The post in which I mentally wander, some, over the concept of "[obviously not] true ghost footage"

BLOT: (15 Jan 2014 - 09:07:31 PM)

The post in which I mentally wander, some, over the concept of "[obviously not] true ghost footage"

As happens to me about once a season, someone I follow online linked to a Cracked.com article. And, as is the usual result of such, I followed the suggested links to other articles. Somewhere along the way, I got to The 6 Most Eerily Convincing Ghost Videos on YouTube. Except very few of them are proper eerie, and maybe only two or so are convincing-if-you-are-in-the-mood-to-be-convinced. A couple are outright silly. Feel free to watch and judge for yourselves [I recommend the first [aka "levitating girl"] and the last [aka "demon hands"], though the headless one was kind of cool]. Still, got me to thinking.

I come from a haunted place. Just about every old house and cemetery within miles of my parents' house has some attached ghost story or legend to it. In fact, there is one not far from there that has a fairly sizable haunted-mystique following. I've written before about the joy of visiting some spooky places, and what fits as kind of weird occurrences in them. As one tells these stories, they grow and bubble and brew. That is the joy and the horror of telling them, sharing them, and having them retold. Engaging the weird.

Once visited a couple of houses near Livingston, AL that were meant to be haunted. House A was bigger, older, and had a long history of ghosts that showed up as orbs on photographs. The woman who lived there would even say how the different orbs were old family members, or were this or that person who used to live there. Except anyone who knows how flash photography works know that orbs tend to be dust particles getting hit in the flash and diffusing the light and the 2D nature of the photo makes it hard to place them. Then, House B was smaller and ramshackle, and the woman who lived there told us about how all these Civil War ghosts would come up knocking on her front door, and then would hang out all night in this sort of ghostly party on her porch. House A had "proof", but was boring. House B had madness, but was fascinatingly sad. Engagement in the weird is a varied beast.

From time to time, I like to sit down and search for keywords like "real ghosts" and "ghosts caught on tape". Not that I believe in ghosts. I cannot actually remember a time in my life where I ever believed in ghosts, not the popular take on the theme, not even when I did believe fully in concepts like the human soul and the afterlife. I might be able, even as an older skeptic, to accept some sort of impression, or a weakening of of the veil, but not the whole shebang of wronged or wrong people clinging to the earthly plane. That's neither here nor there, really. I don't believe in Cthulhu [Nyarlathotep is totally real], but I still like to read about Him/It. Belief and enjoyment are separate in my eyes, and so even not believing in ghosts I like to engage in the legends and, in the case of cheap YouTube videos, the attempts-at-legends.

Trickery abounds, sure. I don't think either of those women a couple of paragraphs back were lying, though I assume both were stretching what they really believed for the act of telling. When a video goes out, though, and has a fallen angel in the woods, someone is going out of their way to stage such a thing. How do we take these videos? Do we give them the same benefit of the doubt we give two middle-aged women living in the respective houses out in the woods? Do we assume vile attempts at manipulation? Do we assume they are actually mocking those who believe? Are they simply lying as a way of establishing what they think is already the truth [no doubt some are by people who believe in angels and ghosts and so forth and consider it good work to trick others into believing]? Is it mean-spirited [no pun intended?] or light-hearted? Did those little girls fake fairies to make dupes of people or to have a little fun? Is it a mixture of all of this?

I've been writing up a weekly thing about horror shorts [the most recent one being about the adapted-from-Ligotti "The Frolic"]. I wonder how much these ghostly videos are tapping into a similar approach? An attempt to bottle fear and to play with the dark in a way that is cheap, easy, and, perhaps most important, prone to having an audience. The best ones are clever, even subtle. The worst are garish and full of themselves. All click, just a little, with the reptile part of our brain and remind us of deep cracks in the old soil and long winter nights when the stars are crisp and terrifying. That's kind of fun. But how would one catalog such a phenomenon? In many cases, known hoax videos, like some of the bigfoot ones, can take years to be confessed-as-fakes. Up until then, they are inkblot tests to show off watchers' worldviews. Documentaries, fictions, maybe-trues? How you frame them will say as much about you as them, most likely [bad CG or hoaky set-ups, aside].

I think my favorite part is how these things are often released into the wild, generate hundreds or thousands or millions of views, get talked about and shared and scare some people while only making others laugh, and part of their charm in many of these cases is how they work because the creator is separated from them. If a bigshot YouTuber was to add a video to his/her channel, it would possibly be seen more but have less of an impact. However, you take a group of "nobodies" from Iraq or whatever, and have them post a video and then suddenly it feels just a little bit more like an assumed truth. Pisses the librarian part of me right off, though. Damned lack of provenance.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: January 2014