We interrupt your giddy ghost hunting fun to bring you this dose of reality...
I would feel remiss in not including a page for those of us who like to take our ghost stories with the proverbial grain of salt. As much fun as I have reading and posting all of this wonderful ghost folklore, I still have to roll my eyes at some of the obvious attention hounds and charlatans who haunt the mechanically cobwebbed attics and Styrofoam tomb stoned graveyards of cable TV. I mean, really. Take a look at some of these people and tell me you can't picture them pacing the halls of a well guarded mental health facility, waiting for 4 o'clock pill time...
You might be asking yourself, "Why does she have a ghost story website if she's a skeptic?" To that I say this: we, the furless, opposable thumbed monkeys of planet Earth, cannot possibly know everything there is to know about the universe with our meager few hundred years of scientific practice. With that few hundred years of science, we can certainly eliminate a lot of obvious crap, however.
Skeptical Investigations and Articles:
The Myrtles Plantation, (Louisiana) "The Most Haunted House in America"
Bodie, California - Haunted Mining Town
California's Winchester Mystery House
Toronto, Canada: The Mackenzie House
Camp Chesterfield, Spiritualist Camp in Indiana
Hampton Court Palace (England)
"Glowing Tombstone" in Emporia, Kansas
Bug's Spirit, Chestertown, Maryland
Discussion of Sci Fi Channel program "Ghost Hunters"
Provo, Utah - Mormon Church Ghost
wonderful and/or thought provoking cynics websites:
The Skeptic's Dictionary: exhaustive archive on many subjects
CSICOP: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
Randi.org: James Randi. He offers $1 million to anyone who can scientifically prove a psychic phenomena.
Penn and Teller's Bullshit! : They did great pieces on Ouija boards and paranormal investigators/psychics.
The Skeptiseum: Nifty archive of old spiritualist images and more
Skepticult: Skeptics who also manage to come off like a bunch of assholes. That's not really fair, I guess. Maybe it's just the guy who manages the site who's a cappuccino slurping, PhD waving, haricot vert eating Dick Face.
