Paranormal Reality & the Spirit World Part 2

Some people say that Ghost Hunters is a show of skeptics.  However, I really beg to differ.  Grant Wilson and Jason Hawes, plumbers by day, are apparently ghost hunters by night.  They have several books under their belt, probably millions in the bank by now (Ghost Hunters is one of the more successful paranormal shows on television, if not one of the more boring - in my opinion).  If these guys were such 'skeptics', would they behave the way they do on camera, or would they have written books with such titles as Seeking Spirits: The Lost Cases of The Atlantic Paranormal Society, Ghost Hunting: True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena From The Atlantic Paranormal Society, and even a novel, Ghost Trackers?  These guys are a 2-man money making machine!

As for Paranormal State (one of my favorite shows and the most interesting other than Ghost Adventures, my other favorite), Ryan Buell - now fighting pancreatic cancer - the team sounds as if they are reading from a script most of the time (as with all the shows, I might add.  Except Ghost Adventures - they sound more authentic, sort of like those 'found footage' films that don't use a screenplay ala The Blair Witch Project).  In conversations, people generally use 'fillers' like uh, um, etc, or may nervously use such tag lines as 'you know' and pepper their speech with 'like' and 'whatever' and 'whatnot', among other words.  The people on these paranormal shows rarely do that!  They know exactly what they are going to say and they say it, no fumbling for words, hardly any pauses to come up with anything...just as if they are reading from a script or being cued.

Ghost Adventures sounds more authentic but...Zak, Nick and Aaron are definitely not into ghost seeking to 'help' people, as Ryan Buell's Paranormal Research Society claimed to be.  They are into for the long green and the notoriety, as is true of all these paranormal groups.  Ghost Lab - Everyday Paranormal - are so hyped on these EVPs they get that it's quite laughable.  "Dude, did you hear that?!?"  Gosh, I thought only college age boys and high schoolers talked like that!  Then there is My Ghost Story...does anyone really believe any of that stuff?  I certainly do not.  It is just a bunch of attention seeking White people.  (Have you noticed that there are almost never any Black, Asian, or Hispanic people being haunted or attacked by evil spirits or demons?)  Ditto the ghost seeking teams - with the exception of Everyday Paranormal, which in its first season or 2 featured a Latino man and the Black guy, who is yet with the team so far as I know.

It is my belief that these 'spirits' are just negative energy being given off by the current inhabitants of these supposedly haunted homes, inns, hotels, etc.  Dead people are just that - dead.  We don't come back, I don't care what desperate people want to believe.  There are no ghosts.  There are no spirits.  There are no specters.  There are no angels.  There are no demons.  There are no phantoms.  There are overactive imaginations, negative energy, positive energy, and just people being people - that is, seeking fame and fortune in whatever way they can.  When we die, that is the end, das Ende, la fin...we are gone forever.  We do not come back to watch over, haunt, or otherwise interact with the living.  Many of the people who appear on these shows actually want to believe that a deceased relative has returned - on one of the shows, I forget which one, there was a woman and her young daughter who apparently had snapped a photo of what the woman believed was her mother's ghost, who had passed away from cancer.  This woman so much wanted this 'specter' to be her mother so...she saw what she wanted to see, and got a photo of what she wanted.  The daughter seemed to be more hesitant to believe that the spirit was of her grandmother.

Fact or Faked: The Paranormal Files sets out to prove - or disprove - video (they don't really like to do photos, though they have) footage of so-called paranormal events.  They usually disprove them though there was one that they could not (The Nightcrawler Investigation) and there may have been more but that's the only one that comes to mind right now.  What I don't get about Fact or Faked is why they feel it is even necessary to investigate these videos, most of which are so obviously fake - especially the UFOs and Big Foots - that a child could see through that nonsense.  Did you happen to see the one about the 'ghost car'?  A cop was chasing this idiot in a car going more than 50 miles per hour, and the car evidently ended up on one side of a fence, leaving the cop to scratch his head and wonder how the hell this happened.  According to Fact or Faked, the driver merely drove through the fence, and the bottom part of the fence - which was not stuck deeply into the ground - merely flapped.  You'd have to view this episode to know exactly what I am trying to state here.  

At any rate, there are no paranormal activity, entities, or anything else of a paranormal nature.  However, I find these shows to be awesome entertainment, better than most horror films in fact, and so long as I can view them on YouTube, Hulu, or any other internet channel, I will continue to do so.  I will also critique various episodes, past or present, here.  Stay tuned.