Mediums and recordings.

I watched a 'Most Haunted' episode set in Fort Delaware and was struck by something.

One of the apparitions they (once more) failed to capture on film was in the kitchen, where a woman comes in, lifts the lid of a pot, replaces it and then leaves. Many people have seen this and it's the same every time so I wouldn't call this a ghost. I'd call it a recording. The few who visit regularly will know that I differentiate between real spirit hauntings, where the spirit actually interacts with the living, and recordings that play back the same way each time like a TV rerun and don't interact because there is no actual ghost there.

The thing is, their medium picked up on the spirit of a woman in the kitchen and described what she did.

Now, this is the confusing part. I don't think a spirit medium could pick up a recording phenomenon. There's no spirit present to give them the information. It's just a recording.

But then, we are dealing with untested territory and indeed with matters for which there exists, as yet, no definitive scientific test at all.

So, there might be mediums who can only detect spirits, there might be mediums who can only detect recordings, and there might be those who can detect both. How would we know? In fact, how would the medium know?

If you're detecting something unseen by others and which you cannot measure against a defined scale because no such scale exists, how could you tell whether you were speaking to spirit, demon, or just watching a rerun?

I'm sure there are mediums out there who will say 'I just know, intuitively,' but for a scientist, that's not good enough. How do you know? What are the signs? How do you perceive the differences?

Seriously. I want to collect and analyse this information. There exists, currently, a vast number of theories of the paranormal and this situation can't continue. We really have to start to pin it down if science is ever going to be persuaded to treat the whole field as legitimate research.

So, if there are mediums reading, let me know.

If, by chance, the 'Most Haunted' team are reading, you might increase your chances if you employ people who don't run screaming every time a floorboard creaks or a moth lands on their arm. Just a suggestion.