Well, I’ve become addicted to yet another British TV show. The show is called Most Haunted and it is quite similar to the Sci-Fi Channel’s Ghost Hunters. Given the long history of TV producers on both sides of the Atlantic stealing each others ideas, it’s probably safe to say that Ghost Hunters is based on Most Haunted. In any case, the premise behind Most Haunted is simple – a film crew and a “spirit medium” visit a supposedly haunted site and record the events of a night spent there with green “night vision” cameras. I’ve seen about eight episodes of Most Haunted to this point and not much happens aside from the occasional noise and ex post facto video evidence of paranormal activity, such as shots of books on the floor after a spirit has supposedly pulled them off a bookshelf. The show itself is a bit of a set up, really. Think about it – here’s a film crew spending the night sitting in the dark in some four hundred year-old house in the English countryside. It’s no wonder they hear things. Lots of houses make noise, especially once they pass the century mark. And any person in an unfamiliar setting – especially one there for the premise of finding ghosts – is sure to interpret any sound as something out of the ordinary. Also, many of the “psychic” types the show uses – mediums and whatnot – lack credibility, even for people of their profession. This isn’t because they’re “quacks” per se, but because of the locations Most Haunted visits. It’s not hard to imagine that a medium could be compromised – consciously or not – by investigating a building he or she might have read about back in school. For instance, Most Haunted once visited the Chatham Dockyard, which at one time was the Royal Navy’s most important shipyard. It was hardly surprising then that the show’s main medium – colorful character named Derek Acorah – was “contacted” by the spirit of Peter Pett, who just happened to be the commissioner of the dockyards at the time of the Royal Navy’s most humiliating defeat ever. One might think that the show would hire an American or Canadian medium to take some of the possibility of cheating out of the loop. But alas, they never called me for that suggestion. Also, the show’s mediums sometimes “channel” spirits from several hundred years ago that speak modern English remarkably well; as you might know “English” from the 13th or 14th century was markedly different than it is today. Perhaps the earliest a current English speaker could go back in a time machine and still be understood by people of the day would be around 1550, yet Derek can “channel” people from 1400 that speak as plainly as a Londoner today.
Now, you might think after reading the above paragraph that I don’t believe in ghosts. You wouldn’t be right but you wouldn’t be wrong either. When it comes to ghosts, I’m like that old poster that used to hang in David Duchovny’s office in The X-Files: I WANT TO BELIEVE. I still have a huge skeptic streak for stuff like this but two facts tend to get in the way of that skepticism: 1) most cultures that I know of have some form of “ghost” in their belief systems. The fact that Asians, Native Americans and Africans believe in ghosts as much as Europeans and Americans do makes me think that there’s more to it that just a bunch of fairy tales, and; 2) people still believe in ghosts. No one believes in fairies, sea serpents, Bigfoot, the boogey man or the Loch Ness Monster much anymore. But you can easily find lots of people that believe in ghosts. You can even find people that say things like “I don’t believe in ghosts, but this weird thing happened once…” You just don’t hear people saying that about banshees!
So why do I want to believe in ghosts? Well, several things happened in my parent’s old house that made me wonder. Otherworldly screams were heard in the house by me and my friends on multiple occasions. Several people reported hearing unexplained footsteps in the house. My mother saw a man in a trench coat and a fedora-style hat pass by her bedroom door as she was looking in a mirror opposite the doorway. Large items like TV sets went missing on occasion and inexplicably returned when no one was home or everyone was asleep. Many, many times I opened the back door to enter the house and heard the “sound of silence” that you often hear when you enter a room just as everyone stops talking. To be sure, the house was no Borley Rectory, but strange and scary things did happen.
But maybe the strangest thing that ever happened to me occurred only a few years ago at the Tower of London. I had just finished the yeoman’s tour and was in one of the gift shops on the site. The shop was rectangular in shape, had three alcoves on each long side of the rectangle and entrances and exits on either short end of the shop. It was nearing closing time and the place was fairly empty. I was in one of the alcoves, bent over to look at something, a CD of “English folk music” I think. There was a rack of aprons behind me, but there was enough space so that just about anybody could fit between me and the rack if they’d wanted to pass. So I’m there checking out whatever it was when I felt someone bump into me, as if they were trying to pass. Because I’m a nice guy that had good parents, I instinctively straightened up and turned around to say “excuse me”… but there was no one there. There was no one within 20 feet of me. None of the aprons on the rack were moving, as they might have been if jostled by someone passing behind me. I was also bent over an air vent, but there was no air coming out of it and in any case I was bent over it in such a way that a burst of air couldn’t have traveled up my coat and caused the sensation. It wasn’t nearly as “scary” as some of the things that happened in my old house – in fact, I don’t remember being scared at all, just “puzzled” – but unlike those events at home, I KNOW that someone (or something) bumped in to me there in the Tower. Besides, think about it: how many times have you had a false sensation of someone touching you? Although I’ve heard all kinds of “scary” and “unexplained” noises in my lifetime, this is the only time I can recall feeling as if someone that wasn’t there touched me.
I remember the first time I heard “the scream” in my folk’s old house. The parents had gone out of town – probably to nearby Lake Lanier, as I was in the house that night with no supervision – and I was lying down on a loveseat near the front door waiting for some friends to pick me up to go to the Midnight Movies. The house was quiet and dark, the only noise being the soft tick-tock of the grandfather clock. I was just lying there thinking about whatever (girls, probably) when I heard a female voice scream from inside the house. It made all the hairs I had everywhere stand straight up. While I’m certain that the scream came from inside the house, it’s worth noting that it sounded like a younger voice – not a young girl, but like a teenager – of which there were exactly two living in the neighborhood at the time – one of which wasn’t particularly friendly with my family, and the other would have been “too cool” to waste a Saturday night hanging out with my sister, who was only 10 at the time and – if I remember correctly – was spending the night at the “too cool” girl’s house. You’d think if it was my sister playing a prank or something she would have admitted it by now… instead she has her own collection of similar stories. Besides, my folk’s house had one of those alarm systems that “beeps” when a door or window is opened. If my sister was gonna prank me by way of climbing through a second story window – one without the sensors – I firmly believe that even her 10 year-old self could have come up with something better than a scream. Besides, while I’m certain that I heard a scream, it also didn’t quite sound real, which (if that makes any sense) made it all the more scary. I mean, had my sister been home, and had she screamed, I don’t think my first reaction would have been abject fear. I would hope that I would have run to help her. In any case, my frightened ass jumped off that loveseat and ran outside to wait for my friends on the curb. But it’s entirely possible that I imagined the whole thing. A young boy, alone in a huge house with all the lights off… It could happen. But I’m telling you, that thing in the Tower happened.
Of course, one of the biggest problems in believing in ghosts is the sheer amount of hokum that surrounds the subject. 120 years ago, “mediums” held “séances” where “spirits” moved common items… using pulleys, magnets and other mechanical means. In other words, it was a fake as a magic show with the added indignity of ripping off people that might have been searching for lost loved ones. Many “mysterious sounds” have been found to be houses settling, air trapped in old pipes or localized seismographic activity. Many of the thousands of “ghost photos” have proven to be either doctored or simple anomalies in either the film, camera or processing. Even the “orbs” so beloved of modern day ghost hunters can almost always be attributed to reflective dust, flying insects, lens flare or some other common scientific explanation. “Ectoplasms” can usually be traced to cigarette smoke, fog or errant camera straps. Even the “Amityville Horror” has been found to be a blatant hoax.
This is not to say that I don’t think people can’t be mediums or that everything captured on film is either fake or misunderstood. I think it’s completely within the realm of possibility for someone to be born with a heightened sensitivity to magnetic fields or something related to ghosts. After all, my sister has an incredible sensitivity to low-frequency sounds… often she’d turn to a member of the family and ask why “that sound” wasn’t driving us crazy. Ummmm… because we can’t hear it, honey? That said, there’s no doubt that there are a huge number of charlatans in the “medium” business. Sadly, I wish it wasn’t so. And I’ve seen too many tapes of “orbs” for all of them to be easily dismissed as insects or dust. Dust cannot travel in a straight line chest-high across a room without some noticeable draft helping it along. And insects just don’t follow many of the gentle “flight paths” that orbs sometimes do in videos. I’m not saying that orbs are ghosts – they could just as easily be some as-yet undiscovered animal or interstellar particle only visible in infrared light that science hasn’t “discovered” yet. But that also means that I don’t think that they’re all fakes, either.
So – what’s your take on ghosts? Do you have a good ghost story you’d like to share?? If so, leave a comment! In the meantime I’ll be here, watching Most Haunted in a darkened room late into the night, rekindling that same vibe that makes 10 year-old boys only watch scary movies during thunderstorms.