As of today, according to our Ghost Poll, most visitors to this website regard ghosts as ‘the souls of dead people’.
This surprised me, I confess, although the two theories I expected to come top are running close behind: ‘remnants of past events bound to a particular place’, and ‘remnants of past events picked up psychically’. Yet the sort of phenomena I encountered in the museum last month, as a guest of the paranormal investigation team The World of Paranormal, suggested to me that perhaps the phenomena itself doesn’t fit any of these models.
The male cells corridor in The Old Police Cells Museum, Brighton.
In a previous post I described what happened during our overnight vigil at the museum, including ouija board conversations with a strange character calling itself SMAX TEYA that seemed capable of affecting the operation of walkie talkies used by our group. I provided some audio recordings that illustrated how SMAX seemed able to turn the walkies on and off at will, and how he seemed able to do this at the exact moment the other group with another walkie happened to be saying phrases relevant to the questions we were asking.
As promised last time, there was some extra weirdness that I’ve held back for a couple of weeks whilst thinking over what it might mean.
For starters: the name SMAX TEYA. It’s not an actual person’s name, of course, and someone in the group wondered at the time if it might be an anagram. This was intriguing, because the coordinator of The World of Paranormal is Emma Yates. SMAX TEYA is an anagram of MAX YATES. But despite the interesting coincidence, Emma stated that she didn’t know any such person.
In the classic horror film The Exorcist, an old priest warns his colleague, ‘The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us.’ Indeed, from previous dealings with the paranormal, I’ve learnt it’s vital always to be wary where your experiences are leading you. For instance, the SMAX TEYA / MAX YATES anagram is intriguing, but it doesn’t really lead anywhere other than piquing our attention.
SMAX TEYA seemed the kind of spirit I’ve often met when using the ouija board, the type that above all seems desperate to draw attention to itself. I’d say that some demons ‘mix lies with truth’ simply because lies soon become boring. They will mix in whatever tiny nuggets of truth they can find, just to keep us interested.
The other bit of weirdness concerned what was happening to the other group in the Council Chamber upstairs whilst we were down in the cells. Just as we were experiencing unusual walkie talkie behaviour, they were experiencing unusual activation of their EMF meters. (An EMF meter is a device that measures electromagnetic fields.) To the group upstairs it seemed that whenever they sat in the Speaker’s Chair, or touched the gavel, or said something provocative, the EMFs would respond, as if someone or something were agitated by their behaviour. We can’t be sure, but it seems likely that the bursts of conversation we heard on the walkie from the group upstairs were synchronised with the activation of their EMF meters. This is why it was mostly laughter and exclamations that we were hearing downstairs.
Entrance to the disused washroom and toilets area.
Once again, this is all rather strange, if we consider that the activation of both the EMF meters upstairs and one of the walkies downstairs seem to have been linked. The ‘naughty’ behaviour of the group upstairs elicited a response from that group, snippets of which (laughter, exclamations) were being transmitted to the walkie downstairs, eliciting a response from us also because it fitted in so neatly with our ouija board conversation.
It puts me in mind of a puppet master who, from their position, where they can see and control things that we (the audience) cannot, keeps pulling the strings of both groups, in order to keep the responses and the excitement coming.
If this was a ghost, then the idea that it is the soul of a dead person seems too simplistic to account for the phenomena that we witnessed. I have no idea what a ‘ghost’ might be, but the way that this one seemed to thrive on our attention, and seemed to be seeking ways to keep us interested, suggests some intriguing lines of thought.
Or is it simply that these lines of thought create the false impression of a ‘ghost’ in the act of our thinking them?
Mwa-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaaaah!
