Scooby Doo Don’t Dig

Last night I went to listen to a man named Andy talk about ghosts.

Andy was in his early to mid forties, had a receding hairline, a bit of a belly and a moustache and had 20 years of ghost huntin’ experience under his belt.

Now, first and foremost let me just state that for the record ghosts are COOL!  Having grown up as an avid fan of Ghostbusters I have always been fascinated by “super natural” occurrences; voices on recording devices, doors slamming, faces showing up in photographs, that eerie feeling you get sometimes when you’re all alone in a big house…brrr!  Shivers up the spine, no?   Apparently I’m not the only one intrigued by this subject; there were about 30 other people in attendance at the talk, most of them in their 50s, slender and tired looking.  I kept my nose firmly planted in my book, pretending to be fascinated by its Wicca related contents, as small groups conversed around me.

The event consisted of Ol’ Andy playing sound/ video clips of things that he couldn’t explain.  To his credit he never explicitly said “THIS IS CLEARLY EVIDENCE OF A GHOST” (I imagine he would have excitedly exclaimed this), though that credit is compromised by the fact that the talk was called “Ghosts” and that he had flyers which outlined “Ghost Tours” for the bargain price of £70 a pop.

The several very sinister/indiscernible sound clips which he played all featured what seemed to be male/ female voices making various horrible noises.  Andy provided us with the context for each clip (this was recorded at Durrington Cemetery in the section where the graves from the 1700s stand.   I tied my recorder to a tree and we left it recording for half an hour.  We were 50 feet away and there was no nearby traffic, etc), and then we would collectively learn forward, squint our eyes and try our hardest to make sense of the auditory cacophony that we were subjected to.  After each recording he would look up at our blank faces expectantly with a “There!”  and tell us what he figured the voice was saying; What do you like, bloody thing, fuck you, let go, and several others.  Personally, I thought it often sounded like a dog barking.

Andy told us about the time he saw his tape recorder slide across the floor and when he grabbed it he felt resistance, like someone was tugging it back.  Or the time he went to the Galleries of Justice and left his tape recorder on the bottom floor, making sure that it was set to record only if it detected a noise, and then went to meet his colleagues’ three floors up.  When they later examined the tape it sounded like various doors were slamming and someone was screaming (or laughing?).  Two of his video recordings didn’t work, and the one that did was not very convincing.

The unfortunate thing about this lecture was that, when dealing with this sort of “evidence” all you can do is take someone at their word that there was no one nearby, they didn’t manipulate the sounds or the footage, and that something authentic was actually captured.  Not to call Andy a liar, but how do we know that one of his mates wasn’t playing an elaborate trick on him?  That being said, I don’t believe that what was captured was anything supernatural, it’s just unexplained.

My charming friend, Moth Demonfly, recently brought this to my attention: http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html

If you’re too lazy to check out the link (you are clearly a terrible person) the article talks about something called Infrasound.

Infrasound refers to noise that is at such a low frequency that you don’t consciously hear it, but your ears still sense it.   As such, this process of receiving sensory input without your conscious mind understanding where it’s coming from wreaks havoc with your emotions.  Specifically, researchers found that sounds between 7 and 19 Hz it could induce fear, dread or panic.  These sounds occur in nature (like before a volcano erupts or an earthquake strikes) so our bodies subconsciously recognize when something might be amiss or potentially dangerous.  These sound waves can also disrupt your vision, vibrating your eyeball so that you might think you see something moving when you are actually looking at a static shape in the corner of your eye.

Cool, eh?  This is far more fascinating than an actual ghost!

But how might this explain recorded occurrences?  I’m not entirely sure, but I’m not convinced that all the sounds that we were exposed to were anything more exciting than wind, dogs barking or mechanical glitches.  Also, when someone thinks they hear something, doesn’t that make you really listen to see if you can catch it as well?  “Oh yeeeeeeah!  It does kind of sound like free-cow!”

It certainly did peak my interest, however.  Time for some further investigations!

The good news?  Andy gave us the names of all of the locations.  I’M GOING GHOST HUNTING!  Who’s coming??

T-FLY