Skepticblog

Finally after over twenty years of admiring and wondering about his work, I had the privilege to meet world renowned photographer and ghost hunter, Simon Marsden. It was a watershed moment for me, as I had conjectured about what his position on the believer spectrum would be for years.  Knowing about the world of woo that circulates around anything that looks even slightly ghostly, I had expected to hear long-winded tales of confrontations with ghosts and all manner of newageness that I felt would be put up onstage during his talk, even if he didn’t actually believe in the existence of spirits.  We all know (at least in America) that’s how to sell books. And Simon has sold a ton of them. A casual look at his archive www.marsdenarchive.com reveals a world few people can compete with for dark shivery images. His work has a haunted quality that’s impossible to deny. But what does he really think about ghosts? 

My first exposure to Simon’s work was through an article in “All Hallows,” the now lamented official organ of Barbara and Christopher Roden’s Ghost Story Society. I quickly rounded up the necessary funds to be able to buy a copy of one of his first collections, “Visions of Poe.” I was transfixed. Here was a collection of cobwebbed gargoyles and creaky old houses like I had never seen anywhere except in my darkest dreams. I immediately wondered the obvious: was this man a believer or a skeptic …or what? In the last ten or so years since his Internet website made it possible to acquire his books on line, I have studiously collected everything I could get my hands on and kept up with first editions as they were released. Over the years we corresponded about various ethereal subjects, but I still never got a clue where he really stood on all this spook stuff. When I watched his incredibly beautiful DVD “The Twilight Hour – Visions of Ireland’s Haunted Past,” * I thought for sure he was hopelessly lost in a world of woo. Just the same, I also knew how media and agents know how to sell a product. The words “skeptic” and “ghost hunter” don’t sit well together in the public eye. So when Simon emailed to let me know he was coming to L.A., I jumped at the chance to hear him speak in person. Would he be a dyed-in-the-wool shut-eye believer? I couldn’t wait to find out. So Susan Gerbic-Forsyth and I traveled out to Burbank, California to find out for ourselves just where the self-described “Ghost Hunter” stood on the subject of ghosts and hauntings.

The foyer of the Burbank Public Library was packed with an odd assortment of people who ran the gamut from bored looking housewives and backpackers to professorial types and the obligatory Goth couples in funereal black. I was a bit surprised that there weren’t more of the punk-vampire persuasion, knowing Simon’s tracts on Dracula’s Castle and the profusion of crypts and graveyards that rise out of the mists in his books. One cherubic woman who stood in the center of the throng awaiting entrance was heard to loudly proclaim to everyone within earshot about the tremendous size of the “orbs” she had recently seen hovering on her front porch. This was delivered as she feverishly clutched a dogeared copy of some “Ghost Homes of Los Angeles” paperback. I could see Susan’s barely restrained skeptical mouth ready to go into full Guerrilla mode, but she managed to keep a lid on her emotions long enough to get into the lecture hall and sit down without exploding.

Simon talked of his childhood and his father who brought his children up on ghost stories and who inherited a huge family home filled with his own father’s collection of occult books. Clearly, Simon was a child steeped in the darkest of woo.  Of course, he was told that the house he lived in was haunted and that the room he slept in was particularly possessed by a ghost with a well-known family heritage. His father was himself a photographer who encouraged him to take up photography at an early age.  These two influences were bound to collide and after working as a developer in several London darkrooms over a period of years in the early 60’s, he struck out on his own and began a series of photographic adventures which have taken him to “over 5, 000 haunted places.”  Hmmmm. We wondered when the other shoe would fall.

Happily throughout his lecture, Simon peppered his monologue with dry British humor which was well received by the group. He skillfully set the tone of a tongue-in-cheek adventurer who hadn’t made up his mind one way or the other on the reality of ghosts. This was a wise move on Simon’s part. He knows where his bread is buttered and didn’t rock the boat of the believers by taking any negative stand right away. His lecture style was a balanced look at the art of photography, not spiritualism or woo. He scrupulously avoided making references to personal beliefs, preferring to stick to references of established cultural folklore or local superstitions he has encountered while briskly clicking through a collection of his favorite images. He used the adverb “unnerving” several times. In his deep London bass voice, this word had the effect of either underscoring the severity of his experiences to the believer, or for those not so inclined; adding to the humorous timbre of the whole presentation. Unnerving has now become a word of choice in my vocabulary. One can apply it to ghosts, traffic jams or almost anything and it sounds great. I remember relaxing in my chair at one point when I finally realized that I was listening to a man of science and not another loony, albeit a man of great artistic temperment and a romantic of the deepest speculative muse.

Things were made abundantly clear to all when he told the group that, “In over 5,000 photo sessions all over the world from France to Russia and the US, there were perhaps five places that I seriously thought I would never want to return to, and only one time did I ever think I might have seen or experienced something I couldn’t put my finger on.”  He then related one story of how he had spent several hours in a dank castle ruin setting up a shot and trying to get the lighting just right, when he turned around and thought he saw an image standing in the back of the room watching him. He didn’t say it was a ghost, just something out of the corner of his eye that disappeared.

We have all had that kind of experience. After pouring over Simon’s books for many years, I can easily understand how there would be many unpleasant places that were extremely cold, dark, damp and dirty that I would not want to ever return to. His voyage to Vlad Dracul’s (the tyrant Dracula was based on)  grave site on a remote island in Romania where he was caught in a torrential thunderstorm and nearly drowned with only an old woman at the oars of a small fishing boat bears testimony to what real fears and dangers he has braved to bring back his striking emotional images. It’s not really his fault if  book publishers and agents whose job it is to hype sales with popular pseudo-scientific bias choose to pump-up his work into the stuff of modern myth and legend. In the realm of contemporary photography, Simon Marsden is the go-to man if you are looking for the finest in high- end atmospheric spookiness. He’s the king of the darkest mountain around and all this magically happens despite the fact that there’s no tricky Photoshop hooey or phony double exposures added in for effect. His work stands on its own and invites the viewer to step across the threshold into a world where things look surreal and unearthly, but are only haunted if you want them to be. There’s not a ghost or a sheet-wrapped spook on view in any of his catalogue. He doesn’t have to go that route.    

Simon swiftly tackled the media’s blitz of paranormal dreck in one foul swoop when he told the audience, “…I have sought out ghosts and hauntings for over thirty years and haven’t yet captured a single image of one. This really bothers me, because I can’t understand how every paranormal ghost hunter or psychic seems to be able to find one on every reality show, week after week.”  Well put Simon!

I’m happy to report that I came away with even more respect for a man who has obviously spent his life enjoying the thrills of actually investigating close-up the places most of us can only dream about seeing and must remain content to visit vicariously through his images. With Simon’s work it’s like reading a good ghost story: We don’t have to stand out in the rain waiting for the right light for hours or descend a rotting stairway to glimpse an open grave. We can open the book, have a look and close it back up again when we have had enough. It’s a comfortable terror and global storytelling at its best. Now when I sit back in front of a roaring fire and dip into his dark delicacies, I can rest safe in the knowledge that Simon Marsden has kept his feet firmly planted on scientific ground, where his manipulation of infrared film, clever darkroom techniques and a keen eye for the bizarre had little to do with believing in any reality of what he might tempt us to imagine in his work. When it came time for questions from the group. There was a profound silence. I think the believers who came to have their beliefs validated by another newage charlatan might have been stunned into reality. Nice.