Oh No...Some Ghost Thoughts...

Hello there

First off, many thanks to Rocky Robot for covering the last couple of days.  I obviously didn’t bother looking at the posts, but I’m sure they were of an excellent standard.  Or his usual standard, at least.

I wanted to do a written post today as I’ve been thinking a bit about ghosts.  Which isn’t ideal.  I’ve also been dealing with some movie piracy issues which seems dreadfully unfair when I’m not well.  I’m pretty sure they’re all sorted now, and it was obviously always gonna happen, but from what Bil tells me about his last film, it’s gonna carry on happening a lot.  He apparently spends a lot of his time getting illegal uploads of When The Lights Went Out taken down, so it’s gonna be loads more when it’s a film that’s actually any good.

Boom.

I’m allowed a quick pretend slam of Bil there, as I’m gonna be lightly defending him in parts of this.  I shall also tell you how I got thinking, and also how I came up, with a new ghost argument (new for me, I dunno if anyone else has already said it).  I’m not even sure why I continue to think of counter-arguments.  Perhaps Carol had a point when she said in the film “You just want to prove you’re right”.  Actually, it wasn’t Carol, it was Alan who was just using Carol to relay his hatred of me.  Surely there was some internet forum he could have used, rather than go to all the fuss of a psychic.

The thing is, proving I’m right isn’t on my agenda at all weirdly.  It isn’t actually on anyone’s agenda.  The things we think are facts to us.  We are all correct in our own heads.  I don’t feel the need to “prove” anything, but the chain of events that led to both myself and Barry having standpoints to debate is a difficult thing to shake off in real life.  You end up opinionated on any whiff of ghost chat, and ripping stuff apart.  Which is what happened to me the other evening.

I was on my iPad looking for something to put on whilst I slept.  More specifically, I was looking for the ambient sound of a motorway services.  Occasionally I remember somewhere I had a peaceful sleep and want to replicate it. I recalled a time when I was in the back seat of a car, with a duvet, at a services on my way to a gig, runningly stupidly early, so had a kip.  The ambient noise was, for some reason, really comforting.  None of this has anything to do with what I’m telling you about, but during my search I noticed, in the recommended videos, that there was one about East Drive.  Which is unusual.  Unusual because I search for the noises from services and the like, not paranormal stuff.  I’d expect to see it in Barry’s recommended videos, but it’s no business being in mine.  Maybe it’s because the trailer and stuff is on there.  Actually, there’s the East Drive revisit video isn’t there? It’s probably just that.

Anyhow, even less likely than that sort of thing popping up in my recommendations, is me actually clicking the thing. It might have been because it had a vague title, something like “East Drive - real or scam”.  I’m deliberately avoiding linking to the video because I don’t want to “target” them.  In fact, there’s no targeting even in my assessment, just observation and question.  I actually found what they were saying to be fascinating, even if I disagreed with most of it.  I didn’t, on the surface, doubt the authenticity of his opinions.

So, it was a bloke talking who, I gather from what he was saying, does a lot of paranormal investigating online.  He’d been to East Drive a couple of times, and said some stuff happened when he was there the first time, but the second time had a different feeling to it.  Nothing went on.  He then came to the conclusion that East Drive was just a money-making scam.  That’s the video in a nutshell.  They’re the headlines.

Now, you’d expect a video like that from me (although I think “scam” is pushing it, I’d go for “bafflingly viable business”), but what I found interesting was the fact that he was still invested in the idea of the paranormal being a real thing.  He wasn’t dismissing this as all nonsense because of the ghost claim, it seemed more pointed than that.  I mean, it could well have been a personal dig.  Plenty of folk broadcast their supposedly “considered grievances” online, that can actually just be traced back to a personal grudge. He also accused the Ancient Ram of being the same deal, but again, acknowledged that there were spirits in there.

It was a proper head scrambling for me, because he didn’t say – about East Drive – “It’s just a house…literally just a house.  Nothing weird at all”.  He said it was a scam, but there were spirits there, but it’s not a monk because the monk would have gone by now with all those people always in the house.  He said the fact that the house is open to the public (to hire), was tormenting the spirits so they would just leave.  That they would be sick of being asked to knock, and that it was a “Ghost Circus” (I think that was the phrase he used).  It was genuinely really confusing. Like a sort of meta debate that applied critical thinking within a fantasy world that had no rules.

I’ve defended Bil about the business aspect of East Drive before.  For me, it’s no different to Blackpool Pleasure Beach or a stately home charging an admission price.  I guess there would be an argument if Blackpool Pleasure Beach charged you to get in and then there were no rides inside that this would be a scam, but I’m relatively certain that nobody is guaranteeing ghosts at East Drive.  They’re just saying “This is what is reported to have happened in the house” (True, it is reported), “This is my experience of it” (debatable, but he’s committed to his anecdote), and “You can come in and spend some time in this purportedly haunted house if you pay this much”.  That’s not a scam.  Daft use of your money maybe, but not a scam.

It was also odd that the bloke says early in the video that he would do the same if he owned East Drive, but then goes on later to call out “the owner” for doing it.  It’s a really confused argument.  However, the “tactic” (as I shall cynically call it), is classic.  It was applying a moral argument, and concentrating on that, over a fictional scenario.  Rules and logistics were thrown about, that – on the surface – made the argument credible, but I’ve already told you one of the logistics stated “the monk would have gone by now with all those people in the house”…

Suspending my disbelief, I’m struggling to follow that.  By that logic, any ghost would surely only stay somewhere where there was nobody ever around (which I’d buy into, given that no ghost has ever wanted to make itself known when I’ve been there). Unless they like the attention, in which case his point about them leaving doesn’t hold up. There seem to be so many contradictory rule books over all this, and not one of them is inconvenient to the rule curator. It’s always a manifesto of what ghosts do and don’t do, that is tailor made to the specifics of what the ‘ghost expert’ wishes to convey. There is certainly no canon-ultra-manual.

I’ve obviously argued all these things with Barry over the years.  Why do they prefer the dark?  Why do you have to be quiet? Why do you have to sit for hours?  I’ve heard all the arguments back, how they don’t like the light (a conclusion based on what?), they shy away from loud noises (a conclusion based on what?), etc etc.  I’ve been told that I will never see a ghost because I don’t believe in them, and also told that Bil didn’t believe in them until one chucked a domino at him when he was decorating (not sitting quietly in the dark).  My haughty opinion has always been that I will never see a ghost because I know all the tricks employed to make you think you have seen one.

Which was the thought process that led me to my new conclusion and stipulation for hearing theories on how to see a ghost.  My challenge would be for somebody to tell me the best specific environmental rules for seeing a ghost, but if they are psychologically and/or neurologically recognised as conditions that also make hallucination or brain trickery more likely, they can’t be employed. Those conditions must be dismissed. It is baffling to me that anybody serious about the paranormal has ever allowed such conditions to be a pre-requisite of an investigation because they have to make any results suspect.  Absolutely have to. The margin of error and discrediting is enormous. You can have all the tech toys lighting up you want, no scientific investigation would trust results with such variable conditions as a base line.

I still find it properly intriguing to hear people apply forced logical arguments to their manifesto though. We could argue that I do exactly the same in my counter manifesto, but I’d hope that mine are a little more resistant to vague scrutiny. As I said, we all believe we are right huh?

There we go, just a few thoughts based on an impulsive late night viewing of, let’s be honest, YouTube clickbait.

Hope your week is going well over there, and that all is safe and happy for you and yours.

Sending all the love from here

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