If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call?
Siri, maybe.
In addition to making phone calls and sending text messages, your iPhone can now be used to hunt down ghosts in your attic, basement or crawlspace, thanks to a newly created attachment called Mr. Ghost. The attachment (via Geekologie) resembles an old cell phone antenna and is available in white, grey, red or orange; more importantly, it functions as an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector that plugs into your iPhone headphone jack and displays on your screen the level of electromagnetic radiation being emitted by anything you wave the detector over.
That means Mr. Ghost can be used not only to measure the amount of electromagnetic radiation certain electronic devices in your home are emitting, but also to find, track down and pinpoint the location of of ghosts, which, of course, emit unusual amounts of electromagnetic energy as they zip around the dark corners of your home.
Mr. Ghost creator Aaron Rasmussen explains how it all works, and hunts for ghosts in his own attic, in his Kickstarter video below:
As you can see, the primary function of Mr. Ghost is identifying the gizmos in your house that are emitting high levels of electromagnetic radiation so that you can avoid exposing your more cherished organs to them for too long, or too often. The more intriguing function, however, must certainly be the ghost-hunting mode: We all have spaces in our homes, or offices, or spouses, that we have long suspected are haunted, and now we have a device to verify our beliefs and vindicate ourselves from our dismissive friends and relatives (and spouses).
The Mr. Ghost attachment, then, will allow us to locate any number of ghosts, including but not limited to spooks, spectres, shapeshifters, phantoms, phantasms, poltergeists, wraiths, succubi and, of course, invisible zombie children.
If there is one great downside to the Mr. Ghost iPhone attachment, it is perhaps that it can only find the position of the ghost, and not actually subdue or capture it. Maybe, as a followup, Mr. Rasmussen could invent an iPhone-ready proton pack?
In all seriousness, Mr. Ghost is a real product, available to back on Kickstarter, where it has already exceeded its funding goal of $7,000, with two weeks still to go. A white Mr. Ghost attachment costs $20 and will arrive in February 2013, per the Kickstarter page; for $25, Rasmussen will get you one by Christmas. Mr. Ghost works on iPhone 4 or newer and iPad 2 or newer; while the attachment will detect ghosts on Android phones, there is not yet an app to visualize their energy, nor is there an immediate plan to build one.
You can find out more and order a Mr. Ghost detector on its official Kickstarter page here.