(no subject)

[unbibium]

 The criteria can be any falsifiable claim, and most ghost stories make it a point not to be.

I took my mom on a haunted tour of downtown Phoenix, and the claims were usually of sightings, or passing on the claims of "sensitives" who visited the site in question. There's no way we can prove that a certain hotel guest didn't see the image of a dead journalist. And if someone went into a room and said "ooo I feel something," again you can't prove that they didn't feel something. Moreover, the tour director's claims had an extra layer of hearsay on top of that: any claim of "this person said they perceived something" can easily be true, even if the person being quoted was were ultimately mistaken or even lying about what they perceived.

However, on that tour, the guide did mention a hotel that was trying to capitalize on a ghost story with some fake evidence. This made my ears perk up a bit; I didn't expect evidence to come into it. They claimed to have some physical artifact related to the event, I think it was some scarf or towel be from the 1930s. But apparently you could tell it wasn't the real artifact because it was too fresh and new-looking. The hotel's mistake is that there are ways to tell that a scarf or towel is NOT from the 1930s.

So, ultimately, the claim has to specifically define what the ghost is in some manner that can be measured and recorded, and sets it apart from anything that is not a ghost.