. doi:10.1111/AN.177

“A Resonant Tomb.” The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, by Jonathan Sterne, Duke University Press, 2003.

Smith, Jacob. Laughing Machines. In The Sound Studies Reader, p 533–538.OCR