My friend’s younger brother, a member of the fraternity, has told us about stuff that has happened there in the past. He is convinced the house is haunted and claims to have witnessed the “orbs” first hand. However, I have to take a lot of things he says with a grain of salt.
I can clearly see what they are referring to in the pictures, but I’m not so quick to say it’s evidence of paranormal activity. I realize they could have been doctored, but I’m curious if there is a natural explanation for the “orbs”.
Funny… I get blobs that look exactly like that on every photo I take with my digital camera. Since they’re always in exactly the same spots, I know they’re something on the lens of my camera. I’ve been unable to clean them off, and plan to take the camera into the store.
These pics have blobs in different places. Consider that there are large areas of white in each shot - the blobs won’t stand out properly against white, so it will conceal some and reveal others. I figure if he turned the camera upside down for some of the shots, that would put the blobs in different places too. Finally, they only provide 6 shots - if he shot a whole roll of film, alternating between camera right side up and upside down, it wouldn’t be hard to pick out 6 where different blobs were hidden or showing so that there didn’t seem to be a pattern. Or the shots could be planned if he knew where the blobs were going to appear. Or the shots could be cropped, resized, etc to show what he wants to show. Or the blobs could have been digitally edited in later.
Ghosts? Bah humbug. It looks like a dirty lens to me.
<sigh> I so want to be paranormal investigator. I personally am in the “I want to believe” camp. I have yet to see anything that would convince me that ghosts do exist though. Everytime I see a ghostly special on the History Channel, or the Travel Channel, it always disappoints me. There never is any kind of concrete, heat camera, EM proof. It usually ends with the psychic getting feelings and thats all the proof that’s needed. Agggh!
I need to buy a haunted house, thats what I need to do. A house thats really spooky and and has a history of bloody murders and maybe an indian burial ground underneath to boot. Only when I see these phenomena myself will I ever believe.
I’ve seen the orb pictures in question, and I even saw the videos. All of these can be doctored of course, or be due to a dirty lens. And why would a paranormal item appear as an orb in the first place?
I would be more convinced of course if I saw what the other instruments they used were reading at the time these orbs were around. I noticed that in their list of observation devices, they had a thermometer, infrared cam, EM meter, and sound recording devices. What did these devices pick up when these orbs manifested themselves?(They didn’t have a heat camera by the way, which sorta irks me)
Anyways, thats my two cents. Do I have change coming back?
Dust reflecting camera flash. Camera flare. There are many sound explanations for this kind of thing that are all so much more likely than ghosts.
It’s funny how no one ever suggested that ghosts float around as orbs until this perfectly normal photographic effect was noticed. Not even those who “talked” to them. Not one ghost ever mentioned; “Oh by the way, we float around as orbs.” Up until then everyone was under the mistaken impression that they looked like pale see-thru people. Were the ghosts just playing some kind of elaborate practical trick all that time?
I figured the most reasonable explanation was dust on the lens, lens flare, etc. I was giving these ghost hunters the benefit of the doubt and not jumping to the conclusion that the pictures were touched up after the fact. I checked out a few more of their investigations, and all they ever get pictures of is these orbs. Their reports claim in some cases that the investigators witnessed an apparition (http://southjerseyghostresearch.org/cases/01064.html) but never have the photos to back it up. They also have very messy recordings of what they claim to be “EVP’s” (ghosts talking). You can make out the words they claim to hear on some, but others are completely unintelligible. And a crappy recording of a woman saying “oh God” is hardly proof of paranormal activity.
I agree with JustPlainBryan. It would be incredible if someone had some really concrete evidence of the existence of ghosts, but these orbs are not it.
Also - in the videos - the “orbs” moving through the room more resemble some sort of small flashlight beam being moved across the floor (in the first video, it changes direction when it reaches the chair… as if it went from being on the floor to on the side of the chair… ooh spooky).
super_head - I don’t think it is a flashlight beam; if you watch the video carefully (or in slow motion) there are actually two “orbs”, the second of which follows exactly the same path as the first.
Perhaps it is a glare / reflection off something moving mechanically?
The mpg is looped. It shows the same event twice. What it features is a spot of light, such as what you might get off a small torch or the reflection of one off a shiny surface, moving over the surface of the floor and then across a seat. How this can be regarded as proof of a ghost is anyone’s guess.
That Investigators report in full:
-16 of us went clomping about the house. We heard doors slamming and footsteps.
-We took photos with flashes. We discovered flashes of light in our flash photographs.
-A few of us felt a bit odd.
-We blundered about in the dark with torches. Videos later reveal moving dots of light.
-A few of us felt a bit spooked.
-Everyone seemed to agree that something nasty may possibly have happened some place here at some time.
