"I believe that if we are to make any real progress in psychic investigation, we must do it with scientific apparatus and in a scientific manner, just as we do in medicine, electricity, chemistry, and other fields."
I wanted to begin this first installment of Haunted Holidaze
with a quote from one of the greatest scientific minds mankind has ever known
in order to emphasize the position that I most adhere to when it comes to
matters involving the supernatural.
Since I spent the first 39 years of my life filled with a great deal of
skepticism (which I now believe was more of an unbending cynicism) regarding
stories dealing with life after death and spiritual encounters, I was never
receptive to people’s accounts of their encounters with occurrences that fell
outside of the realm of my personal understanding or experience. What I later learned about myself, however,
was that the intense interest that developed within me while studying the
social and physical sciences in college, set me on a path of pessimism and
distrust that jaded me to such a degree that I was incapable of ever
entertaining any findings that did not fit neatly within the paradigms I had
set in stone in my mind. As a young
adult in my mid-twenties and well into my thirties, I failed to realize that
this cognitive impliability prevented me from practicing the scientific method
in the manner in which it was intended.
In order for the scientific method to be employed properly, the observer
must maintain a mind that is open to outcomes that may not fit with his or her
current understanding of the topic being examined, along with a healthy
skepticism designed to protect against being led astray by unsubstantiated
findings. However, for one reason or
another in the spring of 2010 my mind was forced open by an event that took
place in a location that was as controlled an environment as can be expected
outside of a laboratory setting.
For a couple of years I had been taking guitar lessons and
had ignored my instructor’s advice to record my practice sessions, a process that he believed could help a student improve quickly by listening to the playback and correcting any mistakes that were highlighted in the recording in subsequent practice sessions. At the time I suppose I was a little
self-conscious about hearing myself on a recording, but after a while I became
a little more open to the idea as the instructor continued to make the
request. One day at practice the
instructor added that it might be beneficial to make a recording if a melody ever popped into my head during the day. He said that if I brought in a recording of me whistling or humming a tune he could help me to determine the key the tune is in and work on chord progressions. Shortly thereafter, I found myself humming a
tune while I was taking a shower before work at around 6:00 AM. After I got out of the shower and woke up my
wife I decided I would grab my cell phone and try to record the tune that I had
in my head. I waited for my wife to get
into the shower and then hit the record button.
I began humming the simple melody (probably a tune inspired by our
recent trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras), made it through one time, took a
breath to hum it a second time and, much to my complete astonishment, I heard
the giggle of a little girl a few feet in front of me while I sat on the couch
in the living room leaning into the cell phone that was resting on the coffee
table. I was shocked but tried to shake
it off and continue humming the tune a second time. However, I wasn’t able to persist very long
until I had to stop the recording and collect myself. Still not wanting to believe what I had just
heard very loudly right in front of my face, I walked around the room to verify
that all of the windows were closed, the TV was off, no one was walking outside
and that my wife was still in the shower with the bathroom door fully
closed. After confirming all of these
things and checking to make sure there weren’t any other applications open on
my cell phone, I finally mustered up the nerve to play back the recording fully
expecting not to hear anything other than my feeble attempt to recreate the
melody I was humming in the shower earlier.
To my complete amazement however, I heard as clear as day the sound of a little girl giggling just as I took a breath between the humming of the two melodies. To say the least I was stunned and played it for my wife the second she got out of the shower. Having experienced paranormal activity in the past herself, my wife had very little difficulty believing that I had just recorded the voice of a spirit. However, I was not so easily convinced so I brought my cell phone to work to play it for my co-workers and received mixed reactions. Those who believed in ghosts previously were convinced by the recording and those who did not believe in ghosts prior to hearing the recording attempted to come up with any alternative explanation they could possibly muster in order to explain away the occurrence (a technique that I was very familiar with since I had spent the previous 39 years of my life doing the very same thing when confronted with other people’s experiences with paranormal events). However, for the first time in my life I realized that the alternatives provided gave no reasonable explanation to what I had documented, and in fact most seemed more improbable than the possibility that it might be feasible, with an extremely sensitive device, to record a residual auditory signal contained within the environment by some means not yet understood by science. But at this point I would once again yield to Thomas Edison to better explain my feelings about mankind’s ability to comprehend occurrences that take place outside the human level of understanding and the potential for technology to bridge the gap between this world and the next:
"I don't claim that our personalities pass on to
another existence or sphere, I don't claim anything because I don't know
anything about the subject. For that matter, no human being knows. But I do
claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate
that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get
in touch with us in this existence or sphere, the apparatus will at least give
them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and
raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to
be the only means of communication."
- Thomas Edison (Scientific American, October 30, 1920)
I share Edison’s skepticism regarding many of the methods that are used to study psychic phenomena including the ones he lists in his quote above. However, it also seems fairly evident to me that, even with the advancements that have been made over the past century in the technology associated with the recording of sound waves and moving images (two of Thomas Edison’s greatest contributions to mankind along with the invention of electric light), paranormal research will continue to be discredited by the scientific community due to the paranormal researcher’s inability to adequately control & replicate the documented phenomena. However, the extensive amount of auditory and visual evidence that exists out there today captured with state of the art digital recorders, full spectrum video & still cameras and electromagnetic field measuring devices cannot be ignored and must be examined with an open mind even if this particular field of research is resistant to control & replication similar to the study of living human beings (i.e. Psychology).
In future installments of Haunted Holidaze I will be
describing my experiences with the paranormal while investigating locations
that are purported to be haunted. In
some instances the data collected proved to be inconclusive. However, in many locations the documented
findings could not be debunked regardless of how hard I tried to find other
plausible explanations for the visual and/or auditory anomalies. It is really amazing for me to look back at
the person I was just a few years ago and realize how much one disembodied
giggle can change a person’s outlook on life, the afterlife and ignite a fire
of curiosity that is impossible to extinguish.
In closing, I would like to leave you with one more quote by Thomas
Edison that clearly conveys his excitement and belief in the ability to someday
develop a means to communicate with that which lies beyond the veil:
"I do hope that our personality survives. If it does,
then my apparatus ought to be of some use. That is why I am now at work on the
most sensitive apparatus I have ever undertaken to build, and I await the
results with the keenest interest."
- Thomas Edison (Scientific American, October 30, 1920)
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