The Estes method is an update to the ghost hunter’s Spirit Box, with all the same flaws
The Estes method is an update to the ghost hunter’s Spirit Box, with all the same flaws
A modern take on the Spirit Box, the Estes Method is similarly doomed to fail, as long as ghost hunters continue to put their biases ahead of the science
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19227931
As a result, ghost hunters reinvent the wheel in an attempt to be scientific, only to find it’s a wheel that never worked in the first place, and now they’ve made it even worse.
The latest trend sweeping through ghost-hunting groups is an excellent example of this issue. A modern twist on traditional spirit communication, the Estes Method (invented by American ghost tour operators), offers a new take on the Spirit Box, which ghost hunters have used to attempt communication with ghosts for decades.
The Spirit Box rapidly sweeps through radio frequencies, creating a stream of white noise and audio snippets from different broadcast sources. Advocates claim that spirits can manipulate these audio fragments to form words or sentences to communicate with the living.
The method is simple; the ghost hunter asks a question, and the ghost uses the audio from the Spirit Box to answer them.
In reality, the messages of ghostly origin result from listener bias, suggestion, and audio illusions. Sentences from the broadcasts are often incomplete, meaning that the phonemes (human speech sounds) can be misheard and, more importantly, misinterpreted as relevant to whatever ghost a ghost hunter is trying to communicate with.
These guys better be careful, they may end up proving ghosts aren't real. Like the flat-earthers.
But idk, they're just as dumb.