Things That Go Krump in the Night

18Nov11

“Spit out the bricks Robinson. What’s this scoop you’ve been concealing?” I hear you wail in unison.

“Wail in unison?” you add after reading the end of the previous sentence. “Your fondness for exaggerated melodrama is both boorish and unnecessary. We merely exclaimed, or at a stretch, cried out in unison. Still, we are highly intrigued and puzzled by your grandiloquent choice of words and wish you would continue, post-haste.”

As you wish. Yes, I used the word ‘wail’, and I used it on purpose. For upon completion of this sentence you may wish to accompany that wail with a shriek or a girlish yelp, because the rumours you have heard are true: spiritualism is back in vogue, with the supernatural and paranormal grabbing ghastly tabloid headlines for the first time since a gaunt Brian Harvey was dragged from his reversing Mercedes by a poltergeist.¹

Banshees, zorse, and other things that go bump in the night have intermittently slithered their way into the glare of the media spotlight over the years, stimulating water cooler conversation and freaking out British white van men and builders from Land’s End to somewhere near John o’Groats.²

Sheepish builders were particularly perturbed by the infamous incident of the flying brick of Borley Rectory (pictured below), deemed by many as ‘the most haunted house in Britain’. Brickies across the nation collectively threw their Daily Stars onto their dashboards, shuddered and nervously discussed how this would make working conditions “nightmarishly hellish/fucking untenable”. On the other hand, I thought it would eradicate the need for wheelbarrows and clunky pulley systems. Different strokes.

"The construction industry in Dublin is dead, lads. I'm off to Galway to become a rustic paperweight."

Aside from the aforementioned amazing levitating brick and Brian Harvey’s abusive poltergeist, the most prominent examples of otherworldly phenomenon infiltrating the mainstream media have been:

• Death-defying escapologist (and not-death-defying human punch-bag) Harry Houdini calling shenanigans on Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife’s spiritualism routine, purportedly referring to her as “a preposterous floozy” in the process.
• In the eighties, sceptic James Randi grew a beard and decided to banish a couple of charlatans, namely Uri Geller and Peter Popoff. The former tortured spoons for a living, while the latter tortured terminally ill people, using his supposedly divine powers to not only not cure them, but to fleece them financially as well. Geller’s career nosedived until he was forced to become friends with Michael Jackson, and despite going bankrupt in 1987 following Randi’s meddlesome meddling, Popoff has since regained prominence, using gullible, ill, lonely people (and McDonalds salt) to rake in over $23 million in 2005.
• Most recently, bespectacled clairvoyant Sally Morgan put her foot in a massive pile of spectral faeces by getting caught using a Bluetooth headset to banter with two Irish lads during a show in Dublin in September. She claims it was all innocent craic – general chat about Michael D., Martin McGuinness, her after party down Copper Face Jacks – but those pesky sceptics are having none of it. They seem to think she was being fed information about her audience through the Bluetooth headset, and not actually having a genuine conversation with the two blokes! The cheek! Despite Sally issuing a heartfelt statement denying any fakery or funny business, this wasn’t good enough for the sceptics: they invited her to prove her psychic abilities at a special Halloween challenge, but unfortunately Sally declined. (She was busy bobbing for apples.)

Due to this revival of interest in the ghoulish and spiritual, it surprises me that neither James Randi nor Derren Brown – nor any other chancing would-be debunker with two inquisitive fingers on the faint, fading pulse of commercial pop culture – have picked up on some recent high profile spooky chat. And it’s not subliminal either: this spooky chat has permeated the British airwaves, even scaling to the lofty heights of number 15 in the UK singles chart earlier this year.

These ambiguous lyrics have been absentmindedly mouthed by distracted housewives as they predatorily browse the reduced section at Tesco. The lyrics have been heard on street corners, spewing forth from tinny Blackberry handsets that are grasped tightly by young males in hooded garments who send racist tweets to non-league football players. Lying alone in a tent tonight, the sound of police brutality invading the left ear, and the bubbling grunt of a slumped heroin junkie coming from the right, a desolate Occupy protestor unsheathes her iPod nano, winds its dial to the letter ‘R’, pops both earphones in at once, presses play and exhales softly before laying back, gently returning to the foetal position. It’ll be a long, cold night, but these lyrics will help her see it through.

They ring of positivity; they chime with jubilation. Or do they? Cliffhanger ending: part two tomorrow.

¹ _{This meddling poltergeist has never been tracked down, thus never tried in a court of law for almost ending the life of a nineties baggy pop icon. Metropolitan Police Service AND Crimewatch, hang your collective heads in shame.}

² _{You think people in John o’Groats know what a tabloid paper is? Remove Rupert Murdoch’s moist tongue from your ear and open your eyes, sheeple. 17% of people in the UK think the word ‘coalition’ is something to do with “the on-going miners’ strike”. Coal not dole. Mangles not Wranglers etc.}

Advertisement

Filed under: 2011, Ambiguous lyrics!, Arthur Conan Doyle, Brian Harvey, Harry Houdini, James Randi, Occupy, Paranormal, Peter Popoff, Sally Morgan, Spooky, Uri Geller   |  Leave a Comment