#2. A Ghost of a Chance: Part 1

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A few years ago, a documentary filmmaker contacted me about a project he was working on.

Not far from where I lived, a business owner named Brad was convinced that evil spirits were frequenting his vape shop, and they were not being good customers. They allegedly knocked items off store shelves, made strange noises, messed with security cameras, and scared the bejeebers out of poor Brad after hours, making his life a living hell.

 

I interviewed Brad by phone a couple of times, and he appeared sincere in his beliefs. Those beliefs were bolstered by a series of surveillance videos from inside his store, which he felt offered proof of his supernatural suspicions. He sent me a dozen or so video and audio clips. They weren’t proof of ghostly visitations. They were, in fact, easy to debunk as camera issues, ambient noise, and socially facilitated misinterpretations. They seemed right out of one of those sensationalist TV series like Ghosthunters, which have been totally debunked, again and again. (I provide sources for some of those debunkings in one of my articles published at TheConversation.com.)

 

Interpreting the haunting data isn’t the topic for this post, however. Instead, I’ll talk about some behind-the-scenes stuff that didn’t appear in my published report. (If you’re interested, the report appeared in Skeptic magazine and is available in the Writings section of this site as “Notes on a Haunting…”)

 

Setting the Stage

 

It all began when Brad sent the filmmaker a dozen or so surveillance video clips containing inexplicable images and sounds, asking him to assemble these clips into a short movie, including interviews with Brad himself and a lineup of sincere but stumped experts. You can view the final product here.

 

The filmmaker, smelling something fishy, contacted me and asked me to offer my perspective on the videos. In fact, he stipulated to the owner that he wouldn’t do the job unless he could include at least one skeptic among those interviewed. I agreed to be his guy.  

 

At the time of my interview, I didn’t know what surveillance clips or other evidence would be included in the documentary. All I could do was offer some generic explanations based on what I’d seen and heard from Brad, and what I’ve learned from reports of investigations of hauntings in other places. As is typical, less than three minutes of my one-hour interview appeared in the final cut. Because nothing I said could reference specific claims and videos, I probably came across as merely a skeptic being skeptical without good reasons, in contrast to the interviewees who’d experienced what they experienced with their own racing hearts, retinas, and eardrums. Oh well. At least some alternative explanations were represented in the film.

 

In the end, there was only one claim in the documentary that Brad hadn’t shared with me before. And perhaps not coincidentally, it was the most startling and spectacular claim in the entire video. That’s what I’ll talk about here.

 

The Bible Incident

 

The video clip and another segment of Brad’s interview appear between 18:33 and 19:12 of the documentary. The scene is the shop’s office, located in one of the back rooms. The wall-mounted camera was pointed across the room, prominently showing the unoccupied desk with a large book in its far-left corner. The glowing light seemingly emanating from the Bible was added by the filmmaker to highlight the book within the visual field. But you wouldn’t be able to discern that it was actually a Bible without Brad characterizing it as such.

 

The claim was that some sort of unseen force or entity intentionally threw the book off the desktop and onto the floor out of frame. The implication is that, in an apparent fit of pique over the Good Book’s messages, an evil and deeply offended something—Ghost? Poltergeist? Demon? Spirit?—slammed that nasty book to the floor.

 

These few dramatic seconds of action were like nothing else in the entire documentary. While other clips showed easily explained dots or wisps of light and indiscernible sounds, this was huge. I wondered why Brad hadn’t thought to mention anything about it in our previous conversations. 

 

I spoke with Brad one last time after I saw this clip. He swore up and down that nobody was in the shop at the time, and he was certain that nobody else with access to the office would have perpetrated such a hoax.

 

Even more important was another bombshell Brad dropped during our conversation: He contended that the same thing happened to him one day! The Bible flew off the desk as he was sitting there working. Unfortunately, the camera was not recording at the time.

 

Brad’s story still doesn’t defy rational explanations, but it did lead me to do a one-eighty with respect to his integrity. But before I offer my take, see for yourself and consider what’s happening in the following videos.

 

In the first, we drop into “The Bible Incident” segment of the documentary at the 18:33 mark.

 

In the second clip, I replicate the incident at my kitchen island.

 

In Part Two I'll discusses how Brad’s video probably employed the same trick I used, and why the “incident” changed my view of the entire affair.

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