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Halloween with Hayley Stevens: why aren't ghosts naked?

A single incident catching someone cheating was enough to start Hayley Stevens on the path from believer to skeptic, as she recounted in tonight's talk at the Westminster Skeptics

In 2005, then just 18, Stevens was, as she told the story, spending her weekends hunting ghosts with a team of others, heading out for haunted pubs around closing time so they could spend the night. On just such an occasion two years later, the sound of a glass breaking sent her into a dark room where a fellow investigator, turning to speak to her with a flashlight in hand, spotted the landlord hiding behind the door. He wanted, Stevens said, to get himself and his pub onto the TV show Most Haunted. The fact that they only caught him by chance made her start to wonder: what else had they missed? What else were they fooling themselves about? Over the course of the next year, her views gradually changed. "Why aren't ghosts naked?" was a question asked her during that time by a skeptic. (Actually, it turns out, some are.)

From the sounds of it, being a ghost hunter was not cheap, likely eating up all the savings Stevens made by only going out to pubs after they'd already closed. A Ghostbox, basically a radio: £55. A ghost laser grid: £30. Various other bits of equipment: infrared cameras, EMF meters, Ouija boards, dowsing rods. And more mundane household items which a person would have anyway: tables, glasses, marbles, coins, keys.

What are all these things for? The Ghostbox is a variant on the old thing of hearing what sounds like speech in the white noise in the unused parts of the radio spectrum – a testament to the human ability to recognize patterns where none exist. EMF meters scan for supposed ghost emanations; infrared cameras look for hot and cold spots. Ouija boards or glasses simply used on a table surface are supposed to channel communications from the dead. Marbles, coins, and keys, left out strategically in an unoccupied room, may have moved when you come back, showing a ghost has been present.

Belief in ghosts seems mostly harmless. But, as Stevens pointed out, hunters may take foolish risks, like trespassing on manor grounds where the owners are armed, or diving into disused and collapsing tunnels. The Darwin Award shoo-in: the people who got killed by a real train while looking for a ghost train.

But besides that, there's the panic of the people who believe a ghost has been found in their home. Do an "exorcism" as a kind of placebo and maybe the ghost goes away for a while. But if the causes of the phenomena are genuine physical things – for example, the house in Australia whose apparent "ghost" rumblings were planes taking off and landing at a local airport – the "ghost" will come back. And what then? Rationalism is usually thought of as cold, but in some situations it's the most comforting option.