Last week I posted a series of responses to various essays by CJ, one of the leading members of the parapsychological research group, ASSAP, on the nature of ghosts and hauntings. One of these was also a response to his article taking to pieces a rather mendacious article in the Star that misrepresented the work of another serious researcher into the paranormal. A couple of decades ago CJ worked as a researcher for the ghost-hunting programme Most Haunted, presented by Yvette Fielding and medium Derek Acorah. Acorah was sacked after he was caught cheating by the show’s resident parapsychologist and sceptic, Dr Ciaran O’Keeffe. Now Fielding has a book out about her time on the show, and Private Eye have reviewed it in this fortnight’s issue. I’m putting it up here as I feel it will be of more than a little interest to people like CJ, who have a serious interest in psychical research and how it is reflected and (mis)represented in the popular media.
‘Ghost busted
Scream Queen: A Memoir
Yvette Fielding
(Ebury Spotlight £22).
“Is it possible to talk to the dead?” Yvette Fielding, television’s “First Lady of the Paranormal” asks in this memoir. The answer is, of course “No”. But Fielding believes – or professes to – that the dead are veritable chatterboxes. You can barely get them to shut up and she’s built a career out of it.
She and her husband, Karl Beattie, created Most Haunted, a long-running “paranormal investigation” show that first aired on Living TV in 2002. With her motley crew of ghost hunters, Fielding would set up shop at supposedly haunted buildings, and ghost-related shenanigans would ensue. Mediums would talk to spirits and sometimes be possessed by them. Team members would claim to see, hear or feel spooks. Sometimes they were even attacked by them.
Viewers had to accept a lot on faith because, for obvious reasons, the ghosts were never caught on camera. The only mysterious thing about Most Haunted was why anyone ever watched it: It was sold to “over 100 countries”, we are told no fewer than four times in this book.
Fielding saw her first ghost at the age of 26, when staying at her mother’s house. The apparition was half a soldier (the top half). A chat with a local historian revealed that during the Second World War, a soldier had been cut in half in an accident on the railway line at the bottom of the garden. Mystery solved! (Later, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Fielding saw a pair of ghostly legs. “To this day, we have no idea who those legs belonged to,” she writes.)
The spectral soldier ignited Fielding’s interest in the paranormal and a few years later, after hearing about a cameraman friend’s visit to a haunted house, she and Beattie hit on the idea for Most Haunted.
Derek Acorah, a former footballer turned “medium”, was a star of the show. Acorah was “possessed” on a fairly regular basis and his ludicrous performances were hammier than Miss Piggy eating a bacon sandwich in a charcuterie. Fielding insists that for a while she thought he was genuine, but also admits that, when filming for the very first episode of the first series, Acorah claimed to be in touch with a spirit who, it later turned out, had been invented by the owner of the property. Yet Most Haunted stuck with Acorah for six years before he was eventually fired (passing permanently into the spectral realm in 2020), and even then his dismissal seems to have been prompted by his abusive behaviour towards the crew rather than his obviously fraudulent antics.
Fielding repeatedly claims that everything in the show is “real and not made up”. How, then, to explain the writer Will Storr’s experience on the set of an episode of Most Haunted Live, as described in a chapter of his book Will Storr vs The Supernatural? He manages to sneak a peak at a copy of the filming schedule and is surprised to see that “happenings” are scheduled in advance. “Yvette and Derek explain local folklore and have a happening”. “Yvette and Derek at St Nicholas Church – further happenings”. Curiouser and curiouser.
Fielding doesn’t mention that episode. She does wonder whether there’s “been some kind of establishment cover-up about the paranormal”. Why might that be the case? “All governments and religions rule by control and they probably don’t want the masses thinking that there might be another plane after this life.” Her suspicions were apparently first aroused when Ofcom ruled that Most Haunted was “entertainment” and not a genuine investigation into the paranormal – proof positive surely of a global conspiracy.
Among all the supernatural guff, we get snippets of some of Fielding’s other work in TV. She was Blue Peter’s youngest ever presenter and had some genuinely hair-raising experiences on the children’s programme. She describes going down a bobsleigh run in Germany. It was so terrifying that when more footage was needed, she refused to do it a second time and the director stood in for her. She also had to re-record the audio . She did it sitting in a car pretending to be in the bobsleigh as crew members shook her seat. Deception in a TV show, eh? Whoever heard of such a thing.’
P. 35.
Private Eye doesn’t have much time for books on the paranormal. They don’t review them, as a rule. Back in the ’90s they reviewed Brian Inglis’ excellent Natural and Supernatural, and were as unimpressed with that as they were about Fielding’s book. In the case of Inglis’ book, they explained their scepticism by saying that such books were theologically unnecessary. By which they presumably meant that they added nothing to genuine belief and understanding of the supernatural. I’m not sure this is the case. As for the question of whether you can really talk to the dead, there is plenty of evidence that some mediums have been able to in the form of information they gave during seances which they couldn’t possibly have gained through conventional means. This classic example of this is the cross-correspondences, a series of mediumistic messages from the 1920s from different communicating spirits, but which were all connected with each other. But there are also any number of fake mediums, many of whom were exposed by people like the escapologist Harry Houdini and the Society for Psychical Research. Back in the early part of this century, one American TV medium was the subject of Penn and Teller’s attack on the paranormal and pseudoscientific, Bullshit!, as well as lampooned in South Park. There was also a medium touring over here who was widely, and justifiably suspected of fraud, who was also subjected to a campaign against her.
The Mirror did a piece a year ago about Derek Acorah being caught faking his communication with the spirits on the show, and the German vlogger, TheSneezingMonkey, but up a video about it nearly two weeks or so ago. O’Keefe was suspicious that Derek was somehow getting hold of information on the local spooks collected by the researchers. So he, like the mischievous property owner in the first programme, started making ghosts up. Derek duly claimed to be in touch with them. These included, when Most Haunted visited the Tower of London, the infamous South African terrorist Kreed Kafer. Then there was the highwayman Rik Eedles and a story about Richard the Lionheart and a witch manifesting in the garderobe of a medieval castle. The two above names were anagrams. Kreed Kafer = Derek Faker, and Rik Eedles ‘Derek Lies’. And the story about Richard I and the witch was a play on The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. There were other hints too. During one episode, Acorah claimed to be in touch with the spirt of Dick Turpin’s love, Mary. He got possessed, and shouted ‘Mary loves Dick’, which seemed to amaze Fielding as a piece of double-entendre.
As for the supposed conspiracy to suppress knowledge of the paranormal realm, this doesn’t wash for a number of reasons. Firstly, most religions have a concept of the hereafter, including rewards and punishments for those who fail to believe or follow their doctrines and morality. It therefore makes no sense for religions to try to suppress knowledge of the supernatural. After all, Karl Marx famously said that ‘religion is the opium of the people’. She is, however, right in that there is legislation governing the presentation of spiritualism on television and radio. I believe this followed a conference on spiritualism by the Anglican church in 1936. By law, programmes on it can only be presented as an investigation, or entertainment. Back in the 1990s there were other programmes on the paranormal, such as BBC 2’s In Search of the Dead, that were presented as investigations and did include footage that spiritualist and psychical research groups claimed to show genuine supernatural phenomena. If Ofcom ruled that Most Haunted was entertainment, rather than an investigation, it was almost certainly because that’s how it struck the regulator, not because they were part of the global conspiracy to stop people realising the reality of the paranormal world.
Most Haunted stopped a long time ago, though it says something about the power of the programme and its popularity at its height that it’s still remembered after all these years. It almost seemed to go mainstream at one moment when it was spoofed on the BBC comedy show Dead Ringers. This had two of the impressions, one playing Fielding, the other, Jon Culshaw, being Acorah, entering a shed in a garden centre. They then surprised and bewildered the poor young woman serving them with ‘Derek’ informing her that there was a tortoise in there that hibernated. Hibernated! Culshaw/Acorah then pretended to be possessed and started singing ‘I don’t want to dance’ in Desmond Decker’s voice. The popularity of Most Haunted and similar shows led to the emergence of the spoof medium, Shirley Ghostman.
Since Most Haunted, ghost hunting shows have gained in popularity and now seem to be all over cable and satellite TV. I’ve heard they also seem to include the presenters getting possessed or attacked regularly. As do various ghost hunting groups, who put their exploits up on YouTube and social media. Most Haunted is gone, but its memory and popularity remain.
Here’s TheSneezingMonkey’s video on the exposure of Derek Acorah.
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