DIARY OF A GHOST HUNTER

Flying is a little like going into labour. Its frightening. Its painful, unless you use drugs. And..once its over your brain blocks it out because you are likely never to do it again  - and you REALLY don't want to remember what it was like the last time you did it. So..after a 14 hour long haul to Dubai and then a 7 hour stretch to Birmingham we landed with a sigh of relief to be finally extricated from the sounds of children wailing, as if they were being scalded in boiling water, and the constant drone of freezing air conditioning in the plane which saw me wrap myself cocoon like in three airline blankets to raise my temperature  back enough to allow for blood flow. The 360 Airbus is huge and I rather not think about how the f**k they get it to stay up in the air. The food was not news worthy. It's worth the 24 hours of being curled up like a centipede, that has had its life threatened, to now be looking out of a window onto a sunny sky and the knowledge that my a...

Today is my birthday. I am 59 years old. I am proud to have reached this milestone with my sanity mostly intact. There where certainly times when I thought I had lost it completely and my own silliness led me down pathways that I regret, in hindsight. But...this path is what it is. It has been filled with ghosts. Mostly of my choosing. Strange, that most haunted people will tell you that they would wish otherwise. They long for their nightmares to just go away. Yet I have spent my life trying to work out who these energies are and why they have been around steadily pushing me in one direction as I mostly screamed and pushed in another. The ghosts I have struggled with most are remnants of the terrors I inherited from my parents. They are the manifestations of fear so deeply ingrained into their psyches through a war they barely survived which then became my nightmares. These creatures, so awful and so dark, plagued my mind as a child, becoming so real that I...

I have just returned from a weekend in Aradale, Victoria. Aradale is about 2 hours drive from Melbourne and about an hour from Ballarat. Its a small township - and very pretty. It has a small main street, an RSL and a McDonalds. But...more importantly, it has one thing that has drawn ghost hunters to the township for many years. ARADALE MENTAL ASYLUM. Aradale Asylum was an Australian psychiatric hospital, located in Ararat, a rural city in Victoria, Australia. Now a ghost "town", Aradale was once known as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum. Aradale and its two sister asylums at Kew and Beechworth were commissioned to accommodate the growing number of "lunatics" in the colony of Victoria. Construction began in 1860 and was opened for patients in 1865. It was closed as an asylum in 1998.  At its height, Aradale had up to 900 patients yearly and is a large complex with up to 70 interesting historic abandoned buildings. https://www.aradale.com.au/aradale.ht...

So this weekend I went down the rabbit hole with Mr Guy Lyon Playfair. Does the name ring a bell? It should. Playfair was the main investigator of the very famous Enfield Poltergeist case in England from 1977 to 1979 involving two sisters who started to exhibit very strange phenomena. Guy Lyon Playfair (born 5 April 1935) was a British writer, best known for his books about parapsychology. Some interesting stuff about him from Wikipedia (the repository of all knowledge): " For two years, Guy Playfair worked with IBPP, Brazil's first and only serious psychical research organisation. He has been a member of the British Society for Psychical Research since 1973 and was elected to its Council in 2004. He has contributed several articles and book reviews to its journal and newsletter. Guy Playfair was a consultant for the infamous BBC production " Ghostwatch " which aired on Halloween night 1992 on BBC One in the United Kingdom. In the end credits of...

So, it's officially ONLY 25 more sleeps till I board a plane to head on a long awaited adventure back to Scotland and England. Of course, I am going to try and squeeze in as much as I can over the four weeks that I am there. I am not traveling alone - I will be with long time best buddy and 'travel b#*ch' Gayle. My husband, who I would love to share this journey with, suffers from long term chronic pain from a work related injury and cannot travel such distances, so, as I don't do single travel , my buddy in notorious adventures has agreed to come along for this joy ride. I must warn you, Gayle is a bit of a scardy cat when it comes to spooky stuff, so I might just have to do some things on my own - but overall, I am lucky to have a great travel buddy. It makes such a difference to be with a person who is easy going and laughs a lot.                                         ...

The dictionary tells us that an expert is 'a person who is very knowledgeable about or skilfull in a particular area.' When you think about the word expert in that way there are certainly many experts in the paranormal field, yet some people really fear calling themselves experts or being labelled as an expert because of the stigma attached to that word . Being called an expert seems to automatically put a target on your back which allows others to criticize those wishing to pass on or share their knowledge. Is that how we see the field moving forward? Is it right to be wasting time on the "I am more important than you are"argument? But then - Should anyone and everyone putting out information on the internet be seen as an expert? Certainly not!  We can all learn from the information that is delivered by others, even if it is that we don't agree with it.  But, in the end, a lot of information is just opinion. And not everyone's opinion is ...

I recently read an article in the Fortean Times ( great magazine BTW) entitled the 'Haunted Generation' and it set me thinking to when we actually got to be so very frightened of ghosts? Where we always so aware that the other side was evil, demonic, out to get us? Or has this been conjured up with the help of some spooky literature and Hollywood movies. Catherine Crowe, a woman who chose to put herself out there and write a book and have it published in the 1800's, wrote about experiences with what she called the 'night side' which was a term coined by the Germans (ofcourse) for that part of life that the sun did not shine on, the other side of the world, the dark side of the moon if you wish. Her book was a great hit to the chagrin of all the male authors of the time and they ended up making a mockery of her. I dont think that the hallucinogenic drugs she was taking at parties helped at all either. But she wanted to spread the word of horror and g...