You could get some giggles from BBC's "Most Haunted," and if you're all about macabre melodrama, Travel Channel's "Ghost Adventures" is your show. Into laughable pseudoscience? "Ghost Lab" on Discovery is the way to go.
But if you laughed at my mention of any of the above shows, "Ghost Hunters" on Syfy is for you.
"Ghost Hunters" is a show made by skeptics for skeptics. The organization featured in the series is The Atlantic Paranormal Society, one of the few televised groups that will actually enter a location to disprove paranormal activity.
The group goes in with the standard equipment - voice recorders, cameras and electromagnetic field detectors - but before accepting questionable data as proof of a haunting, it does everything it can to find a non-paranormal explanation.
Instead of gasping at the blinking lights on the EMF detector, searchers look for the source of the magnetic field. Often radiation emits from unshielded electrical circuits, and high levels can cause discomfort, hallucination and even skin irritation - all of which could lead people to think a place is haunted. EMFs that can't be traced to a source are considered potentially paranormal.
Sometimes, TAPS catches something crazy, like an inexplicable hit on the thermal camera in the shape of a person that the investigators can track through three different rooms. Other times, a thermal hit is just a heat reflection off of a shiny surface of the investigator holding the camera.
The genuine spirit of investigation that the TAPS team exhibits makes it that much more thrilling when they find something they can't explain away, like the door that swung closed - twice - during a recent investigation. The investigators couldn't recreate it or explain it; the door required a lot of force to move and there was no draft.
The finds are usually simple, such as swinging doors and strange shadows, and sometimes the team doesn't find anything at all and must pronounce the place not haunted.
Even in episodes where nothing supernatural is caught, the team members themselves are just as fun to watch as the "ghosts." The tech crew dream team of Dave Tango and Steve Gonsalves is always hilarious. In the 100th episode of the show, the duo wandered around Alcatraz Prison debating the existence of snozberries, and more recently they used laser equipment to turn a supposedly haunted chandelier into a disco ball.
After a while, you stop caring about the possibility that TAPS is faking evidence because it's just as satisfying to hear a mysterious, hissing voice as it is to see team members realize a photo of a ghost face in the mirror is just the reflection of a vase.
"Ghost Hunters"Wednesday 9 p.m.SyFy Channel