I suspect that the TAPS people would still manage to “feel” a presence at these sites.

With the Halloween season just behind us, it seemed timely to take a glance back at what Americans think of supernatural creatures roaming the Earth.

Haloed and Horny – er, Horned

Let’s start with the big guns: angels and demons.  No, not Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.  The “real” ones.

A 2007 Pew Research survey found that 68% of Americans completely or mostly agree that “angels and demons are active in the world,” while only 14% completely disagreed with this idea.

Interestingly, 4% of those attending evangelical churches completely disagreed with the statement that “angels and demons are active in the world.”  Perhaps these apparently conflicted folks were only showing up at church to score some of that sweet puritanical lovin’ they couldn’t find on ChristianSingles.

[BTW, ChristianSingles, "marriage minded" should be hyphenated.]

Ghosts – Do They Prefer Chicks?

What about ghosts?  A Harris poll published in 2003 found that 51% of Americans believe in the existence of ghosts.  In 2005, a CBS News poll found that not only did 48% of Americans believe in ghosts, but that 22% believed they had actually “seen or felt the presence” of a ghost.

While this potential market may help explain the existence of the “ghost-hunter” shows on cable television, such supportive numbers are at odds with the lack of verifiable evidence, and a dichotomy present in the poll numbers is of interest.

While 22% overall of the CBS poll respondents believed that they had “seen or felt the presence” of a ghost, only 14% of men made that claim, while over twice that percentage of women (29%) felt they had experienced such an occurrence.  Why such a discrepancy?  Do ghosts prefer chicks?  Or vice-versa?

“Ghost” was a chick flick, after all.  You make the call.

Today’s pop quiz comes from an article in the Utah paper “Deseret News” about a community college that offers a class in ghost hunting and other paranormal subjects. One student in the class is quoted as follows:

The class has made believers out of many students. “Yeah, I believe in ghosts now. Oh yeah,” said Holladay resident P.J. Rodgers, 33. “After what I captured in this class, wow, I don’t have any other explanations for it.”

Which logical fallacy does this quote demonstrate? Highlight the redacted text below to find out.

This is a textbook example of the Argument from Ignorance. This fallacy is invoked all the time in situations involving the paranormal. Basically, the student is assuming that, because he can’t explain something, the only possible explanation is the supernatural. If you can’t explain something, it’s exactly that: unexplained. It being unexplained is not evidence for the supernatural, or anything else, for that matter.

The unseasonable heat we’ve been suffering through here in St. Pete broke last Friday, finally making it feel like fall, or as close to fall as you feel surrounded by trees that stay green year round. Time to go on a ghost tour!

Ghost tours are traditional in many cities across the country. St. Petersburg is a relatively young city, so it doesn’t have ghost stories that go back to colonial times, or even the Civil War. In fact, most of the stories I heard on this year’s tour were post-1980, if they had historical truth to them at all. I went on a tour put on by GhostTour.net, which leaves from the Full Monty Cafe downtown. The guide was a friendly woman named Laurie, who was wearing a cape and skull earrings. There were about 25 other people on the tour the night I went.

Basically, Laurie took us on a mile long hike to the oldest buildings still extant in downtown. At each stop she talked a bit about the history and significance of the building, and then followed up with some creepy tales about ghosts or other mysterious happenings. Most of the stories ended with the equivalent of a wink, as if she were letting us in on a joke.

Perhaps the most interesting story was attached to the Detroit Hotel, the oldest and arguably the most historically important building downtown, built by the city’s founder John Constantine Williams. In 1981, workmen knocked down a partition to an unused portion to the building’s attic and found a portrait of a man that appeared to date back to at least the early part of the 20th century. The find was reported in the local paper along with a request for information as to whom it portrayed. A couple weeks later, the paper printed a follow-up that came to no firm conclusions. However, Laurie told a story that took the identification of “the Captain” and ran with it. She claimed that some nights when there is a concert at Jannus Landings (a venue that is essentially a courtyard the hotel overlooks) people will see a shadowy figure in old timey clothes on one of the balconies of the hotel, watching the ladies, as the Captain was wont to do. I can attest to seeing mysterious shadowy figures while at Jannus Landings, but they might have been attributable to the fact that I was at a Meatloaf concert, and some of the other concertgoers were smoking what can only be described as a heroic amount of weed.

The next stop was the Ponce De Leon Hotel, currently host to the tapas restaurant Ceviche. At one point, the hotel, by virtue of having a basement (nonresidents can be excused for finding that odd) was used as a morgue, so all kinds of creepy things happened there. Mysterious attacks, falling bottles, suicides (including that of Thom Street, who was mentioned in the first newspaper story about the Detroit Hotel portrait), and even hints of conspiracy. Laurie did tell one story I suspected was a complete fabrication, about the mysterious death of an elderly resident of the hotel. It sounded suspiciously like a conflation of the story of Mary Reeser (St. Pete’s famous spontaneous human combustion victim) and Norma Desmond.

The final two stops on the tour were the Fine Arts Museum (no ghosts, but maybe a curse) and The Vinoy resort. The latter is supposed to be home to a Lady in White, which is such a standard feature in ghost stories that I wonder if it’s mandated by the afterlife entity union, and some stories involving baseball players that showed up in Haunted Baseball.

I enjoy these kinds of tours, so long as the whole paranormal angle isn’t pushed too hard. Laurie did encourage us to take pictures and look for orbs, but I suspect that was a just a little theater. I may be projecting, but I don’t think she took the whole ghost thing very seriously. I didn’t get any history of the area I didn’t know already (I take history tours on a regular basis, too), but the stories were amusing. If you’re in the area and would like to have a pleasant evening out, tickets are available at this website. They’re doing tours every night until at least Halloween.