Primordial Groove

did anyone see this show on discovery channel? A family move into a new home. The child has an supposedly imaginary friend which supposedly turns out to be a ghost? Any info on this alleged haunting? If the events in the show are true, it seems very weird to say the least.

Primordial Groove

doh.nm. I just saw the end. no mystery involved at all. positive ions and electromagnetic fluxes seem to cause hallucinations to some people.

Hatchet

[Doh posted to wrong thread and can't delete]

wildernesse

Does its title shot have this creepy view of a church? If so, that's in Ellerslie GA and I grew up there and the old woman w/ the pictures of Mr. Gordy was my bus driver in elementary school.

The weird Mr. Gordy sightings were talked a lot about--but the whole scratches and she and her mother being psychic and stuff was new to me when I saw it. I think that they had to have a way to make it to an hour or something.

Any questions?

--tibac

Primordial Groove

hmmm, not really, wildernesse. As i was watching the show, I was taken in by the story but tried t okeep my reason intact (if it exists).
On second thought, yes, I do have a question. Is the show a close representation of actual events (other than the scars)? For example, the little girl walking to the gravestone with no prior knowledge of the dead guy. how did she know the name Gordy? How was she able to identify mr gordy? was this a hoax perpetrated by the parents due to some motivation not mentioned in the show?

wildernesse

I can't remember much--all of this started up when I was in elementary/middle school myself.

The original story was that she saw a person--and that person ended up being Mr. Gordy, pretty much the way they portrayed it (thru pictures that Ms. Kelley had). That was what went around when she was in elementary school--she's a couple of years younger than my brother.

The area past the intersection that is our "town" is called Gordydale--because that's where the Gordy's house was. People who have lived there a long time, still can be caught saying "near Gordydale". So I don't guess that it would be all that odd to have the idea of an old man who used to live there, or to have heard the name Gordy.

I don't know what her parents' motivations would be--it certainly didn't make her life any easier in school from what I hear.

Anyway, beyond the stuff that happened when she was very little (I think she was about 1st grade when this started), all the other stuff was new to my knowledge. Of course, once she might not have been so forthcoming once she was branded as the ghost girl. And this is the second tv thing about her and her family at least--which I'm sure isn't for free.

--tibac

DamagedGoods

I saw most of the program, and I recall the part about the EM variations causing hallucinations. While the technical details were sparse, I recall mention of a magnetic field variation in the neighborhood of tens of milligauss; no mention of the rate of variation.

After I rolled a few numbers around in my head for a bit, I really wondered if that's big enough to actually influence someone's brain. If I am generous and allow a 1kHz sine variation of 1 gauss, and I embed a 10cm diameter loop of wire into somebody's head, that would generate a voltage of <1mV (something like 800�V). (My numbers could be wrong though; been a while since I had to use all that e-mag stuff )

1. Can geological processes generate anything close to a 1kHz, 1 gauss variation at the earth's surface? That strikes me as a lot of energy sloshing around below the ground, and I'd think any such process would also involve enough ground movement to be felt.
2. Is such a field variation enough to drive the brain to produce hallucinations?
3. Are there structures in the brain that would be affected simply by the magnetic field itself (i.e., not require induced voltages)?
4. If 2 or 3 are true, then why aren't there multitudes of haunting reports in environments where much, much stronger EM fields are found, such as residences near transmission lines, industrial settings with lots of motors/generators, MRI rooms, homes near radio transmitters, etc? Certainly human equipment is likely to produce the proper combination of field strength and variation more often than geological processes, right?

I have similar problems with high positive ion density causing hallucinations, because I can't think of any mechanism that would allow ions in the air to cause electrical disturbances in the brain. Here too, you'd think that, out of all the grade school children that have been around a Van de Graaf generator, some of them would have been "psychic" and have seen "ghosts" because of all the positive ions in the air.

Since I was skeptical of the 'scientific' portion of the documentary, I was inclined to write the whole thing off as inherited susceptibility to some form of mental illness, a hoax, or a combination of the two.