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INVESTIGATING GHOSTS: The Scientific Search for Spirits
Ghosts have fascinated and haunted us for millennia. They appear in our campfire tales, films, books, and television shows as well as in our dreams and nightmares. Despite widespread belief in spirits and the popularity of television ghost hunting shows, scientific evidence for them remains elusive. Investigating Ghosts is the first book to examine the history and techniques of ghost hunting from folkloric, scientific, and sociocultural perspectives.
No mere armchair scholar, author Benjamin Radford's book is based on nearly twenty years of first-hand, science-based investigations and research. Investigating Ghosts will entertain and educate skeptics and true believers alike, separating fact from fiction about this timeless mystery.
Topics include: 1) Guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports; 2) Analyzing photographic, audio, and video evidence; 3) Ghost hunting equipment: What works, what doesn't, and why; 4) In-depth case studies of solved ghost investigations; 5) Understanding the psychology of ghost experiences
No mere armchair scholar, author Benjamin Radford's book is based on nearly twenty years of first-hand, science-based investigations and research. Investigating Ghosts will entertain and educate skeptics and true believers alike, separating fact from fiction about this timeless mystery.
Topics include: 1) Guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports; 2) Analyzing photographic, audio, and video evidence; 3) Ghost hunting equipment: What works, what doesn't, and why; 4) In-depth case studies of solved ghost investigations; 5) Understanding the psychology of ghost experiences
- GenresParanormalNonfiction
395 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 18, 2017
13 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Radford
20 books49 followersBenjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and a Research Fellow with the non-profit educational organization the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has written thousands of articles on a wide variety of topics, including urban legends, the paranormal, critical thinking, and media literacy. He is author of nine books: Hoaxes, Myths, and Manias: Why We Need Critical Thinking (with sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew); Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us, examining the ways in which deception is used in various media to influence decision making and public policy; Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World’s Most Elusive Creatures (with Joe Nickell), a scientific examination of lake monsters around the world; Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries; and Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore; The Martians Have Landed! A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes (with Bob Bartholomew); Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment (Winner of the 2015 Southwest Book Award); and Bad Clowns, as well as a novel titled The Merchant of Dust. His newest book is "Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits." It is the first book to examine the history, culture, methods, and folklore of ghost investigation, from Victorian-era Spiritualists to modern-day TV ghost hunters.
Radford has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in education. He is a regular columnist for LiveScience.com, Discovery News, Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the Skeptical Briefs newsletter. Radford regularly speaks at universities, colleges, and conferences across the country and has appeared on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Learning Channel, CBC, BBC, CNN, and other networks with three letters. He also served as a consultant for the MTV series The Big Urban Myth Show and an episode of the CBS crime drama CSI.
Radford has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in education. He is a regular columnist for LiveScience.com, Discovery News, Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and the Skeptical Briefs newsletter. Radford regularly speaks at universities, colleges, and conferences across the country and has appeared on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Learning Channel, CBC, BBC, CNN, and other networks with three letters. He also served as a consultant for the MTV series The Big Urban Myth Show and an episode of the CBS crime drama CSI.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 6, 2021
I went through a phase, I’ll confess, of watching about eleven seasons of Ghost Hunters. I was intrigued by some (not much) of what they found, but the concept was new to me and the investigators were mostly charismatic. I was always bothered, however, when they claimed to be doing scientific investigations. Benjamin Radford explains that discomfort in this book. A ghost investigator (he doesn’t dismiss ghosts out of hand), Radford is well aware of what the scientific method is and how these shows aren’t science. He doesn’t debunk, he explains.
This book includes some analyses of investigations both conducted by the author and others. He explains why evidence gathering isn’t the same as scientific exploration. As I note elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) the possibility remains open that ghosts simply can’t be measured. Science may not be the only way to know the world. Still, Radford is doing necessary work. Too many people are easily fooled into thinking using scientific gadgets is the same thing as science.
Radford remains open to the possibility of ghosts. He’s also skeptical of claims that overreach. Ghost hunting, he admits, can be fun and entertaining. The methods used, however, and the results they deliver underwhelm. He doesn’t single out any one televised ghost hunting group but indicates how they use similar techniques and never really move the ball forward. His book is insightful and sympathetic to the cause. It is worth reading by anyone who wonders about the hereafter.
This book includes some analyses of investigations both conducted by the author and others. He explains why evidence gathering isn’t the same as scientific exploration. As I note elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World) the possibility remains open that ghosts simply can’t be measured. Science may not be the only way to know the world. Still, Radford is doing necessary work. Too many people are easily fooled into thinking using scientific gadgets is the same thing as science.
Radford remains open to the possibility of ghosts. He’s also skeptical of claims that overreach. Ghost hunting, he admits, can be fun and entertaining. The methods used, however, and the results they deliver underwhelm. He doesn’t single out any one televised ghost hunting group but indicates how they use similar techniques and never really move the ball forward. His book is insightful and sympathetic to the cause. It is worth reading by anyone who wonders about the hereafter.
June 21, 2020
I'm not your average ghost hunter. Neither am I your average skeptic. While I don't personally believe in ghosts, I'm certainly open to being convinced, and I certainly LOVE the stories. As a horror fan and a magician, I've retold and recreated ghost stories in fictional and theatrical settings, but as a skeptic, I've never had any experience that can justify a belief in the paranormal--and not for lack of searching. As such, this ought to be the perfect sort of book for me. The author isn't a credulous believer, but is willing to look into supernatural claims anyway. Perfect! That's the way things ought to be.
And the fact of the matter is, the author is correct about (almost) everything in the book. By rights, then, this should rank among my favorite books on the topic. It does not, however, and that has a lot to do with unfulfilled expectations. The subtitle of the book promises to inform the reader about "the scientific search for spirits," and the publisher's description on the back cover promises, among other things, "guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports," "analyzing audio, video, and other evidence," and information about what equipment to use or not to use during an investigation. The fact of the matter is, these topics are barely covered at all!
Rather than being a guidebook for scientific paranormal investigation, this book is actually a 300+ screed about how woefully unscientific most investigations are. Fair enough, and the criticism is well-deserved, but it's also nothing new. I've been barking up that tree for years. And as for the ghost-hunting TV shows? Most people watch those to LAUGH at them, rather than to be informed by them. What I wanted was to learn about specific techniques useful in a real investigation, not merely to be warned against poor techniques. Nowhere does the author tell us what equipment to use, for instance, for audio surveillance, nor does he suggest guidelines for the correct placement of audio surveillance equipment. Instead, he merely complains that most EVP evidence is not really evidence of anything. He's right, but we already KNOW that! Even if we didn't, we got the message the first time he said so; had he not repeated the same points ad nauseum, he might have had sufficient space left over to offer some "dos" instead of merely "don'ts."
An example will demonstrate my point. In a chapter concerning "Ghosts On Audio," fewer than three of the chapter's 35 pages are devoted to "improving scientific EVP research," and even those tips are what most scientifically literate readers would call fairly self-evident, rather than offering useful information for the would-be investigator.
Worse, in the author's haste to differentiate scientific research from non-scientific "ghost hunting," he sometimes exceeds the scope of his topic. For instance, on page 296, he contradicts himself when he writes: "Belanger, like most authors of books of 'true' ghost stories and reports, wants to have it both ways; they like to fill books and web pages offering legends, stories, and anecdotes as evidence of ghosts and spirits, while hedging and admitting that at the end of the day they are proof of nothing. Unlike Belanger and other authors of ghost reports, I do expect my readers to believe what I write, because I devote substantial time, effort, and scholarship to determining the truth, telling fact from fiction. There's nothing wrong with collecting and retelling ghost stories, but that should not be confused with research or investigation." Fair enough, but if there's nothing wrong with retelling ghost stories while admitting they're merely anecdotes that don't prove anything, what's your point? If the authors of those collections aren't pretending to be scientists, why are they quoted AT ALL in a book about the SCIENTIFIC investigation of the paranormal? I don't care what non-scientists are doing; I wanted to learn about how scientists do it.
The same mistake is repeated not only in that quotation, but in the book's overall structure. The final two (of only 12) chapters concern an investigation in which the author took part. Admittedly, it makes for fascinating reading, and was actually the most enjoyable part of the book for me. However, its inclusion raises some significant questions, because this investigation was conducted as part of a TV show rather than as part of a scientific endeavor, and while the author carefully documents his attempts to bring some scientific sobriety to the proceedings (and good on him for that), one wonders why he didn't instead choose to conclude his book by documenting one of his own investigations, which (presumably) would have been conducted by scientific means from start to finish, with ALL participants playing by the same rules. Indeed, the inclusion of this particular case study seems to support my hypothesis that he was more interested in demonstrating how unscientific others are rather than helping his readers conduct better scientific investigations.
This isn't a bad book. It's entertaining reading and the information, as I said, is, in most cases, valid (I do disagree with the author on a few points, but that's neither here nor there, and bears little weight in my assessment of the book as a whole). But we come back to the same problem time and again: whenever the author raises a topic that could actually be USEFUL (how to conduct a statistical analysis, how to set up video or audio surveillance, forensic video analysis, how to interview a witness, etc., etc.), he either falls completely silent or claims the matter is beyond the scope of the book (whereas to me those topics seem far more within the scope of the book than most of what is actually included: namely, the repetitive refutation of non-scientific techniques). Of course, a complete text on all of these matters would indeed have exceeded the page count of this book, so I had some hope that the "further reading" chapter would point toward some recommended textbooks on relevant topics. Instead, the author merely points to documentation of some of his own prior investigations.
I appreciate Radford's work as a scientific skeptic and investigator and I highly recommend reading about some of his investigations. However, if you're interested in learning more about investigative techniques yourself, I cannot recommend this book as the way to find the necessary information.
And the fact of the matter is, the author is correct about (almost) everything in the book. By rights, then, this should rank among my favorite books on the topic. It does not, however, and that has a lot to do with unfulfilled expectations. The subtitle of the book promises to inform the reader about "the scientific search for spirits," and the publisher's description on the back cover promises, among other things, "guidelines for scientifically investigating ghost reports," "analyzing audio, video, and other evidence," and information about what equipment to use or not to use during an investigation. The fact of the matter is, these topics are barely covered at all!
Rather than being a guidebook for scientific paranormal investigation, this book is actually a 300+ screed about how woefully unscientific most investigations are. Fair enough, and the criticism is well-deserved, but it's also nothing new. I've been barking up that tree for years. And as for the ghost-hunting TV shows? Most people watch those to LAUGH at them, rather than to be informed by them. What I wanted was to learn about specific techniques useful in a real investigation, not merely to be warned against poor techniques. Nowhere does the author tell us what equipment to use, for instance, for audio surveillance, nor does he suggest guidelines for the correct placement of audio surveillance equipment. Instead, he merely complains that most EVP evidence is not really evidence of anything. He's right, but we already KNOW that! Even if we didn't, we got the message the first time he said so; had he not repeated the same points ad nauseum, he might have had sufficient space left over to offer some "dos" instead of merely "don'ts."
An example will demonstrate my point. In a chapter concerning "Ghosts On Audio," fewer than three of the chapter's 35 pages are devoted to "improving scientific EVP research," and even those tips are what most scientifically literate readers would call fairly self-evident, rather than offering useful information for the would-be investigator.
Worse, in the author's haste to differentiate scientific research from non-scientific "ghost hunting," he sometimes exceeds the scope of his topic. For instance, on page 296, he contradicts himself when he writes: "Belanger, like most authors of books of 'true' ghost stories and reports, wants to have it both ways; they like to fill books and web pages offering legends, stories, and anecdotes as evidence of ghosts and spirits, while hedging and admitting that at the end of the day they are proof of nothing. Unlike Belanger and other authors of ghost reports, I do expect my readers to believe what I write, because I devote substantial time, effort, and scholarship to determining the truth, telling fact from fiction. There's nothing wrong with collecting and retelling ghost stories, but that should not be confused with research or investigation." Fair enough, but if there's nothing wrong with retelling ghost stories while admitting they're merely anecdotes that don't prove anything, what's your point? If the authors of those collections aren't pretending to be scientists, why are they quoted AT ALL in a book about the SCIENTIFIC investigation of the paranormal? I don't care what non-scientists are doing; I wanted to learn about how scientists do it.
The same mistake is repeated not only in that quotation, but in the book's overall structure. The final two (of only 12) chapters concern an investigation in which the author took part. Admittedly, it makes for fascinating reading, and was actually the most enjoyable part of the book for me. However, its inclusion raises some significant questions, because this investigation was conducted as part of a TV show rather than as part of a scientific endeavor, and while the author carefully documents his attempts to bring some scientific sobriety to the proceedings (and good on him for that), one wonders why he didn't instead choose to conclude his book by documenting one of his own investigations, which (presumably) would have been conducted by scientific means from start to finish, with ALL participants playing by the same rules. Indeed, the inclusion of this particular case study seems to support my hypothesis that he was more interested in demonstrating how unscientific others are rather than helping his readers conduct better scientific investigations.
This isn't a bad book. It's entertaining reading and the information, as I said, is, in most cases, valid (I do disagree with the author on a few points, but that's neither here nor there, and bears little weight in my assessment of the book as a whole). But we come back to the same problem time and again: whenever the author raises a topic that could actually be USEFUL (how to conduct a statistical analysis, how to set up video or audio surveillance, forensic video analysis, how to interview a witness, etc., etc.), he either falls completely silent or claims the matter is beyond the scope of the book (whereas to me those topics seem far more within the scope of the book than most of what is actually included: namely, the repetitive refutation of non-scientific techniques). Of course, a complete text on all of these matters would indeed have exceeded the page count of this book, so I had some hope that the "further reading" chapter would point toward some recommended textbooks on relevant topics. Instead, the author merely points to documentation of some of his own prior investigations.
I appreciate Radford's work as a scientific skeptic and investigator and I highly recommend reading about some of his investigations. However, if you're interested in learning more about investigative techniques yourself, I cannot recommend this book as the way to find the necessary information.
September 19, 2019
Radford is a member/editor for Skeptical Inquirer, regular contributor to Snopes.com, Skeptic Magazine, and other media which attempt to apply a scientific view to the weird things people believe (to paraphrase M. Shermer). In Investigating Ghosts, he presents a useful discussion of how “believers” do their version of science when searching for evidence of ghosts/ghostly phenomena, contrasting that with how real science could be applied to help determine if such phenomena actually exist or not. He doesn’t just poo-poo what these people believe, but tries to explore the errors in logic, basic science, statistics, and data collection, that make their work a pseudo-science at best. An interesting exploration of how the nonsense of non-science often fools people into thinking that actual “evidence” exists where there is “no there there.” The book is not for those who just want some spooky anecdotes, but more an exploration of what self-proclaimed “ghost hunters,” do and believe.
December 9, 2025
I found this book very helpful for the specific case I was trying to research. My grandson died recently, and about a week after he died, my daughter and her husband were backing out of their driveway when their car’s screen dinged with a text from their deceased son. The text was empty. Their son’s phone was in the house, so when they returned, they unpaired his phone and turned off Bluetooth. A day or two later, they were again backing out of the driveway when a favorite song of his started to play, pre-empting the radio station that was already on. When they got back home and looked at their son’s phone, they noticed that Bluetooth had turned back on. Of course, I have nothing but their word (and photos of their car’s media screen showing a text received from their dead son) to corroborate their story, but I was hoping to find some kind of explanation or even just helpful hints to figure out what might be happening.
The previous book I read (Spooky Science by Ankney and Miller) was unhelpful. But Ghost Hunting by Benjamin Radford, even though it didn’t “solve” anything, did provide me with useful suggestions. I can’t prove anything, but I suspect that backing out of the carport brought the car close enough to my grandson’s bedroom window to activate the car’s Bluetooth connection. If the connection wasn’t stable (because the phone was barely in range), then odd things like empty text messages might result. Anyway, I was impressed with this author’s open-mindedness and his rational thought processes. His ghost-hunting experiences were also fun to read about. And while I may not have a definitive answer for the mysterious text from my grandson's phone, I feel better knowing there is a more plausible explanation than “his ghost was trying to contact his parents.”
The previous book I read (Spooky Science by Ankney and Miller) was unhelpful. But Ghost Hunting by Benjamin Radford, even though it didn’t “solve” anything, did provide me with useful suggestions. I can’t prove anything, but I suspect that backing out of the carport brought the car close enough to my grandson’s bedroom window to activate the car’s Bluetooth connection. If the connection wasn’t stable (because the phone was barely in range), then odd things like empty text messages might result. Anyway, I was impressed with this author’s open-mindedness and his rational thought processes. His ghost-hunting experiences were also fun to read about. And while I may not have a definitive answer for the mysterious text from my grandson's phone, I feel better knowing there is a more plausible explanation than “his ghost was trying to contact his parents.”
July 22, 2019
Great skeptical look at paranormal investigation.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews