Another Friday, another episode of Most Haunted. I think that MH reviews and critiques are going to become a regular feature here, because it's so much fun to give it the Harry Houdini treatment. (Houdini was a believer in the paranormal, but loved to debunk phoney spiritualists.)
The premise of the show, for those who haven't caught my previous entries, is that host Yvette Fielding, medium Derek Acorah, various assorted friends and (apparently) family members of Yvette and a camera crew go to a haunted place and spend 24 hours waiting for paranormalities.
This week we visited Schooner Hotel in Alnmouth. Mr. Acorah apparently entered with no previous knowledge of the location. For starters, this has to be garbage because how on earth do they plan a shoot without telling him anything, and what (other than honour) stops him doing a Google search?
The two main stories involve the murder of a family in room 28, and two hotel workers being frightened out of their skulls at a black figure fly at them out of a hallway. It is suggested that thousands of ghostly reports have been made in the hotel and there may be as many as 60 spirits in the hotel.
First of all, Derek was drawn to room 28. In the room, he described a despute between two grain traders, William, and Henry (who was French, so his name was probably really Henri). The year is perhaps 1765, 1768. At some point, they leave the room, wander around outside, but come back to the room after having put the lights out and turned on the night vision.
Yeah, they film the night bits in night vision. They wander around haunted places the entire night in the dark using night vision cameras. Whatever.
In the room again with night vision, Derek senses an 13 year old girl, her name is perhaps Isabelle. She is supposed to be related to one of the men, and he sees her standing in a corner of the room. Yvette runs over and instantly starts waving her hand through the poor child- if she's there- because it feels hot. No one addresses our ghostly friend, they just talk about her and poke the air where she stands. At this point cast and crew leave, even though Isabelle is still present in the room.
In room 17, there is supposed to be a ghost of a soldier seen at the foot of the bed. Derek enters the room first and sees a masculine shadow on the wall that is, of course, gone by the time the camera gets there in spite of the fact that each crew member has their own film.
Later on in the night a sceance is held in an upstairs hallway. This consists mainly of our friend the medium naming gutless coawards and powerless any spirits who may be present, and daring them to do things. Nothing seems to happen, although the crew is convinced that all kinds of things happened.
In addition to this, there were various light anomilies and unexplained sounds.
That was essentially the night. Let's start from the littlest things and work our way up, shall we? First of all, unexplained sounds: they're wandering round in the dark! Everything sounds dodgey in the dark, and besides that, old buildings make lots of noise. Americans are often unaware of this as we tend to live in newer houses, but I would assume every Brit to be familiar with the sounds of an aged house- they're much more likely to have spent time in a 200+ year old building than Americans. Maybe this is a ridiculous assumption, but at any rate, any vauge creaks, pops, or bumps in a building of any age (unless they did anything patterned or sequenced) I would mark down to settling, or some other architectural cause. In addition to that, there are herds of camera crew all over the building. They may SAY they're not "anywhere around", but if you've got multiple groups of people in different places in the building at the same time, sound can travel, and no doubt it does.
Secondly, lights. They kept catching things that, yes, may have been orbs- except for one thing. Since they're using night vision cameras, any little bit of light that wouldn't be apparent in the daytime is much more visible. Half the time they show anyone with a video camera, the camera is obviously sending out little spheres of reflected light that look just like the orbs they're catching. Because of the way they film the show, this has to be created by the crew.
The thing that bothered me more than anything else this episode has to be the apparant presence of a spirit right there in the room. Poor little Isabelle's standing right there, and they talk about her and run their hands through her. They do not try to speak to her at all. BUT, later during the sceance, the crew is upset that they're not getting anything and so try to provoke spirits by being unspeakably rude.
In my opinion, all entities ought to be treated as you would treat a living person. I suppose I wouldn't put it past any of the people on the show to act like that to real people, but, still, it seems rude, dangerous, and uncalled for. In addition to that, if they DID have the kid, why didn't they try to do something more with that?
My guess is that either it was total bollocks and they didn't know what to do at that point, or she was a friendly person and they didn't know what to do. Derek has a lovely tendency of pointing out all of the evil and unhappiness and nasty people in a haunted place, which I think is, personally, sick. It's like they're asking to be hurt, and I doubt, from any research I've done, that very many spirits are so very tormented.
As far as the research goes, it's fantastic that they don't have any concrete evidence of people or situations. (Note: it is exactly ten PM. My upstairs neighbor just scared the crap out of me by turning on her vaccum. The girl has issues.) This means they can say pretty much whatever they like as long as no one can prove anything one way or another.
I haven't done any research on the Schooner Hotel myself yet. It's taken me an hour just to write the review and I fear it's getting a bit long. However, I do plan on seeing what I can find out, and if anyone's interested in knowing what I know (or in my continuing to write these whenever I can), leave me a message please. If nobody gives a rat's, I'll probably do them anyway from time to time because it amuses me, but then they'll only be as detailed as I need them to be.