The Orb and I

So, we were catching up on the latest episode of My Ghost Story , when, after enduring yet another wincingly-predictable tale of “I felt so creeped out” and “I felt like someone was watching me” and “we were amazed to see all these orbs“, I suggested that, hey, maybe all we needed to do to get on TV was relate a similar experience in our otherwise peaceful home, shoot a picture of an orb, and boom – instant witnesses to the paranormal.

So I grabbed my camera and….

…caught one. Two actually, and more than that if you examine the photo closely enough. We shot a few more, and got some in those pictures, too.

Now, let’s be honest here. First off, despite a couple of unusual things in the six years we’ve lived here together, we do NOT believe our place is haunted. We even did an EVP session right after this photo was taken, a fairly long one, using our new Sony ICD-AX412 recorder, and got nothing at all. Nothing. Not even close.

Second, note the two boxes on top of the cabinet that the orbs are floating near contain the ashes of Sharon’s first husband and my first wife. Creepy? No, not really – we were both widowed eight years ago, and we’re used to having them around.

The point is this – if you have already convinced yourself that the space you’re in is haunted, or creepy, even if you’ve just been told this by someone else, you’re far more inclined to use photos like this as validating evidence, even to the point (and admit it, you’ve seen this on TV) where you think you can see faces in the orbs themselves.

We try plenty hard not to impose our standards of evidence adjudication on anyone else – but we would throw this picture out immediately…even if we thought the place was haunted. We’ve laid out our standards of ‘orbage’ in our FAQ’s here.

So here’s a question to our fellow ghost hunters: be honest, if you were invited into a home or a building that you were told was haunted, and you got nothing at all for evidence – no EVP’s, no video, no object movement, no corroborated EMF weirdness, nothing except photos like this - would you validate the haunting?

We’ll follow this post up with some additional thoughts soon.