Jason and Grant did not pee in your cornflakes, either

When I was about 11 years old, I was ridiculously into parapsychology. Vampires and witches, too, but mainly poltergeists and ESP. I knew all about the parapsychology lab at Duke, and I had fantasies about going to college there just to study various psychic phenomena. But - I say again - I was 11.

It's probably a good thing that I ended up majoring in something that actually landed me a job after college, or otherwise I might've ended up like the "professionals" quoted in this piece, whose beef with "Ghost Hunters," et al, seems to be pretty much that the TV guys are stealing all the gigs these days.

I never lost my interest in ghost stories, which I guess is why "Ghost Hunters" is one of my favorite TV shows. So, purely as a fan, I feel obligated to defend my favorite Yankee plumbers from - let's face it - kind of a BS premise. First of all, the TAPS crew go into every episode looking to debunk claims of haunting, and 99.9 percent of the time they err on the side of lens flare/electronic noise/etc. So I think that lumping them in with the "Use my energy!" people on the Travel Channel's "Ghost Adventures" isn't exactly fair. (Though, having never seen "Ghost Adventures," I have no idea whether the snippet quoted in the article is representative of what they do.)

Second - if professional academics in the parapsychology/paranormal area don't feel they get enough respect, are the people who were lucky enough to land on TV really to blame? Say what you want about TAPS, but at least they all had day jobs before the SyFy channel came along.

My only quibble with "Ghost Hunters" is that they focus so much on their tech toys and less on the folklore/sociological side of haunting legends. But a) they're on the sci-fi channel, not the History Channel, and, b) the gizmos are the closest one can come to providing objective evidence. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, people who come into a ghost story or haunted place thinking first of the spookiness of the experience tend to look for something spooky. Which is a recipe for subjectivity... a.k.a., not science.

So, I heart the Ghost Hunters. And, I repeat what I wrote this time last year: please, please, please come to Winston-Salem; I will totally hook you up.