OK so one of my guilty pleasures is watching ghost-hunting shows & I have to admit "Ghost Adventures" is my favorite.
I don't believe in the supernatural for a cold minute, don't believe in ghosts, am ridiculously skeptical about the paranormal, & I know such shows are completely ridiculous & basic. & I don't care, I still watch 'em.
I call just about every one of such shows "Ghost Bros", because it's always a handful of white bros running around doing totally ridiculous bro shit & doing all this macho posturing & trying to take the piss out of the alleged "ghosts" they find... which they really don't ever find at all, they just use a bunch of equipment that doesn't really measure what they think they're measuring, & say it's a haunting.
Thing is... the vast majority of shows don't ever really find anything weird or unusual or out of explainable human experience.
...until they do. Until you have *that one episode* where for a couple of minutes, somebody captured something that truly doesn't make sense & is spooky as FUCK.
I love 'em for that, too.
& maybe a weird thing is, even tho' I'm hella skeptical about the paranormal, I mostly think the methodology of studying it is what's so poor. People see & hear & experience weird-ass shit all the damn time, stuff we can't yet explain. Is it paranormal? Ehhh... maybe? Maybe not.
So I'm never going to tell someone who had a "paranormal" experience that they didn't experience something weird as shit. They probably did.
@Impious_Jade
@Impious_Jade Ghost shows are one of my plain old pleasures too, I love them. I also enjoy how they talk about history and historical events, and visit the places where these events happened. I've had a couple of personal experiences that make me perhaps a little less skeptical than I know I should be. But yeah, I love them too. Even the ones that are fictional -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(American_TV_series)
@Impious_Jade I almost never see anything on those shows that looks like my own weird experiences, but I enjoy watching anyway. It should be a guilty pleasure, but I don't feel guilty about it.
When a person claims to have a "supernatural" or "paranormal" experience, my default is that I presume nothing unnatural happened until proven otherwise, but I still treat the person with courtesy and respect, because whatever they perceived was still a lived experience for them.
@Impious_Jade after doing tours at my hotel for 3 years I was far more afraid of the live ones than the dead ones but GA did capture something in the morgue that freaked me out until I quit
@RobinBrayFineArt Whoa that'd be freaky. And yeah, you generally gotta fear the living more than the dead... people can be pretty awful.
Every Ghost show:
"We are not sure what is causing this, so it is definitely ghosts"
*Everyone high Fives (including the ghost which you cannot see)*
@Kinnison LOL yeah exactly. If I showed up on one of those shows, they'd HATE me: "Bro - why you using that EMF detector? What's it showing? Why do you say it's showing you a ghost? How do you know? Did you check sunspot activity this week? How about get a map of this location's electrical system? You sure you using that thing right?"
@Impious_Jade It's probably not nice of me to say, but if something actually did appear while they were goofing around, it would make the shows much more watchable.
@AskTheDevil Hah no I actually agree. That would turn it into a whoooole 'nuther ballgame.
For the most part, ghost shows are accidental psychology shows: they're shows about belief, cognitive biases, & skepticism. They're not really about ghosts or the paranormal at all. & that's fascinating to me.