Seacoast History Blog #54
July 8, 2009

Another one of those paranormal loonies called me again today. This guy wanted to know if he could get permission to take his electronic equipment into the Old Statehouse in Portsmouth, NH and get some haunted readings. He was a nice guy. Very nice, but a nutjob. I explained to him that the Old Statehouse in Market Square was torn down in the 1830s. Not so, he insisted. He had read about it on the web (probably on my web site, since he was calling my phone number) and he was certain the building is still standing. (Continued below)

Usually I just hang up. There isn’t a topic going, outside of ethnic cleansing or the legacy of George W. Bush, that gets me hotter under the collar than these people who go around pretending to record psychic readings in haunted historic buildings.

This guy, who says he is from Danville and doesn’t know the area, was as polite as polite could be. I was the crazy one. I suggested that he contact Peter Michaud at the NHDHR in Concord, NH and ask permission to take his "measuring equipment" into the trailer where the last few timbers of the Old Statehouse are stored.

I’d like to say we discussed the topic, but it was mostly me railing against the utter stupidity of taking "scientific readings" with a device that – while it certainly measures something – tells us nothing about nothing, and certainly nothing about the past.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m sure there are worlds and energies we have yet to uncover. And I’m not even opposed to using the supernatural as a tool to draw people toward an interest in history. I got my first taste of history through Poe, Hawthorne, Whittier and others. But like Stephen King, these were fiction writers making a living making things up. They knew it was fiction. These paranormal guys don’t. And while we may someday find a device that tells us more about the "spirit world", it hasn’t been invented yet. The "readings" on those dials are no more scientific than the horoscope based on astrological data.

"You’re using the scientific method," I told the guy from Danville (or was it Danvers?), "but that doesn’t make it science!"

When I go into an old building, I feel the vibe too. Strap a bunch of electronic measuring devices on me, and you would get all sorts of readings. We all have a natural connection to the past. It’s where we come from. And we are all on our way to becoming part of it. But to pretend to know about the past through false science is to distract us from the bits of truth we really know. That is what bugs me about these people. They distract us from the truth, when there is so little truth to go around.

"Well, to each his own," the paranormal guy said. And even then I would not let him rest. Life is short. We don’t have time to waste fogging up the world with false science.

"No, you’re wrong," I told him, knowing that I sounded like a Class-A chauvinist. "If you’re doing it as entertainment, I’m fine with it. But if you’re doing it as science, you’re lying to people."

At this point the paranormal guy was distracted by one or more children screaming bloody murder in the background. He thanked me for my time and my opinion, and signed off as politely as he signed on.

I think what gets me going is that I see my own work – the hundreds of articles on this web site and my books and lectures – as a search for the truth. The historic record is often wrong. Or it is right in the context of another era, but wrong for our very different world. What passes as history is frequently written by powerful people repressing less powerful people, or the facts are whitewashed, or missing, lost or ignored. My job, as small as it is, requires uncovering lost facts and struggling with great effort to replace fiction with fact. My other job is to make that task interesting and to draw as many people as possible to what the sourpusses in academia and the media call "revisionist history". Or what I call -- the truth.

These paranormal "studies" are just the opposite. The research is spotty at best. They tend toward folklore, not history. They believe everyone who has a crazy story to tell. They don’t dig deeply. They don’t check sources. They are evangelists, not intellectuals. They cannot think critically, only emotionally. They need to get a life.

Then they show up with their imaginary equipment that measures nothing in particular and create a froth of statistics that mean nothing at all. They do not seem to understand that the movie "Ghostbusters" was a parody, not an instruction manual.

And worst of all, people listen, in large numbers. Americans overall (not the readers of this site, of course) are largely ignorant of their own history. People think Plymouth Rock is real and American poverty is not. They are more interested in myth than fact, and they don’t see how history repeats itself, because they don’t know what happened in the past.

That doesn’t bother me. I’m used to it. I don’t know anything about nuclear physics or electromagnetic waves. It’s not a crime to be dumb.

What bothers me is when people make the fog foggier. I feel, and this is pretty pretentious of me, that my job is a bit like picking up litter on the beach. My life is all about making the beach cleaner and clearer. Then along comes some paranormal guy, tossing shiny plastic tokens all over the place. People run and pick them up. They skip them into the surf, and the next morning, the beach is littered with them.

No that metaphor stinks. What bothers me is that people are lazy. They are willing to believe any nutjob that comes along and tells them up is down and down is up. They have more faith than sense.

Paranormal researchers do not do the heavy historic lifting. They zip in and out of an historic site, record their readings and split. "Yup, there was a ghost here all right. Where do we go next?" I’ve spent decades researching the same site over and over and inch by agonizing inch, I’m slowly beginning to get a picture of this town – just one town in a vast nation of towns. Yet more often than not, the one question I’m asked at a lecture is about ghosts or haunted houses.

And I guess I just resent the snake-oil fakirs who breeze in and out and leave us with less than we had before. No it’s worse. Like poltergeists, they make a lot of noise to no end, then switch the road signs on their way out of town. Like false prophets, they create new myths in the name of science. Like imps, they blow out the lamp of knowledge just for fun. Like sludge, they clog and stiffen our arteries. Like lemmings, they trample the fragile path to enlightenment with a thousand frantic footsteps.

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.