#3. A Ghost of a Chance: Part 2

To recap Part 1, a filmmaker working on a documentary contacted me about doing an on-camera interview. His subject was a vape shop where spooky events were transpiring. He shared some eerie videos with me, as did the shop owner, Brad. I agreed to the filmmaker’s request, and I also interviewed Brad over the phone to get his take on what he was experiencing.

Brad seemed genuinely spooked by what he’d seen and heard. But after considering the evidence, I arrived at some simple, non-paranormal explanations and published a report in Skeptic magazine.

The documentary runs twenty-two minutes and is available on YouTube.  

The film included one video clip I’d not seen before: a Bible flying off an office desk on its own. This was different from the other video clips, all of which had ambiguous images and sounds that could be misinterpreted by someone unfamiliar with the likely explanations.

The incident seemed important enough that I should try to replicate it, and that’s the topic for this post.

Here are links to the original clip of the flying Bible and my re-creation of the incident.

Replicating the Flying Bible

If you haven’t already figured it out, it’s shockingly simple to fake this kind of video. To replicate the original, I used common household items, and the whole process took only about 30 minutes from start to finish. I acted alone without accomplices, and there was no video manipulation.

Was my video a legitimate replication in the scientific sense? Yes and no. It’s not a “direct replication,” which would involve trying to exactly reproduce the original conditions. It’s also not a “conceptual replication,” which purposely uses different methods to test the boundaries of the claim. This is more of a “systematic replication,” deliberately altering certain conditions which will potentially strengthen or weaken the original claim.

Like the Diana Krall song playing in the background (“I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You”), my choices were intentional. Basically, I set up a stronger test, but built in checks for an alternative non-paranormal explanation. By using a dictionary instead of a Bible, I showed that the phenomenon doesn’t require a specific religious tome. Kitchen counter vs. office desk didn’t matter. Having a higher resolution camera with better lighting and myself in the picture should only make it harder for me to reproduce Brad’s results.

And trust me: I did not enlist an actual evil spirit to do the deed.

One more thing: Never trust anyone just because they say, “Trust me”! Not when it comes to any claim that violates centuries of accumulated scientific research and theory on matter and energy. And not when there may be far more likely explanations you’ve not yet considered.

My job is simply to offer you a more plausible explanation than “evil spirit.” My explanation will do three things: (1) invoke only known, earthly forces; (2) fit all of the facts; and (3) let you verify it for yourself if you wish.

Here’s a list of ingredients:

Smooth, flat surface

Heavy hardcover book

6” of duct tape

15’ of string

Cell phone video camera

And the instructions:

Select a book that you’re okay with dropping on the floor a few times. Tape one end of the string to the inside of the book’s back cover. Lay the book on the tabletop, back cover down. Orient the book so that the string coming out of it is hidden from your camera’s perspective. Run the string around the table and set it on something near where you’ll sit. Or run it off to the side if you don’t want to be in the frame.

Set up the camera so that it has a clear view of the tabletop and book. You may need to mount it on a shelf, stepladder, tripod, or whatever else works for you. If you’re going to be in the picture, you’ll want to crop out enough of yourself that you can tug the string without the camera capturing any movement on your part.

Do a quick practice run or two to see how the book responds to your tugging on the string.

Turn on the camera, take your seat, and discreetly grasp the string out of camera view. Wait a few moments to build suspense. Eventually, give the string a very light tug to move the book ever so slightly.

Wait a bit more, then give it a more substantial pull, causing the book to visibly lurch in place.

Finally, give the string a strong yank. The book will depart the scene faster than a toupee in a hurricane.

Maybe I was just lucky, but I managed to record my video in a single take.

What to Make of This?

The bottom line is that Brad’s video was easy to fake.

In contrast, if it were a real paranormal event, it would not be at all easy to explain its nature and behavior. If there was something there beyond Brad’s feeling an evil presence, was it a playful poltergeist? A happy angel? A lost phantom? Or a plain old ghost? Regardless, none of these are explanations because they don’t tell us anything about the cause. They’re just different ways of admitting to the inadequacy of our understanding.

In contrast, down-to-earth explanations for the flying bible are well within reach. In fact, it would have been even simpler for Brad to fake a video than it was for me. He already had the cameras in place. His poor lighting, more distant shot, and lower-resolution image would have made it even easier to conceal a string.

Despite his denial in a follow-up interview, I believe Brad probably used a method very similar to mine.

If a self-respecting evil spirit wanted to make itself known, consider what it could have done. It could have picked up the book, flipped it in the air a few times, spun it around, floated it to the four corners of the room, and slammed it back onto the desk. But just like my book, Brad’s appeared to be yanked off the tabletop, at which point gravity took over and, predictably, dumped it onto the floor.

In our conversations, Brad seemed to be an honest, mature, intelligent, responsible, God-loving, Devil-fearing adult. He did confess to me that he’d been under a lot of stress. His mother had died recently, and he was in the midst of opening a store in a second location. He was working long hours and drinking too much. These factors, along with his religious convictions, the judgments of friends and pseudo-experts, and his enjoyment of ghost-hunting TV programs, could have led him to experience heebie-jeebies when alone in the office, and subsequently misinterpret his videos.   

But the Bible clip was something different. Despite the graininess, what took place was much less visually ambiguous than in the other clips. There was no way to misinterpret what supposedly happened. If it were what it was claimed to be, it’s one of the most inexplicable paranormal phenomena ever recorded.

I Have Questions

Why was the Bible clip the only one in the documentary that Brad hadn’t shared with me? He told me he’d sent his best evidence—bottles of vape juice “flying” off a shelf when nobody was around; “orbs” of light moving around the room; long ethereal wisps wafting across the video screen; voices and thuds on the audio tracks—all explained via simple, mundane causes in my article in Skeptic magazine.

So why didn’t Brad share with me the most compelling clip of all? One possibility is that he wanted to eliminate any chance that I’d debunk it in the documentary. Had I done so, he’d have looked willfully dishonest and fiendishly manipulative.

Before seeing the documentary, Brad’s demeanor seemed honest and real. He appeared to be truly upset and perplexed by what he’d experienced in his shop, and motivated to get to the bottom of it the best way he knew how. Mainly, this meant bringing in other equally unqualified observers and emulating the highly questionable methods he’d seen on ghost-hunting TV shows. But he offered no resistance to my probing interview questions, and he even offered me the key to his business so that I could spend as much time as I wanted doing an on-site investigation. I didn’t need to do that in order to explain the videos, but his offer implied a high degree of sincerity.

Up until I saw the Bible video, I believed that Brad simply misinterpreted images and sounds on his recordings, and was probably unaware of how they might be explained without recourse to the spirit world.

After I saw the extraordinary video, I called Brad and questioned him some more. He denied faking anything. Moreover, he told me that he had personally witnessed the Bible fly off the desk once before while he was sitting at the desk, alone in the shop after hours. Unfortunately, that event was not caught on video.

Short of Brad being an outright fraud, I can give him some benefit of the doubt here. It’s possible that his stressful circumstances, frequent inebriation, and long hours of work caused him to contract a case of “the willies” while toiling away in his office alone late at night. He then might have leaned on his strong religious faith to account for these strange feelings, attributing them to some sort of “evil force,” as he called it. 

He also appeared to follow ghost-hunting TV programs with a kind of religious fervor. Most of the episodes I’ve watched involve “analysis” of video evidence, by which I mean combing through video images, almost pixel by pixel, for anything that could be interpreted as other-worldly, no matter how trivial, no matter how easily explained by normal means.

So Brad started looking closely at his surveillance footage and, sure enough, he misinterpreted dust particles interacting with his infrared cameras as ghostly “orbs.” He was also unaware that his own motion sensors could cause wavy images to appear in the videos, or that sounds emanating from other businesses or from outside the building could be recorded on his interior microphones. But discovering these anomalies could have spooked him for real.

Then things may have started to get out of hand. Others he invited into the shop, or to view his videos, may have expressed extreme interest and enthusiasm for the “spirit” explanations.

At some point, Brad probably realized he was sitting on a great marketing tool. By paying for the documentary, he could promote his business and lure in more customers. Even if he sincerely did believe the vape shop housed evil spirits, what would it hurt to add one more striking video to the documentary showing a flying Bible? Even if he had to stage it.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone promoted ghost stories in an attempt to bring more customers into their business. Google “using ghost stories to drum up business” if you want to read more about some of them.

Over the years, numerous individuals have reached out to me to tell me about strange occurrences in their homes or businesses, consistent with the work of ghosts and poltergeists. Always, they were anecdotal accounts of strange feelings, sightings, sounds, or smells. Unlike Brad, none had anything more to go on but their stories. What was so interesting to me was that when I’d offer perfectly reasonable explanations for their experiences, their knee-jerk response was almost always to reiterate their feelings and to reject rational explanations, despite their having reached out to me for those explanations.  

You can probably understand why. It can be disconcerting, maybe even a little traumatic, to confront the fact that our experiences may be terribly misleading. Of course, I can’t prove this to someone who calls or emails out of the blue, certain they heard footsteps upstairs, or found their plates rearranged in the cupboard. I could only tell them what I have learned from other people’s investigations of similar claims, and from a century of research showing how our conclusions about ambiguous phenomena are often predictably misled by misperceptions, misjudgments, expectations, and social influences.

In the same way, Brad’s experiences could have been caused by evil spirits. But there are virtually always “normal” ways to account for paranormal experiences, and the natural explanations carry far more depth and plausibility than the supernatural alternatives.

In many circumstances, feelings and perceptions are valid routes to accurate judgments and explanations. But such explanations are notoriously unreliable when pushing our senses to their limits. In future posts, I want to talk not only about the reliability of human judgment and perception, but also about what it means to “explain” things—both colloquially and scientifically—and the implications of these different ways of understanding what’s happening around us.

Okay, time to close the flying book on this haunting case.

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