About a year ago, I joined a paranormal meetup group, but I never attended any group meetings or events...until tonight.

All of us seem to be pretty staunch skeptics, which is interesting for a group like this. But that's also a good thing, right?

A few years ago, I used to do quite a bit of ghost hunting. However, since moving to San Francisco, I've hardly done any.

Personally, I don't "believe" in ghosts. I have a scientific background, and most of the best "evidence" for ghosts exists in the form of a "feeling" that someone felt while searching for, well, that exact feeling. Some of the best documented hauntings in history ultimately turn out to be cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, brain anomalies (i.e. tumors), etc. But I can't resist a good ghost story.

My methodology consists of showing up at a supposedly haunted site and taking a bunch of photos. Which can be a lot of fun and generally rather satisfying.

I've asked most of my friends whether they believe in ghosts or not. Interestingly, I generally find that most of them do. However, what I find most fascinating is not necessarily ghost stories, but peoples' persistent belief in them, despite limited or no personal experience and hearsay or unsubstantiated claims at best. How my more religious friends reconcile their belief in the paranormal with their faith is possibly the most intriguing.

What annoys me is the popularization of the "paranormal investigator", e.g. the myriad ghost hunting reality shows. Most of these involve spending a few hours monitoring a supposedly haunted site with some fancy equipment, e.g. infrared cameras, audio recorders, esoteric electromagentic monitors, etc. The key is a a few hours. These "investigations" rarely involve more than a single evening, which, for all the "science" they claim to be employing, seems rather ludicrously absurd.

One thing my experience in Indonesia taught me was that a quest for evidence of an undocumented phenomenon requires patience and persistence. A sustained monitoring presence in the environment is the only hope of capturing any kind of evidence whatsoever. A single night makes for good television, but has a negligible success rate, even if the existence of paranormal activity were a certainty.

Consider for a moment that most haunted sites are reported as such by those who live, work, or otherwise frequent there. The most compelling stories are from those that spend a great amount of time in that location, and even they have 2 or 3 encounters at best. There may be the occasional story from the random passerby, but that is statistically likely given a sufficient number of random passerbies.

Thus, any real search for ghost or other paranormal activity will require a sustained monitoring presence, not a single spooky night. A year, perhaps, or more.

A few years ago, a friend and I had an idea for a website (paranormalactivity.com) which would help ghost hunters share and collaborate. Back in my ghost hunting days, I would try to find potential sites by searching the interwebs. However, most internet sites reporting on this topic seem to be created by 13-year-olds stuck in 1995. Think lots of animated ghosts, heavy use of <hr>, and other 90's interweb gimmicks.

But more importantly, the reports themselves are very inconsistent and generally poorly written. My major beefs are

• Multiple versions of the same haunting
• Poor directions, e.g. go down X street, find the big tree, turn left at [unspecified] street, then right at the [unspecified] church...
• Lack of community consensus, forums

We proposed (and began work on) a website which would encourage community involvement, consensus, and clear locations. We imagined a wiki-style user-generated-content site which would promote the following:

• Introduction to a haunted site
• Clear directions to the site, e.g. an embedded Google map pinpointing the exact position. Click for driving directions.
• A list of haunted stories related to the site. Most haunted sites have multiple tellings, if not completely disparate versions. The idea would be to display the most-commonly-found / agreed-upon story up front with alternate versions listed below. Users could vote on the most acceptable story and enter their own version. A discussion page might allow users to enter their personal anecdotes, much like a wiki.
• Photos of the site

For now, file this under personal project 314, but it may see the light of day, um, someday.