WRTH — AM 800

Daniel Messer

WRTH — AM 800

Copyleft 2017 - Creative Commons By-NC-SA by Daniel Messer

Some rights reserved

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Sonoran Dragon Studio. Mesa, Arizona. United States of America.

https://cyberpunklibrarian.com

To the listeners in the darkness,

the watchers,

and those who pay attention.

Blessed be.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.

― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

Introduction - You’re on the air with AM 800 WRTH

Halloween has come and gone along with the entire month of October and we are well and truly into the final days of 2018. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a few minutes and give you some backstory where WRTH came from, and to thank all of those who tuned in. I hope you enjoyed it.

The idea of doing a series of shows about ghosts and the supernatural occurred to me only in late August or early September. It popped into my head and I couldn’t shake it, so by the end of the first week of September I had:

1. Made a plan to do the show.

2. Made a list of topics.

3. Picked about ten of those topics.

4. Decided that I didn’t have nearly enough time to do ten shows, so I whittled that down to five.

5. Started writing furiously to get the scripts ready for these things.

6. Slogged around the Web looking for clips, sound effects, and other audio assets.

7. Realized that I was going to a wedding in Kansas City in the middle of October, so I finally sat down on the first of October to…

8. Record as many of the voice overs as possible so I could edit these things together into a weekly series.

Backstory – AM Radio

I knew I wanted to do something a little different, something with its own story. I hit upon the concept of an AM radio station, one of the last bastions of broadcast insanity. A station that people could tune in from anywhere on the road so long as it was night, and so long as they couldn’t pick up any other station. The idea came from my many travels along the highways crossing desolate stretches of Nevada and the mountains and deserts of California. Even with satellite radio and an iPhone full of podcasts and music, I would check the dials on the AM/FM side of things, just to see what was going on.

Often I got nothing, especially through stretches of Nevada. If you’ve never seen or traveled upon US 93 through eastern Nevada, especially at night, then you’re seriously missing out on the experience of a deserted highway to nowhere. After you leave Las Vegas in the far southern tip of the state, there is damn little between you and Idaho.

What I was hoping to find was a chance encounter with something like a community radio station, broadcasting to people living in a small areas with even smaller populations. You’ll pass through nameless towns and locations along US 93, and you’ll occasionally see radio towers, so I hoped there was something I could sample along those airwaves. Dialing up and down the FM and AM, I picked up very little. But there always seemed to be an AM station here and there, and usually the content was batshit crazy levels of religious broadcasting. It was always faint, there was always a thin blanket of static, and sometimes I could pick it up again later that night.

Well there is a reason for that. AM radio broadcasts are short to medium wave and those radio waves can travel farther at night. I won’t get into the specifics but it has to do with the radio waves reflecting off the ionosphere. The composition of thr ionosphere is different at night because the sun isn’t mucking about with it. I have a couple of friends who work in the terrestrial radio business and one mentioned that, back in his AM days, part of his evening chores was turning down the transmission power of the station he was working. If they broadcast full power at night, they could overwhelm and override other AM stations and the FCC frowns on that sort of thing.

So there was a somewhat realistic basis to my idea.

Meanwhile on my road trip, this ionospheric radio wave pinball means the AM radio station I picked up in the late afternoon, and could barely hear, might come in loud and clear after darkness settles. Even if I’m hundreds of miles from where I picked it up that afternoon. On one of my recent trips, it occurred to me how spooky it’d be if you picked up a radio transmission from an unidentified place, and it had a strange supernatural focus. I filed away that little note into the back of my mind and sat on it until September of 2018.

Backstory – The Paranormal

I’m a librarian, a historian of science, a computer geek, a cyberpunk, and a podcaster. My content typically focuses around that kind of thing. I’ve been recording the Cyberpunk Librarian show in its current form for almost five years. I’ve done other shows like Hyperlinked History, Generating X, and Intragalactic Librarian. So you have more content focused on libraries, history, technology, and science. (Or science fiction at the very least.)

Where in the hell did this ghost stuff come from?

I’m not going to debate the existence of ghosts, or spirits, or the paranormal. We could likely have a more productive debate over politics than the paranormal because at least we’d be starting from an agreement that politics exists. Ghosts? Well, that’s a different story.

When I was growing up, my parents never moved. I lived in the same house from birth to my early 20s. The house had a finished basement and that became my place as I got older. It was brilliant, having my own place to play, and then eventually have friends over. And when you live in the same place during your formative years, everything that happens there, remains there. Gatherings, holiday dinners, fights, triumphs, and the wonder of family. The good… and the bad.

When I was about three years old, my grandfather died in the garage of that house. I don’t think he ever left.

I would hear things at night. It wasn’t the house settling, because the house settling doesn’t sound like footsteps walking around. I would hear movement, occasionally a voice. Sometimes I could write these things off as an overactive imagination. Others not so much.

And beyond the driveway of the house, right across the street, was one of the biggest hospitals in Yakima, WA. To this day, I occasionally don’t hear sirens. My brain learned to tune them out because, after all, I heard them regularly while I lived in that house. I never attributed the proximity of the hospital to anything in the house, it was a different story outside. If you were out in the late night, you’d occasionally see things, or hear them. As a teenager, I was outside quite often around midnight and early morning.

I’ve worked in two haunted theatres and one haunted library. You could say I’ve been experiencing weird things all of my life. So two of the easiest episodes of WRTH were the personal story ones. All I had to do was write it down so I didn’t miss anything.

Thank you for tuning in…

I love Halloween and I love the season surrounding it. Because of a rather intense interest in the paranormal and ghosts, it’s just a time of year that resonates with me. This year I had some time and wanted to do something creative for the season, and from that impetus came WRTH.

Funny thing about the title, and the frequency: I wanted to give the station a name that tied to the content, but wasn’t as obvious a KGST, Ghost FM or something. In the US, radio stations to the east of the Mississippi river get a call sign starting with W and to the west, it’s a K. Another word for ghost is “wraith” and so I adopted an idea from Web 2.0 and removed a few vowels to get WRTH. I wanted a frequency that would actually work on the AM dial, and 800 kHz is a valid frequency for AM broadcast radio transmissions in the US. But why 800?

Because it kinda looks like the word BOO.

Thanks for tuning in.

Daniel Messer

Mesa, AZ

The Shadowlands

This evening let's talk about a modern classic of supernatural experience. No, we're not discussing Ghost Story by Peter Straub. This isn't about The Others. No, it's about something other than that, something online, something that's been online for a long time.

It's not often a hobbyist style website hangs around for more than a few years. Like a karma chameleon, they come and go and then disappear without a trace. But sometimes you'll find a devoted crew of people, passionate about something they're doing, and their website will hang on for longer than normal. Maybe five years. Maybe ten.

Maybe 24.

The world wide web has radically changed over a quarter of a century. But if you know where to look, sometimes you'll find a spot frozen in time. A website powered by static HTML pages, with no fancy database on the back end. No PHP, no C#, and not a trace of JavaScript. Did you know you can still build a website using only HTML? As a guy who used to do a fair bit of web design and engineering, I often wondered how much trouble we cause ourselves with all of these secondary and tertiary technologies, and is it worth all that work just so we don't have to write HTML code ourselves when there's a PHP engine to do it for us?

Folklore is an important thing in the realm of the supernatural. And if there were ever a website that could be a bit of a folktale, indeed a folk hero, all its own; The Shadowlands would be that website.

The Shadowlands, still available at theshadowlands.net where it's lived since 1994, is the work of Tina Carlson and Dave Juliano; two well known paranormal researchers. The Shadowlands stands as an archive out of time. It hails from an era of visitor counters, offers to sign the online guestbook, and web rings.

If you don't know what a web ring is, kids, ask your parents.

As I said, The Shadowlands has been online since 1994, and the website looks straight out of the late 90s. You’ve got those amazing 90s website tropes, with the tiled background, animated GIFs, and broken functionality where things have ceased to work because the technology is simply no longer there. But look beyond that, and you’ll find something quite special, if you’re into this kind of thing.

The Shadowlands contains volumes of testimonials and stories about cryptozoology, UFO phenomena, and the mysteries of the unknown. But for a guy like me, it's the pages and pages of ghost stories that originally brought me there. In the late nineties I had a laptop computer that probably weighed, no joke, eight pounds. This was long before the days of the ultraportables and iPads. I’d copy and paste text from webpages on The Shadowlands and then read them in bed, the laptop sitting next to me. You could say it was my first eReader. The website refers to the collections of ghost stories as pages, and there are currently thirteen of them. Say what you will about triskaidekaphobia, the biggest reason there are thirteen pages of ghost stories is because there were once only twelve, and now there’s one more.

But really, these pages should be called volumes, as each page contains hundreds of stories. Each one an email from someone who found the website, and felt the need to tell their own tales. While the stories claim to be true, you can make up your own mind about that. This is, after all, the supernatural that we’re talking about here. The stories range from well written and erudite to all caps shouting and poor grammar. Dave and Tina seem to have just copied and pasted the stories straight out of the emails they received.

Which is another thing, the stories? They come from email. The email addresses are right there for you to see. This was a more innocent time before spam took over the world of SMTP and you needed Google, Microsoft, or some other service to look at your email and separate the signal from the noise. There was a time, ladies and gentlemen and genders outside and in-between, when you could have an email address and every single email you received was something from someone you knew. Not some Russian bot hawking penis pills and UK lotteries.

The Shadowlands also introduced me to the concept of electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP. EVP is another example of signal to noise, where you’re recording the ambient sounds of a location and, hidden within the static, you hear voices or sounds that weren’t there when you recorded them. The belief is that a spirit can manifest their voice on such a recording, and it comes through as a whisper over the static. Sometimes, you hear whatever you might be told to hear. But sometimes, just every so often, the voices are clear... and completely unexplained.

The Shadowlands had one of the first, if not the first, collections of EVP files online. Today, that sounds weird. Anyone can host audio files on their website. Hell, you got this particular audio file delivered to your device from my website and through the Internet Archive. But back in the 90s, hosting audio online? This was some high-tech stuff, man.

I listened to all of these files at one point or another. After the first few, I tried to ignore the text next to each one explaining what the recorder heard when they played it back. Suggestion is a powerful thing, and I wanted to hear the EVP myself and see if I heard the same thing. I’d have to say that, most of the time, I did.

Then there were the photos. The Shadowlands had, at one point, the premiere collection of spectral photos on the web. Some were taken during investigations, others out of random chance. Unfortunately, that collection seems to be gone. When I tried to load it while researching this episode, I got no pictures and only a placeholder error that simply reads “Form Object.”

But there is yet some good in this weary world, and after hitting up The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, I found a snapshot of the site with the photos intact.

The pictures fascinated me, and some still do. Some depicted the classic orbs that are associated with so many images of ghostly activity. But a few of them, the real gems of the collection, seemed to capture full body apparitions, unexplained mists, and faces in the darkness. You owe it to yourself to take a few minutes to peruse the collection, it’s worth the time.

I’ve been interested in ghosts since I was a kid. You can blame the pop culture of the 80s for much of that. It wasn’t until I was in high school before the subject became, for lack of a better term, more real to me. We’ll get into all of that another time, but I’d like to take a moment to thank Dave and Tina and the thousands of people involved with The Shadowlands for firing my imagination, offering inspiration, and even, I suppose, for the occasional sleepless night here and there.

And if you’re looking for a good time, there’s one to be had in a comfortable corner of the web that’s a bit out of its time, just like the entities within its text files.

Thanks for listening.

All the Best Theatres Are Haunted

Tonight, I'm sharing a personal story, something that happened to me years ago and even after all that time, I've never forgotten it. It's a story of a young man, fresh out of high school and working his first real job. It's about performances, experiences, and my co-workers… One of whom was still working there after all these years and he never asked for a dime.

After all, it's difficult to put a ghost on the payroll.

When I was a teenager, I was lucky to attend Davis High School, one of the major high schools in Yakima, WA. Not only did I meet some lifelong friends there, but the school has a working theatre and auditorium. The theatre is amazing, especially for a high school. It’s got a good-sized fly gallery for raising and lowering curtains and scenery for performances and for hanging lights. It’s got a fantastic sound system, a catwalk over the audience for lighting, and an orchestra pit that can be raised and lowered so you can have the pit, or you can have more stage.

I got into stage craft and theatre technology because a friend of mine was into it. Also, the guy who taught stage craft was the same guy who taught audiovisual classes. Mr. Jim Sollers was a maker before the term “maker” existed. A former news cameraman, he knew more than his fair share about camera work, videography, and broadcasting. This was back in the days of VCRs and he had a bank of several VCRs set up in the A/V room. Using a patch-panel he’d put together by the grace of god and Mickey Mouse, he could put a tape in a VCR and send that video to any room in the school. So if Mr. Peterson’s history class was watching a World War II documentary, all he needed to do was let Jim know and get him the tape. The documentary would show up on the screen, on the time. It was absolutely a closed-circuit TV broadcasting studio.

Jim even set up a channel guide on the closed-circuit TV system where the teachers could find out which channel to turn to for their videos. It was a white board with the day’s schedule written on it and which channels were showing what videos. When I got into the class, I looked all around the room and didn’t see the white board. So I asked him about it and, with an absolute twinkle in his eye, Jim directed me towards a table where a small, hand held whiteboard leaned against a wall and there was a camcorder pointing at it. This white board wasn’t as big as a letter sized sheet of paper.

I learned something that day, and it was something that carried over to theatre work too: You can create something fantastic with the smallest things. This camcorder was something that was sitting around useless until Jim pointed it toward a whiteboard and, suddenly, there’s a programme guide for the entire school.

Since Jim taught the stage craft classes, and since I really liked the man, I got into those as well. In two years, I learned how to light a stage, how to build scenery for a production, how to outfit a production with existing materials and items on hand, how to work the audio board, how to work the light board, how to run the fly gallery, how to work follow spotlights and keep dancers lit up as they flew across the stage, and I learned how to manage a show. I didn’t manage too many of them, because I liked working other positions more. But you could say that stage management was my first foray into anything leadership oriented.

And when I graduated in 1994, I had a job. I had a job almost literally waiting for me at the premiere theatre in Yakima, Washington: The Captiol Theatre. I’d applied because Jim said I should. They were looking for experienced workers and, as things went, I had two years of experience. When the Stage Manager realized I was one of “Jim’s kids,” there wasn’t even much of an interview more than just a few people showing me around and walking me through the paperwork.

Depending on the position, I could make anywhere from $15 to $17 an hour. For a kid just outta high school in 1994, that’s some pretty damn fine money.

And I told you all of that for a couple of reasons. The first is to pay homage to Jim, because that man absolutely changed my life. The second, and likely the most pertinent to this show:

The Capitol Theatre is haunted.

As Jim once said “Of course it’s haunted. All the best theatres are.”

The haunting was a bit of local folklore. The theatre itself opened in April of 1920, just in time for the Roaring Twenties. Vaudeville was in its heyday and the theatre hosted some of the greatest shows of the time. It also featured traveling Broadway musicals, concerts, and provided a venue for speakers. The 1920s was a fantastic period in the history of American theatrical performances.

And then, the 1930s brought with it the stock market crash, Black Thursday, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression. Theatres began to close because no one could afford to pay for live performances. The smart theatre owners decided to pivot and take advantage of a new technology that also showed up in the 20s and quickly grew in popularity: movies.

For many theatre owners, movies saved their businesses and their buildings. It was fairly easy to convert a theatre into a cinema. All you needed was a screen hanging above the stage and then you point a projector at it. You could show the same movie multiple times and the actors never messed up a line, the performances were always well done, and the star of the show never got sick.

Even better, at least for the theatre owners, you didn’t need all of those stage hands to run a cinema. Rather than having a bunch of people working on lighting, scenery, fly gallery, and so on; you needed someone to lower the screen, someone to dim the lights, and someone to flip a switch on the projector. Play your cards right and get things set up the right way, that could all be done by the same guy.

That put a lot of stage hands out of work, in a country that already had a raging unemployment problem. And, you see, I want to put a pin in that, because we’re going to come back to it in a bit.

In 1973 the City of Yakima, working with the Allied Arts Council, obtained the Captiol Theatre. They placed the building on the National Register of Historic Places and the building became a real part of the City itself.

The ink wasn’t all that dry on the paperwork when, in 1975, the theatre suffered a massive fire. The entire audience section of the theatre was gutted by the blaze, leaving only the walls standing around the destruction. Miraculously, the stage itself emerged relatively okay.

The City began rebuilding the theatre as soon as possible. They even hired the man who did the original murals and ceiling paintings to come out of retirement and repaint the dome above the audience. The theatre reopened in 1978 with a sold-out performance by Bob Hope.

But the fire left its mark, and while some things were repaired, others were left alone. For instance, there remained a door from the original stage setup. Originally, the door led to backstage corridors and access to the audience areas. This door is known to open and close on its own. It’ll be open the next morning after someone shut it previous night. It will occasionally slam shut, startling anyone who can hear it. When I worked at the Capitol, the area behind the door was used for storage, mostly stuff that wasn’t always needed. Often, the last person to leave the room would literally block the door open a bit so it couldn’t slam shut during a performance.

You might think it’s all a prank. An early morning crew member opened the door. Someone was having a laugh by slamming it and then running off to join the others in mock surprise. And you might be justified in that thought.

Except, you see… this door is something like ten feet above the stage floor, over three meters, and there is no way to get to it unless you bring a ladder. Before the fire, the door had a staircase leading up to it. They didn’t rebuild those stairs after the fire and, since you can only see the door from the stage and not the audience, I guess they just left it there. If you want to slam that door, the first thing you’ll need is a ladder.

Depending on the show, we’d have an early call time. For those who aren’t into the theatre world, early call simply means you need to show up for work early. For the big performances, this could mean standing on the stage and awaiting instructions by two in the morning. After all, when you’ve got a traveling musical coming to town, and they’ve got three or four semi-trucks pulling trailers loaded with equipment, it’s going to take some time to get things set up for the performance that night.

And an early call typically leads into a late call. Because after the show wraps, you need to tear down all of that stuff and put it back in the trucks.

I tell you this so you’ll understand the reasons that only a few stage hands would be wandering around a large theatre, doing things on their own.

People who’d worked there longer than I did knew about the slamming door above the stage floor. They’d tell you about the toilets flushing downstairs, when there’s no one in the bathroom. And, keep in mind, this is before the age of self-flushing toilets. Doors slammed in other parts of the building, and you’d hear the whispering in the empty halls.

One time, I was wandering around the catwalks above the audience making some lighting adjustments. Ideally you do this with two people because you need one person in the catwalk to move the lights and another on the floor to tell you how to move the lights. The catwalks aren’t well lit, because that would mess with the vision of someone trying to adjust the lighting on a semi-darkened stage. And for the entire time I was up there that day, I felt someone with me. I kept catching movement out of the corner of my eye. Like a change in the ambient lighting, or something throwing a shadow. I’d glance over and see nothing, but the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up when I finally finished and returned to the floor.

The guy down there, a senior technician who’d been talking me through the lighting changes said that me and the other guy up there did a great job and the stage looked really good now for some kind of scene.

“What other guy?” I asked.

“Whoever was up there with you,” he replied.

“Dude…,” I said, “I was the only one up there.”

He didn’t even blink. He’d been there for a while and was used to this. “Oh,” he said. “Must’ve been Shorty.”

Shorty was the name given to the ghost of the Capitol Theatre. I’ve no idea where the name originated, and since I never saw a full-bodied apparition while working there, I have no idea how tall the spirit was. Shorty wasn’t malevolent, at all. With the slamming doors, whispers, and even up on the catwalk, I never felt afraid, per se. I was more on edge, like I knew someone was around me, and I kind of felt awkward about not acknowledging them. Shorty was, and I assume still is, a trickster. He’s having some fun, and I’m sure that little stagehand gets a kick out of it when someone jumps or gets the willies.

And notice what I said there, stagehand. See, there’s a local legend, though I’ve never confirmed it, that says that back in the 30s when the theatre was laying off so many of its employees, there was one who wound up remaining. The story goes that he was to be let go that day. His last duty was to head up into the fly gallery and lower the screen for the movie that evening. If that’s true, it’s bitter irony that the last thing he needed to do before leaving work was to go set up the very thing putting him out of work.

According to the stories, he lowered the screen from the first rail of the fly gallery. This is where most of the fly gallery techs worked and was where all the ropes and tie offs are for raising and lowering whatever hung on the batons. High above that first rail is the second rail. Soaring 64 feet, or nearly 20 meters, above the stage is this counterweight rail, where large weights are loaded onto the counterweight arbours. By adding counterweight, you’d be able to easily pull up the heavy curtains, lights, and scenery hanging above the stage.

The Capitol’s fly gallery has what’s called a double-throw system which means that, for every pound of weight you add to the baton, you add two pounds to the counterweight arbour. So, if they load 500 pounds of lights to the baton, you’re going to need 1,000 pounds of counterweight. This is added to the fly while the baton is on the stage, being loaded. While it’s down, the counterweight arbour is up on the second rail, sometimes called the loading rail.

The lore is that this stagehand lowered the screen, climbed the ladder to the second rail, and leapt off into the empty air.

As far as I know, it’s just a story, but like all good stories, it fits. Many people, facing unemployment during the Depression and a highly uncertain future, took their own lives. But honestly, I’m not sure I believe it. If for no other reason that Shorty’s personality doesn’t seem right for it.

But before we wrap up here, and start loading the trucks, I’ve one more tale for you. And it’s one of the best ghost stories I could ever tell. Not just because it happened to me, but because it was a supernatural event witnessed by over 1,000 people.

The Capitol Theatre has a tradition that, during the holiday season, they secure a performance of The Nutcracker Suite. I can easily trace my love of ballet to the theatre calling me in to work follow spot on that show. It was a gorgeous production and the dancing was amazing.

For this particular performance, they had a traveling crew and ensemble. With a traveling crew comes their own stage manager. That’s not unusual. After all, when you go to see the traveling performance of, say, Avenue Q, you can bet that the show is being managed by someone who travels with the production. That road manager knows the show better than most anyone else and certainly better than the local stage manager. What typically happens is that the local stage manager and the road manager will work together to get things set up and running smoothly and each will be relaying directions specific to their expertise. While the traveling manager may know how to call lighting changes for given scenes, the local manager will know how that needs to happen and relay instructions specific to the theatre’s equipment.

Now then, there’s a scene in The Nutcracker where snow falls from the sky. On stage, this is often handled through the use of a brilliantly simple thing called a snow baffle. Here’s the basics of how it works, and how you can make your own. Get yourself a big old sheet, biggest you can find, and cut slits through it at regular intervals. Just slits, not holes. Don’t make them too wide, because what you’re going to do is fold the sheet in half length-wise and hold the corners of it between you and a partner. Pull the top tight between you while pulling the bottom down snugly. Fill the sheet with some kind of fake snow. Feathery material works best, indeed, down would be a good choice. What you’re looking for are bits of fake snow that won’t just fall between the slits while the sheet is standing still.

Now, once you’ve got the snow in the sheet, let it rest for a bit. Some stuff will naturally fall out on its own but, after a few minutes things will calm down and the snow remains steady. To make it snow, let the bottom go slack and then you and your partner alternate moving the sides of the sheet up and down. This opens up the slits just a bit and lets the snow fall through.

A snow baffle works almost exactly the same way, except it’s positioned using the batons in the fly gallery. During the set up, we filled the snow baffle early and hoisted it above the stage to let it settle. By the time the audience began arriving for the show, the snow in the baffle had settled and everything was fine.

When places were called, I was up in the follow spot booth in the far back of the house. We had wired headsets connected to the stage so instructions and changes could be called up. I’d set my light, adjusted the volume on my headset, and got ready. The curtain went up, the dance began, and it was magical. It really was an exquisite ballet, and everything was going smoothly… until it started snowing during an inside scene.

At first it was just a flutter. Maybe the snow hadn’t quite settled enough. But then a flutter turned into more. It never got to the point of a blizzard, but there was assuredly snow falling when the characters were supposed to be inside.

The traveling stage manager was on the headsets immediately, and he wasn’t happy. He was calling up to the fly gallery, demanding to know what the hell was going on. The fly gallery techs responded, telling the traveling manager to look up on the rail and, as they said this, they shined a flashlight over to the ropes controlling the snow baffle.

The ropes were going up and down, not a lot, but apparently you could see it from across the stage where the road manager was standing. Those ropes were moving up and down, and there was absolutely no one near them. What’s more, there was no one on the second rail either.

To the road manager’s credit, he was a veteran of many theatres, which you’d expect for a traveling showman. He sighed, and with a tone of resignation said “Oh… you’ve got one of those here too, huh?”

The snowing stopped soon after. To the audience, for those who noticed, it was played off as a blooper. A missed cue. A gaff. For those of us behind the stage, well, we knew better. And some of us were giggling right along with Shorty.

Thanks for listening.

Silent Hill PT

Tonight on the show, a ghost of a ghost story. The story of how a story itself can disappear, die, yet live on as a shadow of its former self. We're not talking about a mere fairy tale or classic of medieval horror from the distant past. This is something from today, only a few years ago. And it goes to show, that sometimes, a dead project might just live on....

If we can’t agree on the existence of ghosts, we can at least agree on a definition. On a base level, you might define a ghost as a remnant of something that once was, but is no longer. I would define it as the spirit of something, but then we diverge into the argument of whether or not people, or things, have spirits. That’s an argument for another time, perhaps. But let me offer you a unique opportunity, an opportunity to see the remnant of something that once existed, but died before it could live up to its potential. It’s a dark story; broken, wandering, and circular.

And it just so happens that this ghost story, is the story of a ghost story.

There’s a genre of video game, somewhat new by gaming standards, called “survival horror.” Chances are you’re familiar with the idea even if you’ve never played such a video game because you probably know something about zombie movies and television shows. After all, from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead, zombie stories share a common thread. There are one one or more people, and likely only a small group of them at at that, and they are trying to survive in a world full of zombies that want to eat them. These characters, often literally called “survivors” even in the context of their stories, have to make their way in spite of limited supplies, strained relationships, and the fact that damn near everything is out to kill them, including the other survivors.

That’s a survival horror game in a nutshell. You’re playing the role of one or more of these survivors, trying to get through the game without becoming a banquet for the undead hoards. You have only a few supplies, so use them wisely because when you run out, and you will run out, it’ll be even harder to stay alive.

Within the survival horror genre of video games, one series stands as a respected masterpiece of the craft. They’re dark. They’re surreal. From the very moment you start a game you feel a sense of unease. And while the crawling evil may vary from game to game, it’s the location that provides the basis for the terror.

Welcome to the Town of Silent Hill.

Since the release of the first game for the original Sony Playstation in 1999, Silent Hill has scared the hell out of gamers for around ten games now. I’m being purposefully vague there because it depends on how you want to count the games as to how many there are. For instance, there was an arcade game and a mobile game as well. For me, I’m concentrating on the console releases which are:

1. Silent Hill 1

1. Silent Hill 2

1. Silent Hill 3

1. Silent Hill 4: The Room

1. Silent Hill: Origins

1. Silent Hill: Homecoming

1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

1. Silent Hill: Downpour

1. Silent Hill: Book of Memories

It’s a bit reminiscent of the horror franchises of the 1980s and 90s. After all, I long ago lost count of the number of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies. And then there was that one sequel to Halloween which didn’t have anything to do with everything and it was stupid and bad. Just like those franchises, there are some good Silent Hill games and some that... aren’t so good.

But I digress.

Silent Hill is akin to Steven King’s town of Castle Rock in that the town itself is the locus of fear. There’s more than one supernatural problem going on in Castle Rock and each character experiences a different type of horror in Silent Hill.

There are some common threads to pull on. The horror is very much a creeping, surreal thing that slowly envelopes the characters. A far-off air raid siren wails, brick walls give way to chain link and diamond plating, I swear to god that building wasn’t there before, and why is it getting dark outside?

But the observant listener might have realized that when I listed the Silent Hill games for the consoles, I only listed nine. Didn’t I say there were ten?

Yes, there were. And one is gone.

Let me tell you the story of Silent Hill: PT.

Have you ever heard about a project that you know, you just know is going to be excellent, just because of who’s working on it? Silent Hill: PT was one of those projects. Two masters in their fields, video gaming and movie making, came together to work on a game that would be an amazing story set in Silent Hill. Hideo Kojima, the creative force behind classic games like the Metal Gear series, Snatcher, and Policenauts. And Guillermo del Toro, the award-winning director of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water. Neither of these artists are foreign to the horror genre. Kojima’s work on Snatcher brought an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe to a cyberpunk world. del Toro’s early work includes Mimic, a sci-fi horror film, and The Devil’s Backbone, an exercise in gothic horror. Indeed, del Toro’s directorial debut was 1993’s Cronos, a horror film that was nominated for an Academy Award.

You’re doing something right when your first film scores an Oscar nomination.

Better still, they were working with some serious survival horror star power with one of today’s best-known survivors, Norman Reedus, aka Daryl from The Walking Dead.

Kojima and del Toro were working with Konami, a major video game studio, to develop the game. Using Kojima Productions’ game engine, they created something different than the normal teasers, screenshots, or trailers you’ll typically see emerging from gaming studios when they’re announcing or promoting a new thing. What Kojima wanted to do was to create something immersive, that told a story on its own, and brought the player into this dark world. He called the idea a “playable teaser” and now you know what the PT in Silent Hill: PT means.

You experience the game through the eyes of the character themselves, so it’s a first person view. But this isn’t Call of Duty, there’s no shooting here. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any violence. You wake up on a concrete floor and slowly get to your feet. Your walk isn’t steady at first, but you stagger towards a door and open it, revealing a hallway.

You wander into the hallway and walk down it. The corridor turns to your right and you pass odd things on the floor. Bottles, cans, broken things strewn about as if there might have been a struggle. Something isn’t right, but nothing seems particularly wrong.

Not yet.

But listen, the radio is on, and it’s talking about a man who killed his family. The lights dim a bit as you make the corner and find another corridor. There are doors along here, but none of them open. The front door is locked. You can only continue along the corridor until you walk down a small staircase and open a door at the end...

And emerge back into the same corridor as before.

As you make loop after loop, wandering down a never-ending hallway, the mood changes. Messages appear on the wall, the radio talks about other families killed by their father. And in the distance, you hear a baby crying. You see things move out of the corner of your eyes. The bathroom door, it wasn’t open before. You go to check it out and catch the faintest glimpse of someone inside just before they slam the door shut.

And that’s when you find out that not only is this hallway a weird repetition from which you cannot escape, it’s haunted too.

The ghost in Silent Hill: PT probably garners perhaps three whole minutes of screen time, depending on how long you observe her. But she’s fantastic, and terrifying. She’s also incredibly pissed off and she seems to be even more pissed off... at you.

I won’t spoil the whole thing because, if you’re into ghost stories, this one is absolutely in the top five on my list of the all-time greatest. You seriously need to go watch this game.

But notice what I said there? You need to go watch this game?

That’s because this game is gone. All that remains are videos of people playing it.

See, no one is talking all that much about what happened, but something obviously happened between Hideo Kojima and Konami. Because not only did Konami end their relationship with Kojima Productions and Kojima himself, they announced that Silent Hill: PT would be removed from the Playstation Online store at the end of April 2015. If you’d already downloaded it, you could keep it. But you wouldn’t be able to redownload it after that.

This drew incredibly harsh criticism for Konami. Not only because they basically destroyed a work of art in what could easily be described as the corporate equivalent of a child breaking their toys during a temper tantrum, but also because people loved this game. It was short. It wasn’t meant to be long, but many video game critics and publications scored this game among the best in the genre and, indeed, it was listed as one of the best games of 2014. When the subject of the greatest horror video games comes up, you can bet that Silent Hill: PT is in the top ten.

Despite the criticism, Konami didn’t listen to its customers, or the outcry of the fans, nor did they bow to the pressure from the trade publications telling them they were making a huge mistake. The game disappeared from the Playstation store on April 29, 2015.

And it hasn’t come back.

But you can still see it, right there on YouTube. It’s not the same though, it’s only a vision, the remnant of something that was, and is no longer. Just like the game’s antagonist...

It’s a ghost.

Thanks for listening.

YVRL - A haunted library

When I'm not holding down the station here at WRTH, I'm a librarian, and I've been in libraries for over two decades. I love libraries, and I love librarians. A good librarian has a passion about them, several passions. They're thrilled by knowledge, enticed by fiction, and they're happiest when sharing new books, media, and information with others. I fell for this passion over 20 years ago, and I feel it in my soul today.

And sometimes, librarians are so passionate, they never seem to leave the job... even after they leave this world.

I kind of literally grew up in a library. When I was about three, my dad got a job with the library system in Yakima, Washington. He was brought on as a Facilities Maintenance guy, which meant that while he kept the library and various branches clean, and he fixed things that needed to be fixed. My dad has a good hand for carpentry, electrical work, welding, fabrication, metal work, plumbing, and more. To this day he’s a jack of many trades and he’s pretty damn good at all of them.

So, I was just a kid when he started working at what was, at the time, called the Yakima Valley Regional Library, or YVRL. The main library was closed on Sundays and that’s when he’d go down to do the kind of work that’s best done when there’s no one in the library, especially the public. The main library has high ceilings and within those high ceilings were the florescent lights that brightened up the days and evenings of library patrons. He’d need to change tubes or replace ballasts which meant standing on a scissor lift a good forty to fifty feet above the floor.

As I got older, maybe five or six, he’d take me with him to the library so I could hang out, read, and run around the stacks and play; so long as I didn’t make a mess, of course. The most important reason I was there was to call 911 if something happened. Thankfully nothing ever did. Dad’s pretty damn careful when he’s up that high and fiddling with wires. Thing is, there was another reason he brought me down there, and I didn’t realize it until much later.

Dad started his day around 5:00 in the morning. He had to be at the main library early to get things cleaned up, prep his vehicle for the day because he often traveled to different branches every day, and generally make sure the place was ready to open. Because of that, he was often in the building a good two to three hours before anyone else ever showed up for work.

But that doesn’t mean he was alone.

The main library has four floors: The main floor, above that a mezzanine, the basement, and just a little below the basement is the library’s large meeting room, or auditorium. I consider that to be on a lower level because, while it’s not far below the basement, you have to walk down a flight of stairs to get there. The maintenance office is in the basement, tucked away next to the breakroom and staff restrooms. Just outside of the office are the archives and storage collection for the library. YVRL Main housed a large collection of periodicals, along with stacks and stacks of books that they kept in the basement because, while they didn’t check out regularly, they didn’t want to just dump them either.

In other words, the basement as a completely different library and one that the public rarely saw at the time. While the newer books and media remained upstairs, the storage stacks were there when a patron needed an older item. They’d simply request it and we’d go get it. It was a library of its own, filled with older books.

And I’ll come back to that in a bit. Because I think the secondary library full of older materials is part of this story.

One night the family was gathered around the table, my mom and dad and me. I don’t remember how old I was but I’m pretty sure I was still in elementary school. We were talking about ghosts because the subject came up somehow and dad casually mentioned that he thought the library was haunted.

For a young boy harbouring an interest in the supernatural, that comment immediately grabbed my attention and I started pressing my dad for details.

He wasn’t scared by the ghost. Indeed, at that point, he wasn’t sure what was going on. But he was pretty sure something was there because things kept happening.

At first it was little things. He’d be on one side of the library at 6:30 in the morning. He knows for a fact he’s the only one there, and yet he clearly hears a door slam on the other side of the building. YVRL Main is a big, box like structure with a lot of empty space. In a quiet, empty library, you can literally hear people coughing from one side of the building to another, even if you’re on different floors.

He’d jump of course, because it’s a sudden loud noise in a place it doesn’t belong, even when the library is open. The first few times it happened he’d grab something to use as a weapon and go check it out. He’d never find anything, and what was he looking for anyway? Most of the doors are closed in the early morning anyway and he didn’t make any notes about which ones were open. So he’d go back to work and that was that.

The door slamming was a regular thing, so much so that he got used to it after a while. Sometimes, a door nearby would slam, sometimes right down the hall. He’d check, find nothing, shrug, and go back to work.

Until that one time, in the early morning hours, when he was working on something in the basement... and someone called his name.

Well, that certainly got his attention.

I think we’ve all had something similar like this. We’re alone in a quiet place, nothing but our thoughts to keep us company, and we hear our name. It’s an audio hallucination, of course, and it’s not uncommon. I’ve heard my name several times in my own house and I don’t believe it to be haunted. But there’s something that’s peculiar to my father and I, when this little trick appears in our brains. It’s always a male voice. My hypothesis is, that it’s always a male voice because, in reality, it’s our own voice. No one is calling our name, but we heard it, and it was a male voice because the voice came from our minds.

So dad’s used to that. He’d heard his name called before and paid it no mind. It was the same voice that he’d hear calling his name at home just before falling asleep.

But this time it was woman’s voice. And it was just as clear as if she was standing down the hallway. He turned, and responded, and nothing came back. He checked and found no one. But it happened again, and again after that. The slamming doors, the voice in the distance, and always the same voice. When it was a woman calling his name, it was the same voice.

I’d ask him about this stuff occasionally and he’d fill me in. At some point, he gave the ghost a name, because by the time he’d heard the voice and found no explanation for the slamming doors, he figured it was something and a ghost was just as good an explanation as anything else.

Because he’s a fan of classic movies, he called her Mrs. Muir, after the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. He’d talk to her, because why not? And the weirdest thing is, she’d respond. Not through her voice, but through her actions. If he was working on something and had to be cautious, like fixing an electrical problem, he’d politely call out and ask if she’d not slam any doors for a few minutes, he didn’t want to get hurt.

And she didn’t. The place was a quiet as, well, as quiet as a library. And he’d finish his job without any surprises.

When she did slam a door and startle him, he’d gently admonish her for it and then tell her good morning. When he heard his name, he’d say hello. It seemed like the thing you’d do, you know?

Ny dad worked there for 16 years before I started working at the library.

He’d told the Circulation Supervisor that I was looking for a job, something steadier than my work at the theatre because, while the theatre paid well, it only paid when there was a show. And there wasn’t always a show.

I put in an application for a Page position and they hired me a couple of weeks later. As a Page, it was my job to shelve materials, keep the stacks tidy, and retrieve things from the basement. It was a treat to work in the same place as my father, so we’d often eat lunch together and take our breaks at the same time — adjusting our schedules as needed.

Occasionally I’d need to head downstairs to the storage stacks and shelve down there. Not only were the older materials downstairs, there were the bound periodicals. After people were done using these things, Pages went and put them away. Sometimes, I’d have a full cart of stuff and I’d just head down the elevator and spend some time in the basement. I liked it, because it was cool and quiet and relaxing to shelve down there.

One particularly slow evening, I had a few stacks of some bound magazines to go back on the shelves along with a handful of older books to return to storage. At the time, the library didn’t close until 9 in the evening, but most of the staff working in the basement left at 5:00. By six o’clock, all of the staff cleared out and the basement was a hushed, dimly lit area. You could turn the lights on, but you needed to turn them off, and most of the time I could see just fine so I never bothered.

I wheeled my book cart into the elevator and down to the basement. The periodicals were easy to shelve so I did those first. I left my cart there and picked up the few items to go into the storage stacks and walked back into the darker areas. I put a couple of items away and had my back to the main aisle while I looked at one of the items to figure out what it was and where it went.

Behind me, a woman walked down that main aisle, her high heels making a distinctive clicking on the tile floor as she wandered off in the direction of the elevator and staircase. Now, it’s a library and I worked with a lot of women. The sound of high heels on a tiled floor was an everyday thing. I stuck my head around the corner to let her know I was there. With the lights off, it’d be easy to startle someone who missed me standing in the stacks.

There was no one there. She wasn’t running. She was walking. She’d have still been in the aisle, and she wasn’t there.

My mind immediately went to the ghost, but I also recognized that of course it would. I wasn’t paying any attention, I was looking at a book, and I think I heard something. I think I head a ghost in the dimly lit basement of a library my dad told me was haunted. Of course I did.

And I put it aside. After all, dad told me about the voices, the slamming doors, the occasional thing that got moved. I didn’t even mention it to him that evening because I was afraid I’d sound like a schoolboy who was so awfully excited to hear the ghost too. I wanted something less subtle.

And a couple of months later, I got it.

I worked the evening shift regularly and it got to the point that I’d hear the high heels once a week. Always at night, and there was never anyone there. It occurred to me that, if this sound could be heard during the day, no one would pay any mind to it. A fair bit of the basement was tiled. The sounds of high heels walking around would be a daily thing.

I knew something was weird when I started hearing them walk by me, and I was facing that main aisle. I’d started keeping it in sight whenever I was in the stacks, but I was always cautious that my imagination loved a good ghost story and it could be making one up for me.

Until the incident outside the auditorium.

As I said, the large meeting room/auditorium was a level down from the basement. We didn’t always have a lot going on in there, but here and there a group would use it for something. One night, as we were getting ready to close up, I was downstairs, outside the auditorium, making sure the lights were off and the doors were locked. While the auditorium was dark, the hallway outside was well lit. I made sure the lights were off, and locked both doors.

Behind me, I heard those footsteps again. High heels, on tile, walking down the hall and then up the stairs before fading out. The hair on my neck went straight up, because that sound…. It wasn’t scary, but it was off, because that’s not what I should’ve heard.

The next morning I grabbed my dad, because I had two questions for him.

“You’ve told me about the ghost. The voices. The slamming doors. All of that stuff, right?”

“Sure,” he replied, over his cup of coffee. He had a gleam in his eyes that wouldn’t make sense until about three minutes later.

“Did you leave out anything?” I pressed.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Have you ever heard footsteps? You never mentioned footsteps.”

He put his coffee down and looked right at me before responding.

“I could write off the slamming doors as noises in an empty building. I could ignore the voices calling my name as my own imagination. The footsteps, the sound of a woman walking around the place? I can’t explain that. I never brought it up because I wanted someone else to tell me they heard it too.”

“How do you know it’s a woman?” I said.

“Because of the high heels,” he replied, sipping his coffee.

“Ok. We’ve both heard this,” I continued. “I’ve heard her walking around the stacks downstairs, and you have too, right?”

He nodded.

“So, second question... The hallway outside the auditorium. Was that always carpeted?”

His eyes lit up, and he sat straight upright in his chair.

“No! It used to be tiled! You... heard it too?” he asked.

“Last night, locking up the auditorium, I heard a woman walking behind me, her high heeled shoes clicking on a tiled floor. I’ve heard that several times now, in storage. But that’s a tile floor, and the hallway is carpet, so...” I trailed off.

“Did she go upstairs or was she coming down?”

“Going upstairs. I didn’t hear anyone come down.”

Dad nodded again, “Yeah. She’s always going upstairs.”

A few days later, after thinking about it for a while, it dawned on me. Of course, she’s going upstairs. First, there’s nothing much down where the auditorium is. There are two stairways on either side of a hall. She’s going upstairs because that’s where the books are.

Later that year, I was in the library on my own, clearing a book drop on a Sunday evening because it was a three-day weekend and we’d need the space for people returning things all day Monday while we were closed. After emptying in the bin behind the circulation desk and returning it to the drop, I had another quick look around before gathering my stuff to leave.

“Danny.”

She was down in the children’s section, I think. That’s what it sounded like. She wasn’t right there with me, but we were on the same floor. I know that.

I didn’t jump. I don’t think I was even startled. I walked over to the end of the desk, and headed to the children’s section.

“Good morning, and how are you today, ma’am?” I said, reaching the children’s library and looking around. No one was there.

Oddly, this voice calling my name added another layer to the gathering pile of paranormal occurrences. To my friends, I’m Dan. To many of the people I worked with, I was Dan or Daniel.

To my dad, and to the lady who was my Circulation Manager, my boss, who’d known me since I was a kid. I was Danny. When I was playing in the stacks while my dad worked? I was Danny. There were three people at that library who always called me Danny: my dad, my boss, and the library ghost.

I heard her voice several times. Always my name, always trying to get my attention, to pull me over someplace. And it was always Danny.

But you see, I’d been talking to her too, but she’d never respond. Hell, I don’t even know if she was around at the time, I’d talk to her. But I’d let her know I was in the basement, tell her good evening, ask her about her day, tell her about mine, and be on my way. If ever I was there alone, I’d tell her what I was doing, and see if there was any response.

One day, I asked her about something good to read. I loved those old books and would check them out regularly looking for something different. The old travel books really snagged me and I was looking for one about going to Hawaii or Polynesia or something like that. It’s incredibly interesting to read about a time where traveling to Polynesia isn’t as easy as boarding a 747 and a puddle jumper. I told her so and asked for a recommendation. After all, by this point I figured she’s the spirit of a librarian.

Nothing happened. Certainly. So I grabbed a book on traveling to the islands and went back upstairs. Later that evening, I was back in the same area, putting stuff away. I turned and walked down the aisle where I’d found the book on Polynesia.

And there, face down on the floor, is a book.

Keep in mind, these stacks aren’t really touched all that much, and only by staff. We’d get things off the shelves, put things back on the shelves, and that’s it. I’d never seen a book on the floor back there in the stacks. I didn’t even remember asking the spirit for a recommendation earlier. I picked it up and started to put it away. There was an obvious hole on the shelf where it had been. I checked the call number, checked the shelf, and checked the title.

The Happy Lagoons: Adventures of a South Sea Wanderer by Jorgen Andersen-Rosendal.

And that’s when I remembered asking for a recommendation. I looked around, and I said thank you. I checked out the book and took it home.

To this day, this 1961 book about a former Danish diplomat gallivanting around Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga isn’t just one of my favourite books about traveling in Polynesia, it’s one of my favourite travel books, period.

I guess she knew what she was talking about. Years later, something occurred to me when I thought about this incident again. Most of the time, whenever I felt her presence and heard her, it was downstairs in the basement. The time I heard her call my name upstairs? That was one of the rare times I ever heard her on the main floor. I’d hear her and feel her all over the library, but the majority of the time, she was somewhere around the periodicals and storage stacks in the basement.

That’s when I realized, of course that’s where she liked to hang out. Those books? They’re old, and they’re in storage... but they used to be part of the primary collection. These were the books that used to be upstairs. And if my general idea of when she worked at the library was right?

These were the books that she worked with. This was her collection. Absolutely she knew yhe best book on traveling in Polynesia.

Before I sign off, I want to share two more things. Because, after all, I’ve told you about the experiences my dad and I had at the library and with the library ghost. For all you know, we’re a bit off and we’ve got overly active imaginations.

After years of service at the library, my dad was eventually promoted to Facilities Maintenance Coordinator and given an assistant to supervise. One of these assistants, we’ll call him Carl. Carl was Hispanic and spoke fluent Mexican Spanish. As with dad, it wasn’t unusual that Carl would be in the library alone in the mornings. After all, he was doing the stuff my dad used to do.

One day, he found my dad in the maintenance office and sat down. “Bob,” he said. Have you ever had anything... strange, happen to you in the mornings?

My dad slowly turned in his chair. He’d talked to me about this stuff, he’d never brought it up with Carl.

“Go on,” my dad said.

“I was down in the auditorium area this morning,” Carl said, worry etched upon his face. “And someone called my name.”

“Oh?” my dad said. You have to understand something. This was, for the first time in years, fully independent verification of something he and I knew about for ages. But Carl wasn’t done yet.

“But it’s weird, Bob,” Carl went on. “It wasn’t so much that someone called my name. It’s that everyone around here calls me Carl. Except the lady calling me over by the auditorium? She called me by my Spanish name... Whoever did that, she called me Carlos.”

Finally, there was a guy in IT. He was a nice enough guy, but he was fairly no nonsense. He approached his job as something to be done and he’d do it, professionally. At the time, the library was making some changes in the computer lab, a room stocked with computers thanks to a grant from the Gates Foundation. He was in there, upgrading systems, and running some cables. He’d been at it for some time when, suddenly, he storms back into the IT work area and sits down at his desk. The head of IT asks him if he’d finished the stuff he was working on and he said something along the lines of “No, not yet.” He asked for some help, and the IT supervisor could tell something wasn’t right.

This no-nonsense guy, who’d never mentioned anything about anything outside of professional work stuff, told his supervisor that he absolutely refused to go back to that lab alone. Someone would have to be with him. He wouldn’t say why, and it was obvious he was a little embarrassed, but he was also absolutely serious. So, they got things done, much more quickly since there were two people working on it. And while he worked there, he never strayed from that demand. He’d never go to the computer lab on his own.

Fascinating, actually. Because the computer lab? It was located downstairs, in a room just off to the side of the auditorium.

Thanks for listening.

Most Haunted

The paranormal investigation television show is a phenomenon and genre all its own. One of the first, and most popular, was Ghost Hunters, a show about a couple of plumbers who occupy their off hours haunting houses that are reportedly haunted. Another favourite is Ghost Adventures, a show about para-bro-mal investigators who travel the country and the world looking for spirits. There are plenty of others, but I’ve noticed a trend in many of the shows from the United States, especially the aforementioned Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures.

Provocation.

It’s one of the tactics employed by paranormal investigators to coax a reaction out of a spirit. In the most basic of terms, you’re trying to piss off the ghost. Say you’re in a haunted jail and the ghost of a man who murdered his wife lingers around one of the cell blocks. Perhaps you’ll wander down that block calling out his name, insulting him as a coward for killing an innocent woman. Maybe you’ll shout out to him, asking what it was like when the rope tightened around his neck when they hung him for the crime.

If you’re at all into this kind of thing, provocation is a powerful, but possibly dangerous strategy. After all, you’re dealing with the paranormal and, by definition, something from another world. How angry do you want that entity to be? To the credit of these programmes, and programmes like them where provocation takes centre stage, they often show the consequences of antagonizing a ghost. The investigators may get ill, almost to the point of vomiting. Something throws hard objects at them. They feel overtaken by emotion. In rare cases, they’re assaulted through scratching, welts, and shoving.

As I said, this tactic is popular on American paranormal television, but what about our neighbours across the pond?

I’ve been a fan of British television since before I was a teenager. One evening I was up very late, especially for a ten or eleven-year-old boy. I had a cold, and I couldn’t sleep for the coughing. My mom gave me some medicine and said it was okay for me to watch television while it kicked in. She knew I’d be asleep soon enough, and she likely wanted to go back to bed herself. I sat down in a dark living room and started flipping through channels.

We had cable at the time, and I watched shows I’d never heard of before as well as shows I had heard about but were on well past my bedtime. Who was this Johnny Carson guy, anyway?

Boring, is what I thought he was. Hey, I was only ten or so. I wasn’t exactly a cultured individual by that point. I kept flipping, channel after channel. News, talk show, lousy movie, another talk show, Masterpiece Theatre, women dancing half naked, another movi... waaaaaaaaait a minute.

I flipped back to the half-naked dancing women. Of course I did. And there they were, dancing to a French song I didn’t understand, with a chubby, dorky looking guy whose face positively radiated happiness.

Well, yeah, he was dancing with beautiful women who, as I previously mentioned, were half naked.

The dance number ended, and then a sketch started up. The guy was rapidly patting an old, bald guy on the head. He was telling ribald jokes and recited poems that would’ve gotten me sent to the principal’s office. And oh my god he was funny.

His name was Benny Hill, and he was my introduction to British TV. Not too long after that I discovered Monty Python, and that was it, I became a lifelong fan.

So it goes, a while back I found out about a British paranormal television show. I wasn’t aware of it because, for the most part, I kind of stopped watching TV. It’s nothing against TV or the shows or anything, it’s more to do with my absolute hatred of advertising. And, if nothing else, TV is a medium designed to sell you things with occasional interruptions by the programme you tuned in to watch in the first place.

But this is the age of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. This show was on the latter, my friend told me. So I grabbed my iPad, installed the Prime Video app, and brought up season one of Most Haunted.

It’s the most British ghost show imaginable.

Most Haunted features one Yvette Fielding, the youngest person to host the popular UK children’s show Blue Peter. Now, if you’re not British, you likely have no idea what Blue Peter is. I can tell you that this show has been on the air longer than Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. And, if you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, just hang on. I have a point just a little further down the line.

Yvette was just 17 when she hosted Blue Peter and one of her segments was voted as the “favourite Blue Peter moment ever.” (If you’re curious, it involved roller coasters.) After hosting a hugely popular kids show she went on to do other things, like host another popular kid’s show called What’s Up, Doc?

Now, with Most Haunted, you can watch one of Britain’s premiere television personalities and children’s show hosts swear like an absolute sailor when something scares the crap out of her. For the Americans, it’s kind of like discovering that there’s a new detective on Law & Order: SVU; played by Maria from Sesame Street.

But it’s not the host of Most Haunted that makes it the most British ghost show in the isles. It’s not the locations they visit, even though the locations are wonderful historical sites in the UK. No, the difference between all those American shows and this British show comes down to one thing:

How they talk to the ghosts.

American shows follow a standard sort of prevocational pattern. First, insult the ghost. Second, insult the ghost some more. Third, recoil in horror as something happens. And fourth, bleep everything the investigator says for the next five seconds.

That’s not how Most Haunted works.

No, Yvette has a different tactic. First, her team of investigators typically consists of her, her husband Karl, parapsychologist Dr. Ciaran O’Keefe, and the crew. And by “the crew” I mean everyone from the audio guy to the makeup girl. Everyone gets into the investigation and, indeed, Catherine Howe the aforementioned makeup girl becomes a longstanding member of the team. Yvette and Karl are competent investigators, Dr. O’Keefe is the skeptical parapsychologist, and then there are a host of mediums and psychics, including the hilariously bad Derek Acorah for the first few seasons.

As a bit of scuttlebutt and paranormal gossip, Acorah was actually outed as a fake by Ciaran O’Keefe himself.

The show follows a fairly standard format: Yvette welcomes the viewer to the location, there’s some historical information, a psychic comes in and tries to give them more information, and then the lights out investigation begins. Where many American shows call attention to the investigators using technological equipment like K2 meters, SB7 and SB11 Spirit Boxes, infrared scanners, an everything else except Dr. Egon Spengler’s PKE Meter; the Most Haunted crew usually rolls in with their cameras, perhaps a digital audio recorder.... And that’s it.

There were a few episodes where Dr. O’Keefe used an infrared camera, but that’s about as technical as they ever get.

It’s during the investigation that the differences between countries becomes most apparent. The Most Haunted crew wanders around the location, calling out to the spirits, politely asking questions, and saying thank you when things happens. It’s quite the usual for Yvette to enter a room, begin talking and asking if the spirit is there and if they could give her a sign of their presence, something slams or a thing moves, Yvette will scream just a little, and swear a little more...

And then she politely thanks the spirit for their efforts. There are times she even apologizes for her language.

Being that it’s British TV, some words are bleeped, but they’re different than what is censored in America. I can’t say why that is, because I don’t know what time of day these shows originally aired, but there are instances of Yvette and members of her crew dropping F bombs and, occasionally, they go unbleeped.

Provocation is a rarely used tactic on Most Haunted and only comes into play when something pisses off one of the hosts. One episode features Yvette getting upset with a spirit and she gives them a verbal dressing down. While she’s doing it there are noises and weird sounds and things being moved around or thrown. And she’s just standing there, unfazed and unwavering, giving this ghost what for and pointing her finger while doing so.

It’s fantastic.

And this isn’t just Yvette. Often her husband will go off with Stu the cameraman and that, in itself, is its own special treat. Because Stu and Karl are friends and their banter would make a show all on its own. They’ll be up in the back end of some disused tower in a 600 year old castle, and things start getting weird. Stu has been hit with things thrown by unseen forces, and he thanks the ghosts for doing it. Sure, Stu and Karl might hightail out of that tower like Shaggy and Scooby heading for the kitchen. And as they slam the door shut behind them, they’re thanking the spirits for communicating with them.

It’s so utterly different than American ghost television in other ways. There’s less drama, and for lack of a better word, less upselling. I think the British can fall back on their history a little better than the Americans can. It’s like the comedian Eddie Izzard once said; Americans will be proud of a house that’s been restored to how it looked 150 years ago. Meanwhile, there are apartment buildings in London that are twice that age, let alone the houses that date back to the 1400s. There’s not so much “Check out this freakin’ castle” more than it’s “here’s this episode’s castle.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d refer to these ghostly TV shows as a guilty pleasure. The problem is, when I watch these shows, be it Most Haunted or Ghost Adventures or a paranormal documentary... I don’t feel a single pang of guilt. I’m entertained and I’m enjoying myself. And that takes something special since, normally, I despise TV. Granted, I only watch these shows on services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, or the truck they fell off the back of.

So when it comes to paranormal TV, if you’re into that sort of thing, check out Most Haunted. You’ll find most of it on Amazon Prime Video. The locations are stunning all on their own and the silliness is made even better by the fact that it’s a British kind of silliness. It’s entertainment, crafted by people who want to entertain you.

And as always, thanks for listening.

About the author…

Daniel Messer has worked in libraries for over twenty years, recorded podcasts for over a decade, wrote a few books, and still has no idea how to write something about himself. But people expect to see these kinds of things at the back of the book, so he’ll likely tell you something about how he’s the creator and host of the Cyberpunk Librarian podcast. It’s a show that explores the intersection of libraries and technology with a focus on free and open source software. He does other shows here and there, and this little book is the result of a hair-brained idea he had about doing a ghost podcast.

Dan lives in Mesa, Arizona where it’s usually warm, often hot, and sometimes hotter than hot. He listens to a lot of ambient and space music and partakes of far too much Irish folk music, especially when he’s had a couple of bottles of Irish red ale.

Then again, that’s when he typically thinks up these hair-brained ideas, so it works out in the end.

You can find his other books on Amazon, and you can tune in to Cyberpunk Librarian at:

https://cyberpunklibrarian.com/

1. Introduction - You’re on the air with AM 800 WRTH

2. The Shadowlands

3. All the Best Theatres Are Haunted

4. Silent Hill PT

5. YVRL - A haunted library

6. Most Haunted

7. About the author…