Seriously – what happened to these guys?

Last week’s episode of Ghost Hunters featured a segment where one investigator, in a room (presumably) out of earshot from another, requested that a spirit convey a one word message to his partner in the other room. ‘Atlantis’, in this case, and then another: ‘Comet’.

The second investigator then reported, when the pair reunited a few minutes later, that he distinctly heard a disembodied voice whisper ‘Atlantis’ to him, followed by “something that sounded like ‘comic’ or comics’ or ….”

Well, you get the picture.

First off, like just about everything else on this and other ghost hunting reality TV shows, one has to take it on faith that it was not rehearsed ahead of time. There is a certain suspension of disbelief, or suspension of skepticism if you will, that these guys are not faking evidence ever, in any way – or else the program fails as anything but parody or chincey entertainment. No way to convince the true disbelievers, of course, but that’s okay. It’s not likely they’d be persuaded by anything aired as evidence on these shows anyway.

But let’s say this is the real thing. Unrehearsed, unscripted. What does that mean?

It means that the prompting investigator successfully communicated to an unseen spirit, tested its ability to hear him, tested his ability to communicate a message, and trusted his partner to hear it. The stack of assumptive tests in this experiment is pretty substantial – one would presume that had the experiment failed, it wouldn’t have aired, so to be fair, we don’t know how many times they’ve tried this in the past.

But one of the unspoken tenets of EVP experimentation is that the spirit may be inclined or able  to respond to a provocative questions (“What’s your name?”, “Who are you looking for?”), but more often than not merely vocalizes something at random, oblivious to, or in defiance of, an investigator’s questioning.

The notion that the investigator asked them to repeat a phrase or word to another member raises some interesting possibilities, but also some basic questions about the investigators themselves. Why not, for example, have the spirit identify themself by name. Their birthday, death day. Their spouse’s or children’s names?

How about, “What’s it like to be dead?”

We’re still trying to merge the seemingly trivial content of this exercise with the profound implications it offers. Perhaps we’re looking too closely at something that was concocted at the last minute, or simply falling for an easily staged parlor trick, aided by rehearsal off-camera.

But treating a spirit as a disembodied parrot seems a wildly pointless exercise in revealing the nature of the afterlife. Couldn’t we get the spirit to even intimate about The Final Answer?