We’ve been pretty hard on the Paranormal Power Trio Ghost Adventures in these pages over the last few months – we’ve found a number of their episodes to be long on hype and camera mugging and short on genuine investigating. And we’ve gotten plenty of mail about it too, most of it from aggravated fans. That’s OK.
We caught their latest episode last night, two locations in Chicago. The Excalibur nightclub and the Bachelor Grove cemetery, the latter a long-storied (and unfortunately, heavily vandalized) haunted graveyard in the middle of a heavily wooded nature preserve outside Chicago.
We’re not sure what the make of the floating orb they caught on their video; mysterious lights in the forest leave a lot of room for hoaxing, although the preserve was fairly well guarded by Cook County deputies and, on paper at least, it seems unlikely that someone snuck in past them to set this thing up. One can never discount the possibility of a hoax, but the footage was interesting, as was one of the EVP’s they caught.
We’ve been to our share of wooded cemeteries at night, and the fact is that every single one of them is creepy and makes you feel like someone is watching you. It’s a function of the space, the psychological baggage of being around dead people in the dark, and the spatial effects of inching your way around dimly lit trees without visual reference points. So while we appreciate the evidence they caught, we’re also glad they didn’t overplay the “gee, this abandoned cemetery at night is really creepy…” Of course it is. The point of investigating is not to indulge the creepy, but to determine if there’s evidence of a haunting.
The other investigation, a late 19th century building in Chicago which now houses a glitzy nightclub and bears some stories of a ghost child, reminded us of ghost TV from a few years back, when investigators went in, set up equipment, did their baselines, and actually found nothing. And actually reported finding nothing. No over-reaching on scratchy EVP’s, no possession-drama, no questionable orb still photos. Just…”we looked, we found nothing. We’re not declaring that it’s not haunted (you can’t prove a location isn’t haunted), it’s just not offering up any evidence of a haunting tonight.”
Thank you.
Real investigators – those of us who don’t have TV shows and don’t make piles of dollars off this hobby – know full well that plenty of investigations yield absolutely nothing in the way of evidence. That’s the way this stuff works. Isn’t it?
