I am the worst skeptic in the world...

You might well have missed me last week, and I sort of missed me too - I was struck down with a terrible virus and have only just surfaced. As ever, these things only hit when the kids are on holiday, but there we go - maybe I am just allergic to them?

As we approach all things spooky and halloween, I am always reminded of another dichotomy perhaps not unique to myself, but one which is a central part of my creative and personal life - I 100% do not believe in the supernatural, the occult and the spiritual, and yet I am completely fixated on all three things.

It does sometimes surprise me as to how many people believe in the SN, when, for example, they seem quite unable to believe that things like smoking will do them harm, for which there is ample proof. (Supernatural, it’s a long word and, in my book, covers everything from things that go bump in the night, to major world religions.) One of my pastimes, along with arguing with MOTI, is watching TV show which give people space to relay SN events which they have experienced, and shouting at the screen as to why they are wrong.

I have only come across one story which I was hands down prepared to believe, and if you want to know what it is, you need to listen to the ‘Uncanny’ podcast presented by Danny Robbins, namely episode four and five of the last series, set in America. It is about an encounter between four Native American hunters on a fishing trip, and a family of Sasquatch, enormous hominids who seem to lurk at the wild edges of all human society. I am not sure if a lingering guilt around colonialism coloured my processing (who am I to doubt the word of a native American?) but after listening to their story I would hand on heart swear until I die that there are Sasquatch in Alaska, and move them smartly from the realm of SN, to that of, well, natural.

Maybe it is their all too fleshy and earthbound nature which really convinces - these are very much creatures of flesh and blood, without any ability beyond that of any other animal of size and cunning. Far less convincing, was the show about the Edinburgh Executioner, which you can see on BBC iplayer, and which made the news in the late 90’s and obsessed many journalists and tour guides. Apparently a poltergeist who haunts the tomb of a particularly unpleasant judge in the 1600’s, who spent his time sentencing men, women and children to death, has taken a dislike to the tours being marched past his door, and likes to hit out at passers by. Hundreds of people report receiving mysterious injuries during their visits, sending in photographs of said scratches and bruises which do indeed look nasty, or passing out at crucial moments of the tour. One man investigating the case had his flat burnt down, without the fire touching his neighbour’s, and a spiritualist priest brought in to try a tentative exorcism, died a day later. 

How, you might say, can I argue with the wound evidence, which does indeed look nasty? Ahh, well, it might all have been discovered after the visit to the graveyard, but there isn’t any evidence that they were caused at the graveyard, unless they had bothered to strip naked and take photos just before going in. Personally, I have the kind of skin which will bruise one day and not bother to show anything until a week laters, but will respond to a brief scratch as if I have been clawed by Freddie Kruger. I once developed a rash which started innocuously enough after a night out, and three days later was a raging mass of scabs which engulfed half my torso and rendered me incapacitated and in burning agony - only to slowly ebb away a week later. Had this happened after I had visited a haunted tomb, imagine the connections I might, in my pain and confusion, have made, but it did not.

My point here really is that correlation is not causation - we are told that the ghost of the evil judge causes injury, then we discover injuries after we have been there. We are though now primed to look for injury, because we are creatures of community and we like to belong - so we are hyper aware that ANYTHING which we might discover MUST have been caused by the ghost. On holiday, probably, certainly on a night out, we over interpret what happens to us, we are told there is a terrible sense of evil, so we feel a terrible sense of evil; we see others around us full of apprehension, so we feel apprehensive. As ever, it pays us to react to a communal reaction - if one of the herd gives a warning cry, only a fool would ignore it, so if those around us are feeling scared, so will we. After all, no one gets upset when nothing happens, we don’t remember the times we walked along and didn’t feel a thing, all of that is absorbed into the background noise of life. Feeling scared and apprehensive is nasty, and it behoves us to remember where it was and be alert because, well, better safe than sorry. Places become a nexus for dread and that dread is passed on. The Judge at the heart of the mystery was sadist and an oppressor, an Englishman in Scotland a few years after the act of union, when rebellion was rife and he was rightly hated. He did terrible things and, most unfairly, got away with them and died of old age, and so people have been speaking ill of him for generations. It’s called generational trauma, and it colours most people all of the time, and erupts in contemporary disease and disorder all the time. It is proven that, should a pregnant woman experience extreme events such as war, their children will suffer as adults with more ‘life style’ disease, such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. They can suffer from immune disorders, and even unexplained rashes, lesions and healing issues - so is it really SA that if you take a lot of people to a site connected with their generational trauma, that they manifest that trauma in response? 

           I muse about all this, as much of my work draws on myth, legend and mystery - I am not alone in this of course, because so many artists and indeed, people do - but I don’t think that this is because I am secretly in tune with a SN, but rather that, to put in simplistic terms, when we don’t want to look at the big scary things about being human, we make the big scary things be not human.

I would also put my hands up and admit that I am the worst skeptic you will ever find. I can dismantle every ghost story you bring me with a dose of science and reason, but leave me alone in a graveyard after dark, or walking past one on a twilight evening, or, as once happened, having to walk down a country lane at night when my phone went weird and would not make calls, and was a £30 a month torch, and my brain will paint all of the darkness with ghosts, spirits, ghouls and headless horse-people. I will be reduced in minutes to singing hymns to the God I don’t believe in, in some vain attempt to convince the dark Lord who I will be convinced is an inch behind me, that I am not worth his trouble. Show me an occult symbol under the wall paper, a poppet stuck with pins on the doorstep or a late night TV show about ghosts, and I will be reaching for my stash of garlic/sage/holy water and rock salt before you can say nine lives, I can assure you. This is because I am cursed with the greatest burden of any human, and that is not the lingering hex of a damned soul, but a ridiculously vivd imagination which, when full aroused, will paint my vision with all manner of hell so vivid I’d swear I was seeing it for real, until someone turns on a light. I am, in short, a complete scaredy-cat, who is forced into being a skeptic simply because if I really believed, I would never leave the house or turn out the lights.

My skepticism has only really been tested the once, as the Royal Theatre of Bath funnily enough, when I tool my eldest to see a production of ‘Into the Woods.’ It was good fun, as far as it went, only I kept feeling this weird fluttering about my bare shins, which distracted me from the good bits. It was only afterwards when I googled ‘Ghosts in the Royal Theatre of Bath’, that I read about the haunted butterflies of the theatre, I shit you not, which flutter across the skin of sensitive audience members. If you’re going to have your worldview challenged, I’ll take butterflies over judicial psychopaths any day!

I am currently working on bringing you and the world my art as high quality framed prints, though the ecommerce site ‘Nu Monday’, which you can see here -

Do take a look, and I’ll be launching officially in November and you might even get a bit of a Christmas treat as part of my News-Letter!