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 Ghost Radar is one of the coolest apps I’ve run across. It supposedly detects energy fluctuations in your immediate environment that may be paranormal phenomena – ghosts, spirits, or other entities.  

From the FAQ that comes with the app: “It has been suggested that paranormal energies manifest themselves through the Quantum Flux or are an aspect Jung’s collective unconscious. Regardless of the medium through which the energies manipulate electric devices the resulting manipulated readings seem to indicate intelligence on occasion… It’s believed that paranormal energies have the ability to influence electrical equipment. This idea comes from the concept that matter, life, soul, and life are fundamentally an electrical phenomena.  The app provides a set of parameters for paranormal energies to manipulate which are then processed as graphical, textual, and audible readouts.”

The app comes with a radar screen that shows the fluctuations in the environment as blips. The red blips are the strongest signals, followed by yellow, green, then blue. Over 2,000 words are programmed into Ghost Radar, so paranormal energies can also use words, the audio part of the app. In the above image, you can see the red blip on the radar screen and the word speech to the left of it. That word was spoken aloud when the red blip appeared.

I walked through the house with the phone – and, later, my iPad – and got a few green blip readings. The first synchronicity happened when I walked into Rob’s office to see if there were any fluctuations. A red blip showed on the radar and the word military came up. Rob and I looked at each other.

“Your cousin John,” I exclaimed.

His cousin, who died several years ago, was career military.

Okay, maybe it was a fluke, I thought, and walked outside with my iPhone, but nothing showed up on the screen. It supposedly has a range of about 50 yards. I got distracted by the dogs, who were running around, playing tug-of-war with a toy, and couldn’t stop smiling at how much fun they were having. Suddenly, the Ghost Radar said, Smile. I began to wonder if there could be a telepathic aspect to this app, too. It was definitely a synchro – a word was spoken that precisely described what I was doing.

I started toward the backyard, which is dense with trees and plants, and headed toward the spot where we buried our beloved cat, Tigerlily,  three months ago. A red blip appeared on the screen. I walked faster, watching the blip instead of where I was stepping, and my right foot sank into something wet. When I looked down to see what it was, the Ghost Radar said, Wet. Another synchro. Fortunately, the wetness was just a depression in the ground that was saturated from rain earlier today.

 Now I’m eager to try Ghost Radar in a cemetery (in daylight!) or at some local spot known to be haunted. For just 99 cents, this little app may prove to be most intriguing.

I have been very happy the last few weeks. My Nika has been visiting and she really appeals to my wild side, that part of me that enjoys breaking rules and modes of behavior…well, just because. She and I don’t always succeed on these ventures, our humans are wise to us, but when they’re distracted, we can get away with squirrel hunting that is truly beyond the pale.

When our car pulls into the dog park in the late afternoon, Nika is usually leashed because our humans know she will head wherever the squirrels are – which is usually away from the dog park, in the open land to the south. So as they restrain her, I sneak out the back door and take off toward the dog park. She then strains to join me and if there are no other dogs entering or leaving the park, the human who holds the leash is nearly dragged to the pavement and releases her.

She tears after me and we race around through the trees just outside the dog park, where the squirrels often chitter and chat and laugh about all the dogs. We show them a thing or two, Nika and I do, leaping up at their trees, nearly climbing their stupid trees. And when Nika gets fed up with them, she flies to the south, to all that open land, her leash slapping the ground.

I can only follow her so far. I don’t run as fast as she does.  And always, within me, is the collective voice of my humans, calling me back, to the park, to treats, reminding me that retrievers retrieve, that they return to where they are supposed to be. Once I do what I’m supposed to do, Nika makes a very wide circle and joins me and we enter the park, free of our insulting leashes.

So while we race along the periphery of the fence, where there’s an overhang of branches and leaves from the outside trees, our humans sit around in the shade with others of their ilk and talk and talk. Syria, food, weight loss, job hunting, horses and polo and the interminable heat. Today, here in the shade, it’s 95 and feels like 111, that’s what some weather app on a human phone says. I’m grateful some human has brought in a pool; I plop down in the cool water, and gaze across all the green and sunlight at Nika, who has dug a hole and climbed into it, panting.

I know that Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq are places far from here where horrible things are happening. The humans discuss it.But why should these wars be mine? I only want to chase squirrels and be with Nika. I want other dogs to run and play and chase squirrels and find their true loves; I don’t want them to starve or flee their homes.

The human Prez talks about how there must be consequences for violating international law. This has something to do with the use of horrid chemical weapons. But how can ‘surgical air strikes’ act as punishment when only innocent civilians will be affected? Maimed? Killed? I feel the human despair and rage and hopelessness about this. But it’s not my war.

Just show me the squirrels. Just let me run and dream and wear myself out so that at the end of the day Nika and I are zonked, settled in, gone for the night.

Do you think the world might be a better place if our main enemy was squirrels?

Joe Nickell is a former magician who traded in his magic tricks decades ago in favor of the role of debunker of all that is paranormal. He’s associated with the Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal–CSICOP).

I call Nickell a debunker rather than a skeptic, because clearly he is driven by his belief in the non-existence of the paranormal and is incapable of admitting that some things are not so easily explained by a rational, reductionistic perspective.

Now in his book The Science of Ghosts, Nickell tells us that the only thing that so-called ghost hunters are detecting is themselves.  “If they go through a haunted house and stir up a lot of dust, they shouldn’t be surprised if they get a lot of orbs in their photographs,” he said in an interview last October.

He doesn’t have anything better to say about mediums and their connections with spirits. “The people who profess to be able to talk to the dead tend to be either fantasy-prone personalities, or charlatans, or possibly a bit of both,” Nickell declared. “They would be harmless if they didn’t mislead so many people.”

So it’s not surprising that Mr. Nickell and his colleagues at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry were quite perplexed by the results of a poll they sponsored that was aimed at comparing educational levels with the belief in ghosts. Their survey in 2006 found that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. Contrary to expectations, a poll of 439 college students found seniors and grad students were more likely than freshmen to believe in haunted houses, psychics, telepathy, channeling and other mysterious phenomena.

Oops! It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. But then, contrary to what the skeptics tell us is real – or rather what is not real – stands a sizable percentage of the American public.

Nearly half of Americans say they believe in ghosts, according to a 2012 HuffPost/YouGov poll. Of the 1,000 adults interviewed Dec. 17-18, the poll revealed 45 percent believe in ghosts, or that the spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.

Those results nearly mirror a CBS News 2009 poll, which showed that “nearly half of Americans say they believe in ghosts, or that the dead can return in certain places and situations.” That poll also revealed that 78 percent of Americans believe in life after death.

The skeptics’ response to these polls? In a word, “Scary!”

The photo at the top is the famous ‘Brown Lady,’ a photo taken in 1936 at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England. The one below is a photo I took behind the home of Joe and Nancy McMoneagle, south of Charlottesville, Virginia.

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HAPPY 24th BIRTHDAY, MEGAN!!!