The Nonsense of "Scientific" Ghost Hunting.

If your not familiar with these shows, Ghost Hunters ect., you probably have better things to do with your time. In this post I'm going to point out quickly why these ghost hunters are not doing science. They use this word in an attempt to lend some legitimacy to what is otherwise a group of adults walking around in the dark and giving themselves frights.

The Equipment:
The ghost hunters, paranormal investigators or what ever it is that they choose to call themselves. Will often wander into a site to be investigated festooned with a multitude of electronic gizmos to be employed in the detection of the spirits. Lets go through some of the common items and see how they work and why it is unlikely they can be used to detect ghosts.
1) A thermometer. Everyone knows what a thermometer is right? It detects the temperature of the air or a surface ect. The thermometer is one of the favored tools of the paranormal investigator. Often its use is to find cold spots, or hot spots, in a room or on a surface or anywhere really, and then declare this to be ghost cold, or hot. Do we see the problem with this line of reasoning? First of all there are variations in temperature in any environment. If there weren't, we probably wouldn't need thermometers. Secondly. Being hot or cold has never been shown to be a property of ghosts. Therefore you can no more say that a cold, or hot, spot is a ghost then you can say my foot hurts because a giant invisible elephant is sitting on it.
2) A sound recorder. These are used to record electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. This is where the investigator makes a recording and hears nothing at the time. But later when the recording is played back. There is a ghostly voice speaking in the background. This is easily explained as normal interference on the recording combined with a good dose of pareidolia. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where a random stimulus is interpreted by the brain as a meaningful pattern. It's incredibly powerful and can be very convincing. Pareidolia is especially likely in situations where the person is wanting to find something. Like a ghost hunter. Or the devout Christian who sees the face of Mary in her grilled cheese. What is the claim here. That the ghost is able to somehow imprint their voice directly onto the recording medium? If so they usually do a rather poor job.
3) A night vision camera. Night vision cameras work by using an infrared bulb to illuminate the area to be filmed. This light is then picked up by the receiver in the camera. Since people cannot see in infrared, and the camera can, the camera appears to be filming in darkness. The usual use of these devices in ghost hunting is to see shapes or orbs that the camera picks up but were not visible to the user at the time. The reason for this happening should be obvious. Since the camera is essentially filming in the dark. Of course anything it films is going to be unseen by the operator. The types of things seen on these ghost films are almost always known artifacts and effects of filming with such cameras. They can usually be reproduced with complete accuracy by someone who knows what they are doing.   
4) The EM field detector. An EM detector detects the orientation and magnitude of Electromagnetic Fields. This is probably the most ridiculous of all the tools that the paranormal investigator deploys in the attempt to look for spirits. Once again they simply wave it around and wait for the needle to move or the numbers to change and then declare it to be a ghost. Or psychic or paranormal energy or other such meaningless rubbish. They probably haven't a clue about what the device is actually measuring or how it is measuring it. EM fields are everywhere. You couldn't walk around a home with one of these devices and not have it register something. And, just like the thermometer, EM fields have never been shown to be a property of ghosts or a result of paranormal activity.

The Method:       
In order to do a scientific investigation of ghosts and paranormal activity one must follow two possible methods.
Method 1) First you would need to establish the theoretical basis for the existence of ghosts. This would allow you to construct a theoretical ghost model that would allow for some of the properties of ghosts and ghostly activity to be hypothesized. Once these properties are known and a method for examining and/or measuring  them is devised. Then an field expedition to a hunted site could be mounted to gather data and check it against the model. If the data fits. Success. If it doesn't. Failure. The model needs to be revised to explain the data and make further predictions that can then be tested in turn. 
Method 2) Start by gathering data. Go to a haunted site and gather data. Take plenty of care to recored all the relevant information so that it can be useful later. Then you would need to look at your data and use it to come up with a model of ghosts and their properties that can explain your data and make predictions about further data that you can then go out and test.  
The ghost hunters never follow either of these basic methods. What they engage in is anomaly hunting. They simply wander in with equipment that they don't understand and get excited when it does something they can't explain. It should not be hard to see why this isn't science. It isn't even investigation.  In fact it isn't anything more than a waste of time and effort. These investigations do nothing to advance knowledge about ghosts or their behavior. And they bring us no closer to being able to understand what exactly a ghost is and how we can reliably detect one.  

You can't scientifically investigate the paranormal. By definition it is outside of the laws of nature and therefore not amenable to scientific investigation. If there were spirits and ghosts that could have an effect on the real world, then we would be able to detect their presence and they would no longer be outside of nature. Alas, everything we have learned over the past few centuries of scientific investigation leads us to conclude that there are no such things as ghosts. The ghost hunters aren't doing science. Aren't doing an investigation and are just making themselves look stupid.