Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  Dr James smiles at me, patiently. ‘Sure, it would be wrong to say that we know everything,’ he says. ‘But your counter-argument, if that’s what it is, is saying that for all I know, the current theories might be false, and that means that ghosts could exist. That’s a kind of argument from ignorance. It’s true to say that we don’t know everything – monkeys might fly out of my ass, who knows? It might happen, but that’s not a good reason for thinking that it is going to happen. But, I’m being facetious. What you said is true. We have been wrong in the past. We’ve been wrong a lot. But it’s not entirely rational to conclude from that that ghosts exist.’

  I find myself picturing Dr James with monkeys all over him. Tiny ones in his ears, flying ones down his trousers, a furious king silverback pounding on his head. Even if this man was ambushed and brought down by a wild swarm of deadly apes, he’d still be able to beat me in any argument.

  ‘One of the things that killed Cartesian Dualism,’ he continues, ‘is the problem of interaction. You’ve said that a believer in ghosts would have to say something like, “Ghosts aren’t bodies. They leave bodies. A soul is something else. It survives the destruction of a body.” And if a ghost and a body are different stuff, then the question immediately arises, how does the one affect the other? The kinds of causal interactions that we understand are things like billiard balls smacking into one another. So, how can a thing that doesn’t exist in space, like a ghost, have an effect on something that does?’

  ‘So, what you’re basically saying is,’ I say, picking up my coffee cup and making it float around in front of his face, ‘if a ghost is made up of pure soul, it shouldn’t be able to do this?’

  ‘If the ghost isn’t physical, no.’

  I put the cup down again and have another think. I remember the philosophical point that Lance from the Ghost Club made. It was something about nature being an economical system. And that there’s nothing economical about making us accrue all this wisdom, only for us to lose it all by dying, just when we’ve got life sussed. Lance is right. That just wouldn’t make sense. Would it?

  ‘Maybe,’ says Dr James. ‘But there are lots and lots and lots of things in the universe that end. There’s a thing called the “argument by design”, which is the view that everything in nature seems to be organised to achieve a certain purpose. Imagine you were walking along a beach and you found a watch. You would look at its parts and you’d see the whole thing has been designed to achieve a certain purpose. Somebody must have put it there. And you can look at the universe in the same way and say it’s designed, that there must be a universe-maker, just like there is a clock-maker. You can see patterns. Maybe this Ghost Club person is seeing all this and thinking that it’s all been done for a reason, that you couldn’t accumulate all this information and then just die. Well, he’s wrong – you can look at the earth and see all sorts of things that look badly, badly designed. You breathe through the same thing you drink through. How stupid is that? You choke because of that. Whole species go extinct. There are ice ages that wipe stuff out. There’s disease. People go blind. There’s lots of unpleasantness in the world. Everything tends towards disorder. In fact, it’s even one of the laws of nature. It’s entropy – stuff falls apart. Something like a human being is a little momentary flicker, or a wisp of organisation in the universe, not part of a pattern. If you look at other human lives, like little babies writhing in chemotherapy, you see something that ain’t designed at all. At least, not designed well. You know,’ he says, looking at me with his thoughtful eyes, ‘maybe all the information that people accumulate over a lifetime … maybe that’s it. Perhaps that’s what ought to be celebrated. That bit there that we got. Hoping that there’s more, looking for ghosts or religion or whatever, is wasting that little good bit that you’ve got.’

  6

  ‘Making things fit’

  FOR GENERATIONS THE parishioners of St Nicholas’s have known about the sorrowful spectral forms that move in their church’s graveyard. The ghosts have been here since late in the sixteenth century, when a madness passed through their village like the shadow of a vast cloud. And ever since the clamour and terror of those witch trials and executions, the villagers have known that this cemetery is stained. They say that if you come in the night, as we have, you can still hear traces of the things that happened then, in between the crow calls and the gusts that blow and whistle around the steeple and the stones. And it’s then that you can sometimes see the victims, still mourning at the site of their ordeal.

  The sun has long since set and the only thing moving inside the churchyard’s boundary is the sandpaper winter wind that rises off the wheat fields and runs between the gravestones. There’s nothing here but the gusts and … oh yes, the TV crew. And the lorries. And the chattering fans. And the luxury caravanette. And the most famous medium in Britain, getting angry with himself under a brilliant white arc of light that a film crew are beaming down on him.

  As the shrill breeze runs through his accurately groomed hair, and multiple diamonds sparkle on his earlobes and fingers, I watch Derek Acorah trying to pre-record a link for his television show. After his fourth fluffing, he gives himself a pantomime slap around the face and says, with a whinny, ‘Oh, I can’t act!’

  The crew who are filming Derek and his co-presenter, Yvette Fielding, do not offer any comment. They just remain in position and wait for Yvette to begin, yet again.

  ‘Good evening,’ she says into the camera, ‘and welcome to Most Haunted Live. This is the first night out of three and we’re on the hunt for the ghost of the East Anglian witch trials. We’re here with the Most Haunted Live crew and, of course, we’ve got Derek Acorah. Derek, what are you expecting to happen here?’

  ‘I feel over the next three nights,’ he says, in his rich, scouse-with-added-sugar voice, ‘you know, it’s going to be very eerie.’

  ‘Ooooh, no,’ says Yvette.

  ‘Be prepared to be very scared,’ Derek says, with his forefinger extended and slamming through the air to give the last two words maximum dramatic impact.

  ‘Ooooh, no,’ Yvette says again. ‘I don’t like the sound of that at all. It’s going to be amazing.’

  I have broken my promise to Debbie. I have come on to the set of Most Haunted. Although I am not going to play anybody the tape of our conversation, I have managed to talk them into letting me take part in this evening’s programme – which is a special live edition. On a normal show, Yvette, Derek and their team would simply spend the night in a haunted location and try to film whatever phenomenon they can with their infra-red cameras, while Derek sniffs out bonus information with his clairvoyant powers. Tonight, though, there is a presenter, various experts and an audience sitting in a studio a few miles away from us. They’ll be watching and discussing our experiences as we travel around Essex on the hunt for happenings. My role in the proceedings is to be a ‘verifier’. I have to confirm to the audience that any eerie occurrences that Yvette and Derek report did actually happen.

  I was interested in how extraordinarily guarded the members of Avalon Skies were when talking about the show. They were acting as if the Most Haunted secret police could have stormed in at any moment and dragged them all off for heresy. I was also struck by how impressed Paul Astley was with the programme. I thought it remarkable that Most Haunted turned him and his wife into believers, and not the ex-squaddie friend who saw a dead girl standing at the bottom of their own stairs.

  As far as the state of my own belief goes, Dr James has ripped my brain in half, like a Tuscan farmer splits a fresh lump of bread. On the one hand, my trip to the British Library has affected me deeply. I was astonished at the quantity of evidence and its cross-time, cross-cultural nature. Most of all, though, I was amazed by the consistency of the claims. The fact that poltergeist reports, for example, have remained the same across the world for hundreds of years makes them all the harder to be discounted. And what’s more, when it does seem likely that a ‘haunting’ has been invented
, as at Amityville, it’s simple to spot. Even apart from the trail of money, there’s a string of clues throbbing right through that testimony. A demonic pig called Jodie? Rivers of green slime? A spectral marching band? The implausibility of reports like this only serves to bolster the plausibility of all the others.

  That said, I’ve been equally struck with Dr James’s argument about evolutionary theory not fitting with a belief in ghosts and souls. When humans were just hairy fire-worshipping rapists living in caves, were we an elevated species then? Are there Cro-Magnon men in heaven? Are there cavemen ghosts? What about when we were just slime, floating about in the primordial ooze, bumping into each other and absorbing swamp-shit through our see-thru skin? Where were our souls at this point? Were they, like Dr James said, just hanging around some astral lobby, waiting for the moment when nature was ready for them? And when the timer on that evolutionary oven pinged, when we’d been fully baked to human, did somebody release a big net and did the souls float down and find an empty, man-shaped vessel? If so, who pulled the switch? Who made the oven? Who put our unevolved dough in it and worked out the timings?

  When I think about this – and the answer that so obviously presents itself – I get that vision, again, of my mother at the dinner table. Oh, you will be.

  And something else has happened. The other morning, I got a package from Trevor with the DVDs that he promised me. The footage of Debbie under possession is fascinating. She appears to be in the grip of a man called George Turnbull, who, they discovered after much research, was a smuggler with a history in the pub where the possession happened. Debbie certainly doesn’t look as though she’s acting. The footage, of her shouting ‘I will not be accused’ in a baritone rage, is violent and visceral. And, unexpectedly, the few minutes following her ‘possession’ is just as affecting as what came before – Debbie seems genuinely confused and drained to the point of collapse.

  And then there’s the film of Newcastle Keep. After coming across Fuji’s ‘What’s Gone Wrong?’ webpage, I am now comfortably sure that the orbs that digital cameras pick up are not balls of wandering ghost energy. It’s dust. However, the infra-red, moving footage of light anomalies that Trevor and Lou have caught is harder to explain. Firstly, because of the way it behaves. At Deborah Carven’s house we saw just one globule, in all the hours that we watched, and it followed her up the stairs. And in Kathy Ganiel’s house, there were so many of them behaving in such a bizarre fashion, that I cannot persuade myself to believe that they were dust or insects. But most of all, on Trevor’s film, somebody on camera sees it float down the stairs. He shouts, ‘Fuckin’ hell! Did you see that?’ Firstly, people don’t usually react like that when they see dust. And secondly, for the Fuji theory to work, the dust has to be right up close to the lens. But the member of Avalon Skies saw it where the viewer sees it – on the stairs. So this isn’t a trick of perspective.

  But, anyway, right now, I have duties to perform for the nation’s armchair ghosthunters. Much of Most Haunted’s fun revolves around ex-footballer Derek, who has a ‘spirit guide’ called Sam. Sam lives inside Derek’s head and tells him things about the ghosts and historical events that have taken place in the area. Sam, it has to be said, has mixed results. Much play is made of the fact that all the locations are kept secret from Derek in advance of filming. This way, they say, we know that everything he comes out with is of supernatural origin. Of course, critics believe that Derek is briefed. Some speculate that Acorah types the location into a search engine before he leaves the house and memorises any names, dates and grisly tales that pop up in his browser – something he roundly denies. On at least one occasion, though, Derek has been caught mispronouncing a spirit’s name in modern English and not – as he might be expected to if he was actually in contact with it – in the olde way.

  Just as Derek and Yvette are finally managing to get their lines right, I decide to have a wander about. There are three big production lorries parked with their lights on by the graveyard. As I’m peering into one of the doors, I feel an ominous, looming presence rear up behind me. It’s Judy, the P.R. woman from Living TV, who has been assigned to chaperone me. On the way here, she made me promise to behave myself. I think my wandering is worrying her.

  I follow Judy obediently back to the graveyard. This place is intricately linked with the story of Canewdon and Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General. One of the most common sightings is the ghost of a spectral grey lady.

  Tonight’s show is being anchored from a makeshift studio in a nearby village hall. I’m standing on the exact spot that Judy has directed me to, watching the crew listen to its progress in their earpieces. Next to me is James, a journalist from a daily newspaper who is going to help me with the verifying. So far, Judy’s doing a great job with us. On the way here, she had nothing but bowl-eyed praise for Yvette and Derek. And, after catching me trying to peek at the official filming schedule for the evening, she ticked me off politely whilst clutching it to her bosom. After that, I noticed, she took it to the bathroom with her when she needed to pee.

  Back in the graveyard, our verification skills have been called upon already: something genuinely strange has happened. Just before Yvette and Derek go on air, the battery on the portable floodlight drains instantaneously – just as Stephen the Druid said.

  ‘Shit!’ says Yvette, hopping about the place, as the crew run around finding torches to shine on her face so it will show up on the telly. ‘The light’s gone off! Shit, shit, shit, the light’s gone off!’

  Then, a small lamp that was illuminating a gravestone falls over.

  ‘Hi guys, hi,’ she says into the camera, and to David in the studio, as the live broadcast begins. ‘Hello, everybody in the audience. I think we should just explain something, quickly. We’ve only just been standing in the graveyard for a short amount of time. Already the battery power on the light has gone, there’s a light over there in the corner that’s gone over on its own. But there’s no wind here whatsoever. It’s not nice at all. At all. We’ve even got some journalists here as well that can verify. It’s not windy, is it, guys?’

  It isn’t windy. But then, the light was standing on a flimsy tripod on bumpy, grassy ground and …

  ‘Not at all,’ I say, to Judy’s visible relief.

  Next, we all follow Yvette to the fallen light and watch her crouch down on the floor. She fiddles about with it a bit, in a breathless manner.

  ‘Now, this is quite a heavy light and I don’t even know how it goes back up, but it really has come down. It’s just weird. Derek, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, we all heard it with the naked ear and it was a real sharp sound,’ says Derek.

  ‘Look! You have to twist it!’ Yvette says, holding it up towards the camera and twiddling a black knob on the side of one of the tripod’s legs backwards and forwards.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Derek.

  ‘That’s really strange. You have to twist that. So do you think there’s actually any activity here at the moment?’ she says, looking up at the medium.

  ‘Yes, and I feel there is activity here – and it’s not just residual energy – which I’m excited about, and I hope things are gonna start to happen.’

  ‘If anything comes out at us now I’m gonna absolutely wet myself,’ Yvette says, before handing back to the studio.

  Everybody falls silent again. Derek frowns, rubs the end of his nose a bit and looks away, far into the tungsten-speckled distance.

  ‘Come on, ghosties!’ sings Yvette.

  There’s a long silence.

  A twig snaps.

  ‘Did anyone hear that?’ says James.

  ‘I did,’ I say.

  Judy, it has to be said, appears highly suspicious of her verifiers. She unleashes a dramatic frown in our direction. It’s as if she thinks we’re making the snapping-twig story up – until Yvette pipes up.

  ‘I did, too!’ she says.

  We’re all looking in the direction that it came from – a bushy ditc
h on the edge of the graveyard. A strange black shape moves through the space. It isn’t fuzzy or indistinct, it’s sharp and clear and undeniably there. We stand silently for a second and watch it travel in stilted, jerky movements. Could this be the Grey Lady? Could the psychic remains of this dead witch really be moving through the shadowy shrubbery, shaken awake by the noise and bother of Britain’s premier ghosthunting TV crew?

  Derek clearly thinks so. ‘There she is!’ he shouts, and runs right at it with his arm in the air in the ‘charge’ position.

  As we run after the medium – who’s now disappearing into the depths of the cemetery – it occurs to me that, as Derek isn’t supposed to have been told that we’re looking for a Grey Lady, ‘There she is!’ is a slightly odd thing to have said.

  By the time Judy, James and I catch him up, dodging the wires and ankles of the kit-laden film crew, the shadow has disappeared. But we can still hear movement.

  ‘Sshh!’ says Yvette.

  We’re all dead still and listening hard. There’s silence, then –

  ‘Bollocks!’ shouts somebody from behind the trees.

  St Nicholas’s Church is at the top of a hill that has a thin windy road leading up to it. From one direction it looks totally isolated – an old stone steeple rising from the middle of a lonely countryside hamlet – but in reality it backs onto a large, teeming council estate.