Paranormal phenomena and skeptics

Tonya Hacker has heard voices. She has seen the image of a little boy appear in an abandoned hotel.

“I’m a ghost hunter,” the Oklahoma City woman says. “I am not a crazy ghost hunter.”

Bryan Farha is wide open to something like that — meeting a being from another planet, or even just an earthling with real paranormal abilities.

“I would love for an alien space craft to land on the White House lawn,” he said. “I would love for a psychic to predict something about the future.”

But the two remain pretty much on opposite sides of the belief gap, at least when it comes to spirits. Hacker, founder of GHOULI, Ghost Haunts of Oklahoma and Urban Legend Investigations, is confident ghosts exist and have shown themselves. Farha, a psychology professor at Oklahoma City University who has written for Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazine, thinks no such things have come close to being proven to exist, even if some people think they’ve discovered unusual things.

“We cannot draw conclusions that something is of a sixth sense or of a supernatural origin just because we can’t explain it,” he said.

Hacker says she’s among the more skeptical people in the ghost-hunting “community.” And it’s a big one. What used to be a small “trekkie” community of people who would chat on message boards has exploded.

“There are millions of people, thousands of teams. There’s like 50-something teams here in Oklahoma,” she said. “It’s a total religion.”

People have gone broke, gotten divorced and “ditched” their kids over ghost-hunting, she said. “It consumes them.”

Hacker says she spends much of her investigating time finding perfectly earthly explanations for what some people attribute to ghosts, like high levels of electromagnetic radiation or carbon monoxide, or drafty windows. But she said she also has been convinced by evidence, particularly “electronic voice phenomena,” or voices that spontaneously appear on recording devices. And a few apparitions.

“I’ve witnessed a lot of things,” she said.

Farha said he doesn’t mind people being fascinated by strange things, just the leaping to conclusions over them.

“I don’t mind the belief in it,” he said. “But to blindly believe in it is where the danger lies.”

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