Wellington-based paranormal investigators Strange Occurrence started off as an idea for an art project, which was meant to be “a bit of a joke” until they started getting actual enquiries. With all the members having a lifelong interest in the paranormal, they realised that they would need to get themselves together and figure out how they were going to do it. By 2007 Strange Occurrences was up and running. Since then it’s been all go, with the group conducting investigations in the Wellington Town Hall and private art school Inverlochey House as well as numerous other locations. Josh Hercus interviews one of the founding members, James Gilberd, to explore the world of paranormal investigating.
So what’s it like conducting a paranormal investigation? What sort of equipment do you use?
Well, none of the equipment you use is specifically designed for paranormal investigation. It’s all come from somewhere else. There are no such things as “ghost metres” and things like that. You use what you think will be useful and what you can get your hands on. But, really, you know, when people run around with all this equipment, they think they’re being scientific. Well it’s bollocks. It’s not about the equipment, it’s about how you apply it. It’s about scientific method. And most paranormal investigation groups haven’t got the slightest idea what scientific method is – they might say they use it, but they don’t actually understand it.
It’s really about people in situations and psychology and, you know, you can check for, I dunno, short circuits in their power by detecting magnetic fields and things like that. But any equipment you use is really about trying to establish what is going on in a natural sense, like, what is actually happening naturally – not paranormally.
I don’t really think you can detect ghost with equipment. You can’t photograph ghosts. Every photograph of ghosts I’ve ever seen has been either a fake, or there is no ghost there. People sorta think there is but there is just some kind of photographic effect.
Okay, so on that note, how do you tell the difference between what’s natural and what’s supernatural?
Well, that’s where it gets really hard. And I’ll tell you, you can never be absolutely sure.
If it’s a voice on an EVP – electronic voice phenomenon tape – you’re never really certain if the voice is originating from, say, a rather loud TV in the neighbours’ house or whether it’s coming from somewhere else which we can’t explain. You cannot be absolute certain about things. And anybody who says they are certain, we immediately doubt them. I mean, people say “that is definitely a spiritual manifestation” – no, you can’t say that. We would dispute with anybody who says “that is definitely spiritual” or “that is definitely paranormal” or “that is definitely not paranormal”. You cannot be absolutely sure.
What’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever found?
To be honest, since we’ve been doing paranormal investigations, sometimes we take guests with us. Sometimes they think like things are going to start flying round the room and stuff like that, like in the movies. Well, if that happened, we’d be world famous. That stuff doesn’t really happen. It’s a fantasy. Usually when it does, it’s a product of the imagination. You know, something falls off a shelf and people think we’ve got a poltergeist, just because we’re there. Nothing very scary has ever happened in one of our investigations. I mean, personally I’ve had a few somewhat scary experiences before we started doing the paranormal stuff, none of which I’d definitely say would be paranormal. So, that’s kinda what led into it. But we haven’t had anything. We haven’t had a definite ghost appearance. We haven’t had any object levitating or moving, or anything of that nature that you might see in a movie. Nothing like that has happened and we don’t really expect that it will. Most of the stuff that’s happened has been quite subtle and somewhat indefinite. It may or may not be paranormal.
Do you have any advice for someone who wants to get into paranormal investigation?
Yeah, read a lot. Don’t take too much notice of the TV shows. I mean, they’re entertainment, right? And they don’t give you the full story. Read a lot of books. There are a lot of books out there. And there’s a whole history of paranormal investigation going back to the 1880s when the first paranormal investigations societies were formed.
You don’t need to run out and buy a whole lot of equipment, that’s what most people do. But it’s not about the equipment, it’s about getting informed.
And be sceptical. Like, when I say sceptical, I don’t mean immediately disbelieving, I mean use critical thinking. Don’t just believe what you read and what you’re told because most paranormal investigators are not critical thinkers.
I want to see the evidence and you really have to apply that kind of thinking - show me the evidence. Where is that evidence pointing? And don’t assume a paranormal cause when it’s most likely a natural cause.
Have you found much evidence in favour of the paranormal?
It’s sort of cumulative. You know, if you get one thing, as I said, you can’t be certain. It’s a matter of building small pieces of evidence and putting them together and seeing if they lead you anywhere. We’ve been studying Inverlochy House, which is run as a private art school. We’ve been investigating it for, I think, three years and we’ve done a statistical experiment. We’ve only run twenty people through that experiment at the moment, so it’s very much a work in progress. But we’re publishing the results of that initial experimentation in our book. It’s not statistically significant but stuff is starting to point in the direction of there being some paranormal activity there. But I wouldn’t say for definite.
It’s like court evidence. I mean no one thing is going to hang somebody. It’s an accumulation of small pieces of evidence that point to a situation.
What do you say to the sceptics out there who just don’t believe in this at all, they just think this is absolutely mumbo jumbo?
I’m a member of New Zealand Sceptics myself. A real sceptic is a person who wants to see the evidence before they take something as truth.
The whole thing that we’re all about is actually being agnostic. We don’t know. We don’t know if there are ghosts. We don’t know how ghosts appear or how people experience them. We’re trying to find out, we’re interested. But people often say “oh, well you must believe in ghost then if you’re a paranormal investigator”.
We’re trying to find evidence and if the evidence is saying there are no ghosts, then that’s what we think. If it’s saying that they are, then we’re thinking in that direction. We’re coming straight down the middle, we’re not coming from a fixed position or a polarised position. Whereas most paranormal groups are entrenched in belief. They really believe in ghosts and they’re going to prove it. That is totally not the position of Strange Occurrences and I think we’re one of the few groups that thinks like that, actually.
Ghostbusters
