PROVOKING SPIRITS: IS IT ETHICAL?

By Patricia Bradley Bates

GhostHouse

Ghost hunting is extremely popular these days. It is one of America's fastest growing hobbies. This interest can be seen in the popularity of shows like Sci Fi's Ghost Hunters and the Travel channel's Most Haunted, as well as Ghost Whisperer and Medium. Websites to radio programs such as Coast to Coast host daily features of fans' strangest ghost photos. People are lugging their EMF meters, IC recorders and digital cameras along to houses, cemeteries and family funerals at record numbers in the hope of getting evidence of life after death. There hasn't been this much interest in the paranormal since the séance days of Madame Blavatsky in the 19th century.

Provocation is a current technique being used in ghost hunting. Some investigators think that provocation gets spirits stirred up and irked so that they will get mad and react out of anger. When angry, spirits are thought to produce the kind of phenomena that makes good evidence, such as a clear recording of a spirit uttering words (EVP, electronic voice phenomena) or visual manifestations on camera (apparitions, shadow, lights, orbs, objects that move). The thinking goes: if someone came barging into your house with a lot of equipment and called you names, you might scream and yell too. Well, yes, you would. You might even call the cops.

Ghost hunters can get nasty. Provocation can include name calling, insults, rude joking, accusing spirits of committing certain crimes when they were alive, telling them they are cowards if they don't show themselves or speak to the hunters. Ghost hunters claim this works to give a payoff for the ghost hunters by providing quality sound and visual evidence that helps a ghost hunting team build a reputation in the paranormal field. This can lead to books, TV shows, radio interviews, selling of merchandise. It is true: ghosts are becoming big business!

Let's remember that this provocation goes on in places where human beings once lived, loved, gave birth, raised their families, suffered, died and now - haunt. Ghosts are thought to haunt places where they still have unfinished business, where their loved ones might live, or because they are simply not wanting to leave their family home or place of greatest emotional attachment. If a haunted house exists, it is probably haunted with the former human residents of that house who are human spirits, just like you or me. In other words, ghosts are people too.

How less justified we are, then, when we provoke? After all, we wouldn't barge into a stranger's house and begin to call them names while we hold out our cameras and recorders in the hopes of getting a reaction to go on the news that night. That is, unless we were the paparazzi.

This is a call to ghost hunters to try to remember that one of the top reasons we ghost hunt is to prove the existence of life after death. If there is, there is a spiritual realm that is mostly unknown. This is a realm we will approach when our bodies die. Humans who become ghosts are no different in essence from you or me. We are connected to them - we are all of the human family. Connectedness is the key - respect of the spiritual realm leads out from that.