PARANORMAL INVESTIGATORS
We talk to Alan Murdie, chairman of Britain’s oldest ghost hunting society, The Ghost Club
What exactly is The Ghost Club and what is its mission?
The Ghost Club is essentially a private body of friends and members who are particularly interested in ghosts and the paranormal. It’s a place where sceptics and believers can meet on common ground. We don’t have any collective opinion, but provide a forum and meeting place where people who are interested in the subject can debate and discuss on a social basis. We also conduct our own investigations and research from time to time, looking into both the scientific and the cultural sides of ghosts and the paranormal more wildly. We primarily investigate accounts in Great Britain but we’re also interested in reports of phenomena abroad. I like to think we preserve and celebrate some of our cultural traditions and history of ghosts.
Can you tell us a little about the organisation’s history?
The Ghost Club’s origins go back to the 1850s, to a very loose student society, which was formed at Trinity College in Cambridge. It was then launched officially in London in 1862 (with an announcement in The Times) and it seems to have carried on in this manner until the early 1870s, when it ceased meeting. In 1882 it was revived by Reverend Stainton Moses, a forgotten 19th century figure who combined life as a Church Of England clergyman with being a remarkable medium. The Ghost Club at this stage was a much smaller and more private body, attracting people such as Sir William Crookes and WB Yeats. They would meet every so often in London to privately discuss the latest in ghosts, but were perhaps more occult-orientated. They researched traditions and referred to each other as Brother Ghost. It continued in this manner until the 1930s, and by this time the club had begun to attract a number of significant younger researchers, such as Harry Price. Price would later become world famous for investigating Borley Rectory, a case that he worked on for 20 years and that people are still arguing about to this day. In
1938 Price then relaunched the club as a kind of society dining circle that met regularly during World War II. After Price’s death in 1948, The Ghost Club suspended itself for four years until 1952, when Phillip Pool (a Fleet Street journalist) once again revived the club. That club has carried on, more or less, ever since. During the last 60-odd years The Ghost Club has typically involved investigations into allegedly haunted houses and talks by a wide range of speakers on all kinds of fascinating topics from all points of view.
What kind of investigations does The Ghost Club undertake?
We’ve conducted investigations around the country, in numerous settings, although there is one interesting exception: graveyards – we don’t get many accounts of haunted graveyards these days. We have, however, looked into reports of phenomena in all kinds of domestic, public and historic buildings. These investigations are quite contrary to the sort of thing that gets televised. My predecessor Tom Perrott, who was chairman for 29 years, stated that the only equipment he took on most cases was a notebook, a pencil and a sympathetic ear. Not everything that people may think of as being paranormal is necessarily so. We had an investigation in the 1990s at the House Of Detention, which is a historic prison-turnedmuseum in Clerkenwell in central London, we’ve been into the undercroft of Battle Abbey, and then of course there’s been callouts from private dwellings and houses. I’ve had one or two experiences during investigations, mostly involving noises or object movement that
I can’t explain. A number of our members do investigate things on their own account as well as with The Ghost Club, but we don’t have any ghost-detecting devices. We would have solved problems in science, philosophy and theology if we did!