Hunting Ghosts
Not long ago I spent a good amount of time watching “Most Haunted.” It’s a program from Britain that chronicles the adventures of a handful of excitable, if not reluctant, ghost hunters. When they see anything that strays from the ordinary, they often flee or faint, much like a bosomy matriarch in the old drawing-room comedies.
Either the footage for “Most Haunted” is shot in night-vision photo-negative style or else the British really do need to get more sun. This visual technique makes the viewer at home question what he is actually seeing, and it has the added effect of making every woman look like Mary Travers from Peter Paul & Mary.
On one episode they were in an airplane hanger where some poor soul had long ago burned to death. One of these spirit-hunting sleuths got so wrapped up in the moment that a rare instance of transference occurred. His body turned hot as fire. His colleagues touched his flesh and drew their hands back, screeching. Another hunter’s arm got broiling hot as well, and the gang took turns sniffing it for clues.
In another scene, Mary Travers and an Irishman named Paul (not Paul Stookey) were summoning the spirit of Jack the Ripper in the cellar of an ancient public house. This Paul was something of a skeptic and a hard guy—if a skinny, bespectacled chap with a Mr. Drysdale mustache could ever be a hard guy.
Anyway, Paul came off as quite intrepid—that is, until he mistook a smudge on his glasses for Saucy Jack. Suddenly he’s shrieking and he’s exercising all four limbs like a man who just intersected a spider’s web. We at home see nothing but a photo-negative of ass over elbows as we hear the kind of clomping and banging one hears several times during an episode of “COPS.” This Paul, we learn, has ascended the cellar stairway, leaving Mary Travers on her own.
The courageous man shortly returns and submits that he had spied a figure standing in the corner of the room. We can trust his word because he raises his right hand and swears to it—on the good name of everyone from his grandmother to the Metaphysical poet George Herbert.
Somehow emboldened, he resorts to calling out the spirit of this most infamous figure: "Ya coward. You’re jist a rotten coward who kilt ladies behind closed doors. Ya were nuttin’ in life; ya nuttin’ in death."
Content that the ghost of the Ripper is afraid to take him on, Paul repairs to a rocking chair among a pile of beer casks, where he is last seen rocking comfortably like Will Rogers.
The ghost hunter emeritus is a bloke named Derek. He too is seen as an eerie photo-negative, though one assumes he’d look just as washed out in living color. At times he resembles the elderly Stan Laurel, at other times times a whitewashed David Bowie. Derek is a medium, but not a happy medium, for most of the time he’s possessed by the grim spirits he summons. At one point he’s an old lady, Elizabeth, aged 72, dead. As Elizabeth, he speaks in tongues and makes everyone around him uncomfortable. Later, he’s a murderer named Edward Bryan, and in this persona he goes off into a corner and looks like someone imitating rocker David Byrne playing an air guitar.
My fervent wish was for less Derek and more spooks—or “spirit persons,” to use the official name. At one point Derek was prattling about the spirit person he was sensing but not seeing. If memory serves, it went a lot like this: ". . . and he's got a bit of an overbite. He's quick to anger, though steady as she goes. His mother may have been a charwoman. He's a straightaway honest chap. He's murdered at least five people in a rather heinous fashion. He's fond of rice pudding. He formerly amused his neighbors by wearing wax lips. He only attended the theatre once, to see a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest" and so on. It got to where you could hear the spirit people snoring.
I’ve also watched episodes of genuine American ghost hunters, airing on the SciFi Network. The show, which bears the proportional title of “Ghost Hunters,” follows the exploits of six or seven regular guys and occasionally a big-boned, attractive woman. They hail from Warwicke, Rhode Island, but they evince a Missourian’s “show me” mindset: they don’t necessarily expect to encounter any real haunts on their assignments, which is something they make very clear to those who request their services.
The night I watched, the gang tried to detect ghosts and other otherworldly phenomena at a shut-down prison in Mansfield, Ohio, where “The Shawshank Redemption” was filmed. The best they could summon were rats—actual rodents, not tattletale prisoners.
They also tested at the Lizzie Bordon home. In the bedroom of this notorious murderess, they held up their tiny microphones and asked, “Does anyone here have anything to say?” In the prison, their predominant question was, “Is there anyone here who’d like to get something off their chest?”
But nobody said nothing about nothing, and as Bob Dylan might say, “Nothing was revealed.”
Either the footage for “Most Haunted” is shot in night-vision photo-negative style or else the British really do need to get more sun. This visual technique makes the viewer at home question what he is actually seeing, and it has the added effect of making every woman look like Mary Travers from Peter Paul & Mary.
On one episode they were in an airplane hanger where some poor soul had long ago burned to death. One of these spirit-hunting sleuths got so wrapped up in the moment that a rare instance of transference occurred. His body turned hot as fire. His colleagues touched his flesh and drew their hands back, screeching. Another hunter’s arm got broiling hot as well, and the gang took turns sniffing it for clues.
In another scene, Mary Travers and an Irishman named Paul (not Paul Stookey) were summoning the spirit of Jack the Ripper in the cellar of an ancient public house. This Paul was something of a skeptic and a hard guy—if a skinny, bespectacled chap with a Mr. Drysdale mustache could ever be a hard guy.
Anyway, Paul came off as quite intrepid—that is, until he mistook a smudge on his glasses for Saucy Jack. Suddenly he’s shrieking and he’s exercising all four limbs like a man who just intersected a spider’s web. We at home see nothing but a photo-negative of ass over elbows as we hear the kind of clomping and banging one hears several times during an episode of “COPS.” This Paul, we learn, has ascended the cellar stairway, leaving Mary Travers on her own.
The courageous man shortly returns and submits that he had spied a figure standing in the corner of the room. We can trust his word because he raises his right hand and swears to it—on the good name of everyone from his grandmother to the Metaphysical poet George Herbert.
Somehow emboldened, he resorts to calling out the spirit of this most infamous figure: "Ya coward. You’re jist a rotten coward who kilt ladies behind closed doors. Ya were nuttin’ in life; ya nuttin’ in death."
Content that the ghost of the Ripper is afraid to take him on, Paul repairs to a rocking chair among a pile of beer casks, where he is last seen rocking comfortably like Will Rogers.
The ghost hunter emeritus is a bloke named Derek. He too is seen as an eerie photo-negative, though one assumes he’d look just as washed out in living color. At times he resembles the elderly Stan Laurel, at other times times a whitewashed David Bowie. Derek is a medium, but not a happy medium, for most of the time he’s possessed by the grim spirits he summons. At one point he’s an old lady, Elizabeth, aged 72, dead. As Elizabeth, he speaks in tongues and makes everyone around him uncomfortable. Later, he’s a murderer named Edward Bryan, and in this persona he goes off into a corner and looks like someone imitating rocker David Byrne playing an air guitar.
My fervent wish was for less Derek and more spooks—or “spirit persons,” to use the official name. At one point Derek was prattling about the spirit person he was sensing but not seeing. If memory serves, it went a lot like this: ". . . and he's got a bit of an overbite. He's quick to anger, though steady as she goes. His mother may have been a charwoman. He's a straightaway honest chap. He's murdered at least five people in a rather heinous fashion. He's fond of rice pudding. He formerly amused his neighbors by wearing wax lips. He only attended the theatre once, to see a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest" and so on. It got to where you could hear the spirit people snoring.
I’ve also watched episodes of genuine American ghost hunters, airing on the SciFi Network. The show, which bears the proportional title of “Ghost Hunters,” follows the exploits of six or seven regular guys and occasionally a big-boned, attractive woman. They hail from Warwicke, Rhode Island, but they evince a Missourian’s “show me” mindset: they don’t necessarily expect to encounter any real haunts on their assignments, which is something they make very clear to those who request their services.
The night I watched, the gang tried to detect ghosts and other otherworldly phenomena at a shut-down prison in Mansfield, Ohio, where “The Shawshank Redemption” was filmed. The best they could summon were rats—actual rodents, not tattletale prisoners.
They also tested at the Lizzie Bordon home. In the bedroom of this notorious murderess, they held up their tiny microphones and asked, “Does anyone here have anything to say?” In the prison, their predominant question was, “Is there anyone here who’d like to get something off their chest?”
But nobody said nothing about nothing, and as Bob Dylan might say, “Nothing was revealed.”
posted by JW at jwopks@gmail.com at 7:26 PM
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