From “is anyone there?” to “the show must go on!”
Regular Ancient Origins contributor Charles Christian surveys the evolution of ghost hunting into paranormal research over the past 50 years and asks if the spooky plot has been lost as the old techniques of investigating alleged hauntings have given way to a commercialized entertainment industry. Drawing on his own experience as an amateur ghost hunter at university and his current membership of the UK's long-established Ghost Club, and Society for Psychical Research, Christian will survey both the change in approaches and the change in format.
Among the things he will be looking at are: the low-tech investigations of old, the increased reliance on largely-ineffective gadgets today, the changing nature of ghost hunter from private affairs to mass entertainment events, the impact of commercialization on both the impartiality of hunt organizers and on the availability of venues to investigate, the impact of hit television shows and social media, the decline in preliminary book-based background research, the changing status of the psychic medium with their opinions now going unchallenged, the failure to understand concepts such as crowd psychology and pareidolia, and the rise of the bogus experts and pseudo-academic qualifications.
"Everyone wants to be a superstar psychic researcher today with a large, monetized YouTube audience but in the process, they are destroying the field for serious Investigations, generating fake-news legends, and undermining the credibility of more academic paranormal study," says Christian.
