Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		2.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Ghost Hunters: Season 6: Part 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

T.A.P.S. – This Ain’t Particularly Scientific

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater October 19, 2011

It’s the middle of October, Halloween is right around the corner, and this is generally the time of year when I seek out a few pieces of spooky entertainment to set an appropriate late-autumnal mood. I have a running list of go-to titles that fit the bill: The Evil Dead, Dead Alive, Night of the Living Dead—yes, just about anything with Dead in the name—plus The Shining, House, The Exorcist, and dozens of others. For two or three years, SyFy’s Ghost Hunters series was on that list as well, and I remember having some fun pre-Halloween marathons with my wife and a few friends, holed up in a dark room hoping to see the show’s paranormal investigators discover “evidence” of the supernatural.

Not that I believed any of it. Occasionally, they’d catch ambiguous footage of an eerie shadow or find garbled voices supposedly from beyond the grave in their audio recordings, but anyone with a remotely rational, skeptical mind can justifiably write this stuff off as shoddy, unproven “scientific” methodology or merely the power of suggestion. Still, it does make for decent entertainment. At least, it did. I’m not sure what happened, but over the last few seasons, Ghost Hunters has gotten seriously boring. Part of it may be personal—I simply no longer suffer pseudoscientific truth claims as gladly as I once did—but more objectively, the show just isn’t as exciting as it used to be. Part two of season six—and you can find our part one review here—is probably the dullest collection of episodes yet.

The T.A.P.S. team...

For the uninitiated, Ghost Hunters is a documentary-style reality show that follows co-founders Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, along with the junior members of The Atlantic Paranormal Society—that is, T.A.P.S.—as they investigate homes, businesses, and historical hot spots where lots of “spirit activity” has been reported. Their mission is supposedly to go in and debunk these claims, providing possible rational explanations for the previously unexplained, but they actually spend very little time trying to disprove anything. This is just an estimate, but I wager that at least 75% of each episode consists of the T.A.P.S. team wandering around creepy old locations in the dark, asking questions out loud to the departed and getting easily spooked by the kinds of noises you’re likely to hear in any unfamiliar building. Their methods give a modest illusion of science. They carry digital thermometers looking for sudden temperature drops and wield electromagnetic frequency meters with LED arrays that light up whenever specters theoretically make their presence known. Of course, this is total nonsense, a misuse of equipment and a misinterpretation of the so-called results.

The best explanation I’ve read for why these ghost hunting outfits so poorly appropriate scientific tools for bogus research is in Mary Roach’s book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, which notes the historical link between spirits and electrical phenomenon: “The heyday of spiritualism— with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the ether—coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications—disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant… Electromagnetic impulses seemed to provide the missing explanation for—the absent science behind—mediumistic communication.”

In other words, the T.A.P.S. crew has been laboring under the same correlation fallacy that fooled the scientifically and spiritually curious of the late nineteenth century. Haven’t we progressed since then? Just because your EMF meter lights up when you ask a ghost to light it up does not mean that a ghost was the cause. That’s blindly overlooking the hundreds of other possible explanations. Even though they say they don’t, T.A.P.S. members seem to use a “ghost of the gaps” philosophy; if they can’t explain some phenomenon—even if an actual scientist probably could—then it must prove the existence of the spirit realm.

One gimmick that’s been used increasingly on Ghost Hunters is the “flashlight test.” A T.A.P.S. member—usually Amy Bruni—unscrews the top of a Maglite until it’s in the delicate position between “on” and “off.” The flashlight is then set on the ground and the investigator will ask the spirit to make the bulb blink in response to questions. Go ahead and try this yourself at home if you feel like wasting an hour or so. You’ll prove quite conclusively one of two propositions—either your house is haunted, or the T.A.P.S. team needs to collectively take a junior high level tech-ed class on the basics of electrical circuitry. It doesn’t take much stimuli to get the light to flash on—a slight vibration will do.

Here’s another set of propositions: 1.) Either Jason and Grant genuinely believe in the work that they’re doing to uncover proof of the paranormal, or else 2.) they’re in on the joke that Ghost Hunters exists solely for the sake of ratings, advertising, and entertainment. This one isn’t as easy to discern, but either way the show has problems. If it’s the former, they need to seriously rethink their application of the scientific method, and if the latter is true, they should make damn well sure the episodes are actually entertaining. In season six—both parts—they’re not. I remember episodes from the show’s early years that would actually give me goosebumps and make my arm hair stand on end. Shadow figures rising out of darkness, spectral voices caught on tape, objects moving inexplicably on their own. I never bought any of this as evidence of the supernatural, but it made for decent television. Sadly, the show has even lost its guilty pleasure factor. Over the course of the thirteen episodes included in this set, I can’t recall a single genuinely chilling moment. No mind-blowing findings, no unnerving encounters, no wow-inducing results—just a group of gullible paranormalists struggling to validate their pre-held belief in ghosts with dubious scientific techniques. The most terrifying apparitions we see this season are the guest stars of the penultimate episode: The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Ghost Hunters: Season 6: Part 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Nothing has changed in season six part two, so I'm just going to reiterate my comments from part one: By the very nature of the material, Ghost Hunters isn't exactly going to set any new standards for picture quality. The episodes, presented here with 1080i/AVC encodes, are shot predominately in the dark—duh, ghosts never show up if there are lights on, everyone knows that—and most of the footage during the investigations is in black and white "night vision" mode, which turns faces into pale full moons and eyes into shiny black orbs. I guess that's all part of the creep factor. Since we're dealing with such low-light situations, harsh video noise is prevalent and contrast sometimes goes all over the place, from flat and dull to way too punchy. This is expected. The segments shot under normal lighting look much more natural, and feature strong, realistic color, along with a decent degree of clarity. A high definition presentation definitely benefits the show, and if you've seen any of the old seasons in standard def, you'll notice a fairly striking difference right away in how much clearer everything looks. There are still some some serious problems, though. There are all kinds of compression issues spread across these three discs, from excess noise and periodic banding to occasional video artifacts, aliasing, and even some visible macroblocking. Then again, you're probably not watching Ghost Hunters for the picture quality.

Do note that as it was nearly impossible to capture screenshots in 1080i due to combing, all screen grabs in this review were captured in 720p and do not represent the full visual quality of this release.

Ghost Hunters: Season 6: Part 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The audio presentation is identical to the part one release as well. The back of the Blu-ray case gives "Dolby Stereo" as the only audio option, but you'll notice that the discs actually contain uncompressed LPCM 2.0 tracks for each episode. Like the picture quality, the audio is largely faithful to source, although that source isn't always of the highest fidelity. Taken from digital field recorders, shotgun mics, video cameras, and other tools of the ghost hunter's trade, the audio is sometimes hissy and muffled, and it's generally far from pristine. That said, most of the voices—of the living, at least—come through clearly, and when they don't, subtitles are automatically supplied. The episodes really heavily on musical stabs to sell many of the cliffhanger scares that come immediately before commercial breaks, and these sound relatively clean and full. And that's really all there is to say here. If you've watched the show on Syfy, you already have a strong idea of exactly what it sounds like on Blu-ray.

Ghost Hunters: Season 6: Part 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no special features whatsoever, but here's a list of the included episodes:

• Uninvited Guests: 1875 Inn and Shippen Manor
• A Shot in the Dark: The Colonial Inn
• Signals from the Past: Rose Island, National Baseball Hall of Fame
• Lemp Mansion
• Grammar School Ghosts: Milton School
• Time to Get Touched: Thurber House, Canfield Casino
• The Chopping Block: Bissman Building
• The Oldest House in Georgia: Old Ulster County Jail, Antebellum Plantation
• Home is Where the Haunt Is: Beardslee Castle, Olson House
• Empire State Haunts: Fort William Henry, Buffalo Central Terminal
• Sloss Furnaces
• Real Housewives of Atlanta: Rhodes Hall
• Ghost of Christmas Past: Christmas Farm Inn, Old Stone Fort

Ghost Hunters: Season 6: Part 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Yeah, I don't see anything either.

As you can probably tell, I've been disappointed with Ghost Hunters lately. It's simply gotten more hokey and less scary with each season. Forget whether or not it's "real," the show just doesn't deliver the spook-inducing goods anymore. Part two of season six is interminably boring and— unless you're a diehard Jason and Grant fan—a total waste of time. Amateur spirit seeking investigators may want to check out the show, if only for a good example of how not to do it.