Paranormal Hurrah!

Yay!  A new season of Celebrity Ghost Stories has begun!  I’ve gotten irritated with the paranormal investigation shows.  The hosts are too credulous and uninformed about things like lens flare and shadow effects or the human tendency to see faces and humanoid figures in random shapes.  When I can explain their “evidence” in my living room with minimal effort and they’re not even mentioning the possibility, they’ve lost me as a viewer.

But I like Celebrity Ghost Stories.  The format is good: five or six individual, unrelated stories.  The celebrity narrates their story and the show does a dramatic recreation of it.  I also like that they tell us what makes this person a celebrity since I usually don’t recognize at least half of them.

The stories may be true or may not be true but you can tell most of them believe what they’ve said.  Since I also believe in ghosts and other paranormal experiences, it’s a good collection for research.  It may not be reproducible but its real to them.

I liked this week’s story about a haunted town in England, Whitticomb.  In the 1600s, on a Sunday, while the church was filled with people, lightning struck and the church caught fire.  Lots of people died, trapped in the fire.  The actor telling the story stopped there on his honeymoon and he and his wife noticed the people seemed odd.  No one was talking, no one was making eye contact and no one would respond to them.  They got creeped out and basically ran away.  The ghost experience and the actual history both sound like fascinating stories.

I also liked the story from Guns’n’Roses drummer about a strange voice he picked up during a recording session.  He insists he was completely sober when this happened.  No matter how they fiddled with the dials or checked the soundproofed room, this guttural growling kept spoiling their backup singer’s track.  Later, it’s late at night and their chairs start to rattle and move around.  A strange man appears and then vanishes.  The studio is empty and they begin to look around.  Suddenly they hear a voice say “Don’t come in here, you’re not invited!” and the door slammed shut in their faces.  Turning around, they saw a strange mist hovering in midair.  When the drummer touched it, it was as if it were ice and it seemed to run up his arm and plunge into his chest.  They made a hasty retreat.  The receptionist told them it wasn’t the first time strange things had happened there.  A head and an arm had been discovered in a garbage can directly behind the studio about ten years previously.  The studio eventually went out of business because of difficulties retaining both staff and artists.

Now that’s a cool story.