It’s Flashback Friday. Every Friday we bring back a golden oldie article from yesteryear. A chance for you to re-read it and see if it is still relevant today!
As people get older the buffer between them and death gets thinner. A child’s first experience of death is usually great-grandparents. This leaves layers of ‘old people’ still there as a buffer between them and their own mortality. For most, when their grandparents come to the end of their lives, they are well on course shaping their own lives and still quite busy and mentally occupied. But by the time the last layer of the buffer, their parents, are shuttling off this mortal coil an internal siren is wailing inside. There’s nobody left. They are now at the top of the tree, the next in the firing line.
This scary prospect, along with the heart-wrenching feeling of loss of somebody so important can switch the despair circuits in the brain to overload. Humans don’t like things they can’t understand or control. Death is one of them. It’s very frightening. So, to be able to cope we invent things to make death anything but the full-stop or end. Children will do similar things when scared of the dark. Their imaginary friends will protect them. For some grown-ups this imaginary friend is religion. There are no religions that exist without giving us places to go beyond death. Most religions make considerable money out of us on route, and give the clever few extreme power in exchange for removing that fear of being dead.
One of the safe beliefs includes the possibility of ghosts and hauntings whereby for various reasons people are supposedly associated with buildings or places, despite the fact that they are long dead. The hassling of ghosts and haunting ‘spirits’ has now become a television sport.
Possibly the main programme doing this is called “Most Haunted” commonly found on Living TV (anybody notice the humour there?). The concept is that a crew of camera and sound, Producer, make-up lady, etc., etc., follow around a screaming lady host (married to the Producer) along with a number of guest mediums who supposedly are able to commune with dead people. Maybe the most hilarious of these is Derek Acorah. Derek has built a huge following and equally huge bank balance from his harassing of dead people. His main dead contact is an ex-Ethiopian ‘spirit’ called Sam. Apparently Sam knew Derek when he was also an Ethiopian some 2,000 years ago. Because of this, Derek can now speak to Sam on ‘the other side’ and get Sam to pass on information about dead people. Well, the ‘act’ of Derek and Sam talking to each other is side-splittingly funny to watch.
“Most Haunted” wheels out Derek and puts him in a room in an old castle or something equally spooky. It then switches the light out and we watch in night vision as he talks to dead people (Quite why you have to turn the lights out to talk to dead people has never actually been explained!).
What is brilliant about watching his captivating performance is that people believe it is real, and ignore the obvious tell-tale signs. I mean, we can suspend belief when Orville the plastic duck speaks, but inside we still know it’s really Keith Harris’ hand. That doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. But the mediumship stuff of Derek Acorah is always presented as if it’s real and for some reason people ignore the tell-tale signs that it’s pretend. Nobody, for example, ever questions how he can instantly walk into a room and vividly describe the scene, painting a word picture of events from hundreds of years ago, when (for example) a women is being strangled by a man. He’ll describe what they were thinking, their emotions, what they were wearing, and they will supposedly even speak through him. Ask them (through him) about how they killed somebody or were themselves killed and they’ll describe it vividly. Ask them (through him) their name and they can’t remember, or there’s a struggle with Derek having to ask “Sam” repeatedly to help him grasp it. 20 or 30 seconds may be spent with “Patter?” “Pitta?” “Oh, Peter. Ok Sam, can I have a last name” “Wooden something” “Wooden Wooden ah, Woodman. Peter Woodman.” “Yes, his name was Peter Woodman”. So, the name takes this long to come out, and yet the dead person will happily tell the story of an event in four part harmony and it takes seconds.
On one occasion a dead aircraft pilot from the Second World War had taken possession of Derek and was speaking through him. He was happily answering questions about some accident he’d been in which had caused him to get badly burnt in a fire, and was waxing lyrically about how he was a brilliant spitfire pilot. When innocently asked how far he could get on a single refuelling of a spitfire he refused to answer saying his intelligence was being insulted. Obviously Derek had forgotten to read up on such details beforehand. Yet, everybody loves him and believes him.
To avoid further tarnishing Derek’s credibility within the “Most Haunted” TV show, he goes off and is never present when additional spooky bits are filmed. Interestingly, the screaming host of the show is never present either. The Producer of the whole show is always left with his crew to film ‘vigils’ in the dark using night vision. It is only when this Producer is there that strange things will be ‘caught’ or ‘nearly caught’ on camera. The stopping of the mechanism of a large clock whilst only the top bit is being focussed on, or the throwing around of objects, this always happens during these sequences. And always with only the Producer and his intimate crew present. Nobody ever notices this fact either! I’m guessing that should questions ever be asked, then Derek and Yvette Fielding (the screaming host of the show) are able to keep their credibility in tact because they weren’t there at the filming of the really spooky bits.
I have two things I’d like to see to improve “Most Haunted”. Firstly, I’d like to see the whole show carry a declaration that it is for entertainment only and that it is not real. Secondly, I’d love to rig a place with some of the most inventive man made poltergeist special effects, and slowly let them off during their night vision vigils. Can you imagine how scared they’d all be if they thought they really were seeing a haunting instead of making one up.
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