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I'm going to offer a different explanation for why some hospitals are
haunted, since I would think that a ghost would want to go back to the
place where they lived or stay around their family. Since Recurrent
Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK) is caused by someone who's in physical
or emotional pain, and there are a lot of people in hospitals who are
in pain, hospitals could be haunted not by the dead but by the living.
This could be especially true in mental hospitals where people's
perceptions of reality are warped. In fact, I think this is something
that should be looked into. A lot of patients in mental hospitals who
are seeing things may really be seeing something (and of course some of
the things they're seeing are still imaginary). They could be seeing
poltergeist activity, either created by themselves or by other people
in the hospital. As we said earlier in the entry about the different
types of hauntings, it IS possible in a poltergeist case to see
apparitions, but what's actually happening is the person is
telepathically projecting their fears to other people in the vicinity.
It can be witnessed by multiple people at the same time, but the
poltergeist agent has to be somewhere in the vicinity. No activity is
experienced while they are away.

Then for the abandoned
hospitals where there are no people anymore, they could be haunted
because the patients were mistreated or it could be residual from all
the people who were in pain when they stayed there. It's also possible
that the person "wasn't all there" when they were alive, and that could
be another reason why they're still hanging around.

In order to see something with your eyes, it needs to first have matter. Ghosts don't have matter so how can we see them?

The
theory is that when someone sees a ghost, it's telepathy. The ghost
consciousness projects itself to a person and then their brain creates
the image of a ghost. The reason ghosts wear clothes is because we're
seeing them the way they see themselves. When you close your eyes and
picture yourself, don't you imagine yourself wearing clothes? Also,
most people when they picture themselves don't see themselves right
down to their feet, which could be why ghosts are often seen without
feet. (Auerbach)

Why do ghosts appear in pictures? That's
Psychokinesis (PK), or "mind over matter". We know from experiments
that PK affects film, so that's what the ghost uses to appear in the
picture. "In their lab the Soviet scientists [Sergeyev and Ivanenko]
had observed that while making objects move, [the subject] Kulagina
caused exposurelike effects on sealed photographic film. Moved objects
actually left distinct traces across the sealed film." (Broughton,
p.142) Sometimes the ghost may only project itself to one thing at a
time, which is why we may get something in a photo that we didn't see
with our eyes. However, just because you didn't see it with your eyes
when you were taking the picture doesn't make it paranormal. It could
be a camera defect. It could be dust illuminated by the camera flash.
It could be the camera strap or a finger in front of the camera, etc,
etc.

Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVPs), or ghost voices caught
on tape, are PK too. The ghost doesn't have a mouth or vocal cords to
make speech, so it has to manipulate the voice recorder using PK. The
reason ghosts are able to "hear" our EVP questions when they don't have
ears is telepathy. But you don't die and just suddenly you are able to
do all these things. They have to be learned, like Patrick Swayze in
the movie "Ghost". That could take forever, which is why older
hauntings are sometimes more active. (Auerbach) Some may never learn
how to do it, or it might be really hard, which is why we can't sit
down with a voice recorder and have a whole conversation with a ghost.
They might not even be able to hear us.

References:

Classes on Parapsychology taken with Loyd Auerbach

Broughton, Richard. "Parapsychology: The Controversial Science"

Why are cemeteries haunted? Unless someone was murdered or hung there,
there really isn't any reason why they should be haunted. If a ghost
knows it's dead, why would it choose to hang around in a cemetery all
day when it could go somewhere else? And if it doesn't know it's dead,
then it should stay around the place it lived. One possibility is that
it's a residual haunt and not an intelligent. The energy from all the
people who come to the cemetery to grieve gets imprinted onto the
environment. If the ghost knows it's dead and is free to go anywhere it
wants, it's also possible that it could just be visiting its grave. But
traditionally there is no reason why cemeteries should be haunted,
unless someone died there.

There is another theory involving ley
lines, which are hypothetical earth energies that align a number of
places of geographical interest such as old cemeteries, churches,
ancient monuments and megaliths. Some believe that our ancestors could
sense these energies better than us, and they subconsciously placed
cemeteries and churches on these places to try to neutralize the "bad"
energy. This, according to the theory, is why a lot of cemeteries and
churches (places that are supposed to be holy) are haunted - because
spirits are drawn to the energy there, which they use to manifest. One
of the problems with that theory is, as has been said in previous
entries, ghosts don't draw energy from batteries, appliances, and the
environment to manifest. Many researchers believe that ghosts ARE some
kind of energy, they have their own. Also, ley lines haven't been
proven. Skeptics say that the so-called ley lines could be the product
of ancient surveying, property markings, or commonly travelled pathways.

Before
you investigate a cemetery, you should research the history to find out
if anyone died in it, because otherwise it's probably not haunted.

We don't know what consciousness is, and until we do this is all pretty
much up in the air. Ghosts may not even exist, or they could be
something totally different. Since we don't know what consciousness is,
here are some of the different theories of what it could be.

An Electromagnetic Field

Robert
Becker is an M.D. and very established research scientist. He
discovered the direct currents in our body. Before that, we only knew
about the nerve impulses that transmit commands from the brain to the
motor nerves, and carry sensory messages from sensory nerves (skin,
ears, nose, eyes, taste buds) to the brain. But those are just
electrochemical. Scientists scoffed at the long-discarded myth that
there is electricity running throughout our bodies, like in old
Frankenstein movies, until Mr. Becker discovered the direct currents.

The
nerve impulses that are electrochemical travel down neurons. The direct
currents have to travel through the myelin sheath though because
impulses and electricity can't travel through the same neuron at the
same time without interfering with each other. When applied to bone
fractures, the direct currents will heal breaks that weren't knitting
(before, amputation was the only treatment). And the direct currents
also play a very significant part in limb regeneration. (If you're
interested in that, read Becker's book "The Body Electric".)

The
direct currents in our body produce an electromagnetic field. Some
researchers think that the brain's electromagnetic field is what binds
all the information in the different parts of the brain together to
generate consciousness:

"Each part of the brain has a particular
function with respect to the nervous system. The visual cortex has one
function, the frontal lobes have another function, the auditory system
has yet another function. And yet when we look at the external world we
see things as having properties that are inseparable from the object
itself...Imagine I have a little bird on my hand. I can see the bird. I
can see its color. I can see its shape. I can hear it sing. I can feel
its weight on my hand. It might peck me. All of these things occur
simultaneously, so we say that the bird has those properties. But all
those properties are put together in different parts of the brain. So
one wonders how the brain makes a collage of all these sensory inputs
to generate one single precept -- the bird -- out of all the different
sensory systems activated. This is called the binding property. Since
we don't know for sure how it works, we call it the binding problem."
(Llinas)

"Through his research, Professor McFadden realized that
every time a nerve fires, the electrical activity sends a signal to the
brain's electromagnetic field. However, unlike solitary nerve signals,
information that reaches the brain's electromagnetic field is
automatically bound together with all the other signals in the brain.
The brain's electromagnetic field does the binding that is
characteristic of consciousness. What Professor McFadden and,
independently, the New Zealand-based neurobiologist Sue Pockett, have
proposed is that the brain's EM field is
consciousness. The brain's electromagnetic field is not just an
information sink; it can influence our actions, pushing some neurons
towards firing and others away from firing. This influence, Professor
McFadden proposes, is the physical manifestation of our conscious
will." (McFadden)

An electromagnetic field could plausibly
survive bodily death and become a ghost, because energy can only change
form, it can't be destroyed. "Interesting enough there is some data out
there that suggests that the mind goes into theta waves just before
death, which gives us a possibility of ghosts." (Milione)

The
regular EMF meters that ghost hunters use are frequency weighted to
only pick up the EM fields from electronic devices, so they shouldn't
be able to detect a ghost consciousness. It's been hypothesized that
it's actually a reaction between the ghost's EM field and the EM field
of the environment that's being detected and not the raw EMF of the
ghost itself. The Trifield Natural Meter, however, can detect the nerve
impulses in your body when you move. If consciousness is an EM field
like we have in our body, you hypothetically might be able to detect a
ghost with this meter. However, even the most sensitive meters on the
market today are still very primitive and might not get anything at
all. And for all we know, consciousness might be something else
entirely.

An Undiscovered Energy

If
Psychokinesis (PK) is "mind over matter", and consciousness is an
electromagnetic field, then PK should affect the EM field of the
environment, but it doesn't. (Auerbach) The theory was that PK is the
willed action of the brain's electromagnetic field on the
electromagnetic structure of inanimate objects. "The material world, at
least as far as physics has penetrated, is an atomic structure held
together by electromagnetic forces." (Becker, p.269) However, nothing
happens to the EM field during a PK demonstration. (Auerbach) This
could mean one of a few things. It could mean that consciousness is
probably not an electromagnetic field. It could be a new kind of energy
that we haven't discovered yet. Maybe it either gives off
electromagnetic "radiation" or has a reaction to the EM field of the
environment. (Auerbach) The other possibility is maybe consciousness is
one thing and psi could be something else.

Quantum Entanglement

At
one point in time, everything in the whole universe was connected. It
was all contained in one cosmic egg. Then came the Big Bang, and it was
all split apart and scattered throughout the universe. But it all
continues to remain connected to this day through space and time, long
after the initial interaction took place. (Radin)
This is quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement isn't a theory, it's
been proven in laboratories. If you take a photon of light or any
atom-sized object and fire it at a screen with two slits in it so it
splits in half, the two halves will stay connected. (Radin) If
something happens to one, the other will "know". Even if you send both
halves to opposite ends of the universe, it doesn't matter. "It's as
though we lived in a gigantic bowl of clear jello. Every wiggle - every
movement, event, and thought - within that medium is felt throughout
the entire bowl." (Radin, p. 263) This happens not because there's some
kind of signal transfer going on between them, but because at some
level since they both came from the same place originally they're already coexistent with each other.

Quantum
entanglement is one of the theories for how psi works. The reason ESP
happens most often between twins could be because they were both split
from the same egg. Maybe this is what's going on in PK. If we're
already entangled with other people and objects, then maybe some people
can use that to affect
objects. In theory, quantum entanglement isn't limited just to ordinary
spacetime either. Since EVERYTHING came from the same cosmic egg, we
could receive glimpses from the future or past too. There will be a
whole entry about quantum physics later.

Perhaps consciousness
is something like quantum entanglement. Maybe all the neurons in the
brain are entangled with each other, and that's how the different parts
of the brain make a single whole.

The Brain Could Be Like A Radio

The
brain could be like a radio or TV that picks up signals from the
environment. Maybe consciousness starts out as a blank slate and your
personality and emotions have to be imprinted onto it. Perhaps when
someone is "reincarnated" they're really just picking up on information
that someone else imprinted on the environment. What's interesting is
that there have been some reported cases of reincarnation where the
person who died didn't die until a few months or years after the person
recalling the past life was born.

However, if consciousness turns out to be something like this, I don't think that leaves any room for intelligent hauntings.

References:

Classes on Parapsychology taken with Loyd Auerbach

Becker, Robert. "The Body Electric"

Llinas, Rodolfo. "The Electric Brain" Accessed 02/10/06

McFadden, Johnjoe. "Our Conscious Mind Could Be An Electromagnetic Field" Accessed 02/10/06

Milione, Ron. "Electromagnetism" Accessed 02/10/06

Radin, Dean. "Entangled Minds"

I've been ghost hunting since the beginning of 2005. I
didn't have experiences prior, I've just always been interested in
things like ghosts, UFOs, Big Foot, etc. For a long time I thought
nobody would take me seriously because I didn't have any experiences,
but I think it actually allowed me to think outside the box better
because I didn't already believe.

After being unable to find a
group to join in my area that I liked, I decided to try to start my own
group. I went on some messageboards and found some people who were
interested. We had our first meeting at my house to meet everyone and
start making plans. Our group was called East Central Wisconsin
Paranormal Investigations (ECWPI), and we had our first investigation
at a metaphysical store in Oshkosh.

My second investigation was
at JFK Prep in St. Nazianz. I wanted to do a good job so I contacted
other paranormal investigators in Wisconsin and asked if they would
help us out, and they did. The investigation was only supposed to be
two nights but it became an ongoing investigation that lasted three
months. Through JFK Prep I got a lot of my training and I also started
to become networked with other groups in Wisconsin and to get invited
on their investigations. I also got interviewed for the show Scariest
Places On Earth, but the show was fake. After telling them a story
about an experience I'd had, my interviewer asked me, "Okay, can you
tell me it again, but can you word it like this?" They also kept trying
to get another investigator from our group to say that the place was
evil and you shouldn't go there. They ended up not using any of our
interviews for the show. You can still read my investigation report
from JFK Prep on ECWPI's old blog at: http://wiscghostnet.blogspot.com.

ECWPI
disbanded after a little more than a year. Getting a group started
isn't as easy as it sounds. Nobody knew each other when we first
started, and over the course of a year we found some people lost
interest or they just didn't stay active, one guy I had to remove, and
some of us just developed different methods. And there were also too
many people in the group and we had to rotate who got to go. So we
split into two separate groups but it was on good terms and everybody
is still friends.

Four of us from ECWPI started Heartland
Paranormal Investigations (HPI) in Manitowoc with one of our
consultants from the old group, and my old co-founder started Fox
Valley Spirit Hunters in Oshkosh. I've since been on nearly 20
investigations as a member of ECWPI and HPI, including occasionally
getting invited along on investigations with other groups. Most
recently I got to spend Halloween investigating the Grand Opera House
in Oshkosh with Fox Valley Spirit Hunters.

Sometime during all
that I started to really get into the science of ghost hunting and went
back to school for Psychology and Parapsychology. I'm working on my
second major in Psychology at UW-Milwaukee right now with plans to go
on to grad school after that to become a therapist or guidance
counselor, and I'm also taking Loyd Auerbach's Parapsychological
Studies program. I'm not impressed by someone who boasts that they have
a certificate in ghost hunting or parapsychology because my feeling is
that ghost hunting isn't a proven science and you can't get certified
in it. There are no experts. So even though I'll be getting a
certificate when I complete this, I'm going to continue taking classes
in Parapsychology where I can find them and just count this as one
credit. Unfortunately no one offers a degree in Parapsychology anymore
so you just have to major in a science and take classes and attend
seminars where you can find them and build your own major.

Recently
my girlfriend Amanda moved up here from Florida, and since we both
ghost hunt we wanted to do it together. The group I was with, HPI,
didn't want to add more members and then have it be like the old group
where we had to rotate who got to go, so that is why we've decided to
be independent together.