UK Living’s hugely successful paranormal investigation series ‘Most Haunted’ sees the launch of it’s 9th season on DVD here in the UK on Monday. A
nd after 6 year’s worth of investigations, live episodes and celebrity participants we ask the question, how real is ‘Most Haunted’?
Yvette Fielding and husband/co-producer Karl Beattie and the team take us to various apparently haunted locations across the UK and spend 24 hours on location to try and communicate successfully with so-called astral beings.
I’ve been watching this series on and off over the past years and find it extremely interesting. But, like many others, are increasingly frustrated by the lack of undeniable proof of the existence of spirits.
Most of any particular ‘bumps in the night’, strange noises and eyewitness accounts are more often than not laid to rest by on hand Parapsychologist and resident sceptic Ciarán O’Keeffe. As a viewer of the show I’m often amazed and slightly unnerved by some of the things I hear and witness in the ‘final cut’ of each episode. Then O’Keefe appears at the end and suggests a number of other more grounded reasoning behind these apparent supernatural goings-on.
Where the hell’s the Controlled Testing?
Most Haunted is frustrating on so many levels, none more than the lack of attempting to control particular environments for more substantial investigations. Most of the time each team member equipped with a camera with night-vision capabilities prefers to actually sit in a darkened room and film their face and not the actual room where it seems more of the action occurs. The majority who think viewers will find the teams reactions more exciting than the actual possibility of catching a glimpse of uninterupted evidence is laughable.
Each investigation often tries slightly different attempts to communicate. Yet, however, after all these years and all these episodes there still hasn’t been a single, solitary undeniable piece of evidence to convince me. Here’s a few more of my gripes…
- Lock down cameras. Try wide shots of whole rooms/areas when the team are in there. This may actually capture stone throwing and the source of certain noises and light anomolies. Table movement always seems to be slightly out of shot on one end where of course a team member could be controlling the movement.
- Use digital cameras. I watched a paranormal investigation show once on late night TV and they took lots and lots of photos of each area at night. And there were some fantastic and very difficult to explain outcomes. To me a video camera is simply replicating what the eye sees. An actual digtial camera can capture split seconds that the eye can easily miss, especially in pitch dark scenarios.
- STOP FILMING YOURSELF! Why the need to film your own reactions. We’ve seen them a million times over. It’s no good filming yourself and talking to the camera (which can STILL be done without the camera being on you) only to have a strange shadow walk past or a bang from across the room and you missing the shot. More often than not as soon as some strange occurrence happens the camera person instantly swings the camera around to try and film the source only to find out they’re WAY TOO LATE. Unfortunately this just adds to the sceptisism of the whole experience.
I will continue to watch. And I wouldn’t mind trying it myself. But let’s hope the next season of Most Haunted will take on board some no-brainer suggestions from it’s critics.
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