Comments on: It’s Ghost Hunting Time Again

By: saburai

saburai — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:58:32 +0000

Revision: It occurred to me after posting that the line

“not even a 5-year-old would mistake them for actual paranormal activity”

could be interpreted as a tacit assertion that there is such a thing as “actual paranormal activity”. So far as I know, there ain’t. I just meant that haunted houses don’t generally DISGUISE themselves as anything other than normal secular-but-spooky entertainment.

By: saburai

saburai — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:53:54 +0000

Last night, I visited the new local Halloween haunted house (the kind where kids making $5/hour jump out and yell at you). I don’t think anyone would argue that haunted house venues do any disservice to science; scary as they CAN be–last night, not so much–not even a 5-year-old would mistake them for actual paranormal activity.

However… THIS haunted house was built into a real 19th Century Mortuary: the P.J. McMahon & Sons Funeral Parlor (see this link: http://www.hauntedmortuary.com/), and apparently the owners of the site weren’t content startling teenagers with pneumatically controlled zombies and a dude with a fake chainsaw. As the link proclaims, they will soon renovate the abandoned mortuary and convert it into an “Interactive Paranormal Observatory and Lab”.

Ahem.

Signs set up in line for the haunted house declared that the old mortuary had been “certified” (!) as haunted and that, in addition to setting up a paranormal lab, authorities unnamed would be carrying out midnight tours and ghost-hunting expeditions.

The $20 I spent on the haunted house didn’t scare me much… this news, however, scared the heck out of me for free. New Orleans tends to attract romantic spiritualists (a charitable description) at the best of times; goodness knows who will come out of the woodwork for this nutty endeavor.

The only consolation will be if the lab’s director is named Venkman.

By: Lee

Lee — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:12:57 +0000

As someone who suffers from sleep paralysis, I can confirm that the brain does some very, VERY strange things when one is in a hypnagogic state. If I didn’t know what was happening I could very easily begin to believe there was something paranormal going on. It’s frightening but fascinating.

By: decius

decius — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:04:52 +0000

There’s a typo. Tales instead of tails. I hate to nitpick on such an excellent article.

By: DLC

DLC — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:48:59 +0000

As someone who used to believe all that paranormal horse feathers, I can say that believing in ghosts is fairly easy, but coming to un-believe them was also easy, for me at least.
Since the time I stopped believing in such things I have not seen a single case of so-called ghostly manifestation that could not be explained to the satisfaction of all but a few die-hard believers.

By: T-Man

T-Man — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:59:37 +0000

The Unicorn Rangers Psychic Police?

:wipes coffee off keyboard: