I’ll admit it, I have a particular weakness for shows about the paranormal, UFO’s and Bigfoot. When channel surfing, when in doubt, I can usually find something crazy on History Channel or Discovery. There’s very little of it (if anything) I believe anymore, but I still find it fascinating. It’s partially because there are still things that are truly mysterious, and partly it’s out of sheer disbelief in some of the crackpot theories they come up with. Sometimes I find myself just yelling back at the screen.
At some point, I’ll probably do more in-depth reviews of some of the current crop of shows, but I thought I’d share this tidbit. The other night I was clicking around and landed on “My Ghost Story” on the Biography channel. It didn’t seem too compelling to me. A couple people were investigating an old lighthouse, supposedly haunted by the ghost of a little boy and…a cat.
They did some EVP work (electronic voice phenomena), where they set up a recorder and record ambient noise as they ask the “spirits” questions. Usually, any sounds captured are just gibberish, or are so vague you could twist it to make it sound like anything. In this case, they captured what actually does clearly sound like a cat meowing. Whether it was a ghost cat or just a neighborhood stray remains to be seen, but I’ll concede it sounded like a cat.
Now, one common technique on these shows is to show a faux computer screen with the audio waveforms of the sound, and a caption at the bottom with the words the investigators think were said by the ghost. It really reinforces their power of suggestion. In this case, even though we clearly hear a cat, the editor still thought it necessary to spell out the word “Meow” on the screen.
I don’t know why, but this struck me so damn funny. Just me? Okay, fine.
Click here to jump to the point in the show where they make this amazing discovery.
