Ghost Videos: A Scientific Analysis — Ronan's Internet Content Venue

Lately, I haven’t been watching, reading or playing a whole lot of blog-friendly media while I grapple with coming off medication for my chronic migraine. You might have noticed, due to the lack of blog. But in the Age Of Content anything can be spun into a blog post, so here I present some absolutely substance-free commentary on the substance-free Youtube videos I’ve been binge-watching while my lidocaine-addled brain calms down.

It’s time to talk about ghosts.

Much like alien abduction stories and UFO encounters, I love hearing about people’s ghost sightings. If you ignore the conceit that they’re meant to be real, you’re left with a concise little horror short that can often be quite eerie in a way that commercially-produced horror has trouble matching, and every so often something comes along that’s hard for even an ardent skeptic to completely dismiss. Nothing that would make me actively believe in ghosts, but interesting enough to chew on for a while, with your brain-mouth.

Lately my go-to source for ghost videos has been this Youtube channel which specializes in compiling supposedly paranormal videos from all around the world. After watching dozens of these compilations, some repeating patterns begin to stand out. Such as:

There Are Ghosts Hiding Behind Everything

We don’t tend to spend a lot of time thinking about what ghosts get up to in their off-time. Do they have hobbies? Do they read ghost newspapers or knit little ghost jumpers for their ghost dogs? According to the internet, ghosts actually have one very specific downtime activity, which is hiding behind every piece of furniture in your house.

A large number of the clips involve mysterious entities peeking out from behind walls, doorways and trees, such as in this example:

Now, less spiritually-attuned readers might comment that this could be literally anything, such as someone’s hand, a small puppet, or some kind of suburban mole that lives in people’s walls. But apparently the person who took the video said there was no one else upstairs at the time, and you’re not allowed to lie about that sort of thing on the internet, so it must have been a ghost. And there are many other examples just like this one, all of them equally inexplicable.

For example, here’s a ghost hiding behind a tree:

All of this very compelling evidence suggests only one hypothesis: ghosts are hiding behind every piece of furniture or object in our environments, ducking out of sight whenever they enter someone’s eyeline. Except sometimes they don’t manage to hide fast enough, allowing hapless mortals to catch a spooky glimpse.

I think ghost hunters could use this information to their advantage, for example by randomly twirling around at high speed in order to catch ghosts peeking out from their hiding spots. Maybe someone could attach a GoPro to their back and spin around in a circle, then analyze the resulting footage for apparitions.

There is one peek-a-boo ghost video which is a little harder to explain, in addition to being actually quite creepy. It’s hard to see in still images, but supposedly this clip shows something white and ethereal peeking out from behind a door before scuttling upwards to the ceiling. It’s obviously not beyond the realm of fakery, but it would have taken a bit more effort to put together than just having an accomplice stick their hand around the doorframe, and if it is a special effect of some kind then the result is pretty effective.

Even when the CGI is a little more obvious, the results can be fun to watch, such as with this video. No, it’s not particularly convincing as an actual ghost sighting, but it’s better than watching Malignant.

Creepy Faces

My favourite genre of ghost evidence is when someone takes a photo or a video of, like, their kid’s birthday party and then later they notice a fucked-up face that wasn’t visible at the time. Some of these videos are extremely good content.

For example, get a load of this:

Obviously, these images are even easier to fake than the peek-a-boo videos. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of photoshop could whip up the above image with little trouble. It even has a vaguely Cottingley fairies-esque vibe which all but invites suspicion of fakery.

Some ghost face videos and photos are more subtle. It appears that ghosts like to hide among small groups of people, especially when the environment contains jumbled items or lots of different textures and colours. Why, a less spiritually-attuned individual than I might posit that some sort of well-documented psychological process was causing people to see human faces in random noise!

But forget about that, check this out:

If this was just paradoleia and not the camera lens gazing across the vale and into the spirit realm beyond, I’d be kind of hard-pressed to work out what exactly we’re looking at here. Anyone else have any ideas? I guess it could just be another person, sitting unusually still amongst the dancing teens. I tried running the image through an AI enhancer and it didn’t touch the “ghost” face at all despite recognizing the two human faces, so make of that what you will, I guess.

Ghost Hands

When ghosts aren’t showing off their faces, they like to insert their spooky hands into various locations and openings. Here’s a video of two ghost hands in the same location: one grasping the edge of a boat and the other disappearing into some grass.

To me, the second one looks like it could be the back of some sort of bird: if you interpret the middle “fingers” as actually being tail-feathers, I think it becomes quite clear. And since the video was taken near long grass near water, it’s certainly plausible that there could be waterfowl poking around.

I kind of hope I’m wrong though, because the idea of disembodied ghost hands is very fanciful to me. It’s the sort of thing you used to see in hokey old horror movies and novels, so it’s got this retro charm. Whatever happened to disembodied ghostly body parts? When did that stop being a thing?

Conclusion

In short, ghost are definitely real.