sayA ghost hunting team called Pengegers Paranormal Pansy’s – who initially formed as a joke – say that they have captured evidence of the paranormal on camera at St Day’s Old Church in Redruth. According to CornwallLive, the ghost hunters visited the church at night to conduct a live-stream ghost hunt and claim that the people watching their live-stream noticed something odd in the church window as shown below…
The team have described it as ‘a strange figure in the top floor window of the church‘ which they say ‘can’t be a living human’ as “[t]here’s no inside for the Church. It’s all been stripped out. As we were walking down, on the live stream you can see the outline of a girl in the window.”
Can you really see the outline of a girl levitating in a disused church window? I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a good question.
Apparition Investigation
I took to Google Maps in street-view mode and, helpfully, people who have visited the church during the daytime have added photos of the church from various different angles, including from inside the church itself. While it is true that the church lays empty with only historic plaques and memorials in place on the inner walls, that this means a little girl is floating in the upper window in footage is questionable, to say the least.
‘It can’t be a living human’ does not mean the logical explanation to leap to is that it’s the figure of a deceased person. Exploring the church via the street-view photos shows that the windows have elaborate frames in them with some frames still containing glass or acrylic.
The walls are quite high and the windows are positioned in such a way that when you’re looking up from ground level to the top part of the church, you can see windows from the neighbouring wall through the windows in the wall you are facing. With this in mind, when viewing the screenshot of the alleged ghost, it seems obvious that the “figure” is just the top area of a window set further back in the wall to the left. Part of the window frame that creates the apparition is obscured from view by the window frame at the front.
The Problem With Live-Stream Ghost Hunting
Live-stream ghost hunts are the evolved version of old-school ghost webcam sites. These sites were how I first leaned about ghost hunting when I was 14/15 and, eventually, how I became involved in paranormal research. On these sites, you would watch live webcams that were set up in allegedly haunted places to see if you could spot anything strange on them. There were cameras in a house in Missouri that I would watch avidly, and webcams in Willard Library, for example.
The often low-quality webcams would refresh routinely (could range from every 15 seconds to every 15 minutes) and you would then take a screenshot of anything odd that you were seeing and post it on the accompanying forums so that you and others could discuss your “cap” (slang for capture.) The difference is that as bad as the quality of the webcams may have been, they were stationary and in a somewhat controlled environment.
Live-stream ghost hunters are unfortunately the worst type of ghost hunting out there. The “evidence” presented by them is largely often spotted by those who are sitting at home and watching the live footage on social media. The cameras they are watching are often attached to, or held by the ghost hunters at the location and streaming live online via sometimes dodgy WiFi. The locations tend to be dark with lots of potentially confounding variables that the person at home just isn’t aware of as they’re not present.
Plus, we’re not presented with a photo taken by a camera, but a still from some poor-quality footage, and that’s largely all the live-stream ghost hunters will ever offer to back up their paranormal claims. Not only this, but as it isn’t the ghost hunters themselves who spot the alleged anomalies, it’s impossible to gather reliable testimony about what happened from them ans they’re usually retelling the stories of others.
As the person at home isn’t present at the location, their experience is also limited and therefore unreliable too. The ghost hunters often respond to the live chat that accompanies the live-stream footage and if someone watching along says they’ve seen something, the ghost hunters will respond to this and adapt what they’re doing. Firstly, having to focus on such a chat takes the investigators attention away from their surroundings meaning their testimony is even more unreliable. Secondly, focusing your investigation on the experiences of someone who isn’t present at the site is just ridiculous.
On their Facebook group, the 500+ people who watch along with their live-stream videos post dozens of screenshots from the videos with red circles drawn around largely nothing which they’ve personally seen as significant. On the group, the “Pansy’s” say ‘you won’t be sceptical after following us’.
I beg to differ…