Miscellanea Agnostica

It’s become an old refrain in newspapers and television news rooms. They’re looking for stuff to fill the newshole and occupy airtime, so they resort to “make-news” on whatever crap they can find. “Hauntings as news” is something I’ve addressed several times already here, and there appears to be no letup. The venerable Hartford Courant … no stranger to this kind of paranormal “make-news” … is treating us — once again! — to yet another non-story about a non-haunting in one of Hartford’s most famous places — complete with a not-so-clever headline:

Who You Gonna Call? Ghost Hunters In Hartford

Ghosts were companions of Mark Twain throughout his life.

They were something he encountered way back when he was a newspaper reporter in Nevada, writing of “spectres starting up from behind tomb-stones, and you weaken accordingly — the cold chills creep over you — our hair stands on end — you reverse your front, and with all possible alacrity, you change your base.” …

So it may not be a stretch to imagine spirits still roaming the large, fanciful Victorian in Hartford’s West End, where Twain lived for 17 years.

Whispered about for years, the stories have accumulated enough to draw TV’s popular “Ghost Hunters” to town last month for a full investigation. And seeing a trend, the Mark Twain House & Museum is opening its doors this month to point out the spooky doings for a series of special “Graveyard Shift” nighttime tours.

Did you catch that reasoning? Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, wrote ghost stories, ergo, his home must be haunted.

I kid you not, people. This is the bullshit that passes for “journalism” these days. How utterly pathetic.

One last thing: Ghostbusters is a truly great movie … perhaps one of the best comedies of all time (I say that in spite of the fact that I don’t believe in ghosts, spooks, specters, etc. at all). But can we please, please, please knock off the quotes from the movie in anything that’s ghost- or haunting-related? I mean, come on … using “Who ya gonna call?” in the headline of this story on a haunting? It’s juvenile, and it’s not even creative. What bilge. Enough already!

Several times I’ve blogged about the unthinking nature of journalism in the US, and how they’ll stoop to reporting on the “paranormal,” putative hauntings in various places, alien abductions, and so on if it’s a slow news day and they have space to fill. This trend has only gotten worse with the mass layoffs at most newspapers and many other types of media outlets, which have in turn resulted from the collapse of advertising revenue. The latest example of this horrible trend comes from KXTV, News10, in Sacramento CA:

Are children more psychic than adults? According to two people with American Paranormal Investigations (API) kids tend to be more open to certain paranormal occurrences.

Ana Marie Sotuela and Dave Bender are real-life ghostbusters with API. They are holding a seminar this Saturday, Sept. 18 called “Children and Psychic Phenomena” with paranormal expert Loyd Auerbach.

Folks, phony psychics peddling their crap in the form of seminars, is not “news.” And swindles like this hardly deserve any free advertising in the form of this story.

Note too that the word “investigations” in the name of this outfit, is a misnomer: They are not truly “investigating” anything, they’re merely taking their beliefs, and using methods such as shoehorning, cherry-picking, and following other cognitive biases, to justify and rationalize them. None of these things has the slightest thing to do with any kind of truly objective “investigation.”

I suppose it’s possible these “psychics” paid the TV station for their airtime and Web advertising … the wall between media outlets’ news and ad departments has been under pressure and is even collapsing lately elsewhere, so I assume this is possible. Then again, this may be a simple — but not unethical — example of overly-credulous reporters looking for something to fill time and Web pages.

At any rate, the last thing our young people need is to have the idea that they must be “psychic” pushed on them by these swindlers, the reporters who tell us about them, or their own well-meaning but misguided or ignorant parents. Children are a precious resource and ought not be exploited.

Hat tip: Skeptic’s Dictionary.

The “haunting as news story” (about which I’ve blogged a couple times already) has become not merely a curiosity, it seems, but a persistent journalistic motif. Everybody’s getting in the act now. Here’s an AP report via Fox News (WebCite cached article):

Baseball teams fear ‘haunted’ Milwaukee hotel

The Pfister [Hotel] is Milwaukee’s most regal address, having hosted every U.S. president since William McKinley and scores of celebrities who can take a self-guided tour of the hotel’s Victorian art collection. Today, it’s the place to stay for upscale business travelers and out-of-town visitors, including many Major League Baseball teams. Commissioner Bud Selig, a Milwaukee native, is a frequent visitor.

But some players don’t care for the 116-year-old hotel’s posh accommodations and reputation for privacy. They swear it’s haunted.

Yes, folks, this is exactly the sort of urgent, breaking news we need the AP and Fox News to provide us! That ballplayers are afraid of a hotel because — they say — it’s haunted. They can provide all sorts of stories to back up this claim, and the article itself lists a number of them. There are even some Milwaukee locals milking the presumed haunting of the Pfister for their own gain:

Allison Jornlin, who leads haunted history tours for the folklore research organization Milwaukee Ghosts, said guests have reported seeing a “portly, smiling gentleman” roaming the halls, riding the elevator and even walking his dog. The apparition is said to resemble Charles Pfister, who founded the hotel with his father, Guido.

“His ghost is thought, usually, to behave very well,” Jornlin said. “But MLB players seem to bring out his mischievous side.”

Why’s that?

“Obviously, he’s a Brewers fan,” Jornlin said.

But even some of the Brewers won’t stay there in the offseason.

There’s a problem with this assumption; Charles Pfister cannot have been a Milwaukee Brewers fan … he died in 1924, but the team didn’t arrive in Milwaukee until 1970. (There was a Milwaukee Brewers team in Pfister’s time, but they moved long ago, and have been the Baltimore Orioles since 1954.) This means Jornlin’s claim is chronologically impossible!

No matter how commonplace these stories are … strange tales being passed around, do not make a true haunting. Haunted houses (and hotels, and any other structure you can name) are mythology, not reality.

With mass media outlets suffering due to the recession, and newspapers failing around the country, one would think journalists could find something more substantive to report on, than “hauntings.” But I guess not. Sigh.

The newspaper industry in the US is rapidly collapsing under the weight of too many expenses and not enough advertising revenues. There’s no longer enough money to keep batallions of nosy reporters on staff to report fully on current events or root out things like corruption, corporate excess. Instead, they just regurgitate whatever comes into the wire services, and they write stories based on made-up crap, instead of offering real “news.” A prime example of this that we’re seeing, here in Connecticut, is reporting — packaged as “news” — about hauntings; and worse than that, writing that states that these hauntings are “real.”

The latest example is in today’s Hartford Courant:

It’s hard to stump the staffers at Connecticut’s historical landmarks — they’re pretty well versed on their buildings’ one-time occupants. But there’s one common question for which they have no adequate answer: Is this place haunted?

Very old buildings commonly come with lore about spooky happenings, but rarely does anyone really explore these tales. To that end, officials with Connecticut Landmarks have tapped the East Haven-based Connecticut Paranormal Research Investigators (CT-PRI, for short) to get to the bottom of things.

We know this outfit is “the real deal” because of its pedigree:

The five-member CT-PRI was founded by Christine Kaczynski, who introduces herself as “coming from a family of exorcists in Greece.”

Gee, how comforting to know there’s a heritage there. Why, of course we can take her word for things!

This story includes the caveat:

A design engineer by day (she doesn’t charge for ghost-hunting), she’s been working in the paranormal field for 35 years and formed the group five years ago.

OK, so she doesn’t “charge” anyone for mucking around in their homes looking for ghosts. She just makes appearances, presumably for money, and sells her stories to book authors, which happen to have been the ways the Warrens made their living; and she gets Hartford Courant reporters to generate free publicity for her.

Then we have this confusing little claim:

Kaczynski points out that they’re not actually looking for hauntings, which are malevolent spirits, but for spiritual presences.

I may not be hip to the latest metaphysical lingo, but I honestly do not see how a “malevolent spirit” cannot also be a “spiritual presence.” Then again, I’m just a skeptical, cynical heathen, so what the hell do I know?

I’ve caught the venerable Courant reporting (laughably) on what it called “known hauntings” before, and just a little while ago another paper in northwestern Connecticut pulled much the same stunt. This is a trend that I hope stops very soon.

It must be a slow news day here in northwestern Connecticut. One of the local papers, the Torrington Register Citizen, ran a news story about — of all things! — a putative ghost in a city bar. Yes, that’s right … reports of a ghost at a bar, are news (WebCite cached version):

Is there a ghost in Snapper Magee’s? After an investigation this past weekend it is possible.

Now, don’t ask how reporter Ronald Derosa conducted this “investigation.” In fact, he didn’t. It was someone else entirely:

Around 2 a.m. Sunday morning, after the popular Water Street bar closed, the Northwest Connecticut Paranormal Society came in to investigate reports that the building may have a spirit inside. A team of five investigators, including a sensitive and a psychic came by from the Professional Investigations and Presentations group, equipped with an assortment of tools to conduct a proper paranormal search, said John Zontok, the director of the organization.

We all know — of course! — that an organization dedicated to the “paranormal” is going to be objective and above-board about such an investigation, and be as skeptical about these “ghost rumors” as anyone can possibly be.

Right?

If so, you’d be mistaken:

From 2 to 5 a.m. the team remained, setting up eight infra-red night vision cameras, EVP sensors to pick up voices, and tools to measure the electro-magnetic field, Zontok said.

The result: there was a high amount of magnetic energy in the front of the bar as well as in one room on the second floor where there was no electricity at all, he said.

“Which could possibly mean there was a presence there, trying to show itself to us,” he said.

Zontok concludes there must be “a presence” there … there can’t possibly be any other explanation for magnetism. It’s not possible, for example, for there to have been some steel somewhere in the building structure, that accounts for it.

He checked for the presence of “electricity,” and ruled that out.

So there must be “a presence” there, which has nothing better to do with its time, than sit and wait for Zontok and his crew to stroll in, set up equipment, then tamper with it while it’s there.

(Note to Zontok and his pals: Magnetism doesn’t require the presence of electrical current. Really!)

You might ask, “Is this guy for real?” Unfortunately the answer is a big “YES!” There are a lot of people who take this very seriously and they soak it up enormously. It’s fodder for a number of television shows, including one that Zontok’s group will work with:

Now, the group is ready to be featured on the Discovery Channel this October, around Halloween, he said.

It’s nice to see how, with all the things that are happening in this country, in this state, and even this part of Connecticut, that the Register Citizen can find the time and space in its pages to tell us all about this important haunting. (I shouldn’t make fun of the RE … even venerable newspapers such as the Hartford Courant sometimes resort to crap like this.)

Just in case anyone out there isn’t clear on the matter … there are no such things as ghosts. For a professional journalist to decide that there are … or even that they might exist … is inexcusable.

The Hartford Courant ran a story recently on a restaurant not far from where I live. The building dates back to Revolutionary times (1780, I believe). For years I’ve heard stories about it being haunted. But now the Courant proudly declares — get this! — that the building is known to be haunted (cached version):

The ghost of Abigail Pettibone is known to haunt the upstairs of the locally famous Pettibone’s Tavern, which dates from the 18th century.

As I said, I’ve heard stories all my life, about that place. Rumors that the building was haunted. Tales about the ghost that lurks there. Assumptions about why she lingers there. And so on.

But until I read this, I had not realized that it was known to have been haunted. As in, certain that it’s haunted, or proven to be haunted.

This is interesting. I must have missed something, because a demonstrable haunting would have made the news — and much further away than just my part of Connecticut.

Sorry, but the reporter is incorrect. The haunting of Pettibone’s Taven is not “known.” It may be “assumed” to be haunted, or “claimed” to be haunted … but it is most certainly not “known” to be haunted.

If it were, I’d say someone ought to apply to the James Randi Paranormal Challenge and make a cool million bucks before the prize runs out next year!