Posts by Hayley
The dog and the angry man
We were in the dimly lit function room of a village pub somewhere in the heart of Wiltshire trying to contact the ghost that had been seen walking through that area. It was raining outside, all of the customers had gone home a long time ago and we had come to the conclusion that the basement was the centre for the activity – I forget how we came to that conclusion but we had, and so naturally I was too scared to go in there.
We were sitting outside of the basement entrance around a table and there was an upturned glass in the middle of it with about ten people sitting around the edge. I can clearly remember that I was sitting between the landlord and one of my team mates and we had been ‘talking’ to numerous ‘ghosts’.
I was leading the communications and because of this I was talking directly to the ghosts that we thought we were communicating with, so the others at the table would mutter the questions they wanted me to ask when they thought of them and I would repeat them.
The glass has stopped moving and we had been sat in silence eagerly anticipating what was going to occur next when the medium who was sitting opposite me suggested I asked the spirit we were communicating with if it was a dog. I placed my finger back on the glass and went to ask the question and then realised what had been said. I paused and glanced to my left where the landlord was sitting and was glad to see that he also looked confused by the request.
“Ask… if it’s a dog?” I repeated, looking across the table at the medium and he nodded, “Why?” I questioned, genuinely confused.
“Just, I’m just getting a thought” he said shaking his head slightly and leaning across the table to place his finger on top of the glass with the rest of us.
I had been taught by experienced ghost hunters that when a medium told you that, you did what they suggested,
“Spirit, are you a dog?”
There was a pause and then the glass moved in a circle three times before coming to a stop.
Silence descended once more as we all took in the answer. I was skeptical and very much aware of how weird the situation had become because at that stage I was willing to believe that dead people were able to talk to me by pushing a glass around a table, but a dog? Yet, even though I doubted the situation I knew that some people around the table would probably accept that as possible and I didn’t want to laugh as one of them was driving me home that night and, well, that would have been awkward.
As my mind processed the fact that we were apparently communicating with a dog who had somehow developed the ability to push a glass around the middle of a table I became quickly aware of the fact that I was breaking tradition by not continuing on with the questions despite the fact that a spirit has just made contact.
“Thank you spirit”
The glass pushed to the left of the table, “uh… woof woof?”
I had panicked and I had woof-ed at the glass. I was filled with dread as I realised what I had done, but was saved by the landlord who started laughing in his seat next to me, laughter that thankfully spread around the rest of the table.
“I’m sorry, I just find it really hard to believe that a dog is pushing this glass” I said, embarrassed and relieved all at the same time. Suddenly the glass slid towards me with such a force that it almost fell off the edge of the table and into my lap.
“It’s the angry man again”
I looked up at the medium who was staring at me,
“He wants you to go into the basement.”
The angry man was the ghost we had been communicating with from early on in the evening, he had continually tried to push the glass into my lap and had hurt another team members hand by forcing the glass into it. The angry man was called ‘Joseph’ and was ’32′ according to the answers he had given us.
Naturally I was terrified at the idea that this spirit was back with us.
“It was him messing with us, saying he was a dog” the medium explained as the glass started to turn in anti-clockwise circles which, apparently, indicated something demonic.
Me entering the basement wasn’t even slightly possibly going to happen because it was scary and dark and spooky, so I bluffed my way out of it by asking the spirit for clarification.
“Spirit, you want somebody to go into the cellar with you?” the glass moved in a circular motion to indicate ‘yes’, and a nervous shuffle went around the table with numerous people looking at me uneasily.
“Spirit, can you clarify who you wanted to go into the cellar by pushing the glass towards them please?”
The glass started to come towards me and I panicked because I didn’t want to go into the cellar with a ghost and I didn’t want to look like a coward in front of the others, so I did what any sane person would do in that situation – I pushed the glass a bit more than I should have and it ended up in front of another team member called Dave. He ended up going into the cellar and not me.
*this is one of many recollection posts I will be making over the coming weeks, looking back at my early years as a ghost researchers, before I became skeptical and more rational*
When ignorance makes you look like a twat
I have often written about the awkward position I find myself in as a skeptical paranormal researcher who sits in between two groups of people with hugely opposing ways of thinking. Group one being skeptical people who require evidence before accepting something as possible, and group two being paranormal researchers who generally don’t.
My skepticism is often mistaken for non-belief or cynicism – which are both two completely unique things. Both a believer and a non-believer in something can be skeptical or cynical but people often can’t understand that my skeptical position isn’t a direct attack on their choice to believe a particular thing, and instantly form the conclusion that because I am a skeptic I in some way oppose them and everything they think and believe when that may not be true at all.
A rather unexpected accusation levelled in my direction on Facebook by Malcolm Robinson, a paranormal investigator and author who I’ve met on several occasions at paranormal conferences we were both part of, made me realise that such a view-point is stronger that I thought it was, and I am very disappointed by this.
Malcolm today posted a ‘note’ on Facebook about an email he received that suggested Asparagus could be a cure for cancer, the body of the text contained numerous testimonies about how Asparagus had helped people suffering from cancer and he claimed to post it ‘for debate’.
I cannot comment any more on the post as Malcolm has removed me from his Facebook friends, which is always a good way of encouraging debate…
I am somebody who requires proof past personal testimony before I accept something is viable. This is because testimonies can be misremembered, added to, made up or quote mined. When it comes to medicine I am hugely in favour of evidence based medication that has been through clinical trials and testing.
I pointed out to Malcolm that claiming to cure cancer without proper evidence is actually illegal, which it is under The Cancer Act 1939. I know this because I regularly make complaints to Trading Standards and the Advertising Standards Authority about misleading claims being made by alt-med practitioners. In the last week I have made TWO complaints about alt-med practitioners who claimed to be able to cure cancer which is awful.
I also mentioned that if Asparagus did cure cancer, doctors and professionals would be prescribing it to people suffering from cancer already. The response shocked me – I’ve included a screen cap below with it outlined in red.
The fact that I choose not to accept something at face value does not mean I have a closed mind or will not accept new information as and when it is presented. However, new information and claims needs to be able to stand up to scrutiny, and personal testimony alone does not provide enough evidence for reasons already pointed out above.
For me to choose not to believe a claim someone else has read in an email about something that might help those with cancer, doesn’t mean I would not recommend the treatment IF it was found to work after testing and trials, and to claim so is disgusting. This is life and death we are talking about here, not some pantomime setting where believers like Malcolm boo skeptics who say ghosts don’t exist (I’ve witnessed that by the way, the skeptic was Richard Wiseman, who wasn’t even present) and where it’s okay to say ‘If people choose to believe in ghosts then there’s no harm‘, because to claim something might cure cancer when there isn’t substantial evidence to prove so IS harmful. If it does work then yes, that’s cool, but if it doesn’t then people have been provided with false hope and could have concentrated their time and effort on something that provided results.
It’s not a risk that is worth taking at all. It provides people with false hope and can kill them. It’s that simple.
I’ve lost very close relatives to cancer and even years later the pain of their loss is still raw and to think that there are people who would have offered my relatives false hope angers me more than people probably think possible, especially as I know it does happen. That is why I am so vocal about evidence based medicine and tackling misleading claims – and to treat my skeptical mindset as close-minded and as a blanket dismissal is ignorant of what skepticism is.
Malcolm wasn’t claiming this WAS a cure, but he was suggesting it could be possible without providing further evidence. Wether he posted it for debate or not, it was misleading information and to delete me from his facebook friends meant that I couldn’t continue the debate he claimed he was so desperately seeking.
Shameful.
Oh, and just for you Malcolm are the damning links that will put your ‘debate’ to rest. Proof that Asparagus probably doesn’t cure cancer. I’m shocked that a researcher such as Malcolm didn’t even bother to check Snopes or UrbanLegends. Again, shameful…
Some fish are woo
Sometimes I feel guilty for sending complaints to Trading Standards or the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) regarding Alternative Medicine practitioners and I’m not really sure why. Part of my thinks it could be because when I once challenged a local homeopath about claims he was making in a local magazine he used his family as a way to try and stop me from proceeding with my complaint. It was something that made me feel like an awful person at the time and I think it is something that plays at the back of my mind when I’m submitting my complaints - “this person could have a family who depend on their trade” – but then I think of people who are seriously harmed, or even killed as a result of dodgy alt-med treatment and advice, and I submit my complaints regardless.
It’s a tricky thing to do, but deep down I know I am doing the right thing, even if numerous people think otherwise and see fit to be abusive in response.
I have been keeping a keen eye on print based adverts and online adverts of local (and not so local…) alt-med practitioners ever since I first saw an advert for local spiritual healer and psychic surgeon, Nina Knowland, in my local paper asking for parents of children with Cystic Fibrosis to come forwards for her help in healing their children. It was the first time I had ever taken a stand against an alt-med practitioner because of claims they were making.
Since then I have lodged dozens and dozens of complaints to the ASA and Trading Standards about all sorts of claims that are made – some with great success. So you can imagine just how excited I was when it was announced that a plugin had been created that would enable people to make such complaints in mere seconds.
It’s called ‘Fishbarrel‘ and it’s a Google Chrome Plugin created by Simon Perry from Leicester Skeptics in the Pub and the ‘Adventures in Nonsense‘ blog. He created the plugin last month but I have only just started to use it because I was a very loyal Firefox fan who was too stuck in her ways to even consider downloading a new browser.
However, my impatience with having to copy and paste stuff into the ASA online complaint system soon saw me wave goodbye to Firefox (and my plan to wait until Simon developed something similar for my beloved Firefox browser…) and download Google Chrome simply so that I could start logging complaints in minutes, rather than the hours it would take me before.
All in all, Fishbarrel is genius! GENIUS! I have nothing but praise for it. Anybody who keeps a keen eye open for misleading claims should have the Fishbarrel plugin.
I like to think that the slight pang of guilt I feel every time I submit a complaint is an indication that I am considering both sides of the debate and is proof that I am human after all. When it comes to healthcare we cannot afford to make mistakes – evidence based health care is hugely important for all of us and without it I would have died five years ago and a lot of people reading this wouldn’t even be alive.
People have the right to choose to use alternative treatments if they so wish, but they should be able to make that decision based on correct information and without being misled, and that simply isn’t the case with the majority of websites that I visit that offer these alternative treatments. That’s why it is important to be vigilant and to be vocal, and luckily for those of us who are willing to speak up and complain about misleading claims, doing so is now as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
Mediums aren't like plumbers
Recently on the Righteous Indignation Podcast we released an interview we conducted with Steven Upton who is a medium, as well as a Minister for the Spiritualist’s National Union and the SNU’s communications director. It was released in two parts and you can find part one here and part two here.
One question that was asked during the interview was whether it was possible to safeguard or regulate who is able to practice as a medium. Steven answered that is was very much a case of “buyer beware” when it came to employing the services of self-proclaimed mediums, but that bodies such as the SNU self-regulated the field as much as they were able to. He pointed out that the SNU has been training mediums for over 100 years, issuing certificates and diplomas to mediums since around 1916 . He said there are roughly 100 trained or SNU accredited mediums who often have letters after their name, such as CSNU or DSNU. If a member of the public is choosing a medium to have a reading from and they choose a medium who has a diploma or certificate from the SNU and they’re not happy with the reading or they think they’ve been misled, they can issue a complaint to the SNU. All mediums accredited by the SNU have to follow a code of practice and if a complaint is made about an accredited medium, they’d be investigated – awards can be removed, the medium may be unregistered or the SNU might reassess them if a complaint held up.
Steven likened this to buying a kettle with a kite mark, or choosing a plumber who was registered with a regulatory body – like CORGI or similar.
This is a point that I very much disagree with and although I voiced this disagreement in the interview it wasn’t really the place to elaborate as much as I would have liked.
I think that the attempt to regulate a field such as mediumship and to implement a code of conduct shows that people involved in said field recognise that there is a chance for abuse and they’re trying to control it, which is admirable. However, I do not believe that self-regulation can work for claims that have not been proven to exist under testing in scientific conditions. That is essentially what this boils down to – people regulating people who claim to have unproven abilities.
When you buy a service from a plumber you are paying them to do plumbing, so we asked Steven to define exactly what service it is a customer would be buying from a medium. His response was that the service a medium gives is providing the customer with proof of existence after life/death. I vocally doubted that many mediums would say this was the service they offered, or that people who go to mediums for readings would know that was what they were paying for.
I have seen mediums – who indeed call themselves mediums – claiming to see the future, or reading cards or stones or crystals. In fact, just this week I spoke to a medium who had a very different definition for what a mediums role is (which you can hear on a future episode of the Righteous Indignation podcast.) I do not believe that paying a medium for a service (i.e. to provide evidence of existence) is akin to paying a plumber for plumbing services simply because there is no clear-cut definition for what a medium is or does. If you asked a selection of people who might visit a medium for a reading or session what service they were paying the medium for , I am sure that there would be many different answers to your question which isn’t comparable with a service such as plumbing or carpentry. With this in mind, I think it’s pretty unlikely that a paying customer would always be aware that they were being misled or potentially tricked out of their money, thus they wouldn’t know they had a valid complaint.
This is why I do not believe that self-regulation is effective for practices such as mediumship.
Steven was quick to point out that the same could be said for plumbing – if a plumber hasn’t repaired a boiler correctly you might not be aware of the fault until it’s too late, and such a fault could kill you. However, such a fault is defined and can be proven by other experts or people. When it comes to mediumship the only experts we have are those who themselves claim to be mediums or believe in mediumship (an ability that is unproven, remember), which I don’t see as impartial regulation whatsoever.
Another point that Steven raised in the interview was that the term ‘psychic medium’ didn’t make sense as somebody was either psychic or a medium. Later, when I pointed out that there were mediums who made all sorts of claims, not just that they could provide evidence of existence, Steven pointed out that predicting the future, the reading of palms and similar was actually illegal under the ‘Vagrancy Act of 1824‘. This was true until 1989 when the law was repealed [read F2 of the act] under the ‘Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1989 (c. 43)‘. Until then it had stated that the act included:
“every person pretending or professing to tell fortunes, or using any subtle craft, means, or device, by palmistry or otherwise, to deceive and impose on any of his Majesty’s subjects”
I was rather surprised that somebody involved in a regulatory body dealing with similar trades would so confidently refer to out of date legislation that, quite frankly, deals with little more than superstitious nonsense.
Many will claim I’m being closed-minded, but I’m afraid I will only take self-regulation of mediumship as seriously as I take mediumship, which is not very seriously at all. By all means prove me wrong, and bring evidence to the table that proves such abilities exist, but until then trying to regulate people who claim to have these abilities is in my mind similar to pissing in the wind. Just a messy battle with hardly any good progress being made.
My first visit to a crop circle
“Crop circles are boring! Why not visit something like Avebury instead?” I grumbled into my microphone during the recording of another episode of the Righteous Indignation podcast. It was a few months ago now, but the words echoed through my head as I waded through chest-deep rape seed oil crop, trying to locate the centre of the crop circle that had been photographed in the field recently.
What made me decide to go and visit a crop circle? Well, I’ve been ill lately and my doctor told me that getting out and about would help me recover. When I read that a circle had been found in Avebury, Wiltshire (which isn’t that far from home) I decided it was the perfect time to get out as my doctor had instructed, while visiting a crop circle as many people had insisted I did for quite some time now. I was able to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Crop cricles have always been artistic creations that I have admired photographs of, but I’ve never really understood the obsession people have for visiting the sites these circles are made in.
It had been over an hour since we’d stopped in a small road-side parking bay and made our way into the field that we finally found the circle. It was the first crop circle I have ever stood in, and although I didn’t feel any energy or presence as many people who flock to these sorts of formations report, I did sense the wonder of the design. To know what the design looked like from above and to try and picture it as you stood inside it was an interesting experience.
I grew up in a farming village and because of this the impact of the ruining of crops does sit heavily at the back of mind because as children we would be told off for playing in crop fields before the farmer had collected his harvest. However, to see perfectly curved lines laying out in front of you in the crop, the stalks of which are all laying down upon one another in one direction, is quite a beautiful thing.
I should probably explain now that I do not believe these circles are created by aliens or anything paranormal in nature – I believe they are created by humans. In fact it was clear to see that a stomping board had been used as some of the stalks of crop were snapped at the bottom.
I recorded some audio that will be on a future episode of the Righteous Indignation Podcast, including an interview with a couple we met in the circle who believed the circle was created by aliens and Earth energies.
Even though I don’t agree with them, it was lovely to hear about why they had visited the circle, and what significance it had for them. As the man, Steve, commented, these circles give people something to visit, they’re interesting, and they bring people together – people who probably wouldn’t have spoken had it not been for the fact that they were all awkwardly standing in the middle of a field.
I am slowly becoming a crop circle fan. Oh dear.
To view my photos from the day click here to be taken to a facebook gallery.
I support…
