Ghosties

Kevin and I look forward to Friday evening not just because it is..Friday evening...but also because at 20.00, 'Most Haunted' is on. This turned out to be a phenomenon in Britain and is carried by the W-network here, god bless them.

When MH started out, Yvette Fielding and husband Karl Beattie had taken their idea for the show to several of the mainstream TV networks and been turned down. Living TV must have blessed the day that Yvette came into their lives though, it has been a runaway success, putting Living on the map and is now their flagship show. The several times a year three-day live events draw millions of viewers, sadly we don't yet get to see them.

The original spiritualist medium with the show, Derek Acorah, a true showman has been 'discredited' by the show's parapsychologist Kieran O'Keefe. Kieran set up a couple of made-up ghosts and Derek took the bait. But all this says to me is that some of the time Derek reads the minds of those around him. This explanation seems far more logical to me than that Derek would risk national humiliation - because a lot of people watch this, by using something he'd overheard.

Kieran O'Keefe always appears at the end of the show and tries to give a 'normal' explanation for whatever has happened. Last night however, even he was stumped. On camera we have a stone flying through the air passing two members of the team horizontally. The only other person in the room was the one holding the camera and was standing parallel to them. Bats can't really throw stones horizontally. Nor can he really explain the 'light anomalies', a phenomenon formerly known as 'orbs'. And last night, one of the team using his own night vision camera in a room on his own is freaked out by a loud groan in his ear which we could hear clearly.

Being quite reflective, I am amused by how we have picked up the language of the show, the language of mediums.
A couple of Fridays ago, sitting in our living room, Kevin and I were both overwhelmed simultaneously by the smell of cigarettes. Not smoke exactly, but the smell as on a heavy smoker's clothes. We checked the windows and none were open. As far as Kevin was aware, neither neighbour smokes, but of course they could have had visitors, I'm just not sure how the smell of it gets through solid walls. There was no-one outside. When we told Kevin's parents about the odd incident, it was suggested, tongue-in-cheek that maybe we had a ghost. Kevin's thought was that we hadn't ever witnessed this before. My response was, 'but maybe they were in visitation.'

On the show, 'spirit people' or 'entities' are either in visitation or sometimes they are 'grounded'. They can draw energy from those in our world in order to interact, which is why the MH team often feel very cold or very hot during an encounter.

At my flat in Old Portsmouth I had several unusual things occur. The television just turning itself on during the night can be explained as could the lights flickering, but I never managed to explain how all the gas taps were turned on all at different angles without a human touching them.
I am convinced that my seeing purple lights has a very normal refraction of light type explanation. My optician didn't agree. I have woken in both of my Portsmouth flats to see hovering lights.

The flat in old Portsmouth was just a few doors away from a house where the Duke of Buckingham, not a very popular fellow, was murdered, so you wonder.... Portsmouth itself is in parts a very old city and I posted previously about the Ghost Walk and the Garrison Church, so it's not impossible that my flat simply was being visited. But from watching MH I also 'know' that people have ghosts attached to them. Goes without saying really.

We've both come to love Yvette and Karl, Richard Felix the historian with the team, David Wells and Derek Acorah, also now Gordon Smith, the spiritualist mediums. (maybe that should be media? ;) We love little fat Kath, the hairdresser who doesn't seem capable of getting Yvette's hair into a sensible style. We love Yvette's red leather trousers because they look so silly. We love Yvette for being such a scaredy cat. We, no I, love to cringe every time 'Ivvie' mispronounces something, which she does frequently, it's as though she has someone else write her litle monologues but no-one goes through them with her beforehand.
We don't trust Stuart or John the sound man, we discredit phenomena that happen around them. And now we feel betrayed by Kieran O'Keefe who denounced Derek to the press.

Most of all though, we love that this show deals with things that can't be explained, because that fulfills a need but it also opens up a huge universe of possibilities.