Alleged ghost hunters have some super nifty tools to aid them in their paranormal searches. You’ve got your required education from purchasing all the Paranormal Activity movies, EMF meters, night vision goggles because no self respecting ghost comes out during the day.
And you’ve got your Ghost Box or Spirit Box. Not all things labeled a ghost box operate in the manner I mention to follow, but some of the numerous con men who inhabit the world have helped nudge the confirmation bias and auditory pareidolia along.
There’s quite a nice little assortment of these available on Amazon. Some may be better than others. Some may operate differently. First, the basic idea. The ghosts for whatever reasons, most likely not having an evil looking doll to inhabit need to communicate with us via an old radio. Preferably one found in a dusty attic, with or without a gramophone of similar vintage and a copy of the Necronomicon. When the finder turns on the magic radio the spirits speak in brief clips garbled by an insane amount of static. The apophenia takes over and you start trying to make sense of what bits and pieces sound like actual words. You have to, because the magic radio never gives you anything approaching a full short phrase or heaven forbid a sentence or two.
The trick is, damaging the radio. You don’t want the paranormal investigation to be interrupted by actually hearing the final score of the Astros game and the post game show on how they got caught and what new way to cheat they cooked up this time. The human mind allowed to wander is much better at producing the reaction that these are expected to produce in the gullible target audience. Even by its name there’s an expectation something spooky is about to happen. So you’re more inclined to listen like you’re doing audio Ouija board research. Did the spirit just say, “DEATH”? Gosh darn it that sounded like “death”. Soul? Carry? Like Jim Carrey? That dude is ducking evil. I know he said Carrey. Etc…
The intentionally damaged radio is designed to rapidly skip through different frequencies and only pause long enough for a short burst of actual audio.
A well practiced gematria guru offers a video with a rapid fire Gish Gallop of the story combined with some numbers. The tiny numbers are the equivalent of the short burst of audio. You’re not supposed to dwell on the gazillion alternatives for each number. You just take their word for it. They told you the ghost said “Soul” even when you thought you heard “Seal” and get off topic with the Seventh Seal or Navy Seals or whatever. A person with symptoms of early onset gematria dementia falls for it.
The effect is also a lot of fun for the synchronicity clique. Now left alone to the Spirit Calculator and way too much free time on their hands because they’re between jobs again they start to make connections (that don’t really exist) on their own. That’s when you get the fun stuff like the sports decoder suddenly going off topic on how the numbers also show that what they are for breakfast matches to the head coach of Rutgers in three different ciphers. Personal life decodes are a primary source of unguided by the alleged expert fake data. And later stages of gematria dementia (gementia? gementria? dematria?) oh boy is that cognitive dissonance fun to deal with in real life. These are the kind of people that get into arguments just for the sake of arguments.
Just like you can get a device marketed as a Ghost Box off the internet, it would be fun to have a product that combined the best of both worlds. It speaks random short words that are related only to numbers. Then the end user can have double the fun! First make up whatever number you want to hear instead of the tedious process of using a gematria calculator. Then decode those numbers and math terms and maybe some calendar data into what you want the story to be! Double the fun, should be worth at least $1000 and a bargain at twice that price!!
(Dematria deprogrammer sold separately.)
No comments:
Post a Comment