Ghostbusters exist! In England alone, there are several tens of thousands of them: armed with instruments and inspired by the ideas of scientific experiments, they tirelessly search for evidence of paranormal phenomena in castles, pubs and mansions. Life talks about the successes and failures in their "scientific" search for ghosts.
The question of ghosts, ghosts and other paranormal phenomena in modern science is usually declared insignificant and passes through the department of prejudice and the fight against pseudoscience. The exception here are anthropologists - researchers who try to describe the unique features of human cultures (be it the world of cannibals from the Amazonian selva or Chelyabinsk gopniks). Anthropologists take the question of the reality of "spirits" out of parentheses, they are rather interested in how supernatural beings are perceived by man, how are they embedded in politics and economics, what do they mean in people's lives?
One such anthropologist, Michelle Hanks, has spent many years researching ghostbusters in northern England. She attended numerous sessions in houses, museums and pubs "with ghosts", the traces of which the hunters tried to catch personally and with the help of instruments. However, the scientist was not interested in spirits, but the "researchers of the paranormal" themselves - their doubts, the search for objective criteria, disputes about faith and knowledge and other purely scientific problems that they are forced to solve.
From tables and plates to sensors and appliances
But first, a little history. Medieval folk ideas about spirits, witches and ghosts were gradually dying by the 19th century, thanks to the education and energetic work of national elites to "disenchant" the world. Then, thanks to a new religion - spiritualism - even in high society, interest in evoking the spirits of the dead and supposedly real evidence of life after death grew (a prominent spiritualist was, for example, Arthur Conan Doyle, who preached rationalism, materialism and the deductive method in stories about Sherlock Holmes). Numerous spiritualist organizations, as well as the rise of parapsychology in the 1930s, attracted criticism from skeptics and educators who exposed mediums and parapsychologists as crooks.
At the same time, a grassroots, popular movement of researchers of the paranormal developed in Britain and the United States - in 2006 alone there were 1200 organizations in England. Usually such researchers themselves experienced a meeting with a "ghost" or seek to make contact with untimely deceased loved ones. They do not like the position of skeptics who deny the reality of the paranormal, but they also consider spiritualists too naive and gullible. It is not for nothing that they call themselves researchers: after all, they are looking for objective evidence of the presence or absence of ghosts, recorded by special devices. Like scientists, they do not want to take eyewitness testimony on faith. As with academics, there is heated debate in their community over research methodology.
For example, only in the city of Sunderland in the North East of England there are two research groups: Specter Detectors (SD) and East Coast Investigators (ECD). In SD, paranormal phenomena are “caught” through automatic writing and divination on a magic crystal - in ECD these methods are criticized as unscientific and unsuitable for verification. In response, members of the SD criticize ECD (where subsonic trails are considered the main indicator of paranormal activity) for bias and dogmatism.
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But all researchers of ghosts are united by the conviction that the phenomena of interest to them belong to the natural world. "The paranormal should be called normal … It is no different from the force of gravity or electricity," one of the researchers told the author of the article. And that's why they ridicule those who naively "believe" in ghosts: no, researchers of the paranormal want to act rationally and get scientific evidence of the existence of ghosts - and by the same to prove that they are not crazy and not charlatans.
It is the collection of information that is the main goal of the "hunters". Sometimes we are talking about the testimony of mediums and personal experience of meeting with ghosts, sometimes about video recordings and fixing changes in the environment, carried out using digital thermometers and electromagnetic field sensors. The latter are the most prestigious: "ghostbusters" are suspicious of subjective experience, suspecting those who allegedly personally encountered paranormal phenomena of an unscrupulous desire for fame. As in classical science, devices inspire hope for the absence of human fraud.
The main thing in the world is energy
In the search for objective traces of ghosts, "energy" plays a special role. The fact is that historically, the energy of the electromagnetic field was associated with the phenomena of the spiritual world as early as the 19th century. And in 1985, Canadian neurophysiologist Michael Persinger suggested that changes in the Earth's magnetic field, acting on the temporal lobes of the brain, cause a sense of the presence of supernatural beings. Parapsychologists seized on this idea and linked "strange" sounds and images with high levels of magnetic activity and fluctuations in the electromagnetic field.
The more scientifically oriented "ghost hunters" of northern England, when entering a castle or pub, first bypass all the premises, measuring the "background electromagnetic energy". Rooms with relatively high levels are considered more conducive to paranormal experiences. Further, when one of the researchers suddenly begins to talk aloud about contact with a "strange force" or directly with a "ghost", others immediately begin to measure the electromagnetic energy around him - to "objectively" make sure if his words are not pure fantasy.
At the same time, the concept of "energy" is used in a less precise sense - as an analogue of "soul". “We are all made of energy. Energy cannot be destroyed. And when we die, this energy must go somewhere, right? " one of his interlocutors asked the anthropologist. Proponents of this point of view use electromagnetic field sensors not in deliberate experiments, but simply to search for ghosts. "Ghosts communicate with us using electromagnetic energy," - said one of the researchers of the paranormal.
Experiments against ecstasy
The collision of these positions leads to insoluble conflicts. For example, in the summer of 2009, two groups - Dark Night Research (DNR) and Ghost Seekers (GS) - gathered at Newcastle Castle to jointly research the paranormal. Joe from DNR wanted to conduct an experiment and find out if people feel paranormal due to the energy of the electromagnetic field. He asked the members of both groups to sit in one of the rooms of the castle for half an hour. Joe turned on radio frequency transmitters (to create an increased electromagnetic background) and asked the participants in the experiment to record everything that happened to them.
At the same time, the "hunters" from GS showed enthusiasm incomprehensible to Joe and dubbed his device "the ghost machine." One of the GS members, Mary, said after the experiment: “It was cool! The apparatus actually helped. I picked up this warm, playful, friendly energy. I felt it on my face. " Then she turned to another researcher: “Joe's machine really allows you to grasp things. He passes energy through the apparatus, and this allows the energy to manifest itself. " It can be seen that, in Mary's perception, the “technical” electromagnetic energy of the device was mixed with anthropomorphic energy - playful and friendly.
Joe listened to these outpourings with a stone face. The experiment clearly failed: instead of checking (with an objective device) the influence of factor A on factor B, we got some kind of ecstasy from the "ghost machine". Here's what he told the anthropologist: “Well, it was interesting. I honestly don't know. I'm still studying the results, but I'm not sure about anything. All [participants] felt the presence of something friendly, happy energy. Hell, I was happy doing this [experiment]. I sent streams of electromagnetic energy at them - and they experienced something. I don't know what I have proven or not proven. So the results are interesting, but I don't know what to do with them … Was there anything paranormal there? Or is it all in our heads? The devil only knows."
However, after a few days Mary's enthusiasm also faded. “To be honest, I don't know what to think. Yes, I felt something in the castle. Really very cute something. But I don't know what I felt and what it means. Did the machine do it? Was there a ghost there? I think I want the best evidence, at least for myself. " Joe and Mary, with initially different attitudes towards "presence of mind", are united by one thing - a deep doubt. Even Joe, an adherent of rigorous experimentation, did not rule out the possibility that the sensation of the paranormal was generated not by the electromagnetic energy of his apparatus, but by the spirits themselves. "How can I prove for sure that this is not a ghost ?!" he complained to the anthropologist.
The elusive ghost of science
It is important that with all the excitement and enthusiasm during the "contacts" with the paranormal, the main emotion and driving force behind the activities of the British "ghostbusters" was doubt. It frustrates researchers and makes them obsessively review and repeat experiments, criticize their experience, question their qualifications, the actions of friends and associates, and, in general, the meaningfulness of their activities.
But doubt, with all the frustration that accompanies it, reinforces in "researchers of the paranormal" loyalty to scientific, rational thinking. It allows one to accumulate personal experience of contacts with “spirits”, distinguishing “hunters” from the number of ordinary gullible inhabitants who “believe in ghosts”. But, unlike normal science (in the understanding of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn), where the scientific community reaches a consensus on controversial issues, among the researchers of the supernatural, discussions do not stop.
Reaching agreement on the main thing (are the paranormal phenomena real and what causes them) requires that people trust each other's experiments and the methodology of their conduct. The paradox is that the "ghost hunters", imitating the "correct" science, fell into a vicious circle: they set up experiment after experiment, put forward hypotheses and counter-hypotheses, but the final proof of the reality of ghosts is endlessly postponed into the future. It remains to enjoy the process - which they do.
Anna Polonskaya