Every field has its vocabulary, and the one around ghost footage mixes three kinds of word: names for what witnesses report, names for the tools investigators carry, and names for what cameras and recorders do on their own. This glossary defines each term plainly, says which of those three kinds it is, and gives the ordinary cause where there is a well-known one. It does not rule on what a ghost is.
Entries run alphabetically. For photographs in particular, orbs, mist and faces explained goes into more detail, and the rest of the section is in On Camera.
Apparition
A ghost reported as something seen: a figure, a face, a shape in a doorway. The word comes from the Latin for “to appear,” and it describes an experience, not a cause. In the record, an apparition is what a witness says they saw. In footage, it is a shape in the frame that someone has identified as a figure. The two are worth keeping apart, because a witness account and a frame of video are checked in different ways.
Cold spot
A patch of air that feels noticeably colder than the rest of a room, often reported at the start of a haunting. Old houses have ordinary sources for them: drafts through gaps in windows, floors and chimneys, and evaporation from damp walls or skin. A thermometer can mislead too. Many take a few seconds to settle on a new reading, so a number that drops as you walk across a room may be the instrument catching up.
Ectoplasm
The substance Spiritualist-era mediums produced during séances, usually from the mouth, nose or ears, and photographed as pale, draping material. It was presented as a physical form of spirit. In the cases that were exposed, it turned out to be cheesecloth or muslin. The word survives in popular culture, mostly through films, long after mediums stopped producing it in front of cameras.
EMF
Electromagnetic field. Investigators carry EMF meters, the K-II being the best known, on the idea that a presence might disturb the field around it. The meters do measure something real. They respond to household wiring, phones, appliances, and anything else that carries current. A spike near a wall may be a cable inside it. A reading means something only once those sources have been found and switched off.
EVP
Electronic voice phenomenon: a voice found on a recording that nobody heard at the time it was made. Investigators grade EVPs as Class A, B or C by clarity, A being a voice most listeners hear the same way, C being faint and open to interpretation. The idea was popularized by Konstantin Raudive’s 1971 book. The ordinary candidates are stray radio pickup, noise from the recorder itself, and the ear’s habit of hearing words in sound.
Full-spectrum camera
A camera modified to record near-infrared and ultraviolet light as well as visible light. Investigators use it to see what the eye cannot. What it shows is often unusual. Colors shift, and materials that reflect infrared strongly, such as some fabrics, foliage and skin, come out bright or pale. An unexpected glow in full-spectrum footage is first a question about which surfaces in the room reflect infrared.
Ghosting
Two things share the name. On an analog television, ghosting is a faint offset copy of the picture, caused by multipath reception: the signal arrives once directly and again, a moment later, bounced off a building or a hill. In photography, it is the transparent figure left by a long exposure or a double exposure. Ghosting.tv is named for the double meaning. The history is in spirit photography and the double exposure.
ITC
Instrumental transcommunication. The umbrella term for attempts to receive communication from the dead through devices: EVP recordings, spirit boxes, and similar methods using radios, televisions, telephones or computers. The word describes a practice, not a result. When an investigator speaks of ITC, they mean the method they are using, and whatever came through it still has to be examined like any other recording.
Matrixing
The ghost-hunting word for pareidolia: seeing a face or a figure in random texture. Investigators use it most often about photographs and video, when a face appears in a curtain, a bush, a patch of shadow or the grain of a dark frame. The term is useful because it lets investigators name the effect themselves before someone else does. See pareidolia.
Orb
A soft, translucent disc of light in a photograph, most often taken with flash. The ordinary cause is backscatter: the flash lights a speck of dust, a droplet of water, pollen or an insect a few centimeters from the lens, too close to be in focus, and it records as a blurred glowing circle. Orbs are more common on phones and compact cameras, where the flash sits right next to the lens.
Pareidolia
The tendency to see meaningful patterns, especially faces, in random input: a face in a cloud, in a wood grain, in a power socket. It happens quickly and without effort, which is why a face in a photograph can feel so certain. It applies to sound as well, as words heard in noise. Pareidolia does not mean nothing is there. It means a face alone is not evidence of one. See matrixing.
Poltergeist
German for “noisy ghost.” The word covers reports of objects moving, being thrown or falling, and of knocks and bangs with no visible cause. Poltergeist accounts often center on one household, and in many of them on one adolescent in that household. The word names the pattern of reports. What causes those reports is argued case by case; individual houses and their cases belong to Hauntings.
REM pod
A device with an antenna on top that sets off lights and a tone when something changes the electromagnetic field around it, working on a principle similar to a theremin’s. Investigators place it on a floor or table and ask a presence to touch it. Any conductive body near the antenna sets it off: a hand, a person leaning close, a pet, a moved metal object. What it detects is proximity, not identity.
Residual and intelligent haunting
Two categories investigators use. A residual haunting is described as a scene that replays, like a recording, without noticing anyone present: the same footsteps, the same figure on the same stairs. An intelligent haunting is described as a presence that responds to people. The distinction comes from investigators themselves and is widely used in the field. It is not a scientific category, and it assumes that something is there to classify.
Rods
Thin, fast streaks crossing a video frame, sometimes with what look like fins or wings along their length. They were once presented as unknown creatures. They are insects, usually flying close to the camera, stretched by motion blur: in the time a single frame is exposed, the insect crosses a large part of the picture and its wingbeats register as a ripple along the streak.
Shadow figure
A dark, roughly human shape reported at the edge of vision or in the corner of a room, often seen for a moment and gone when looked at directly. Peripheral vision is poor at detail and quick to register movement, and figures in the room are a common report during sleep paralysis. On video, check the dark corners for noise, compression and shadows cast by people outside the frame.
Spirit box
A radio modified to sweep across frequencies rapidly, never stopping on one station long enough to play a whole word. The P-SB7 is a well-known model. The idea is that a spirit could use the passing fragments to form speech. What the device produces is a stream of broadcast snippets, and the simplest reading of any word heard in it is that some station was broadcasting it. Whether the order means anything is where the argument starts.
If you have footage of any of the above and have been through the ordinary causes, send it to us.