Good & Bad Ghost Hunting Equipment

Adventures in Ghost Hunting: Lame and Laudable

A while back, I put out a challenge to ghost investigators to come up with new ideas: new gadgets, protocols and theories to further our understanding of or gather better evidence for the ghost phenomenon. It's a tough challenge when we don't really know what we're dealing with for the most part. Although the inventors weren't responding to my challenge, following are two new ghost-hunting gadgets; one completely laughable (should we say fraudulent?) and one that's interesting and potentially useful to ghost investigators.

THE PARABOT

A guy by the name of Robert Bess from Richmond, Virginia, claims to have built a machine that can capture ghosts and poltergeists. He calls it the Parabot. It's a big glass-walled box on wheels, fitted with colored lights, spark generators and a few electronics of dubious purpose. The thing makes a lot of noise, and apparently Bess can open and close its doors by remote control. Does it capture ghosts? Uh... what do you think? This is one of the silliest things I've seen in this field in quite awhile, but it did get Bess the attention of The Travel Channel, which featured this nonsense on theirGhost Adventures Live cablecast last Halloween. Did he catch ghosts live on the air? Uh... what do you think? Bess further proved himself less than trustworthy on the same show when he was caught on camera throwing an EMF meter across the room and then exclaiming, "Whoa! What was that?!" We really don't need guys like this in paranormal investigation.

EVP FIELD PROCESSOR

On the other hand, we have the EVP Field Processor (EFP) developed by Larry Odien for the American Paranormal Research Association. It's not a huge breakthrough, but certainly could be of benefit to investigators hoping to capture EVP. The EFP is a modified digital audio recorder that provides a real-time visual display of the sounds recorded. So what? The advantage here is that although you still might not be able to hear the EVP voice at the time it is recorded, it might register on the visual display. So when you see an anomalous spike on the visual display when all is silent, you might have captured an EVP. Play it back and find out. This can corroborate evidence, especially when a video camera is focused on the display; then you have a visual recording of the spike when it occurs along with the audio recording. Nice job.

By Stephen Wagner, About.com Guide