Ghosts, pareidolia, and why I'm now a skeptic

Sheree McNatty - 1 August 2019

I’m Sheree McNatty, Secretary of NZ Skeptics. I’ve just been asked by a teen about how Skeptics disprove psychics, paranormal activity and the afterlife. When I was a teen I was interested in finding proof of paranormal and the afterlife. I told enquiring Aunts that I wanted to be a Parapsychologist when I left school. I found the thought of people I had known who have died being somewhere else comforting and I wanted to experience it and prove it. Friends and I had seances, I did Tarot and tea leaf reading and tried mind reading. There had to be something after this left and I wanted it to be real. However, it led me to become a Skeptic as no matter what we tried it wasn’t convincing. I also found out there was no point being a Parapsychologist as nobody is going to fund repeated experiments that have failed every time.

Here’s some of the things I’ve looked into as a Skeptic and stories and examples of why.

Pareidolia explains a lot of ghost photos and things like faces in mountains on mars and the moon. Pareidolia is very much programmed into the human brain, we look for faces from a very early age, babies will spend longer looking at a facial image than any other images, and you may find yourself finding faces in curtains and patterns on wallpaper. Sounds even become words if we tell ourselves what we expect to hear. There is a really suitable example which you may have come across on social media. I’ll call it Green Needle/Brainstorm. There is another case of this which resulted in evidence not being used in David Bains’ murder trial. The evidence was a garbled phone call. If people were told what to hear, they heard that, but without being told what to hear everyone heard something different or no words at all. It was interpreted by some as “I can’t breathe” Others heard “I shot the prick” and still others could make out no audible words out at all. This shows how strongly and seriously people can be convinced by pareidolia. You will find ghost hunters who use EVP (Electronic voice phenomenon), and rely heavily on interpretations of what they hear.

Our Autumn 2019 magazine has a description of what we are calling The Cathedral Effect - where you step into a place of dignity, solemnity and worship, you feel closer to God. If you go to a house or site of murders, you may feel shivers and creepy feelings. If you don’t know they are sites of murders you may feel nothing. I work in a rest home and people die there on a regular basis, surely you would find ghosts aplenty there. It doesn’t feel haunted though as it’s light and bright, but if the rooms were aged, dusty and dim we may feel the presence of “ghosts”.

There is also the double standards of ghosts. The thought of “granddad’s ghost” watching over you and guiding you through the troubled times of life is comforting, but granddad watching over you in the shower… not so comforting. If those we loved can be near us and surround us in the afterlife, what is to stop those we don’t love?

There have been many organizations who have offered substantial monetary rewards for proof of the afterlife. They all remain unclaimed. Surely no psychic should ever have financial problems, have shows cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances or be struck down with a preventable illness (The spirits should say put down the pie and go for a walk you have heart disease long before a doctor diagnoses it.) TV show Sensing Murder has solved no murders, the psychics have even led producers to sites claiming the body was near but then that body is found in a very different place years later.

Special pleading, when someone says it can’t be tested, the spirits don’t like it, or you have to believe to receive then you can dismiss something as untrue.

Take a common everyday force that moves objects (Often when we don’t want it to) it’s not a poltergeist, it’s gravity. Science still hasn’t fully explained how it works yet, how it influences objects to draw them in, but it is very real and very measurable and can be tested again and again. Gravity doesn’t need you to believe in it to act. It’s an actual measurable force. So, when the psychic can’t perform or their guesses are no more accurate than chance and they blame something else for interfering with their power, remember gravity is an actual unseen power, that can be measured and relied upon.

A casual friend visited a psychic, it cost him $100. He needs his money and was job hunting, so I was angry he paid that. I told him he should have come to me first, he thought I meant for a reading, so I played along. I asked him to cross my palms with silver and I’d do a reading for him. (making someone pay means they are more likely to believe rather than be ripped off) so two silver coins, 40 cents, were placed in my hand and I closed my eyes. I told him there was an older male coming through (A safe bet as men tend to die younger than women), and that male had been looking out for him and guiding him through recent troubles. I said there were health issues still to come and not all obstacles have been overcome but that he will find the strength to get through them (a safe statement knowing him, his current health issues and that all of us will have health issues come up at some stage). At this stage I opened my eyes and saw my friend with tears in his eyes, he said to me “Its Dad coming through” I felt so horrible, cruel, and so mean as I was only making up statements to prove to him anyone could do a psychic reading with Barnum statements, like I was using.

Barnum statements are something everyone experiences but also something positive, so you want to believe. E.g. “you are often misunderstood but are a lot smarter than people think”, or “You have had some difficult choices, but you need to know that in the long run you have done the right thing”.

I told him what I was doing and hurt him too by making a fool of him believing I was contacted by his dad. I asked him to tell me what things the “Psychic” told him that were different from what i just did. He said she knew things that nobody else could know, I pressed for specifics and he said “She knew that Dad and I would sit round the table having a drink and a yarn” I replied that everyone does that, that’s what we are doing right now. My friend wanted to believe his Dad was still there, somewhere and still cared about him, nothing was going to convince him that he was wasting his money. I asked him to tell the “Psychic” something untrue next time. Like that he wanted to contact his brother who died when he was 10, he doesn’t have such a brother so if that fictional brother came through, he would know the psychic was a fraud. He told me later the woman he saw was a fraud. He didn’t go into details, I didn’t press him for them, we never kept contact but still say hello as friends, and I think my reading did a lot of damage to our friendship.

A door slamming may give us a fright but it’s more likely to be drafts not a ghost - it’s not scary without the movie music. Shadows darting across a room can be an insect near a light source. Jumping to the conclusion that anything we don’t know is a ghost or spirit haunting is like hearing hoofbeats and thinking of zebras not horses.

A seance may work and may give you interesting answers to questions, but do this experiment too. Blindfold all participants and unknown to them replace the Ouija board with a monopoly board, or rotate it so letters are in different places, you will find the spirits guiding suddenly can’t spell.

So how do I find comfort or anything to offset the negativity of death? In knowing that I have interacted with and made a difference in many people’s lives, that I carry their memories and pass on my memories to my children and those I interact with. Because of this I talk openly about friends and family members who have died, it keeps them alive for me. When nobody remembers me then I will truly die.