Paranormal Challenge, Series Premiere at Rolling Hills Asylum

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I'm going to watch the show again.  Out of curiosity to see other investigation groups I may, but I was not impressed.   Some of you may certainly disagree and that's fine and I may change my mind if I ever get the chance to meet Zak in person, but, I'm sorry, he annoys me.  Everything is so dramatic and fast-paced, which is not in the spirit of paranormal investigations.  I know, I know, its a show so it has to be exciting but its just not my thing.  Ghost Adventures, at least the few episodes I've seen, is produced in this same manner and its hard for me to watch.

The show starts with introductions of the teams: an all-male group, Resident Undead, and an all-female group, Paranormal Xpeditions.  At first I thought this was a cool idea, a battle of the sexes, but then it turned into this sexist race by the guys!  At one point the leader of the guys even asked an "entity" if he/she liked his group more than the woman!  So not called for.  I understand its a competition, but not a competition to win the hearts of the poor souls who haunt the location, only to conduct the best investigation.  Sad thing is (sorry if I spoil it for anyone) that they won.

The investigations:
I actually felt bad for the groups.  They only had two hours to conduct investigations before switching locations within the Asylum.  And then another two hours to investigate again.  Not to say that I am some professional ghost hunter or anything but that doesn't seem like enough time to conduct a quality investigation.  I had a hard time with the short hour we had at each location at the Stanley!  The women seemed to enjoy the process by sitting, taking it all in, and visiting various areas. They freaked out a few times and didn't try to figure out what was happening, but overall they did a good job.  The men were impressive in their teamwork, splitting up within seconds and taking on solo investigations to benefit the team.  They also did a good job at reacting to noises, although every little noise they heard they attributed to paranormal activity.  They even called out the entity by name before knowing it was actually that spirit.

Don't get me started on the dowsing rods.  Zac and crew called them out on that so I won't go there.  But the guys just seemed rushed, having to beat the competition, rather than taking in what they were experiencing.  And the whole Dan getting pushed thing...sorry, but that was faked.  He bent his knees and fell forward as if he were pushed.  If he were pushed from the back like he said he was, the top of his body would have fell forward first but that wasn't the case.  Just saying.

The evidence:
The women presented two visual evidence, which were nothing but dust orbs.  If you've read my earlier post on orbs, you know why I won't even dive into this.  However, the audio evidence was crazy!  To actually hear the anguish left behind in that room gave me goose bumps!  The men presented very weak audio evidence; they were really stretching those recordings as EVPs.  I'm not even sure that a professional investigation group would have presented that to a client. But, you have to play the game right?  They did present an impressive piece of visual evidence: a thermal picture of what looks like the outline of a person.

The results:
You may not be surprised to hear that I hoped the women would have won.  They seemed to keep the most professionalism and present the best evidence.  For me, its hard to use visuals as great pieces of evidence since its easy to debunk whereas audio is harder to rule out, especially when no one reacts to such a stunning  noise!  And I don't think its fair to use evidence as a reason to choose one group over another.  We all know that you can't control paranormal experiences (unless its faked of course) so the challenge should be more about how the teams handle themselves and the attempt to find evidence, not the evidence itself.

Lastly, I can only assume that the first episode shown was not the first recording.  Otherwise Zak saying "this was the hardest decision we've had to make on the show" just sounds silly!  I hope this wasn't the best recording they had (shown first to get a lot of viewers for future episodes) otherwise this is not going to last very long.