Ghost hunting has always attracted people who believe that technology can bridge the gap between the living and the dead. What’s new is that the technology in question is now generative AI, and the paranormal community is not sure how to feel about it.
The App That Reads Electromagnetic Signals as Spirits
Amy Waine and Jarrad Cutting, the pair behind the Amy’s Crypt YouTube channel, have spent years building their own software tools for paranormal investigation. Their latest, an app called GhostTube Seer, takes signals from a phone’s built-in magnetometer, maps them to words in a database, and then feeds those words into an image generator to produce visual output. Waine and Cutting describe it as “the world’s first AI Ghost Hunting tool.”
The results are abstract: during a session at the Winchester Mystery House, the app generated images of wooden walls, golden curtains, a woman reading, another woman in a black shawl, and a flock of white birds. The pair interpreted each image as connected to the history of the location. Whether or not one accepts that interpretation, the mechanics are straightforward: the app is pattern-matching sensor data and producing visual output. The meaning is supplied by the humans watching.
GhostTube Seer, which requires a paid monthly subscription, has surpassed one million downloads according to its Google Play store listing. Since its release in 2023, it has become a regular feature of Waine and Cutting’s on-screen investigations. It is not alone in this space. Sean Austin, a paranormal investigator who appeared on a Travel Channel series, launched an app called Spirit Phone Innovations that uses what it describes as “advanced AI” to analyze audio signals for electronic voice phenomena, a long-established technique in ghost hunting circles.
A Community Divided on What AI Actually Changes
Not everyone in the paranormal world is welcoming this shift. Alex Matsuo, a paranormal researcher and author who also works professionally in the technology industry, raises questions that go beyond personal preference. Her concern is methodological: if an AI tool is being used to detect ghosts, what data was it trained on to define what a ghost looks like or sounds like? That question has no clean answer, and it matters, because the output of any machine learning system reflects the assumptions baked into its training.
Matsuo also flags two ethical dimensions. First, whether generative image tools are drawing on copyrighted artwork to produce their supernatural imagery. Second, whether AI-powered ghost hunting tools risk creating what she calls “paranormal echo chambers,” reinforcing users’ existing beliefs rather than challenging them.
Her skepticism sits alongside a broader tension that has emerged in online paranormal communities since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. AI-generated ghost stories and supernatural images have spread widely across platforms, to the point where communities like the r/Nosleep subreddit have introduced strict policies banning AI-generated content. The concern is not just about quality. It is about authenticity, and about what happens to a community built around personal experience when that experience can be simulated at scale.
Matsuo’s view is that the core of ghost hunting is irreducibly human. Many people enter the field, she explains, after experiencing grief or trauma. The search for ghosts is, for a significant number of practitioners, a way of processing loss and confronting questions about what happens after death. That emotional foundation is not something a language model can replicate, and it is precisely what she believes is at risk of being diluted.
What This Reveals About How Humans Use Technology to Seek Meaning
Here is what most coverage of this story misses: the ghost hunting community is not a fringe curiosity. It is a case study in how humans have always recruited new technologies into the search for meaning, particularly around death.
Matsuo points to Thomas Edison’s reported attempt to build a “spirit phone” capable of contacting the dead, an ambition that finds a direct parallel in today’s AI-powered “deathbots.” The history of spirit photography, a contested phenomenon of the 19th and early 20th century, tracked closely with advances in photographic technology. Each new medium became a new surface onto which people projected the hope of contact with something beyond ordinary experience.
Generative AI is the latest iteration of that pattern. The difference is scale and accessibility. A magnetometer app with over a million downloads, combined with an image generator, puts a tool in millions of pockets that can produce personalized supernatural imagery on demand. The images mean nothing without a human to interpret them. That is the point. The technology does not find ghosts. It gives people a new way to look.
There is also a material dimension worth noting. As AI infrastructure expands, it is physically displacing the kinds of spaces that paranormal communities value. A former asylum in Pennsylvania, long used as a haunted attraction, was sold to a datacenter developer in late 2025 for demolition. Local residents organized and successfully blocked the project in May. The same technological wave reshaping how people hunt for ghosts is also, literally, tearing down the places where they go to do it.
In Short
Generative AI has entered the ghost hunting world, producing apps with millions of downloads and splitting a community between those who see it as a natural extension of their practice and those who worry it undermines the human core of what they do. The deeper question is not whether AI can detect ghosts. It is what it means when a technology designed to generate plausible output is applied to a search that has always been, at its heart, about grief, belief, and the need to feel that something is there.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.