I Ain’t Afraid Of No Ghosts……

A cottage I stayed in that was part of a "haunted" hotel.

Everyone loves a good ghost story,including a skeptic like me. I grew up in a family that pretty much believes in ghosts, my father in particular believed in them. I have memories of him trying to contact spirits using a circle of letters, with the words “yes” and “no” at the 12 and 6 o’clock positions in the circle, and a glass – it was called “glassy glassy”, if I remember correctly – I was very young.

Throughout my childhood I just took it for granted that there were ghosts, although I’d never seen one. I also believed that the house I grew up in was haunted, but looking back now – a little more wiser – I realise that it was just the noises that an old house makes. It was already an old house when my family moved in, I think I was about 4 years old at the time. It had pressed ceilings and wooden floors, and underneath the house was an old cellar, so it isn’t surprising , with temperature fluctuations, that the old floorboards creaked and groaned, sounding very much like footsteps to an overactive imagination.

I often wondered why people’s spirits would stay behind when there was, supposedly, a much better place to go to. I also wondered if it was possible to talk to them without using a silly glass, and if it was possible to find out what was on the “other side”; and so my interest in the paranormal was born.

I read every book I could find on the subject – ghosts, the occult, supernatural phenomena, telepathy, psychics and anything else that was remotely related to the paranormal. I probably would have gone wholeheartedly into pursuing the realm of woo if I hadn’t chanced upon a library book debunking all of the things I was reading about. I can’t recall the name of the book, only a few paragraphs in it talking about a magician who made it a habit of exposing anything to do with the paranormal. The magician’s name was James Randi. What struck me was the reward that he offered to anyone who could prove that they could talk to the dead, bend spoons or read minds – and not a single person had claimed the prize. Back then, in the 70’s,  the original reward was only a few thousand dollars – not the One Million Dollar Challenge it is today, and it still hasn’t been claimed.

I don’t see all those years of reading up on the paranormal as a waste; instead it gives me insight into the world of woo and knowledge of how some fraudsters think and operate.

Anyhow, this post is basically a long winded way of saying that I will be doing a couple of posts on ghosts,  haunted houses and unexplained phenomena. I’ll relate some of my own experiences and I’ll look at how these paranormal activities can be explained.  I’ll also explain how ghost hunters investigate claims of the paranormal, and will visit a local pub that’s said to be haunted and tell you what I find.