Paranormal Pancake Parlor 2000

Are your pants hiked up to proper ghost hunting standards today? Did you go to the Mattress Outlet and pick up the most absorbent mattress you could find? Good! Now lodge it in your throat and wait for our specialists to come to you!

Today's Paranormal spooky Internet thing comes from Brydenman. Check this video out!
Urban Legends Series: Spiricom
The video doesn't pause so make sure you don't make the same mistake I did. We've since sealed off the room and set it ablaze in a golden, purifying, eternal flame. I'm sorry, Ms. Johnson. Your children didn't make it out.

Didja watch it, yet? Pretty cool video, I thought. My initial thoughts were, "Pfft. Communicate with ghosts. Right." Then I was like, "hmm ... maybe ..." It has pictures and appears to have some attempt at documenting evidence. Dates, names, photos, audio. That means it's real, right? It's very different from the usual, "You don't even know what my life is like, man. It's filled with immeasurable darkness the likes of which you'll never know. I wear all black, am plastered in tacky makeup, gaudy jewelery, am 300 lbs. and covered in a fine sheen of my own personal grease.
I -
can talk to dead people.


Anyone who doesn't believe is just a big jealous meanie. So there."
-that is par for the course for this sort of thing. Whether it was real or not, it was different. I was intrigued. So I did some research.

LOOKATTHIS
At about this time, things started to look a little sillier and a couple thoughts came to mind. If this thing really worked with this amount of accuracy, why haven't I, someone who spends a lot of time reading about this kind of spooky paranormal ghost stuff on the internet, ever heard of this. You'd think there would be a half-hour special covering this whole thing on the Discovery channel or something instead of the handful of "Most haunted places" shows recorded in the early 2000s that they've been rerunning for so many years.

You'd think there'd be more development on this sort of thing. You'd think they'd try using something like this on a show like Ghost Hunters or one of their contemporaries (Ghost Adventures and their MOST SCIENTIFIC device, the ghost-talky-machine doesn't count).

But nope. It's just like, "Hey, there was a machine once that could let this dude talk to ghosts. He used it a couple times and it was spooky. The End. Hey, guys. Let's go try to talk to ghosts. Too bad nobody knows how :("

Okay, so that's one thing. Just conjecture, I know. Then there's the pictures.



Really? Your ghost machine spit this out? The spooky dead people from the other side painted you a movie poster-like image. Lucy Fieldohair and Jake "The Steak" Luger star in DOUBLE THE STAKES II: Discount Memories.

I don't know about you, but for me any credibility this story had went down the tubes. I'd be far less skeptical if these ridiculous easily faked pictures weren't also captured from the same people. DID YOU SEE THE SPIRIT OF JOHN DENVER!? AMAZEEEEENG!

Then I found this on Coast to Coast:
The two men allegedly contacted the spirit of deceased NASA scientist Dr. George Mueller, but Rorke believes there was some fraud at play.

As evidence, he revealed that O'Neil, the sole operator of the Spiricom device, was a schizophrenic ventriloquist, who may have used his voice-throwing skills, along with an electrolarynx, to create the voice of Dr. Mueller. The Spiricom recordings "sound exactly like" the modulations produced by an artificial larynx, Rorke pointed out. In addition, O'Neil's only source of income was from the Metascience Foundation, and they paid him more money for results, Rorke added. Rorke also presented some newly discovered Metascience audio, noting that there is never any overlap between O'Neil and the Spiricom voice.

Here's an interview with Dr. Rorke. (click)

More troubling. Also read this from Wikipedia:

In 1980, William O'Neil constructed an electronic audio device called "The Spiricom." O'Neil claimed the device was built to specifications which he received psychically from George Mueller, a scientist who had died six years previously.
^{And that was the precise moment this story completely slumped over and died for me.}

At a Washington D.C., press conference on April 6, 1982, O'Neil stated that he was able to hold two-way conversations with spirits through the Spiricom device, and provided the design specifications to researchers for free. However, nobody is known to have replicated O'Neil's results using their own Spiricom devices. O'Neil's partner, retired industrialist George Meek, attributed O'Neil's success, and the inability of others to replicate it, to O'Neil's mediumistic abilities forming part of the loop that made the system work. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the recordings of conversations were falsified by O'Neil, specifically with an electrolarynx. The clearly audible vocal fricatives in the recordings, along with the fact that during the hours of recordings O'Neil's and Mueller's voices never overlap (as would happen in normal conversation), support this theory

Now my text is underlined and I have no idea why or how to disable it. Wonderful. Well, I'll (HEY, it stopped underlining!) leave it at that. I'm making no claims to my professionalism in researching these sorts of things. I just went to Google, looked at a few links, and made my decision. Not the most scientific way of going about things, but enough for me. I deem the spiricom to be nothing paranormal. But it was fun to read about anyway.

Let me know if you find more hideous ghost things from the internet.