I’ve recently been chatting with a journalist, Geoffrey Bunting, about the topic of ghost-hunting technology. It was triggered by him working on a piece marking the 15th anniversary of the Xbox Kinect, something I’ve posted about on this site. While exploring the technical aspects, limitations, and weaknesses of the hardware, the ‘afterlife’ of the project as a SLS system for use by ghost-hunters is what has brought him to me, although many others could have discussed it in far finer detail than I could. For me, this developed into an opportunity to explain a little more about WHY I wrote a science show about ghost-hunting. That’s what this post documents. (UPDATE: The Guardian article was published 3rd Mar ’25, and The Verge article was published on 30th March.)
Question 1) When it comes to the existence of ghosts (and our ability to detect them), are you a believer or a sceptic?
Sceptic or believer? Great question. Anyone that professes to have any kind of religious belief immediately classes themselves as someone who believes in the supernatural, gods, devils, good versus evil, that kind of thing. As to whether that translates to belief in the paranormal, which can include UFOs, telepathy, cryptozoology (Big Foot, etc), the jury is out. You can be religious, believe in spirits, but not consider them to be lost souls, or dead loved ones. Tough one. I’d say I’m religious, but don’t believe ghosts are dead people.
Question 2) What are your thoughts on the Kinect on a technical level? Was its moderate gaming performance unfair? Was it ahead of its time? Are you surprised it’s had such a diverse afterlife in multiple fields?
I never used the Kinect as a gaming interface. I had a Playstation 1, then a Playstation 2, with the EyeToy. Certainly that VGA resolution camera wasn’t great. I imagine that the Kinect was good for Xbox users, and the idea of movement as a controller was a welcome diversification helping to explore new gaming markets. So yes, it’s been a technical level only, but I have respect for the way that it was designed and produced. It was WAY more than Sony worked with at the time.
How successfully it was used on the Xbox, I can’t really comment on. The Wii was where I lived for that kind of motion gaming, which was certainly great, especially for engaging my parents with, who were not gamers at all. In the same way that not every Wii game was a hit, even if the tech behind it was good, the success of the Kinect would have fallen on the games that utilised it.
I principally engaged with it because I was aware of its use in ghost-hunting, via Ghost Adventures, which my stepdaughter loved. After all, I wrote a science show about ghost-hunting tech to appeal to an audience that maybe isn’t switched onto science, or who find their views radically different to a stereotypically skeptic scientist. My aim was to encourage tinkering, coding, innovation, and employment of the scientific method in an enjoyable and practical way.
I do wonder how much Microsoft considered the non-gaming fields from the inception, especially by making the software development kits freely available. That was a totally different approach to how Sony ran their projects.
Question 3) With your understanding of how the Kinect works, what do you think is happening when the Kinect deployed as the SLS camera is picking up figures in empty space?
When ghost-hunters use the Kinect as an ’SLS’, false positives are a certainty. It is far out of the environmental conditions for standard use. It’s quite normal for ghost hunters to be filming themselves in the dark, with infra-red cameras and torches. You’re bathing the scene with IR light, while using a sensor that measures a specific pattern of infra-red dots. If you imagine how easy it is for drivers to be blinded by the low, winter sun on a bright day, you can appreciate how equally confused your Kinect is when it is fed too much IR information. While you continue to drive on, where you assume the road to be; likewise, the Kinect ‘assumes’ it is receiving accurate data.
I’ve also seen it provide false positives in brightly-lit rooms, where sunlight is entering the room. The algorithm is trying to make sense of the environment, but is principally expecting to see a body there. That was its main gaming purpose. We may recognise the face of Jesus in a piece of toast, or an elephant in a rock formation; our brains are trying to make sense of the randomness around us. Is it really the face of Jesus? The Kinect software has the same purpose, but doesn’t have the executive control to overrule its hunches.
Question 4) The Kinect, whether it’s 15 years old or a newer version, represents aging technology and joins a lot of other similar aging technology in ghost hunters’ arsenals, who seem to prefer dictaphones from the 2000s, old radios, and often slightly dubious cameras that lead to a lot of ambiguity around what they present as evidence. What do you think is the appeal of older and/or ambiguous technology when it comes to ghost hunting?
If a person pays good money to enjoy a ghost hunt, what are they after? They prime themselves for a ’spooky encounter’, and open up to the suggestion of anything being ‘evidence of a ghost’. They want to find a ghost, so they make sure they do. Afterall, nobody pays cinema prices to see a movie they know to be terrible, just so they can be disappointed by the experience. There is a level of investment in the experience.
As many ghost-hunters will say that ’the best equipment to sense with is the person themselves’, I can also understand how something that has built-in ambiguity would be the tech of choice. I’ve watched ghost-hunters use two different devices for measuring electromagnetic fields (EMF). One would be an accurate and expensive Trifield TF2, that never moves unless it is actually encounters an electrical field. The other would be a £15, no-brand, ‘KII’ device, with five lights that go berserk when someone so much as sneezes. Which one was more popular, do you think? Maybe this is why nobody wants to use the second generation Kinect: it had so much more error-checking, which limited its false-positives.
However, old tech is ofter cheaply available from charity shops, or eBay. Because I want to encourage people to begin tinkering, join a Makerspace, learn some coding, or try breadboarding, I want them to have access to stuff they can break, and not sweat about too much when it blows up. Burning out an Arduino is not as expensive as destroying your mom’s new MacBook.
Question 5) What are your thoughts on the morality that these kits are being sold at levels magnitudes beyond the usual reselling market? With SpiritShack, for instance, selling an SLS for £400 when you can get a Kinect on eBay for under £15.
On that note, it may be a bit unscrupulous to sell pre-made kit at greatly inflated costs, especially when it comes to selling software you can download for free from Microsoft, in the case of the Kinect. What you pay them your tenner for, are essentially the instructions on what to install, in what order; (information and links I’ve provided for free on my website.)
Why did I do that? I’m in the field of encouraging people to be curious, ask questions, find answers, and try to develop new skills for their future. My hope is that we live in a society that fosters curiosity; that searches for knowledge and tries to make it work, before it resorts to buying it.
There was a follow request up to these answers:
“…given your interest in ghost hunting and its tech, and in encouraging people to explore these questions themselves, whether you can say a little on the value of ghost hunting – as in, what people want to get out of it in your experience. I’m aware there are some bad actors in the space, who perhaps want to take advantage of folks’ grief, but there are also a lot of sincere people looking for something in this and I was having an interesting chat earlier about how there is something very human in this desire to find proof of something more and it may well be interesting to ground this piece in that (which would be great to have a quote on) even if part of this exploration is explaining what’s happening on a technical level in these situations. Again, thought you might have some sincere insight.”
I’ve only really come at ghost-hunting as a means to reach an audience underserved by science, who may have thoughts and opinions different to what science has discovered. Some may perceive dialogue on the topic as a sensitive subject, assuming that science maintains a polarised stance to the target audience. (The reason I use dialogue is because I’m also interested in listening to the stories visitors share about why they ghost-hunt, how and what they experience. This may inform how I approach talking about the topic with future engagements. More on this later.) Beyond talking about ghost-hunting, the wider implications may also be true of strategically unlocking dialogue on opinions about causes of climate change, or vaccination; vastly important topics with wildly differing views amongst various groups.
So, by opening my show with: “I don’t want you to stop ghost-hunting, but you can do it better if you apply the scientific method…” my aim is to approach the controversy on common ground. What then follows demonstrates how the tech used to supply ‘evidence’ of ghosts is fallible, just like human holding it. So while the medium of the engagement is a ’science show about ghost-hunting tech’, the messaging can be better read as, ‘Applying the scientific method can help you be more thorough in assessing what you are experiencing, before you wrongly leap to to the wrong conclusion. Here’s how you can try it.’
An example: Let’s say one member of a team experiences a cold spot while in a room, on a dark night, during a ghost-hunt. A non-scientist may immediately proclaim it as presence of a ghost. Their logic would flow: Phenomenon ‘A’ = evidence of a ghost. Excitement heightens, the group dynamic changes, and the team unwittingly adopts a scenario of social conformity. I did a show at the British Science Festival in 2010 about this:
People can be caught up in the moment, wanting to attain what they paid money to experience. However, applying the scientific method, the thought process is different: Observed phenomenon ‘A’ may be caused by reasons ‘B’, ‘C’, or ‘D’. These could be a draft from a window; blood-flow fluctuations in my skin caused by feeling unsettled, making me sense cold more; or something else. So we design and conduct experiments to test for reasons ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’. (I’ve seen so many ghost-hunters try to measure the air temperature of a cold spot in front of them using a FLIR camera, I cry. These devices only measure the temperature of solid objects, not air. For that, try using a thermometer. A proper face-palm moment.) Anyway, even if all these are proven to not be the cause of phenomenon ‘A’, the only conclusion we can reach is that, ‘Phenomenon ‘A’ is something we don’t yet understand the cause of’. To assume you experienced a ghost, without asking and trying to answer any appropriate questions, is sadly what happens too often.
I say ’sadly’ but consider the reasons people go on ghost hunts. On one hand, it may be because it’s a fun entertaining way to watch your mates outside of their comfort zone, spooking each other for laughs. It may be because we’ve seen the tension and terror in television programmes, and want to be scared (again, as entertaining as watching a horror movie). Maybe you just want to collect footage of people using ghost-hunting tech in an earnest fashion, so you can use it in your science show… with consent, of course. (Disclaimer: I’ve accompanied ghost-hunters in this capacity, and have not witnessed or experienced anything either personally, or via equipment, that I couldn’t explain scientifically.)
However, the reasons people ghost-hunt is often tied to deeply entrenched beliefs, or personal experiences that are likely to be ill-founded under appropriate examination. After all, it is an intriguing question: What happens to us when we die? What you believe, will be strongly rooted in a chosen particular system of religious beliefs. (I include Atheism in this, as a system of religious belief.) Yet, even within shared categories of belief, opinions may vary. For instance, not all Christians believe in an afterlife, depending on how well they have studied the Bible. Likewise, not all ghost-hunters will agree on the causes or meanings of what they experience; There is a lot of interpretation going on, as in the example mentioned above. I’m a scientist, so I tend to interpret a rational explanation for a particular phenomenon. Where my step-daughter ascribes much meaning to seeing a feather on the floor of our living room, often commenting that ‘Grandad is around’, I just see it as the fact that the cushions on the sofa should really be made of cloth with a higher thread-count that what they currently are.
Mercifully, I’ve managed to avoid the ‘bad actors’ in my engagements so far. They have recently been well parodied in the 2024 Plex series, Ghost Show. I’m sure there are unscrupulous people who claim to be mediums, or be sensitive to a spirit realm, and they will be happy to take your cash. To the person who either wants to be entertained, or who genuinely wants to quiet their unsettled thoughts about lost loved ones, etc, this would be no different to seeing a palmist at a funfair, reading your horoscope, attending a seance, or using another form of divination such as tarot. To what degree of seriousness you place on these experiences is very much in the hands of the individual parting with the cash, and often outside the bounds of the proclaimed beliefs of that individual’s religious stance.
It’s very difficult to rationalise what makes an individual want to go ghost-hunting. Personal belief is paramount, and as varied as the population’s reasons for ghost-hunting. Which raises the focus on the individualised belief that a person holds, even when they do profess to hold guiding, religious beliefs. How much weight can we place on the individual when it comes to how serious they take their professed belief framework?
For instance, the concept of engaging the services of a spirit medium, fortune telling, and inquiring of the dead are condemned in both old and new testaments of the Bible (Deuteronomy 18, v10-12, and Galatians 5, v19-21 respectively). And even in biblical accounts where mediums appeared to be at least partly correct, their advice either led to tragic events (in the case of King Saul), or their skills were removed by a form of exorcism (as done by the Apostle Paul in Acts 16, v16-18). Even a cursory glance at the topic of what the Bible says happens when we die reveals that the dead aren’t conscious, and cannot haunt anyone (Ecclesiastes 9, v5-6). In light of this, it would be very hard for a person professing to be Christian to find loopholes in the instruction manual they claim to be the word of God. But they do, and they go ghost-hunting, and they break these sacred rules for personal reasons. Maybe curiosity is the new god. Maybe people will continue to seek confirmation bias; constantly asking the questions until they receive an answer they’re prepared to accept. Perhaps the critical question should be more like, ‘What do we WANT to happen to us when we die?’
That approach is also not compatible with the scientific method. When science conducts research into a matter, and finds no evidence to support it, it accepts that as ’true’ for now, or until we can understand the construct better using better equipment, and moves on to another topic. Maybe this is why research into the paranormal is not a consideration for mainstream science. Historically, the research was done, and all the claims explored lacked evidence that could be proved using a scientific method. Anecdotal evidence of any paranormal experience is out-weighed by the body of evidence suggesting other causes for people’s susceptibility to forming belief in these experiences.
This is one area where science does have an interest in the paranormal: why people believe it. I can heartily recommend Chris French’s 2024 book, the Science of Weird Shit, and his previous book, Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience, which actually reads more like a thesis on the topic. Both books explore the areas of traditional psychology, presenting reviews of these bear on why people believe in the paranormal, etc.
I’m more than aware that at the end of this post, I didn’t really answer the question succinctly, so here goes… For me, the value in people ghost-hunting is all to do with folks asking the right questions at the right time. Investigating ‘what REALLY made [that phenomenon] happen?’ will quickly discount false-positives they may have thought were ‘ghosts’. With time, they will recognise that there are always sound, logical reasons for the events they experience.