How to Hunt for Ghosts With Your iPhone

It’s getting near Halloween, when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin, so I traveled to a notoriously haunted picnic table during a solar eclipse to find ghosts with my iPhone.

There are no end of “freemium” apps for paranormal investigation—Ghost Detector: Radar Camera, Ghost Hunting Tools, Spirit Board, etc. Some claim to monitor EMF frequencies to point you to spirits. Some say they “translate” ambient noise into ghost speech. Some say they use your phone camera’s LIDAR sensors to find the supernatural. Some are just like, “yeah, we totally see ghosts around you.” They’re all labeled “for entertainment purposes only,” but I wanted to know if they actually work.

Thomas Edison: inventor, entrepreneur, ghost-botherer

Before you cynically dismiss the idea of using a smart phone to chat with specters, ask yourself whether your’e smarter than Thomas Edison. After inventing both the light bulb and the phonograph, Edison wanted to make a machine to communicate with the dead.

“I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us,” Edison told The American Magazine in 1920. “If this is ever accomplished, it will be accomplished not by any occult, mystifying, mysterious or weird means, such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.”

Even with the spiritualism craze of the early 20th century a hundred years behind us, half of Americans still believe in ghosts. I’m not one of them, but I’m open to the possibility, so I’m following in the footsteps of Edison by giving iPhone ghost hunting an honest shot.

How to find ghosts with your iPhone

There’s no agreed upon blueprint for how to find ghosts—the field of paranormal investigation is too esoteric and personal (or fake) for that—so I invented my own process, and tried to set up the most favorable conditions for finding spirits. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Get the right tools

The first step to successful paranormal investigation (and simple home remodeling projects) is having the right tools for the job. I eschewed ghost hunting apps that sold themselves as games, and downloaded the following popular apps from the Apple store:

• Ghost Hunting Tools: This app says it was “developed for beginners and professionals in paranormal research.” It features an EMF meter (ghosts love electromagnetic fields for unspecified reasons) and an EVP recorder that captures ghost sounds that are imperceptible to human ears. It then translates those sounds into words.
• GhostDetector—Haunted Radar: This app promises it is more “accurate and sensitive than any of its counterparts.” It purports to detect EMF fields to find ghosts, and has over 9,000 reviews on the app store and a score of 4.2. Plus, it’s the best-looking of the ghost apps I downloaded.
• Ghost Finder Tools: This app says it’s the “most used by ghost hunters all over the world.” It features six tools for ghost hunting that can be unlocked once you view an advertisement for “Solitaire Cash.”

Step 2: Go to the right location

Most ghost-hunting apps promise to help locate the ghosts around you, but I don’t want to know if there are ghosts in my house—I have to live here—so I chose an infamous haunted location for my investigation: picnic table 29 in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park.

The legend of the haunted picnic table

On Halloween night 1976, Rand Garrett and Nancy Jeanson, a promising musician and actress, were consummating their young love on top of a picnic table in a remote, desolate part of Griffith Park, or so legend has it. Just as things were getting good for the pair, a heavy tree crashed down on them, killing both instantly. The young lovers’ families decided to scatter their ashes at the site, that they might always be together—a weird decision, but it was the 70s.

Since then, it’s been said that all attempts to remove the tree or repair the table have been met with supernatural protest—malevolent voices whispering “leave us be” or “next time, you’ll die” have been reported, as has the mysterious disappearance of tree trimmers sent to clean up the spot.

I can’t find any verification that any of this actually happened, beyond the fact that a pine tree really did fall onto this picnic table at some point, but the site draws the curious and morbid to this day, who leave behind notes and tributes to the young couple.

It is a legitimately spooky spot. Here’s a map to the haunted picnic table of Griffith Park if you are brave enough to visit.

Step 3: Pick the right time

You might think midnight on Halloween would be the right time to contact the spirits of Nancy and Rand, but if ghosts repeat their patterns throughout eternity, this would be the worst time to disturb the ghostly lovers (besides, you’re not allowed in the park at midnight).

So I chose to talk to Nancy and Rand at 9:23 a.m., Oct. 14, 2023, just when a solar eclipse was darkening the sky. During an eclipse, the shadowed sun acts as a spiritual beacon that calls the wandering dead back to Earth and agitates the spirits that remain behind. (In the tradition of paranormal investigation, I made up all that stuff about the eclipse being a beacon, but it sounds good, right?)

Before leaving, I consulted Ghost Hunting Tools for any last minute advice from the spirit world. I let it listen for electronic voice phenomena in my home for a bit and translate the ghost-speak into English. An apparently friendly spirit said, “Bail” and “Warning.” No joke! Pleased with my message from The Beyond, I set off for the haunted picnic table.

My expectations were high as I approached the isolated corner of the park where the picnic table stands. It’s near the peak of Mount Hollywood, where the roads are closed to cars, so it requires a fairly strenuous hike or bike ride to visit. This protects the eerie isolation needed for ghost-peeping. I didn’t need an app to tell me that this is a spooky spot, especially because of the greeting cards, flowers, and candles left behind by others.

Right before the eclipse, I turned on my GhostDetector: Spirit Radar app, waiting for the sky to darken and the spirits to make themselves known. The anticipation was, I admit, pretty scary. But when the eclipse hit, nothing happened. There was no spike in EMF fields on my reader. No apparitions appeared. Even the eclipse itself was a bust—it got slightly darker, maybe, but the mountains and trees blocked my view of the sky anyway.

I tried the other ghost hunting apps I’d downloaded and received similar non-results. Sometimes the unspecified gauges or needles would move, but not in any way I could interpret. So I sat in silence for awhile and allowed Ghost Hunting Tools to record the ambient noise of the picnic table. The “ghosts” said, “Reference Fade Market Steel Cord Incorporate Fork Negative.”

Among the problems with the ghost-hunting apps I tried is that they don’t include instructions. They’re basically collections of animated needles that seem to move randomly over gauges with labels like “aura.” You’d have to work hard to interpret their results in any way.

Before long, a trio of other amateur paranormal investigators showed up. They didn’t know how their apps worked either, but they told me they’d tried to research Rand and Nancy, and they couldn’t locate any verifiable accounts of the deaths. They interpreted this as something very spooky, not an indication that the whole thing was a legend. I started to say that if a wooden picnic table really was hit by a tree in 1976, it would have rotted away years ago, but I stopped myself—I didn’t want to ruin my new friends’ morning.

Step 4: Try again

So maybe there were no ghosts at the picnic table because no one actually died there, and ghosts don’t like hiking. But I know someone died here:

Above is The Portal of the Folded Wing in North Hollywood’s Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery. Built in 1924, this memorial to dead aviators houses the cremains of Walter Richard Brookins who flew with the Wright Brothers, dirigible pilot Augustus Roy Knabenshue, and many other notable names in aviation history. It is also the site of the most ironic plane crash in history.

On July 18, 1969, a twin-Piper Navajo that had just taken off from nearby Burbank airport crashed into the dome of The Portal of the Folded Wings. The pilot and one passenger were killed instantly.

Surely those ghosts must be around. But no. Despite being literally surrounded by the dead in their graves and at the site of the verified deaths of two people, my ghost apps pointed in no particular direction. The EVP readings did not come out “Mayday Plane Down” or anything either. Just more gibberish and a constant supply of commercials for solitaire games. I was starting to feel like I’d been had.

Final investigation: I actually find a ghost! (OK, not really)

Despite the protests of my family, I tried hunting for ghosts at my house too. The detectors seemed slightly more lively inside than out, but only slightly. I took them on a tour of my palatial estate and there were no significant readings.

Before giving up entirely, I downloaded this non-ghost-based, seemingly legitimate EMF detector. Using this app, a corner of my living room spiked the gauge, burying the needle to the right. Finally a result! The ghost hunting apps I tried did not show a similar spike. But whatever. It’s a ghost—proof of the supernatural.

Skeptics might argue that the high EMF area is right around my stereo speaker, and the closer I bring it to the magnet within the speaker, the higher the reading goes. But maybe I found a ghost that really likes music.

The fact that I couldn’t get any of the apps I’d downloaded to register an actual EMF field is troubling. But maybe they have some sophisticated software that separates everyday EMF fields from ghostly apparitions. Or maybe there’s nothing to ghost hunting apps at all.

Conclusion: I could not find ghosts with my iPhone

The October 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine reported on a strange semi-seance Thomas Edison held at his Menlo Park laboratory in the 1920s. According to this account, on a dark, windy night, Edison gathered a collection of scientists, psychics, and mediums and unveiled a machine that fired a narrow beam of light into a photoelectric cell attached to a meter that recorded any fluctuations—the Edison Ghost Phone!

Edison (supposedly) had the mediums all contact the spirit world so he could observe and record anything supernatural passing through the room with his device—if ghosts appeared, surely they’d break the beam of light. The results of the experiment (and the experiment itself) were never made public by Edison, but all signs suggest it didn’t work—even with one of history’s greatest inventors running the show, nothing happened.

Nothing supernatural, anyway. Edison and his pals had a spooky evening of fun hanging out with mediums and entertaining the possibility that there is more to the world than we see. So it was with my experiment. I didn’t find ghosts, but I traveled to a really cool, spooky spot in Griffith Park, went to an aviation memorial, and met some friendly weirdos. Conclusion: Even though I couldn’t find ghosts with any iPhone apps, maybe the real ghosts are the friends we make along the way.