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They are used to things that go bump in the night, creaky floorboards and sudden chills in the air – but TV’s ghost-busting duo Yvette Fielding and Ciaran O’Keefe are well aware that most of the strange phenomena they experience have a logical explanation. Former Blue Peter presenter Yvette, who has visited many ghostly locations in Living TV’s Most Haunted series, is the more susceptible of the two, confessing she is easily spooked.
But Dr. Ciaran O’Keefe, a psychologist and member of several parapsychology societies, can usually find a logical reason for so-called paranormal activities. “I’ve never seen Ciaran get frightened or scream or anything like that,” says Yvette. “We make a good Laurel and Hardy of the paranormal world. I’m the goofy one and he’s the strait one.” Ciaran adds: “I’m the sceptic of the two of us and always give the voice of reason. I’m the one that tells Yvette to shut up all the time!”
Millions of viewers tune in regularly to watch Yvette and her team of ghost hunters spend the night in some of Britain’s most haunted locations. They are about to start filming the ninth series of Most Haunted, which has just celebrated its 100th episode on Living TV.
The show, made by Yvette’s husband Karl Beattie’s production company, Antix, quickly achieved cult status after being launched in 2002. Yvette has always been interested in the paranormal, but has also had some spooky experiences closer to home, she reveals. In fact, there have been some strange things happening in the home she bought with Karl a year ago, where they live with their two children, William, 12 and six-year-old Mary.
“We have a farm just outside of Sandbach, Cheshire. It’s 500 years old and there have been strange things going on there. Our children have seen shadows on the stairs, Karl has heard the patter of footsteps coming into the kitchen which he thought was our daughter but she was upstairs fast asleep.
“Both of us have been woken up by what we thought was our daughter Mary shoving flowers under our noses and we told her to go back to bed. When we came downstairs she’d been with Karl’s mum all morning and hadn’t left her side.
“We asked a medium to come to our house and he told us we had a classic case of The Others, you know the film, where there's a woman living upstairs with her two children from Victorian times and the girl is more likely to show herself than the little boy.
“Recently we’ve had clothes move around and a table has moved. We didn’t see it move, then one morning we came down and it had shifted to a different part of the room. It’s weird but we are not frightened at all. They don’t mean any harm to us, so it’s fine.
“The first people recorded living there were called William and Mary, in 1683, and our children are called William and Mary.”
Now Yvette and Ciaran have written a book, Ghost Hunters, in which they re-open the case files of some of the world’s most famous hauntings. They also explore five new cases in locations including a Cheshire family home, a deserted shipyard and an abandoned church which is now used as a nightclub.
The scariest new case for Yvette was that of Cammell Laird, a derelict shipyard in Birkenhead, Merseyside, where owners had reported sightings of the apparition of a man, movement of objects, unexplained noises and ghost lights.
“The place was huge and when the lights went off there was just me and Ciaran wandering around on our own in a big open space,” Yvette says.
“There have been a few times when I’ve felt in danger, like when things fly around and hit you. Another time I felt a breath on my year and heard a man laughing, and caught the laugh on my radio microphone, on a Most Haunted investigation in the Golden Fleece in York.
“I just screamed a lot and thought I’d gone completely barmy.”
Another amazing episode was on Halloween two years ago on a live show in Clitheroe when Yvette witnessed every member of the crew collapse and faint.
“They all went down one after the other – and there was no explanation.
Despite this, she says she’s not easily spooked and has remained open-minded about ghosts.
“I’ve got a lot braver working with Ciaran because he has put me right on a few things, like looking for logical explanations. If there’s a cold draught, for instance, it’s not automatically a ghost. There could be a draught from under the floorboards.”
Ciaran adds that in 95% of cases of reported paranormal activity, there is a logical explanation.
“I believe that people genuinely see ghost and have haunting experience. I think I still have to explain all of the experiences. You can explain a lot of them because of various environmental various such as EMF (electro-magnetic field), drop in humidity, air pressure and temperature. Those sort of things can start people thinking they’ve had a genuine haunting experience.
“It’s also simply psychology, the power of suggestion, or group conformity, in a haunted location for example, when someone says they can feel something cold and you want to be part of the experience.
“There are a lot of experiences that we have explanations for but I still think it’s tentative. Even scientific theories and psychology are still theories to an extent. But I’ve never seen a ghost – I’m still hoping to. I wouldn’t run away, I’d have a battery of questions.
“But there are a few things I don’t’ have an explanation for, such as a spooky laugh in the Golden Fleece pub in York.
“In the book we did an investigation of a nightclub. We did a séance and as people were reporting what they were feeling, we had a thermal imager focused on the table, it was like a scene from the movie The Fog.
“We were getting green, which signified a drop in temperature which encroached on the table and the people sitting around it who were sensing something.
“As they then started to say that nothing seemed to be happening now, the green just faded away. I’m not getting Casper going across the screen but I’m getting an experience that at this point in time I can’t explain.”
Some people can live alongside ghosts quite happily, Yvette has discovered.
“Our sound recordist on Most Haunted has seen this man in his house and his garden, but daren’t tell his wife because she’d freak out. But he’s not bothered.”
Ciaran lives in France with his wife in a location devoid of spooks. Indeed, nothing scares him, he says.
“I’ve devoted my life to researching the subject and if a ghost came up to me I wouldn’t run away.” |
