Ghost Hunter Technology Revisited

you know, questionably tied to the Halloween theme. Today, we're going to return to a classic topic that tech Stuff covered way back in two Now. I'm not replaying that episode, but I am revisiting it. So in t I and my then co host Chris Palette sat down to talk about tech commonly used in ghost hunting. And let's get this out of the way first. Just like I did twelve years ago, I am a skeptic. I do not

believe in ghosts. I think ghostly phenomena describes a collection of misinterpretations, mistakes, willingness to believe uh scams in some cases, the human tendency to look for explanations to stuff, and you know when those explanations are not immediately evident. We tend to invent explanations. For example, one thing we humans are pretty good at is recognizing patterns in lots of noisy stimuli. And this makes sense. It's a kind of

survival mechanism. You're right, If you're scanning the tall grass and you notice a pattern that looks like a lioness's head, well you might just save yourself from being a lions lunchable. So it's a portant that we humans are able to recognize meaningful shapes or meaningful sounds and white what might otherwise seem to be like just random information. It's it's recognizing the signal through the noise. There's a real value

to that. But that ability is not full proof. Sometimes we don't see the pattern and we end up as lunch so we just failed to notice it. Or sometimes we see what appears to us to be a meaningful shape, but really it's just a bunch of visual clutter that doesn't actually form the shape we have perceived. So the classic example of this is laying on your back and looking up at the sky and saying what clouds look like?

You know, seeing shapes in the clouds. You might look up at a fluffy cloud and see a face or an animal or something like that, and we know that the cloud isn't really a face. In fact, we might even realize that if we were to view that same cloud but from a different perspective. Let's say that we were well up in the air in a hot air balloon looking at that cloud, we might see that it's it's made up of totally different shapes. It doesn't look like a face at all, and it's only because of

our perception from the ground that we think that. But you know, you move your perception a little bit and it doesn't. The same thing was true of the infamous face on Mars. There was this famous picture of this, uh, this little physical region of Mars, where it kind of looked like it was a face, like perhaps someone had carved a face into the very rock of Mars. Except then we found that if you viewed it from a different angle, it didn't look like a face at all.

It was just a natural formation of hills and valleys that when the light hit it at a certain angle and when looked at from a certain perspective, looked like a face. So again, like our perception can play tricks on us, otherwise optical illusions wouldn't exist, right, So that's something that we need to remember. There's also a concept called apophenia, by the way, the tendency to look at something that doesn't have patterns in it, but we perceive

a pattern. We often call that paradolia. Right, So you look at a cloud, you see a face, that's paradolia. Well, there's a similar concept called apathenia. That's a term that Klaus Conrad coined while writing about early stages of schizophrenia.

And Conrad was describing this tendency to see connections between things that aren't actually connected, and beyond that, beyond perceiving these connections, you get the feeling like there's a real significance to it, a special meaning between these perceived connections, even though in reality, objectively, there is no connection between

these things. And you can sort of draw a line from that tendency to stuff like conspiracy theories, where you start looking at things that really don't have any connection with each other and you start drawing connections to them, and you start assigning causal relationships and motivations and active steps towards pushing these things forward. That's where a lot of conspiracy theories take place because we have this natural

tendency to do it to some degree. You know, some people have a stronger tendency to do it than others, And as Conrad was saying, that people who are particularly susceptible to this often are demonstrating uh features that are common to early stages of schizophrenia. So it's dangerous because

we can start building upon an early misperception. Right, we make a mistake in drawing a conclusion about things we've observed, and then we build upon that mistake, and before you know it, you've got an entire structure of beliefs there that's built on a faulty foundation. But by then it's too late, right, you've already bought into a lie, or at least a misinterpretation of the facts. So what this tells us is that our brains are not completely reliable.

Our brains interpret information, but sometimes the ding dang gray matter makes mistakes. This applies to everyone. In fact, if it didn't happen, then stuff like stage magic would never work. Magicians count on the fact that our brains are fallible, that we can be tricked. Scam Artists do it too, but they're more nefarious about it, all right, All that's just to establish the fact that we humans can encounter

stuff and draw incorrect conclusions. Now, the thing about ghost hunting is that ghost hunters have kind of doubled down on this and have gone even further through the misuse and misunderstanding of technology. The hunters say their tech helps them detect ghosts. I say they are misinterpreting data. Uh, perhaps by just you know, naturally misinterpreting it, sometimes willfully misinterpreting it. Sometimes they don't believe what they're saying at all,

but they're doing this because it's a living. They're making money through it. So I don't want to paint everyone with the same brush. I think there are true believers out there who are mistaken but sincere in their beliefs. And I think there are scam artists who don't believe a thing that they are saying, but they are, you know, exploiting other people's belief in the paranormal in order to make a living. But anyway, it's all fundamentally anti scientific.

And let's get to our first example to really dive into that, and and that is trying to find meaning in random noise because This plays back to things like apophenia and paradolia, So in this case, I'm talking about literal noise. And there are a couple of different ways

that ghost hunters tried to do this. They might try and take an audio recording device, and this could be anything from an older magnetic tape system like even real to real tape systems in some cases, to stuff like digital recorders that save audio files directly to solid state drives, so you can have an analog recording or a digital recording.

There are a lot of different variations out there. Another take on this is not the recording device necessarily, but a playback device where they might scan through a spectrum of radio frequencies to see if something emerges as you're doing the scanning. We'll talk about that in a second too. Now, in all these cases it helps if you take a big old dose of magical thinking along with your technology.

That can go a long way to filling in gaps, because when you start to ask questions about what's going on, things fall apart fairly quickly. So let's start with recordings. This alone gets pretty messy. So the simplest version of this is that at ghost hunters have set up recording devices in an area where there is supposed ghost activity, and you might do this so that you can monitor the area for longer periods without having to have a

human sit there the whole time. So you just let a recording device go and then later you check back and you scan through it to see if there are anything registered on the recording device. Maybe you even have one that only turns on when there's an audible noise, and so you just have recordings of anything that actually

went beyond a certain threshold. Or maybe the idea is that the spirits are going to be more inclined to be chatty if there are no nosy breathers who happened to be in the space breathers by the way, or what ghosts call the living, which is something I just made up, or another perfectly cromulent explanation. As you want the recording to document anything that is actually experienced, because otherwise you have to rely upon witness accounts. Those are

thoroughly unreliable. We know that witness accounts are unreliable in all really matters, because our our perception and our memories are fallible, and we can make mistakes, especially the further removed you are from the event, the more fallible it gets. That's not to say that witness reactions have no value whatsoever. They do, but they're always there's always a matter of

how reliable is the witness. The witness could be making mistakes, the witness could be influenced by a line of questioning, or the witness could be attempting to, you know, pain a picture that wasn't really accurate in the first place. They're all these possibilities. Then there's the matter of how any sounds actually end up on recordings, because there are different explanations for this, right, So there's the very straightforward answer.

There's the answer that maybe spirits were making audible noises which could perhaps even include speech, and the recording device thus picked it up because it's the same thing that anyone would have heard. But they're also let's call them paranormal enthusiasts who have put forward other hypotheses suggesting that the spirits or ghosts or psychically gifted humans are somehow able to project sound onto a recording without actually making

an audible sound. So, in other words, whatever the mechanism is makes some sort of alteration to the recording process. So in the moment when you're there, you don't hear anything, but in the playback you hear a sound. This is called electronic voice phenomena or e v P, or as

my friend Shay says, it's ghost a s MR. So if we're using real to real magnetic tape, a ghost hunter might put forth the hypothesis that a ghost used its electro magnetic powers, which we'll talk about later in this episode, to somehow manipulate the magnetic particles on the tape itself, and that that's what created the sound you hear when you play the tape back. So even though you didn't hear it in the moment, the sound is there because the ghost has effectively bypassed the microphone and

recorded directly onto the tape. So that's that hypothesis, And there are problems with this. First, depending upon the instrumentation used, you can get artifacts during recording sessions. Uh And if the tape you're using used to have another recording on it, then the tape recorder might not be particularly good, and it may be that you have faint artifacts, faint recordings that are left from previous sessions on that tape. So the stuff you're listening to wasn't even put there during

the recording session, but from a previous one. And so that's a possible explanation for at least the magnetic tape ones things where you could have artifacts from earlier recording sessions. Obviously, if it's a brand new tape that was never used in recording, that's not going to be the case. So this isn't like blanket explanation for every moments, just pointing out that there are our natural explanations for these sorts

of things. Uh, And there are other totally natural explanations for odd stuff picked up on audio recordings, including just faulty recording processes. There's nothing quite like having someone who is unfamiliar with a tool who has then put in charge of using that tool, like they're going to be mistakes made and it may not be evident that a mistake was made, but it's recorded, and that can lead

to all sorts of misinterpretations. If you give me an electronic device I have never used before and you're very vague with the instructions, chances are I'm going to do a really poor job at using that tool properly, and I might draw some conclusions based upon my use of that tool, but they're completely incorrect conclusions because I wasn't using the tool correctly in the first place. Then there's the actual playback experience. This is where we get to

our brains playing tricks on us. We hear the playback and it seems so long ago. Now, we hear the playback and we listen oh hard for anything that we might identify as a meaningful signal. We're really listening hard, and we might start to interpret connections and patterns in the noise even when none really exist. We mistakenly identify stuff as having intent and meaning behind it, when in

fact it's just random noise. That's just how our brains work, and we have to be aware of that, and we have to think critically before we run with that interpretation. This also is the case was so called ghost boxes, and this episode, because I'm head up, is going to start running long if I'm not careful. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'll talk about ghost boxes and what those are, but first let me go get a drink.

We'll take this quick break. Okay, was rambling about ghost boxes before the break. What are those? Now? These are devices that are meant to sweep through a band of radio frequencies. Typically we're talking AM radio here, doesn't have to be, but that's like the standard is using AM radio. It actually kind of reminds me of being in the car and hitting that scan feature found on most car radios.

And when you do that, what happens is your radio is starting to seek out viable radio signals, right, like a strong signal that represents this is something that would come through onto the speakers, and once it does, it will settle on that station for a few seconds, and if you don't hit the scan button again, it will

then jump to the next available signal. And once in a while if you do this, if you hit scan on a road trip, you might end up with some pretty funny results on occasion, like you might get the opening bit of one song and the closing bit of a totally different song, and it's just because of the way the scan jumped. It might have a weird way of fitting together. That's funny. Like that can happen, right. It's not the best way to stay entertained, mind you,

but it can on occasion produce something funny. What ghost boxes are doing something similar, except they sweep more quickly through radio signals, so you're not really settling on any one frequency for long. Plus you're going through all the frequencies in the band over and over and over again, so not just the ones that represent a signal, but the static that's in between signals and again. The ghostly mechanics of this approach, like what ghosts are doing to

supposedly communicate through this device, are really questionable. The ideas that somehow a ghost is able to communicate as the ghost box cycles through these radio frequencies, piecing together noises that create words or phrases, so the little snippets of sound could be reinterpreted to be communications from the great beyond, but it's really just random snippets of sound and static. I'm not even sure what the mechanism would be for

a spirit to communicate in this way. I mean, how would a spirit even know to manipulate radio signals in time with a tuner that's rapidly cycling through different frequencies.

I mean, imagine that you're trying to have a phone conversation with someone, only in order to do it, you have to run down a hallway where there are phones mounted on the wall all down the hallway, and meanwhile, your friend who's listening to you also has to run down a hallway of speakers, each speaker tied to one of the specific phones, and that's the only way you can be heard. That seems like a lot of work

to me. How does a ghost even do that? So there's no only no real explanation as to why you would use a ghostbox in the first place, at least not an explanation that makes sense, because all of those explanations pretty much require you to first accept the existence of ghosts or psychic phenomena from the get go. You have to accept that those are things that are real

from the start. They don't prove the existence of these phenomena, they just are assumed to be associated with them, and you get into the circular reasoning, right, like, oh, the ghost box proves there are ghosts, and ghosts prove that the ghost box works. That's not how science works, right, That's not an accurate kind of of conclusion you can make. But let's move on. We're gonna talk about a different technology used in connection with ghost hunting. So get ready

to say cheese, because we're gonna talk cameras. The humble camera has been an integral part of the ghost hunting subset ever since its earliest days when it became a tool used by spiritualists, and it kind of got started as a joke that was interpreted as a real thing, and then the person who made the joke realized they could make a whole lot of money if they ran with the joke being real. And I'm talking about double

exposure in this case. So for we're gonna talk about photographic cameras like actual um film and and plate cameras, the stuff that takes place before digital cameras. So these are the kind of cameras that take images by exposing some photoreactive chemicals that are coded on some substance UH. They expose those chemicals to light, so a lens focuses the light and directs it to whatever surface has these

photoreactive chemicals on it. So in the good old days, these were photographic plates, and later that was replaced with UH, with film that had the chemicals essentially painted onto them. And then you would develop these photographic plates or film through a process where you expose them to different chemicals, you would develop a negative. From the negative, you could produce a positive image and then boom, you've got your photograph. But one thing you could do with these cameras is

you could take a double exposure. And that's just what it sounds like. It's when you expose the same photoreactive surface to light twice. You can actually do multi exposure, though the more you do it, the messier the image is going to be to a point where you're not gonna see anything. And maybe you do it by accident, right, maybe you failed to advance the film in your camera and you expose the same frame of film to light twice, or maybe you do it on purpose to create an

interesting effect. Maybe you're an artist and you're just experimenting with this sort of stuff. But however he gets made, a double exposure can have some really interesting features. You know, figures that were perfectly corporeal during the actual photo session could appear to be ghostly in the double exposure photo. Artists have used this effect to create amazing and sometimes you know, unsettling works. And there are modern tools in

editing software suites like Photoshop. They give artists the chance to replicate those effects. Using digital photographs or even create brand new effects inspired by double exposures. But it's all stemming from the very physical phenomena with early cameras. Now, at a casual glance, you might think the photographs you're looking at depicts something supernatural because there are these kind of ghostly images in there, and the less you know about how film works, the more likely you are to

misinterpret what you are seeing. If you have a background in film and in film development, you would likely spot double exposures right away. You would understand what you're looking at, you would know how it was produced. But to the layman, particularly back when photography was a young science, it could seem like proof that the supernatural exists. But no, it's just a multiple exposure of photoreactive chemicals that were subsequently

developed into a photograph. Then there are the orbs. Uh, the orbs so orbs and photography refer to these little spears of light that sometimes show up in photographs, and ghost hunter types might claim that such orbs represent spirits or ghost or psychic phenomena or something along those lines. But the real explanation is pointedly not paranormal. It's just very very normal. So why would orbs appear in a photograph. It's due to a phenomenon called back scatter, and it

all has to do with light. So let's say you're a ghost hunter and you're in a creepy old mansion and you're at the foot of a really particularly creepy staircase, and all the lights in the house are turned off so that you can see any ghostly phenomena right away. And you've been told that there's a ghost that sometimes walks up and down this particular staircase, and that usually

this ghost is invisible to the naked eye. So you take out your digital flash camera, you set it up on a tripod, you pointed up the staircase, and you start taking flash photos. And the focal point of these photos is on the staircase itself, so you focus the lens so that it's on the staircase. Well, if you're in an old mansion, they're likely going to be dust particles in the air. Depending upon the condition of the mansion, maybe there's quite a few dust particles in the air.

Some of those dust particles may well be within the view of this camera lens. So when the flash goes off, the flash eliminates not just the staircase, but these little moats of dust that are floating in the air. Now, the particles aren't necessarily in the focal point of the camera, like some of them might be very close to the camera, but obviously the lens is focused on the staircase beyond, so these unfocused particles reflect light back at the lens.

The lens is designed to collect and direct light to a sensor, so that gets recorded as this sort of circular blob of light, a little artifact, a sphere of light or orb. Dust particles that are close to the camera are going to appear very bright, sitting out against the focused part of the image because they're closer to the flash. So the bit of staircase you've trained the

camera on is darker. This orb will stand out much better because it's a piece of dust that's a little closer to that flash and therefore shows up as a brighter spot in the image. So there's nothing supernatural about any of this. They're just dust particles or sometimes water droplets. The same thing can happen with underwater photography because you have all these little particulates in the water that can

reflect light. Meanwhile, you're focusing on something that's further out from the lens, So it's just this very small surface that's relatively close to the camera flash and therefore reflecting light back to the camera lens. It happens in an instant, so when we take the photo, we don't see the orbs. You know, that's not how our eyes are are catching this, but they are showing up in the images that we captured. Again, we get to the question of if this were a

paranormal entity, how does this work? Exactly like, assuming that this is a ghost, how is it that's showing up as an orb on the image? How would a camera pick up something that we cannot see with our own eyes, Because how is the camera able to see it? If we cannot, how is it able to produce something that we can see? Wants it's a recorded image, but we

can't see it when it's in the moment. Now I do understand how folks could start to think that a camera could do this, because we do have things like infrared cameras. Right we humans can't see in the infrared range of light. Infrared light is invisible to us. I mean, we can feel infrared as heat, but we can't see it. But with infrared cameras, we can capture images in infrared. But the images that we look at, the ones we see from these cameras, Obviously that information has to be

converted into the visible spectrum for us to see it. Typically, the warmer areas appear in the early part of the visible spectrum. So your red's, oranges and yellows, right, that's those are the hotter things. If you're taking a picture with a thermal camera and it's red, you know that's a hot part of the image. The cooler parts appear in the latter half of the visible spectrum, so you're greens, blues,

and purples indicate cooler areas of an image. So if we have an infrared or thermal camera, uh, well, that's device that's capable of capturing stuff that are humanized cannot see. So based on that, I can understand why people might think that somehow a normal camera could capture a ghost image that would otherwise be invisible to us. But there's no mechanism to describe what it's capturing or how that happens. So unfortunately for ghost hunters, that's just not what's happening.

It's literally just light reflecting into the lens and causing an artifact in the image. All right, well, then we got the big daddy of technology used in ghost hunting, the cren de la creme, the piece de resistance, the old e MF detector or meter or reader. E m F stands for electro magnetic field. Although a ton of these are marketed as just ghost hunting or ghost detecting technologies, it is it's really ludicrous to see how many are.

In fact, I think I read one study that said two out of of three e MF meet is that they found were related to paranormal investigations, which is not what they were made for. But you know, it's a great way to sell them. If you're a manufacturer that makes the MF meters and you don't mind the fact that people are buying them on the mistaken pretense that they could detect ghosts, it could be a really effective marketing tool. Okay, so it's time for a quick brush

up on electro magnetism. This is one of the fundamental forces of the universe. The others, as we understand them, are the strong force, the weak force, and gravity. Now, these forces all have different strengths at different ranges. So the strong force, for example, is in fact the strongest, but it has a very small range on it's on the sub atomic scale, so it doesn't work beyond that.

Gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, but it has infinite range, so everything in the universe technically has a gravitational effect on everything else in the universe. But this is a very weak weak force, so really we only start to notice it. We humans only start to notice that when we have stuff that's got a lot of mass, like planets and moons and stuff like that, where we start to really see the effects of this force. The electro magnetic force is stronger than gravity, but weaker

than the other two. It also has infinite range, so it's not nearly as strong as the strong force or even the weak force. It's the physical interaction between electrically charged particles, and this connection between electricity and magnetism is fascinating, and I'm pretty sure that everyone who's listening to this has at some point played with a basic electro magnet,

probably made one in science class at some point. So the way that we used to do it when I was in school was we would take an iron nail, like the kind you would use in construction, and we would take some insulated copper wire, usually insulated copper wires that no one was gonna get a shock or anything. We would wrap this wire around the nail several times,

creating coils all along the length of the nail. Then we would attach the ends of the copper wire to the two terminals of a battery, which would allow an electric charge to move through the wire. So current moves through the copper wire. It's direct current because it's going in just one direction. And that means that the the electricity is looping around this nail over and over, and it turns the nail into a magnet. And the nail has a north pole and a south pole, just like

a permanent magnet would. And if we were to use that to pick things up that were ferromagnetic, you know, there you go. You've just made yourself an electro magnet. So electricity can generate a magnetic field. Likewise, if you take a permanent magnet and you start to move it past a conductor, you know, move it so that the magnetic field of the permanent magnet encounters this conductor over over again. You can induce a current to flow through

the conductor. That's the basis for a lot of our technology. Actually, everything from electric motors to dynamos two transformers all depends upon this relationship between electricity and magnetism. And we've got a lot more to say about that and how that relates to e m F meters. But before we get to that, let's take another quick break. Okay, we are up to the e m F reader or meter or detector. Ghost Hunters use these to look for fluctuations in electromagnetic

fields in an effort to apparently detect ghosts. I guess the idea is that ghosts, through some unexplained mechanism, are capable of manipulating electromagnetic fields. How they do this is never really explained in the satisfactory way in my opinion. You might get some pseudo scientific explanation of that, but often you don't even get that. You just hear people

starting from the assumption that ghosts can do this. But even with the pseudo scientific explanations, it really doesn't make any sense because you've again you have to establish the existence of the cause before you can declare it as the cause. Right, saying that the m F detector went beat because of a ghost and then saying the ghosts exist because your detector went beep. That's just circular reasoning. Again,

it doesn't actually prove anything. So you have an e m F meter and the readings fluctuate and boom, there be ghosts nearby, according to ghost hunters. But what's really happening here. Well. E m F meters or detectors have very sensitive components that are easily influenced by electrical and magnetic fields and the strength and the fluctuation. So, in other words, the amount and the rate of change of those fields determines how much response these components in the

e m F detector give off. Right, how how influence are these elements inside the detector itself. That's a measurable quantity. You can measure how much it changes. So by measuring how the components respond, we can determine the presence and even the strength of an electromagnetic field. Now, I admit this is a super high level version of what's going on.

It is not getting into the nitty gritty mechanics, and there is a much more technical explanation, but honestly, it gets deep into the physics of electromagnetic fields and complex equations that we use to derive field strength, and it frankly goes over my head pretty quickly. So rather than bumble through a bad explanation, I just want to reduce this to the fact that these meters measure the amount of change that they encounter as electromagnetic fields affect the meters.

That's it, that's all they're meant to do. So it's kind of an under easy to understand when you realize that magnetic fields can induce current to flow through conductors, and that a current moving through a conduct or it creates a magnetic field. Once you understand that, having a little of device that has very sensitive elements inside it that can respond to this, that makes it pretty simple to understand from a high level. So e m F

readers can really be divided into two broad categories. You have single access meters and try access meters or try axes meters, and you can think of an axis in this case kind of like an antenna. So a single access e m F detector has what would amount to a straight antenna, and to get a full reading, like a full accurate reading with a single access e MF meter, you would have to slowly rotate the meter to properly

measure an electromagnetic field. If the antenna was perpendicular with the actual electromagnetic field, it's not going to pick up much of a signal. It's because it's out of alignment. If you rotate it so that it's out of that perpendicular orientation, then you would start to see the meter go off. If in fact, you were within a magnetic field, an electromagnetic field at a ninety degree rotation from the perpendicular with relation to the field, you should get the

highest reading in whatever spot you're in. So moving into or out of an electromagnetic field will cause a detector to go off, which makes sense, but it means that moving around in an area where you have an electromagnetic field, you're gonna get ratings, and that can get really confusing

really quickly. It might seem like the field is moving around, when in fact it's just that the detector is passing through a static field, which to the detector amounts to the same thing as being stationary, while a fluctuating field is around the detector um. So it can be easily misinterpreted. Is what I'm really getting at, So for ghost hunters, it can appear as though a field is spontaneously appearing and disappearing, but in fact that's not necessarily the case.

I mean, it could be the case, but it could also be that the single access detector has moved into an alignment where it's not going to pick up the field in the first place. So the field could still be there, but the detector isn't sensing it because of its orientation. But you rotate the detector and spooky, the ghost is back. Now this is not really the case

with try axes detectors. So as that name suggests, here you've got detectors that can pick up electromagnetic fields along three axes at the same time, not just in a single orientation, but three different so x, y, and Z if you If you think of it that way. They are more expensive than single access detectors, but they can create a more meaningful reading without having to rotate the meter, so you can use them more effectively. But one of the most popular devices in ghost hunting is a single

access meter. One that's used frequently is called the k TO safe range, often just referred to as the k TO eater. Themeter has a couple of other features that make it popular with ghost hunters, and I'll touch on that in just a minute. Now, some things we need to consider about electromagnetic fields are that all electrical devices generate electromagnetic fields. So the electrical wiring and a building generates an electromagnetic field, and different things can impact how

strong those fields are. So, for example, if the wiring and a building has really poor shielding, let's say, like the insulating material around the wires have kind of rotted away, then you're likely going to detect stronger electromagnetic fields in that area, assuming that you know those circuits are actually active. Also, electromagnetic fields can penetrate some material and it can reflect off other material. So it's just like I mean, light

is electromagnetic radiation when you get down to it. Just like light can pass through certain things and it bounces off or reflects off of other things, the same is true with electromagnetic fields. So that means you might encounter

fields in places you didn't expect. Right, Maybe there's a place where there's no visible source for an electromagnetic field, but that may be because the source happens to be on the other side of a barrier, like on the other side of a wall and you just can't see it. Or maybe it's that there are reflective surfaces that have essentially bounced the field to where you are, and while it doesn't look it's close to like a source, it's

in fact because it's been reflected there. Electricians who are hired to seek out faulty wiring they know that an e m F detector is just the first step to actually tracking down the source of an electromagnetic field. So if they're looking for the faulty wires, they know, all right, well, this is my starting point, but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm at ground zero for wherever the faulty wiring maybe.

So that means if you're using an e m F detector, there are a lot of things that can support your erroneous use of that technology. If you pick up a reading somewhere that doesn't appear to be near electrical sources, well you might jump to the conclusion that something else has to be causing this fluctuating electromagnetic field, and since there isn't apparently an electrical system at fault, it has

to be ghosts. And yeah, that's a huge leap to make, but it's essentially what you see with ghost hunters who rely on e m F meters. Knowing that electromagnetic fields might be passing through a wall or that they might be reflected off a surface tells you that you can encounter them in places that you wouldn't expect to and that they're all from perfectly mundane sources. But let's get

back to the K two for a second. So it has a poor reputation for e m F detectors, at least according to the Atlantic and a piece titled The Broken Technology of Ghost Hunting, writer Colin Dicky says, the meter is known to be poorly shielded, which means this meter is particularly sensitive, and we'll pick up signals from

very small sources, including stuff like cell phones. So maybe you've had an experience like this, like maybe you're listening to music on some cheap headphones and your phone is nearby, and your phone gets a notification, and at the moment that your phone gets this notification, the music you're listening to gets this weird digital stutter. I used to have

some desktop speakers that were bad about this. If I had my phone on my desk and I was listening to music on the speakers, then I would get the diddy did they did? Did it sound? Whenever any kind of signal hit my my cell phone, Well, those signals have interfered with the electrical signal going to the speakers. This happens when the headphones or speakers have just poor shielding around the wires that lead to the speakers and

the signal interferes with that. So, with better insulation than the wires are protected and you don't get this digital stutter well with an E M F meter. If it has poor shielding, it means the meter is likely to

go off a lot more frequently. It's kind of like a hair trigger, uh, and a well shielded meter isn't going to do that at That could mean that you could be standing in the middle of an attic where there are no electrical systems anywhere close to you, and if someone around you gets a text message, the meter might register a fluctuation because it's picking up interference from the cell phone signal. And, as Dickie points out, the faults of this meter actually turned into assets for ghost hunters.

Erratic performance plays into the narrative of looking for a mischievous ghosts. It's not the meter that's to blame. It's that they're ghosts around you. Now, there are other tools that ghost hunters will occasionally rely upon, thermal cameras and heat sensors and thermometers, for example, to detect things like cold patches, but again, detecting an area that is colder or warmer than its surroundings that doesn't actually tell you that much. Let's say that you've got a crew with you,

you're doing a ghost hunt. You're in an abandoned building, and you set up in one room and you start looking for orbs, and you're turning on recording stations to capture e v P, a lot of people moving around getting things established, and then you move away from this base of operations and you start picking up cold spots.

Could that be a ghost or is it just that the room you came from had some heat build up because you had warm bodies moving around, you had electronic equipment being turned on that gives off heat, and then the area you're moving into hasn't had these sorts of heat sources, so the heat is slowly creeping into other parts of the building and it creates the illusion of these cold spots. Other stuff that can also cause cold spots, like a blocked or clogged air event can do that.

Drafts from outside obviously can do that. Just being in a building where maybe you're in a far point from where a thermostat is, so the temperature at your location isn't gonna match wherever the thermostat is because it's it's it's too far away, right, Like poor thermostat location can really cause very uncomfortable conditions within buildings. We're sure if you're near the thermostat, you're experiencing whatever temperature you've set

it to. But the further you get away from that, the the greater deviation you experience from whatever that's set temperature is. Well, that could be an explanation for things like cold spots or warm spots. I think ultimately the role that tech plays and ghost hunting is one that is meant to support the belief in ghosts. Any outcome is seen to be evidence supporting that. A lack of interesting stuff on recordings or video or film, all that means is that ghosts were not active at the time

of investigation. Anything you do gather counts as evidence. Any lack of evidence is dismissed, So it's a head's eye win tails, you lose kind of situation. On top of that, a lot of text role relies upon the misuse or the misunderstanding or both of that technology. Arthur's see Clark famously said any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Meaning if we were to teleport into the future and see what technologies future humans were using, to us, so

would seem magical because we don't understand how it works. Well. It doesn't actually have to be that advanced to seem magical. It just relies upon ignorance. We just had to have a limited understanding of the technology for it to seem magical to us. So if you think of cameras as just devices that produce images of stuff that is definitely there, then you don't understand how a reflection off a mode of dust could create an orb and you're more likely to accept the idea that the blob of light is

supernatural in nature. And of course, tech plays a part in supporting our desire to know what happens after we

have shuffled off this mortal coil. As William Shakespeare once said, it is natural to wonder what, if anything, lies for us after we pass away, and while we usually think of ghosts in terms that are creepy and scary, the idea is also something of a comfort, because, of course, if ghosts exist, it suggests that there is some sort of continuation of our personal experience even after we expire. We want there to be ghosts because that means we

don't just cease to exist after we die. We are highly incentivized to believe in an afterlife, but just because we want to believe does not necessarily make it so. Now, perhaps there is an experience after death. I am no expert on the subject. I cannot say one way or another. I haven't died, I don't know, so maybe there is. But I feel confident in saying there is no compelling evidence the ghosts as they are frequently portrayed in entertainment

like ghost hunting shows are a thing. I feel there's no compelling evidence whatsoever to support that, and certainly none relies upon the misinterpretation of the use of technology. Now again, from the spiritualist days of the late nineteenth century up to ghost hunting programs that are on today, I feel like so much of that is based firmly on misunderstanding or willful ignorance of what technology is and how it works, and then twisting that to support an interpretation that in

turn supports this preconceived idea that ghosts exist. So that's it. That's my bummer of an episode about ghost hunting technology. There are obviously other technologies used in ghost hunting that we could talk about. Um And I'm sure that lots of you out there have seen programs that had some pretty compelling experiences on them. You also have to remember that editing is a thing that it's way easier to shoot a whole lot of footage than edit together something

that is remotely interesting. Um. And also, like you know, some people fake stuff. I'm not saying everyone does, but some people definitely do. And uh, it just takes a little bit of that to create something that feels compelling when ultimately the Emperor has no clothes. All right, that's it for this spooky episode tech stuff. I plan to do a few more spooky related themed shows before Halloween gets here. Hope you are all well and that you are having a good time. I really hope that you're

enjoying the spooky season. If that is your thing, I know it's my thing, like even being a skeptic, I still enjoy it. Like I like ghost stories, and I like ghost story movies and all that kind of stuff. I really enjoy them. But to me, their stories, and that's where it starts and ends. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, feel free to reach out to me. There are a couple of ways you can do that. One is to

download the I Heart Radio app. It's free. You can navigate over to tech Stuff. Just put tech Stuff in the little arch bar will pop up. You'll see that there is a little microphone icon on there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. And if you want me to use the message in a future episode, just let me know, because I only do it if you tell me to. But you can reach out that way, or

you can do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.