My ghosts are shy around people

 By Scott Beveridge

It appears the ghosts that follow me around only come out when I am alone, if one can believe the new app downloaded on my Droid X.
 
Ghost Radar Classic’s green tracker is showing nothing as I write this in a newsroom, where the police scanner is jamming and reporters voices are raised while they conduct telephone interviews.
 
The green radar also came up empty Tuesday at a local pub where a friend, Val, tried to explain to me how this device works. Val is a true believer in ghosts and the radar on her BlackBerry registered them all around her.
 
I felt left out, ignored and thought about calling a séance to lure spirits to my smart phone. Now that really would have drawn stares from the otherworld from my bar wife across the room at Beer Belly’s in West Elizabeth, Pa.
 
Given a U.S. copyright in 2009, one Jack Jones of Spud Pickles offers this free app, which supposedly uses a “proprietary algorithm to analyze quantum flux,” his website indicates.
 
Ghost Radar Classic occasionally blurts out words it interprets from ghosts while using a variety of smart phone sensors, like those on traditional equipment ghosthunters use to detect sound, vibration and electromagnetic fields.
 
It’s been 15 minutes since I activated the radar this afternoon and I’m still sitting in a roomful of somewhat normal reporters void of paranormal activity around us.
 
But, as I earlier turned off Interstate 70 into Washington, Pa., alone in my Ford sedan, a few blips of red and blue appeared on the phone as signs of ghosts along with the words “find” and “George.”
 
“Who in the hell is George?” I asked myself. And then it dawned on me that the phone’s global positioning system might have given Ghost Radar a hint that I was entering a city named after President George Washington.
 
Hey, it’s a logical explanation from a nonbeliever in ghosts.
 
They also came out yesterday while I was alone again in my car, offering an assortment of words that made no immediate sense at all. 
 
Another 15 minutes have rolled by here at the Observer-Reporter in Washington, Pa., in a century-old building where any ghosthunter with credentials would surely expect to find paranormal activity. The ghosts still are not talking.
 
While an online poll at Spud Pickles indicates 75 percent of the people who use its radar apps believe they work, the company makes no promises.
 
What the readings mean and how they are interpreted are “up for debate,” the website states. “You be the judge.”
 
Now does anyone out there in the real world know where I can find a good app to direct me to the best India Pale Ale in town?