The 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos on YouTube - Part 1

YouTube is full of "This is totally real, guys" ghost videos, and if you don't spend at least one night around Halloween browsing through a bunch of them, you're not truly getting into the spirit of the holiday. Here are what we consider the most eerily convincing videos in the genre.*

*Note: Science has found zero empirical evidence for the existence of ghosts, aliens, demons or any other supernatural creatures, and these videos will surely not fool an expert in video fakery. Unless he or she watches them alone, late at night, in the dark. Then they become very convincing.

#6. The Levitating Girl

It's just a dude strolling through the woods in Russia, when he sees something ... weird:

Approximately 99 percent of "supernatural" videos can be revealed as hoaxes simply by asking "Why was anyone filming this?" As much as Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project have attempted to convince us otherwise, people usually don't have cameras glued to their faces unless they know someone is about to be shot out of a cannon or something. So that's our question as soon as this video opens:

Twist ending: The dog is actually several smaller dogs in a suit.

A Russian man is out filming his dog in the woods, waiting for something quantifiable adorable to happen. Maybe the dog was supposed to do a back flip or something. Instead, he runs off, having apparently sensed black magic in the trees. The cameraman chases after him and stumbles across these two girls and holy shit, one of them is flying:

The older girl in orange watches appraisingly as the tiny one in red floats 10 feet above the ground. Camera Manikov steps in for a closer look, making all of the noise in the world as he does so, and the girls spot him. The hovering child drops back down to earth and the two run off.

Now, the obvious answer here is that the girl is on a wire. There's even a convenient gap in the filming -- as the guy is moving in closer, the camera is pointed at the ground for a second or two, and when it snaps back up, the little girl is already back on the ground. We don't ever actually see her descend, which if wires were involved would be a dead giveaway. You'd see her tilting awkwardly or her clothes pulling up at odd angles wherever the wires were attached, even if she were wearing a harness. So clearly, she's being held aloft by wires that are connected somewhere in the trees ...

Um, in the ... uh, trees ...

Or maybe a crane? Someone could've, you know, moved a crane out there to the left or right of the girls and tied a harness to that ...




Ok, well, it's probably just ... CGI or green screen or something. Maybe it's a viral ad created by a tourism bureau in Russia designed to ensure we never, ever go to Russia. Or, if we do, that we never enter the woods alone. Mission accomplished, guys!

#5. The Headless Ghost

In this video, we have four kids wandering around looking for a ghost in an abandoned school in Iraq (one description says India, but since they're speaking Arabic we'll go with Iraq). The boys are kind of wandering aimlessly through stairwells and empty classrooms for a solid two minutes, which would arouse suspicion under our "Why is anyone filming this?" rule if not for the fact that we know they are explicitly waiting for the lights to suddenly dim and for a hallway full of disembodied 19th century clothes to start doing the Monster Mash. That doesn't happen. What happens is much creepier:

About halfway through, while conducting yet another unremarkable sweep of a hollowed-out classroom, they seem to find what they are looking for:

A headless goddamned ghost appears right in goddamned front of them. You literally see it materialize on camera -- of all the entries on this list, this is the one you absolutely have to watch. Seriously, your mind will be blown like Eric Stoltz's penis in The Rules of Attraction. As they swing the camera lazily through the room, the ghost just walks very purposefully toward them like it's delivering a pizza, while a long, low moan emanates from its phantom lungs.

Surely at this point our ghost hunters are propelling themselves the hell out of that school on pants-shredding jets of crimson-tinged fear diarrhoea. Except they aren't. In fact, they have no reaction at all, and they continue scouring in the haunted building for another two boring minutes until the clip ends. (At least the "moaning" isn't coming from the ghost -- it's the beginning of a call to prayer in a neighbouring mosque. You hear the service continue throughout the rest of the video.)

YouTube commenter's seem to think the ghost is simply one of the boys who went to go look out the window; that the bright light coming through obscures his head and gives him a washed-out ghostly look for the camera. But again, watch the video -- when the camera sweeps across the floor a few seconds earlier, nobody is standing there:

And it really does look like a translucent figure materializes into an empty freaking room. You can even see it beginning to bleed out of the wall and take shape when the cameraman first shakily stumbles in:

If this is all an accident of the lighting and their shitty cell-phone cameras, then it was a lucky damned accident, considering they were specifically there to hunt ghosts in what they thought was a haunted abandoned building. If they doctored the video with effects later, then this is a remarkably subtle job. These are giggling teenagers goofing around, and we're pretty sure they gave us a creepier ghost effect than any of the Paranormal Activity movies. So good job, guys -- you successfully creeped us out, one way or another.