I watch them mostly because A) the acting in some of them is REALLY bad and I love to MST3K the shit out of it and B) I like hearing about the history behind these places. However, where it is they cross over to.....I have yet to see any evidence that these spirits exist, let alone that they cross over to anywhere. I do love how on Ghost Adventures, every place has a portal to Hell. They're more common than Starbucks. Honestly, you would think that Hell would have better security.

When I was growing up in Voodoo Haiti, I saw plenty of weird stuff..floating furniture, rocks hitting the roof when nobody was around, freezing cold spots in the house with the smell of something long dead, etc. At first I was terrified. I'd sometimes wake up in the night with an evil presence in the room, choking, unable to breathe.

But eventually I got tired of being afraid and turned and fought. I noticed that these things only happened to people who happened to believe in them, so I decided it was all my imagination and that I wouldn't respond to anything else. Sure enough, a few more floating things happened, but I ignored them, never again gave them attention, and they went away.

Mmmm... are you spoofing us right now?

Try stopping TV all together and catch some Movies on You Tube or NetFlix. Foreign Films with subtitles where you have to read and connect. This goes for Sports on TV also and go for Sporting Events that stream like Soccer or Gymnastic Events in Foreign Countries. Make the change slowly but surely.

All "reality TV" is bogus. The industry calls them "unscripted" rather than "reality" because they recognize that "reality TV" has nothing to do with reality. THe things you are referring to in such TV shows are fictional, staged events created to make the TV show interesting and sell the ads. That's all.

My stepson, atheist though he is, makes a hobby of watching this stuff, so I've wateched (or more often half-watched) way more of this than I want to in the interest of participating in his life. He doesn't really buy it, but I think he has a low grade fear of the dark and it helps demystify it a little for him.

At any rate, I have noted that setting aside that these alleged supernatural manifestations always have HUGE setup and must take place in the dead of night with the lights off and so forth, the visual "evidence" is INVARIABLY captured in the far distance of every shot, such that a digital zoom-in is very fuzzy and often in fact not as "impressive" as it is from afar.

Logically if you set up a camera in a given room, any given manifestation would be equally likely to appear in the distance, the middle range, or RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA. But they are ALWAYS way in the distance.

i wonder why that is? Well ... our brains are eager pattern-matching machines and so our brain takes digital artifacts or indistinct reflections and does its best to figure out what it most looks like. And usually the narrator or the implicit setup of the scene provides an explanation or preconceived idea of what it is anyway.

This is, of course, assuming that the makers of the show aren't faking any of the evidence. Recently we watched a few shows that featured a guest "investigator" whose own show had been discredited as faking evidence. Sure enough, that show had a very different subjective feel and a LOT more visual / kinetic manifestations, though not one of which could not be explained as a trick. A planchette on a Ouija board literally flies to the YES position from the center. A door or gate opens or closes itself. The camera pans back across a room to reveal that an object has been moved (or, in one case, that two portraits on the wall had been turned upside down). Some of these are offered up without comment or exclamation, unlike the irritating habit of other shows, but they are just too plentiful and convenient (and low budget).

Voice evidence is a similar situation. I have averted my eyes from the screen when I can tell audio evidence is about to be presented, because they are invariably of such low quality that they are subtitled. But the subtitle is the suggestion that sets you up. It will say "get out" or "murder" or some other two syllable phrase but if you just listen to the audio it's nothing but an indistinct sound, sometimes just a couple of thuds or a bit of static which, if you play it over and over with a subtitle, you might think that it's a voice. Other times I hear some other phrase that fits the sound rather than what they claim it says.

And here again it's like the visual evidence always being in the distance. Not only is the sound "in the distance" (it's questionable what the "words" even are) but the phrase is seldom actually meaningful and sometimes not even relevant. Maybe the setting is an old Civil War fort and the voice sounds like it's saying "old shoes" and the "investigators" are saying, wow, did you hear that? What could it mean? Well it must mean the soldier's ghost was wearing old shoes! No, it wasn't old shoes, it was old mews! He must have had an elderly cat named mews! And sure enough there's a photo we found in the attic of this guy from 1862 with his cat! What an amazing bit of evidence!

So, no, color me "not impressed". I can (barely) tolerate these shows on the level of (really) mindless entertainment. It's like settling in around a campfire in the woods to hear a spooky story just for fun, with pseudo science thrown in for good measure.

Can you say hollywood?

As soon as anyone can catch and weigh a soul I will consider the possibility of such a thing.

All I have until then are assertions without evidence that humans, unlike all other life, live on after death in some magical fashion we do not have a clue about, but which nearly every religion asserts as a reality in some form.

I think all these ideas are simply human creations designed to quell the fears of cognitive beings who can grasp life and death, and who are also emotional and so fearful of death.

"In America, belief in the unreal seems to be very fungible
. Individuals don't so much abandon religious fantasy in
favor of reason as find different fantasies that better
suit their particular excitement and credulity quotients."
— Kurt Andersen

These shows are fun to watch .A TV show about ghosts , wouldn't be much of a TV show , if they went to a site , and nothing happened . Some of the things they show , could be staged . A piece of string tied to the leg of a chair could easily move a chair , or tied to the handle of a cupboard could be yanked to open the cupboard door . Voices could be someone off camera speaking . Sometimes our own fear makes things seem spooky . Sometimes , it's someone is pulling a prank on someone else . I have a couple of self opening doors and a light switch panel behind a door that , if you bump the door , changes the light . A plumber brought his ten year old son with him on a job , one day . I pulled out my magic wand (my cane) , and pressed the small push button beside the door , which he couldn't see from where he was standing , and when the door , "magically ," opened , he was shocked and called me a witch , which made me laugh .

I have this special equipment that allows me to hear garbage and say it is a ghost saying garbage. That is real proof!

Many special effects and misdirection are employed
In the making of these type of media genre
Made popular by horror movies and peoples curiosity.