What gaming I do has been on computers rather than consoles, so this is a development I missed—using the new Xbox for ghost-hunting.

Ever since the release of the Kinect motion sensor controllers in 2010, gamers have been posting videos of “Kinect Ghosts” detected by their Xbox 360. The Kinect prompts you when a new person is in the room, a phenomena dismissed as a glitch by most users if they’re alone. However there are hundreds of videos on youtube of not only ‘someone not there’ being detected, but these ‘ghosts’ also using the motion controller to operate the system.

It makes sense, really. Ever since the invention of the flash camera and the tape recorder, not to mention other instruments, people have been trying to record photos, audio, temperature anomalies, and other “hard” evidence of ghosts.

The blog posts links to this YouTube video of a “Kinect Ghost,” and from its links you can find others.

Have you tried it?

A BBC piece examines EVP —  Electronic Voice Projection — or the alleged recording of spirit voices on tape or digital recorders.

The simplest explanation is that EVP voices are just stray radio transmissions. Usually they are so faint and masked by static interference that it’s hard to make out what they are saying, and the EVP investigator has to “interpret” them for you.

That might seem like a weakness but that’s also their power. As Joe Banks, a sound artist, points out, a dead person speaking in studio quality wouldn’t be nearly so convincing as a voice you must strain to hear.

Banks has an ongoing project called Rorschach Audio. He suggests that the voices are the aural equivalent of inkblot tests devised by Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. He argues that while the EVP experimenters think they are doing parapsychology, they are actually unwittingly carrying out psychology experiments.

Also, dogs speaking English.

An old house in a small town in eastern North Dakota.

The house was once a boarding house for railroad workers, so I am told, as well a private home through the second half of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first.

When I go grouse and duck-hunting with my friend G., who has lived there for the decade past, I usually sleep in the enclosed front porch, which is about 8 x 12 feet in size. That room contains a single bed, a desk and chair, a lamp, and a disassembled bookcase — nothing more. (I like that room because I can take my dog outside easily.)

In 2011, I left for the 1,000-mile drive home, went about five miles down North Dakota 200, and wondered where my cell phone was. I stopped the truck and looked — no phone. I went back and with G.’s help searched the 8 x 12 room and the lawn between the front door and where I parked.

“Clarence must have taken it,” he said.

Once home, I went through the truck like a drug agent looking for contraband. No telephone. Nor did it ever appear at G.’s house.

This year, my fifth visit to the house, I kept a close watch on my telephone, and it came home with me safely.

But then I walked into my temporary bedroom and smelled cigarette smoke—a strong smell, as though someone had just finished their cigarette in the little room.

I asked G. about it. He was blasé. He had smelled it, his wife had smelled it, his teenage stepkids had smelled it. (No one in the family smoked cigarettes.)

And I smelled it four or five times more, at odd intervals, not connected with time of day or humidity or anything like that.

G. attributes it to one Clarence Bolz, who owned the house a couple of decades ago. Mostly he haunts the workshop attached to the garage, G. said. Small items sometimes disappear, and now and again G. smells Clarence’s cigarettes.

Such a ghost story would be too minor even for Fate magazine’s reader-submissions column. But it was the first smell-linked haunting that I had encountered.