Haunted Maine and Those Who Promote it

I admit, Maine can be a creepy place sometimes. First there’s the long history…you can’t have ghosts unless you have dead people…the woods are thick and dark and the cemeteries are old, overgrown and hardly a place to lighten your mood. Fog shrouds our coastline at times. Then there’s the plethora of books in the “Ghosts of New England” category. No doubt written in long dark winter nights or perhaps told around an eighteenth century fireplace, these stories are part of the Maine experience. Then there’s Stephen King up in Bangor. Pet Semetary anyone? Rent the movie for a close-up of our area. Here’s a page listing “haunted” places around Bar Harbor.

Nowadays we have a new breed of ghost stories, the pseudoscientific variety. Let me say right now that I am an extreme skeptic; I don’t tolerate any mumbo-jumbo, so I report on this subject while holding my nose. I’m referring to those cable TV shows which feature investigations into the paranormal using video cameras showing green-tinted images and mysterious gizmos which record some sort of aura or electromagnetic field. All of these devices yield results which are supposed to provide “evidence” of some sort. I can’t claim I have ever sat through one of these stupid shows because I know the conclusions will always be ambiguous–the goal is to get the viewer to believe some place is haunted without coming out and saying it.

It turns out that these shows appeared about the same time as wannabe versions in Maine. Whether one caused the other I can’t say. The two I found are Maine Ghost Hunters (don’t expect me to provide a link) and Maine Ghost Hunter’s Society. Folks, I gotta tell ya, these groups are an embarrassment to me. And ME. Here’s two samples of writing in their discussion forum:

Though i never had any personal experiance with Ghots i must say that i had many different experiances or i should say unexplained and personal experiances with the Paranormal. It can be very comforting to know that we are not just imagening.

Hello. my name is *****. i am engaged and have one child. i believe i have always had a natural abbil. to sensens thing, good or bad.

Need I say more? OK, how about this: Go ahead and look at their murky photos and listen to their distorted audio (which they call EVP-electronic voice phenomenon) for a thrill. Then download this podcast from the wonderful Point of Inquiry website. The interview is with Ben Radford, a real paranormal investigator using real science. You will have to either listen to or skip ahead of an opening editorial to get to the interview.

At livescience.com, Ben writes many articles about pseudoscience, the one about ghost hunters is here.

Critical thinking is not a natural human trait. Let’s not lose it! The overwhelming majority of Mainers still have it!

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