For five years now Edinburgh
has opened itself to the world of the paranormal. In 2005 tourist attraction The Real Mary King’s Close (there’s a fake one?) organised the first
GhostFest and buoyed on with that initial
success the annual event has gone from strength to strength and indeed there
are now several other GhostFests throughout the UK.
The basic theme is one of
celebrating the all round spookiness of a city and from that point of view
Edinburgh qualifies – like many cities it claims to be the most haunted in the
UK. Throughout the ten days of the
festival there are overnight investigations, talks and tours. And one of the advantages is that it
does allow you entrance to areas which are normally off limits. For example this year I was able to
visit two five star hotels and previously I have been backstage at the
Playhouse Theatre and the amount of areas under the streets of Edinburgh I have
traversed is unbelievable!
The range of events on offer
appears to have something for everyone – there are full on overnight vigils,
there are two hour demonstration sessions, Q and A sessions with ghosthunters,
film sessions and even mini events for the kids!
One particular piece of
ghost hunting that was well represented this year was EVP or Electronic Voice
Phenomena. A recording is made of
someone asking a question and the recording is allowed to continue for a period
after. And in theory there is an
answer to the question contained on the piece of recording that should be
merely silence! A technique
popularised by Konstantin Raudive and featured in the neglected movie White
Noise it is most definitely intriguing.
Nowadays it is carried out using voice activated Dictaphones – this has
two advantages – if there is nothing there no recording is made so there is
less silence to listen to and the files produced are easily transferred to
computer for enhancement (ideally as little as possible).
I took part in a number of
these sessions courtesy of Ghost Finders Scotland and found some intriguing results. There are all sorts of potential
explanations ranging from spirit voices to machine noise from the recorder, but
the machines do sometimes appear to capture sounds that were apparently not
there when the recording was made and if it is just mechanical noise from the
recorder why isn’t it present all the time? And in all honesty our brains do try to make sense of the
world around them so it could be a classic case of paradolia where we try to
fit random sounds to words, but when I asked if the spirit at Gilmerton Cove
was willing to show itself it really did sound like it said “I already have you
stupid bastard”!
All round the Edinburgh GhostFest is a welcome addition to the year round succession of festivals
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