Ghost Hunting for Skeptics
Mark Honeychurch - 11th November 2024
Our membership at the NZ Skeptics Society consists of an interesting mix of different kinds of people, and although we generally agree on a few core ideas about requiring evidence before making claims, there are members who hold a variety of views that other skeptics would consider fringe. One of these members, James (who has talked to us at one of our past conferences, and I’m Facebook friends with), posted on Facebook recently that he was running a paranormal investigation of one of Wellington’s heritage buildings, Inverlochy House - which is currently used as an art school:
Inverlochy Paranormal Tour
When: Monday 28 October, 8:30-10pm
Fee: NZ $25.00
Course Details
Join members of the New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society to conduct a mini paranormal investigation of our infamously haunted house!
For this year’s Wellington Heritage festival, you are invited to delve into the haunted history of Historic Inverlochy House. Since 2007 our house has been the subject of ongoing inquiry by long standing paranormal research and investigation group, New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society.
For this event, members from this group will guide participants on a mini paranormal investigation of the site. You will tour Inverlochy House, delve into its haunted history and use procedures shared by experienced investigators to discover conclusions of your own.
As soon as I saw this event pop up in my feed I figured it’d be fun to attend, so I messaged my usual partners-in-crime, Bronwyn and Tim, and roped them in on my first ever ghost hunting adventure. I then totally forgot about it until the day before, when at the last minute I noticed it in my calendar. So at around 8:15 pm on Monday, just after the sun set, we all met in front of the building and walked up the steps to our venue for the night, the haunted Inverlochy House:
Bronwyn and Tim ascending to Inverlochy House
Tim and I entering through the main door
Briefing
Once inside, we all gathered in a room to the right of the main corridor, which we were told by our hosts James and Denise was our “base”. This base was a safe place that we could come back to if things became too scary for us while we were investigating the other rooms.
We had a safety briefing, with the usual fire and earthquake procedures (“car park out the front” and “duck, cover, hold” respectively), and then James talked to us about his background.
James is a professional photographer, and around 20 years ago he teamed up with Denise (who works at Inverlochy) and a couple of other friends to create their paranormal investigation group, “Strange Occurrences”. Inverlochy House has been one of their most investigated buildings, but the group has visited many supposedly haunted locations over the years.
James said that he has also found himself receiving a lot of queries from around the world from people who have had strange things happen to them, or who have captured odd things on camera. He told us that his background in photography allows him to understand some of the nuances about how light and shadow can cause strange effects on film, including orbs and other ghostly weirdness.
The group’s modus operandi is to first visit a site during the day time, to both get a feel for how the location is and to look for any potential hazards that may become dangerous at night in the dark. They then return at night time, sometimes several times, moving from room to room and recording their results as they go. There was talk of how the group sometimes use a seance technique of asking questions of a ghost while investigating a haunting and waiting for a response, and also how they occasionally invite psychic mediums to join them on their investigations.
One important lesson that James said he’s learned is to never discount the paranormal when people ask him if he has a rational explanation for something spooky that’s happened to them. He told us that in the early days he would sometimes just give someone a plausible, likely explanation and leave it at that, but that often this was taken badly, as the person had been hoping for something more supernatural. Maybe they wanted to believe that the outline in their photo was their grandma keeping watch over them rather than a trick of the light, and who is he to take this away from someone who finds comfort in their belief.
There were around 20 of us in all, so once we’d finished with the pleasantries we were split into four groups and told that in these groups we would be investigating six different areas inside the building. Because of issues in previous years with different groups moving around at different times and making noises that could then be attributed by others as otherworldly, we were given a strict timeline of our movements between rooms:
Each room visit lasted around 5 or 6 minutes, including 3 minutes of quiet time (“silent vigil”) where we would all stop walking around the room and would stand still listening and watching for any strange sounds or movement. We were free to turn the lights on and off as we saw fit, and most rooms had one or more emergency exit signs that easily provided enough light to see the entire room when the main lights were off. It turned out, unsurprisingly, that dark rooms were much more fitting for a ghost hunt than well-lit rooms, so we turned the lights off where we could.
Equipment
Before we started we were given a quick rundown of the hardware that we had at our disposal, much of which was already familiar to us skeptics:
From left to right - night vision, digital thermometer, torch, EMF meters, infrared camera, dictaphones, video camera, still camera with IR filter removed, more EMF meters and a skull.
Part of the rundown, as well as explaining how to turn the equipment on and use it, was that we were given some sound advice about gotchas we needed to watch out for. This was really good to see being done, as it ensured that people weren’t just putting every anomalous measurement down as being a ghost. Here’s a few of the things we were told, and how using these devices played out during our ghost hunt:
Thermometer
The thermometer they had is a handheld device that has a proximity sensor on a wire, rather than a laser. This tech is less sexy than lasers, but helps to give a more accurate reading of the temperature in a room. The trouble with laser thermometers is that they read the temperature of whatever the laser is pointed at and bounces off of, meaning that if you point them into the middle of a room they don’t record the temperature of the air in the middle of the room, they record the temperature of whatever the laser hits at the other end of the room instead - usually a wall or window. So if you have one of these laser thermometers in your hand, moving it around a little as you point it, or if someone walks past it while it’s stationary, its reading can suddenly change. Someone seeing this change may think that they’re witnessing a sudden temperature drop in the middle of a room, when in reality all they’ve done is moved the laser from pointing to a brick wall that’s still warm from the day’s heat, to a window or metal surface that’s cooled much quicker and is at a lower temperature.
EMF Meter
The EMF meters either give positive readings for detection of an electromagnetic field, or for detecting changes in a field over time. So we were told to place the devices in one place in the middle of the room where they would give a negative reading, away from any electrical wiring, and then watch them to see if they suddenly picked up an electromagnetic field. We were also warned that proximity of mobile phones or other handheld devices could give a false positive result.
Our EMF Meter picking up the electromagnetic field coming from a light switch
The EMF Meter had a red LED, which made it look awesome in the dark
At one point Bronwyn was scanning a room with the EMF meter and, in the middle of the room, away from any electrical cables or devices, she started picking up a reading. When she moved a metre to the side, the beeping stopped, and it restarted when she moved back again. It was especially loud when she scanned the device up and down her torso, causing me to exclaim that she had haunted boobs. To double-check, I stood in the same place and tried moving the device in the same way, but my reading stayed at 0. This intrigued us for a while until, in the next room, while the lights were on, we ran some more tests, and found out that Tim was also haunted. Our eventual conclusion was that movement was causing people’s clothes to create static electricity, and that this was being picked up by the device. For some reason the clothes that I’d worn were less good at creating static, and I was unable to claim a personal haunting - maybe my taste in fashion is too cheap, mostly consisting of synthetic fabrics from KMart.
Infrared Camera
The handheld infrared camera came with some interesting warnings - residual heat can hang around on surfaces for a while, and infrared light can also be reflected off of surfaces like glass. Firstly, this means that if someone leans against a wall, they can leave an impression of themselves in warmth on that wall. And because a lot of ghost hunting is done in the dark, and the camera only shows things in 2D, it can appear like one of these residual images is in the middle of a room when in reality it’s against a wall.
A test where I placed my hand against a wall for about 15 seconds, and then removed it and pointed the infrared camera at the wall
An imprint I found in a hallway, minutes after another group had been in there
For the picture above, I assume one of the members of another group who went through the room before us must have leaned against the wall. I’m pretty sure I can make out their hands, forearms and shoulder blades.
Tim having fun with the infrared camera. He enjoyed playing with it so much we almost had to pry it from his hands
We confirmed that if someone stands near a reflective surface the camera can pick up the reflected heat, which can look like a ghostly heat shadow standing beside the person. This was something we weren’t able to get any good photos of, but Tim experienced it while he was using the camera - with both windows and whiteboards in the background able to reflect heat.
Dictaphone
The dictaphones we were given were supposed to pick up any anomalous noises we heard. We were instructed to speak into them if we heard any noises where we could identify the source, and were meant to describe the source - we were told that it may, for example, be a passing car or a dog howling. In reality, our recording was punctuated by messages such as “Tim just walked on a creaky floorboard”, “Bronwyn bumped into a table” or “that was my stomach growling”. There were also a lot of sounds coming from the six groups elsewhere in the building, as we didn’t seem to be able to stick to the timeline we’d all been given (maybe we should have synchronised our watches like in the movies). As well as floorboards, doors tended to make a lot of noise, as did both flights of old wooden stairs:
The main staircase in the middle of the building
I have to say that speaking into the dictaphone and recording our experiences as we went along made the whole experience feel much more professional. It was like we were part of a formal investigation, following some sort of gold standard in ghost hunting procedure.
Our Olympus VN-712PC Dictaphone
Despite the feeling of legitimacy that these dictaphones afforded, we were warned the devices have automatic gain levelling, so if there are no loud noises they increase the pickup volume of the microphone, making quiet noises sound like they’re loud. As well as giving a distorted view of how loud sounds are, this also means that some noises can be distorted in ways that make them sound more ghostly, and I’ve also heard that it increases the chances that electronic noise from the internal circuitry ends up being recorded by the hardware as if it was an external sound. So, basically, like most of the other equipment, this device was prone to false positives - and presumably the preferred makes and models of these devices that ghost hunters share amongst themselves are popular precisely because they tend to give these false positives and anomalous readings.
Debriefing
After we finished visiting all of our allotted rooms, we headed back to the safety of the home base room for a debrief. James and Denise talked about some of their previous experiences with supposedly haunted houses, including one with a group of impressionable female students whose flat was badly in need of repairs, including a broken door latch that meant the front door kept blowing open.
When the teams were asked for feedback, there was very little that anyone had to say. One woman in another group reported “feeling” a lot of activity in the front room upstairs, and a woman in our group said that she thought her clothing may have been tugged at some point. James asked her a few questions, and was satisfied that her jacket may well have just been caught on a piece of furniture and her moving would have caused the tugging feeling.
The organisers of this ghost hunt were asked if they had any plausible explanations for the many weird experiences that people have had in haunted houses. Between them they mentioned both time loops and the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, which may sound plausible to a lay audience but didn’t sit well with us skeptics. Throwing out half-baked ideas with names of highly theoretical physics concepts does not make for a satisfactory explanation.
I think James and his group occupy an interesting place in the occult landscape. Looking around the room, it felt like James’ rational explanations for many of the mysteries he’d been asked about was a bit of a bummer for the believers. However, his embracing of cranks like psychics, the use of devices that give a false confidence that something spooky’s being measured, and the regurgitation of wacky ideas with a veneer of science, don’t really sit well with people who are skeptical - me included. And so I think he’s painted himself into a corner where his potential audience is quite small - people who want to believe that ghosts are real, but are happy to accept that there’s never been any good evidence for them, just lots of false positives and misguided amateurs.
After the event came to an end, it was interesting to overhear that a man in one of the other groups was letting the organisers know that he had felt a lot of different activity in all of the rooms. It seemed like maybe he considered himself attuned to psychic energies, but maybe didn’t want to risk ridicule by mentioning this to the whole group.
And, as maybe a world first, I can report that us skeptics also found ghosts during our paranormal investigation. In the Screen Printing room downstairs, at the back of the room, the art school students had been learning how to create posters by printing a malevolent-looking ghost on them:
It was great to find actual ghosts on a paranormal investigation, even if they were a little two dimensional