Too dismissive
I’ve seen several letters over the last couple of years complaining that FT is being too sceptical. I fear that Dr Paul Lee’s article [FT437:38-41] goes further than that and introduces insufferable smugness to the table. His article insults a large number of people who take a serious interest in the ‘spectral nation’ and who give of their time and effort to investigate. Are they sometimes confused or misled? Yes. Do they deserve to be savaged by Dr Lee? No.
Take me, for instance. About 20 years ago I attended one of the ghost tours he vilified. Why did I go along? Because of Most Haunted and a general interest in the paranormal. The event was led by two mediums, but the group gave some very sensible guidance about how the investigations should progress and the session finished with everyone getting together to discuss results. Were there some people who claimed every creak, groan and crunch was the spectre of Jack the Ripper? Yes – but none of those claims were made by the organisers. Were there people attending who just wanted to be scared? Of course.
But those people only tended to go once. Personally, I hadn’t experienced anything (nor had the friends I was with), but we all wanted to learn more – and so we went on more investigations. And after a while, we had some experiences that none of us could explain. Some were scary, some were funny, some were just weird. But at no point did we make assumptions. We tried to look for explanations and more things ended up with a mundane explanation than not. As we attended more investigations, we worked with the same people several times and those people had a methodical approach and were just curious about the paranormal.
After a time, I got invited to be part of another group that took a more scientific approach. We had a couple of members who were sensitive, but everyone approached the investigations with the view that what we wanted was proof. To that end, we would research the buildings and areas we were visiting, looking for histories of hauntings, events in the local area and newspaper reports. We did our best not to misinterpret anything that we found.
Dr Lee makes a wide variety of assumptions about amateur investigators – they are too dumb to understand their equipment; they will accept the ‘utterances’ of mediums or psychics over historical documentation; and, of course, they will believe Derek Acorah.
Businesses prefer to respond to people who are going to pay them rather than take the time to reply to Dr Lee? And charge people to use their premises? How shocking! Businesses, especially those concerned with hospitality, are going through a time of economic crisis and are doing whatever they can to make money.
The work that Dr Lee has done is both interesting and valuable, but it is undermined by his smug attitude. Let’s face it, we all hate what Most Haunted did, and anyone who takes investigations seriously keeps as far away from it as possible.
Andy Barkham
By email