Ghost in the Machine, Part 1: Spooky Week #2

looking at it as a vector of political extremism. Sometimes it's useful to not just to look on from the outside, but actually hop into other people's reality tunnels to gain a more intimate understanding of how they interact with our world. This was my primary motivation in attending the Ghost Conference, to learn what metaphysical beliefs drive the attendees and how

said beliefs intersect with politics and our broader culture. My experiences at the conference ranged from ghost hunting to being hypnotized, to learning of the galactic Federation of Angels and abortion hungry demons. So with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my report back on the twenty twenty three Oregon Ghost Conference. The first challenge we faced was simply getting

to the town of Seaside. The first day of the conference, Friday, March twenty fourth, coincided with a massive snowstorm along Highway twenty six from a Portland to Seaside. As we were driving on the treacherous mountain roads, a white out completely engulfed our view. When we emerged from the snowstorm, it was as if we'd gone through a portal, transporting us from the mountainous forest to the small coastal town of Seaside, Oregon,

into a world of ghosts, spirits, specters, and overpriced convention food. Seaside, as the name suggests, is a beachfront town situated in northern Oregon. It was founded in the late eighteen hundredths after railroad baron Ben Holliday built his summer vacation quote unquote Seaside house on the plot of land which is now Seaside's golf course. It's always been a sort of tourist resort town that people from Portland travel to for

beachfront entertainment. The conference is put on by a friendly high school art teacher and Oregon City commissioner, Rocky Smith. Smith has been doing ghost tours in Oregon since the mid nineties and has been putting on the Oregon Ghost Conference since twenty twelve. Originally, it was held in Smith's hometown of Oregon City, an extremely haunted town often cited as the end of the Oregon Trail. In twenty sixteen, the conference outgrew its Oregon City venue and relocated to Seaside.

It's now the largest paranormal convention in the Pacific Northwest. The conference features ghost tours, classes, guest speakers, vendors, tarra readings, seances, ghost hunting, and paranormal investigations. The first big event I marked on my schedule was a ghost tour to get acquainted with Seaside's most haunted places. The tour began right outside the convention center. Conference director Rocky Smith led this one himself. He filled us in on some old ghost

conference lore. The Seaside Convention Center went through some extensive renovations right before the pandemic, but the first year the conference took place in the convention center, they had a class for kids where a group of children explored around the old building to find what they thought were the most haunted places. There was one hallway on the west side of the building where people routinely reported strange experiences back in twenty sixteen, a child at the conference claimed

they saw a ghost down this hallway when exiting the bathroom. First, they just saw something out of the corner of their eye, and then when they turned to the left, they saw a woman in an old dress staring at them. At first, they weren't sure if the dress was long or short because they were too scared to look down, but then they noticed that the woman didn't have any legs and was just floating in the air. Because of the new renovations,

that hallway is no longer accessible. Rocky Smith remarked that he didn't know if that was intentional or not, but said that a lot of times when they redo buildings, they'll change the part of a building that used to be kind of scary and uncomfortable, so that hallway is now used for storage, although one of the convention staff members claimed that a vacuum cleaner now held in the

hallway is possessed. So there's that. The convention Center was originally built in the seventies and doesn't really have a lot of notable hit history, but when looking into hauntings or reports of ghosts, typically people try to learn the history of the building or plot of land in question. For Seaside. That's kind of hard because in nineteen twelve, four blocks of downtown Seaside burned to the ground, destroying

most of the town's early history. The first stop on the ghost tour after we left the Convention Center was one of the reportedly most active sites of ghostly activity in Seaside, the Bridge Tender Tavern. It was built in nineteen fourteen, so just a couple of years after the Big Fire. I used to be called the Pastime Bar and then suffered its own fire and was later renamed the Bridge Tender. The previous owners of the bar claimed that in the early twentieth century it was a brothel.

This is unconfirmed, but it relates to the tavern's most frequent ghost, the Madam. Staff and patrons of the Bridge Tender regularly addressed the Madam. If customers are being rude, It's said that the Madam will spill drinks on them, you know, stuff like that. The story I like the most about the Madam has to do with the taverns old CD jute box. If a specific song played on the jukebox, something would go haywire, CDs would shoot out of it or other weird things would reportedly happen in

the bar. Patrons would put the song on repeat just to see what would happen. Eventually, the owners took the CD with the song in question out of the jukebox so that people would just stop playing the song. But people are persistent bastards, so now people just play the song on their phones or the new digital jukebox in the Bridge Tender. Now the theory is is that the Madam just really hates this song, so she gets mad

when it plays and then causes some commotion. The song is Dancing Queen by Abba, So if you want to go test this yourself, you can travel to the Bridge Tender and play Dancing Queen and see what happens. Another highlight from the ghost tour was learning about the old Seasider Hotel at the end of the promenade. It was purportedly haunted by multiple spirits, and it was believed that when the hotel was torn down in the eighties, the ghosts followed the hotel staff who got new jobs at

a restaurant in downtown called Girdles. New employees are said to have recognized apparitions from the hotel and the restaurant gained a haunted coffee pot that would either move on its own or even fly across the room, depending on who you would ask. I think it's nice that the ghosts seem to have a pretty good job relocation program, something that most of us do not so good for them.

As the ghost tour approached the beachfront promenade, that snowstorm from the nearby mountains seemed to have caught up with us, and a dreary mix of rain and snow began to descend. Upon ceased, as if some otherworldly force was trying to keep us from further exploring the hauntings of the town. So as even my trench coat began soaking through, we took refuge back indoors. The very first class my friend

Elaine and I took at the conference was titled Ghost Detectives. Now, despite the silly, stounding name, it was probably the most grounded class throughout the entire weekend, certainly the one with the least amount of spiritual dogma. The class was focused on best practices for conducting paranormal investigations, specifically to ensure that the process and finding's mirror the evidentiary standards. Set

by the justice system for law enforcement investigations. The instructor, doctor Nelson, is a supervisor for a crisis hotline with degrees in mental health, metaphysics, and fine arts. He described his methodology for investigating paranormal activity as quote unquote applied science. He was definitely the most meticulous investigator of the whole weekend and the least ghost hunter esque in terms of advocating for strict investigative procedures and not just assuming that

every spooky noise was evidence of a ghost. Most of his class was spent explaining very basic police investigative procedure, proper ways to collect evidence, having a chain of evidence, and not simply jumping to conclusions. It's a little foolhardy to assume every single spike on an electromagnetic field or EMF meter is actually a ghost trying to communicate. The other unique thing about his class was the emphasis on before pulling out your special ghost detecting tools, perhaps one

should conduct thorough interviews and collect witness statements. If the people reporting the phenomenon, try to figure out what's going on in their life, maybe even look into their own mental health background. As much as you're able to if they've had any sudden losses, past trauma, or history of paranormal experiences. Asking thorough questions can give a much fuller

look at what someone might be going through. Some examples of things to ask or look into were if the phenomenon is related to a house, who owns the house, who lives there, who has experienced the event? What led to a paranormal investigator being called? What precipitated the phenomenon? When it occurred? How often has it occurred? When was it first noticed? Was there just one random strange experience?

Or is someone going through an event in their life that has made an experience suddenly stick out as strange? Has the person sought help, and has the phenomenon been verified by more than one person. In terms of haunted houses, figuring out if there's any issues in the house is a great first step, because if there's a carbon monoxide leak, that could explain a great many things, or if someone claims ghost ectoplasm is leaking through the ceiling and walls,

perhaps the roof and water pipes should be inspected. Elene and I did a little debrief after the conference, and they reminded me of another good tip gleaned from the ghost detective class.

someone who like makes stuff with his hands. He's very like he feels very grounded and like and like consent this reality a lot in a lot of aspects, and this is like a very fun hobby that combines his two favorite things, well two of his favorite things, just like Ghostbusters cosplays and also like parnimal investigation stuff.

is about the same as belief in demons. But the interesting thing about that is although Americans belief in organized religion has been decreasing, especially Christianity, belief in ghosts has been and still is on the rise. In fact, it's gone up by nearly four hundred percent since the nineteen seventies. These last three years, for really the first time ever, Gallup polls show that less than fifty percent of Americans

say they belong to a religious congregation. Alan Downe is a computer scientist and professor at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts. His research suggests that the Internet is a major cause, not just a correlating factor, in the decrease of religious affiliation, and with the rise of the Internet and reality TV, ghost hunting has become a relatively popular niche hobby. But as religious belief has declined, belief in the afterlife has remained the same about seventy percent

according to the General Social Survey. Gallup's polling suggests that currently about three and four Americans have some sort of paranormal belief Thomas Moen, a sociologist who's been conducting a study on religion and paranormal belief at Bowling Green State University, said that he's finding that quote atheists tend to report

higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk unquote. As to why so many Americans believe in ghosts, Mohen says, quote, people are looking to other things or non traditional things to answer life big questions that don't necessarily include religion unquote. Throughout the conference, the word ghost, spirit, and entity were often used interchangeably. Each of those words kind of act as an umbrella term for a broad swath of ontological concepts.

Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that relates to the nature of being. Depending who you ask, a ghost or a spirit can be anything from a wayward soul of a deceased human, some otherworldly energy, an evil presence, or even some sort of temporal loop. Historically, these terms have never been very clear either, they've evolved with the times, so Elene and I prepared a brief history of ghosts to help give context for the rest of this episode

and the next. The idea of contacting spirits or interacting with some sort of spirit world obviously isn't new. Worldwide, people have traditions of interacting with ancestors that deceased and a variety of non material beings. Ancestor veneration in China goes back at least six thousand years, while the word shaman, relating to someone who works with spirits and in the spirit realm for healing and divination, comes from the Tungusic language of Siberia and has practices that are at least

too millennia old. The term necromancy stems from a Greek word meaning divination of the dead. In the Odyssey, Homer writes of Odysseus learning necromantic rituals to summon the shade or underworld ghost of Tyresius. While clerical necromantic traditions through the medieval period made a clear distinction between the souls of dead humans from other random spirits, that separation was not as ubiqui among folk beliefs of people who claimed

to interact with the spirit world. Emma Wilby describes in her book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. How into the early modern period, many cunning folk basically low level magicians and conjurors had ghosts, fairies, and animal spirit companions, all of which seemed to interact very similarly. The European concept of ghosts being linked to evil or demonic forces is a relatively new idea. It came to be as a byproduct of the Reformation and rejection of the Catholic Church.

The Catholic doctrine of purgatory and limbo was rejected by the new Protestants, which caused some cosmological problems when it came to people's own experiences with ghosts and spirits. Catholics held that ghosts were basically spirits of dead humans on vacation from purgatory, But with Protestants rejecting purgatory for its lack of biblical basis, they defined some other way to

explain the apparently fairly common phenomenon of ghostly encounters. A Swiss theologian named Ludwig Lavater attempted to solve this cosmological problem in his fifteen sixty nine book Despectus. I just picked up my copy a few weeks ago and had been going through it, and it's a lot of fun. The full English title was quote of ghosts and spirits walking by night and of strange noises, cracks, and sundry fore warnings which commonly happened before the death of men,

great slaughters, and the alteration of kingdoms. Pretty cool stuff. Two of my favorite consecutive chapter titles are quote what hath followed this doctrine of the Papists concerning the appearing of men's souls, followed by testimonies out of the Word of God, that neither the souls of the faithful nor infidels do walketh upon the earth after they are once parted from their bodies. So that kind of gives you a look at the writing style of this entire book.

Despecters became massively influential. It was widely translated. Shakespeare was reading this as he was writing Hamlet. More importantly, the text took off across many Protestant circles and became the backbone of the cultural conception of ghosts in the soon to be United States through such Protestant sects. Instead of ghosts being wayward specters of dead humans who escaped from purgatory, Lavater proposed a great many explanations for spectral experiences, including

many non mystical causes. He lists illness, insomnia, psychoactive substances, sleep paralysis, and grief as being common causes of ghostly hallucinations, an opinion now shared by many psychologists and doctors. Definitely, the closest thing I've ever seen to a ghost was during a sleep paralysis episode. Lavator writes, quote, Melancholic persons and mad men imagine things which in very deed are not fearful. Men imagine that they see and hear strange things.

Men which are dull of seeing and hearing imagine many things which in very deed are not so. Unquote. He also cites pranksters as another common cause of perceived spectral activity, but most interestingly, in an attempt to bash the Catholics, the Protestant Lavater also lists low level clergy trained in exorcistic magic to summon demonic spirits in an achromatic fashion

as possibly producing some supernatural phenomenon interpreted as ghosts. Now, Lavater does believe in spirits, but his thesis is that genuine ghosts spirits bumps in the night, those strange cracks and noises which we now might refer to as politgeists

are almost always demons that are torturing people. He wrote that devils can quote appear in different shapes, not only of those which are alive, but also of dead men as well as a peer in the likeness of a black dog, a horse, an owl, and also are able

to bring incredible things to pass unquote. Levater did admit that in the rarest of cases, God may send angels or the spirit of a dead person to Earth for a very specific task, but due to demons a nature trickery, there's really no way to trust that a ghostly presence may be from God. So he recommends that one should always assume that a specter is demonic. God may even allow demonic spirits to appear as a form of punishment

and a sign that one should repent for wrongdoing. Lavater's theologic work on ghosts were part of a larger Protestant Christian campaign to literally demonize all spirits. Right, the only thing you can really talk to is Jesus or God. Anything else is probably just a demon. This is the version of ghosts that I grew up with as a kid, the idea that basically, if a ghost appears, it's probably

a demon trying to scare or trick you. This concept that spirits and spirit contact were predominantly demonic, changed the nature of many witch trials, since when cunning folk listed their familiar ghosts or fairies, they were basically admitting to trafficking with demons. The next evolution in ghost lore came in the form of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologian and scientist. In fact, he was one of the first to postulate

the existence of the neuron. As Christians in Europe were dealing with this messy assortment of spirits that you really shouldn't try and interact with, but if you do, you better make sure they're angels, Swedenborg was about to shake

up this whole entire cosmology. In the seventeen forties, he started having quote intense mystical experiences, dreams, and visions unquote, which led him to believe he was in contact with a spirit world and entities that he described as angels, demons, as well as other spirits, including ones from extraterrestrial planets. This is like one of the first guys to do the spirits I'm talking to are actually aliens, which is

pretty cool. In seventeen eighty five, he published a book titled Heaven and Hell, based on his experiences of the afterlife. According to Swedenburg, once humans on Earth pass on to the spiritual world, they enter a intermediate realm in between heaven and hell and eventually either become beautified into angels or twisted into demons, and then respectively pass on into

either heaven or Hell proper. While his depiction of spirits were obviously influenced by his Christian beliefs, the variety and breadth of his spirit world was broader than just the undead. Swedenburg's writing was one of the early influences on spiritualism.

Core tenants of which are there being multiple levels of the afterlife and that an individual's awareness persists after death and may be contacted by the living, which is pretty similar to what most people now would probably describe as ghosts if you were to ask them what a ghost is.

While Swedenborg actually recommended against attempting to contact spirits, he had a lasting influence on American spiritualism for creating an explicitly Christian based system where spiritual entities worked as mediators between humans and God. Coming out of Upstate New York in the decade before the Civil War, spiritualism brought to the other aspects of the Radical Quakers with Swedenberg's idea of spirit intermediaries who could bring messages to the living.

The spiritualist movement formally began on March thirty first, eighteen forty eight, when the Fox Sisters made their fraudulent clases of contacting a spirit who could communicate through knocking noises.

Starting initially in Quaker communities, mediumship and seances immediately took off across the United States, including the White House as the Lincolns were graving the loss of their son, showing that interest in ghosts and seances were not just a parlor trick for commoners, they were also a parlor trick

for the president. The fact that the rise of spiritualism coincided with Civil War deaths and gruesome battlefield photography certainly helped fuel the drive to communicate and receive messages from the recently deceased. Due to its Quaker roots, the spiritualist movement was abolitionist, and its belief in an egalitarian afterlife prompted its members to advocate for social change here on earth. Even the messages that mediums claimed to relay from the

dead were often progressive. In eighteen fifty two, the medium Isaac Post published a collection of messages supposedly channeled from such people as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and other famous figures who urged the living to push for radical social change. The book, entitled Voices from the Spirit World, included a passage claiming that the ghost of George Washington became an

abolitionist after death. And I don't know the idea that the ghost of Jefferson and Washington suddenly became abolitionists after death. Although I understand its utility at the time for trying to push people towards becoming an abolitionist, it does kind of read as a little bit gross, considering how that was very much not their opinions when they were actually

living humans. New to the spiritualist development of ghosts was not just the idea of regular spiritual contact, but evidence that the spirit world could be shown to the physical scientific world. Basically, the precursor to modern ghosts emerged between the Civil War and World War One. In London. Multiple ghost clubs and psychic or paranormal research groups were founded in the mid to late eighteen hundreds aimed at scientifically

investigating ghosts, hauntings, and the claims of spiritualists. Similar groups for investigation opened up in the United States, and around this time is also when we start to see the use of technology to assist in capturing alleged evidence of ghosts. In eighteen sixty one, amateur photographer William Mumler was developing a self portrait when a shattery apparition of a young

girl appeared on his developing plate. Mummler knew this to be a simple mistake of reusing an improperly scrubbed photography plate, what we now would call a double exposure, But upon showing this photo to a very excited spiritualist friend of his, he realized the lucrative opertune tunity that lay before him. Thus was born the business of spirit photography. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes's fame was a fan of spirit photography. He became a member of London's Society for

Psychical Research and eventually became a spiritualist himself. The recent inventions of the phonograph and telephone were hoped to be utilized to create evidence of spirit contact. According to Ghosts of Futures, Past Spiritualism and cultural politics of nineteenth century America by Molly McGary. Thomas Watson, famed assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, experimented with the telephone as an aid to

spiritual communication. Decades later, Thomas Edison sought to develop a quote unquote spirit phone, telling American Magazine in nineteen twenty quote, I've been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us, not by a cult, mystifying, mysterious or weird means, but by scientific methods. Quote. Edison's spirit phone never really turned out, and we have very

little information about it. It seems Edison thought that elements of our personality or memories existed in a form of like almost particles that could be measured and amplified by vibrational sensing equipment, but not much is recorded of his actual attempts to build this spirit phone. By the end of the nineteenth century, newspaper is reported on ghosts and

hauntings along with other regular news. A twenty eighteen New York Times article on the paper's own history of reporting on ghosts said, quote Paulette D. Kilmer, a cultural historian and professor at the University of Toledo scoured the paper's archives. Her research turned up nearly three hundred ghost stories in the times between the founding of the paper in eighteen

fifty one and the early twentieth century. Unquote. While news coverage of hauntings dropped off during the twentieth century, the ways in which people attempted to understand ghosts only got

more complex. The mediumship of the spiritualists has combined with the ever growing field of paranormal research, New Age beliefs, and pop culture fascination with poltergeist, spirits and UFOs, along with the resurgence of Evangelical Protestantism into an overlap of conflicting ghost cosmologies and what it means to contact the spirit world. To cap off our first night at the conference, we signed up for our very own ghost investigation at the Starry Night Inn, a quaint little house just a

short walk from the convention center. We got to the inn right before midnight on Friday evening before we ventured out on our hunt for ghosts. We were split into two groups of five, with one starting in the inn and the other in the outdoor bathhouse. We got acquainted with the ghost hunting tools we were going to be using. First, we were given a popular EMF meter routinely used for ghost detection, called a K two meter. It's supposed to

measure electromagnetic fields and features colorful light up LEDs. I'm going to read a quote from the lead investigator we were paired with. Quote. If a K two meter spikes without reason, if it's not put next to anything powerfully electrical, then we can consider that paranormal. Consider that a spirit. When our body dies, we leave behind our energies. Our energies is EMF, and this starts to pick it up. Unquote. Among the paranormal skeptic community, the K two meter is

notorious for giving off false positives. With its unshielded sensor is able to be set off by cell phones, radio waves, and even nearby batteries. The other device we were using is something called a rempod. Essentially, it's a small, horrible sounding junior theoremy with some LEDs attached. An antenna creates

an electromagnetic field. If something conductive gets close to the antenna, it forms a capacitor between the object and the antenna, and the pod will light up and make some noise, or if it's electromaenetic field gets disrupted by something like say cellular or radio frequencies, it will also make a horrible beeping noise and light up. I'm going to read another quote from our lead investigator quote when our energies are around, the pod will react to any energy field

that comes close to its antenna. So as we invite spirits in, we can tell them how they can interact, and we can tell them, hey, if you walk over to that light over there and touch it, it'll light up unquote. There is something funny to me about telling a ghost to walk over somewhere, just a little it's just a little amusing. My group of five intrepid investigators were sent out to the bathhouse, which we were told used to be a carriage house and horse stables that

got damaged in the nineteen twelve Seaside fire. The lead investigator started by informing any possible spirits that we do not mean them quote harm or intrusion, and that we would just quote like to talk. He then informed any ghosts in the vicinity that if they quote unquote walk up to any of the devices with LED lights and quote unquote touch it, it will light up. Quote, go ahead, use your energy and touch all those lights for me.

That way we know you're here unquote. Potential specters were also informed that if they speak into an electronic recording device, us corporeal humans could hear their voice when we play back the audio. This is called EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon. More on that on the next episode. The lead investigator then asked any nearby ghosts what their favorite food is, which seems like a cruel question to ask a ghost because they can't eat anyway. A barrage of questions then

flooded out, can you tell us your name? What are you wearing? Who is the president? Not exactly all things I would ask a spectral anomaly if I was given the opportunity. But after a few minutes of silence, the rempod is started to light up very faintly. The lead investigator starts talking to the presumed ghost and suggests that they play a game to find out what the ghost's

name is. This is how it works. Someone recites the alphabet and if the rempod lights up on any of the letters, that means the letter is in the ghost's name. We first got the letter N and then the letters O and D. Then I started going through the alphabet and it lit up on the letter I. Then it let up on the letter I again, and then the letter R. At this point, the lead investigator decided that

the ghost's name was Ronnie. As we were about to leave the bathhouse, someone who worked at the end came in and told us that there was a stableman with the last name Norris who died in the fire. So now the ghost's name became Norris. Next we moved to the basement. One person in our group was a little spooked and elected to stay outside. None of the rempods or anything lit up in the basement, but the person from the inn, the one who told us about Norris,

joined us in the basement. When down there, they said they saw a ghost that they were familiar with, named Cassandra. They then turned to me and said that Cassandra likes me. Cassandra was reportedly trying to give me a hug and said that she wishes me quote all the well beings in the world unquote. Now, Cassandra was also apparently trying to tell me about a Grandpa John, which I don't have, So if any of you have a Grandpa John who needs to tell me something. Just let me know.

words or music slipping through from radio stations. I guess it's sort of the modern incarnation of the spirit phone. The idea is that ghosts can somehow manipulate the radio waves to speak complete words or sentences as the box is cycling between frequencies. Basically, spirit boxes are supposed to act as an electronic radio medium for spirits to communicate. The lead investigator thought that the spirit box was telling us to leave, but words weren't really clear in my opinion.

For example, here is a clip in question.

recorded a little debrief on our way back to the hotel. No, I do find it super interesting how people try to like the way they interpret electual readings as you would a conversation, and they they assert their reality on it, being like if this happens, this means you say yes, right, so then so then the abs of the thing also becomes an answer. It's it's it is a very interesting process of people like crafting their own reality as things are happening.

share our thoughts on our first ghost hunting experience. Okay, now that it has been over six months since you and I were at the organ Ghost Conference, I'm curious to see how our debrief now may kind of differ or be expanded upon from our debrief literally minutes after we left this investigation at the Story night in and you know this this day was This day was interesting because we had the ghost Detective class like right before

this investigation. We were able to have these two kind of ideas of what a ghost investigation looks like kind of play off each other, which I think led to a pretty fun holistic experience in terms of the many kind of diversity of investigators that were at this event.

something paranormal has occurred. And when you go to the ghost hunt, specifically the ghost hunt that we went to, everyone there was a assuming that paranormal things were occurring just as a baseline.

there is. You've already framed what you expect the encounter to be and how whatever you're encountering will interact with a whole mess of like ideas.

ten fifteen seconds the light turns on. He's able. It's it's it's crafting this whole like timeline of this ghost like doing this thing when really this is just a flickering light like that that, but through the way that he has this like uh, this like commanding voice, it's making it as if the ghost is like following these instructions and then being being like rewarded for following these instructions by saying like good, good, good good, or if

they don't follow instructions, then the ghost is like scolded. So it's it's just a lot of a lot of interactions like that.

as an actionable answer. Whoever is leading the quote unquote investigation gets to either intentionally or even unintentionally, craft the meaning of the experience based on how the questions are framed, when questions are asked, and how the group responds based on the activity or lack thereof, of the EMF devices.

The rempods often go off erratically or in seemingly random intervals, but when their activity happens after someone just asks twenty questions, it's assumes to be related to whatever the most recent line of inquiry was. It all operates on correlation versus causation, with people mostly jumping on the ladder. No matter when pods light up, the results can be turned into a

meaningful sign if the investigator is talking frequently enough. These sorts of ghost hunts are primarily a form of entertainment. It's a novel experience you can have with your friends and family to have a fun time together over the course of a few hours and maybe get a little spooked. I wasn't expecting a rigorous scientific investigation at midnight and seaside Oregon, nor do I think that's even a useful

way of getting at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather than viewing ghost hunts as objective inquiries into paranormal activity, I think for most people they operate more as a way of inducing paranormal experiences, the same way occultism seeks to induce mystical experiences, and religion strives for a connection with God. All of these are practices of constructing meaning

and finding patterns, and that's not to discount them. They only are a problem when they become exploitative and harmful to yourself and others, which is what we'll be talking about in the next episode. So stay tuned to hear about warrior angels tasked with vanquishing demons, how mendel illness is a sure sign you're possessed by an evil spirit, and how abortions and the Internet are opening up portals in our world to demonic forces. See you on the

other side. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for it could happen here. Updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.