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I don’t believe in ghosts

30.Oct.09 | Posted in Features by Stephen Noble

A tour of the Castle Keep by Alone in the Dark Entertainment. All Photos by Stephen Noble

I don’t believe in ghosts. The annoying contradiction is I am very, very easily frightened, and old ghost stories run through my head as vividly and as violently as they did when they first petrified me, and as someone who can’t stand to watch any horror film it’s with unfamiliar and quivering feet I find myself on a ghost hunt.

Twilight is fading fast, and outside the Castle Keep the fifth scariest ghost hunt in the country starts, with ghost hunter Steve Taylor spinning tales of personal exploits and spiritual encounters.

We get to the meat of the story; a security guard with 14 loyal years at the Keep has been left beaten and broken by a monk’s residual ’energy presence’, as Steve puts it.

The actions and giddiness in Steve’s story telling brings the tale alive, and the feelings and emotion of ghost hunting actually have a physical effect; I’m rattled and feel both nauseous and nervous.

When we arrive at the eerie end, the climax isn’t quite delivered. Two men, dominated by an unhealthy Hell’s Angels love affair, rip through my comfort levels as they fire up the hogs - surely the largest to be found, with their amplified, shivering growl - directly behind me and my heart was now excessive in its drumming.

The heart twinges eventually end, and euphorically a nervous belly laugh rises outwards and the entertainment side begins. The adrenaline-shakes were complimented with intense, if fleeting, fear, and although the loyal security guard may have never returned, I still don’t believe in ghosts.

“It’s not for everybody,” Steve Taylor assured. He’s the man behind Alone in the Dark Entertainment, the business that evolved around spirits, witches and distress.

“ We’ve had people come in here and not even lasted a night never to come back because of sever nightmares and intense fear, so you have to have the right mindset to go out and do this.

You put yourself in locations where people have been murdered, you’re not out there looking for your great Aunt Marble who’s coming through to tell you about her kidney pain, these are the people you don’t want to find. ”

Steve stumbled into selling mystical products in 2001, no doubt gaining the eye for traditional craft and facts from his past. He said:

“ It really came to light while I was living in Essex with a partner who was a witch. She practiced witchcraft, not white or black; she was just a witch. While I was with her she introduced me to a lot of people and I noticed there was a market, along with a hobby, which I found interesting, and that was making witchcraft tools.

A wand with Scroll by S.Taylor and S Costello for company HandCraft:

So I started what I called my sticks and stones business, I would hunt through the forest for hazel wood and I would tie on pieces of crystal and quartz to make traditional wands which are used for opening and casting circles.

I went around a few shops and they were gob-smacked with them. What I learnt very early on is that attention to detail is key; it’s what you produce to people that keeps them interested. ”

The hobby proved lucrative, but Steve outgrew the idea. He took the cash and moved to Newquay to establish himself in a more youthful market, in an old coastal town unfortunate sailors’ deaths are soaked into the history, and ghost tales are galore.

“ I was working as a surf instructor. I was just chatting to a group of girls I was teaching and one asked if I knew any ghost stories. I told them all the local stories; about ancient smugglers and mystery lights and the girls asked if I would take them around to some of the locations I was talking about, I said no bother.

The only thing is they turned up with about 45 people. She said she would pay me £3.50 a head, so I carried the tours on through the whole summer and ended up earning a mint. ”

Above Steve Taylor hearing things going bump in the night:

Under the name of Alone in the Dark Entertainment Steve set up his ghost tour company, and, like every good story, the love of a girl, his fiancé Jill, saw him relocate to Gateshead where the lure of the old Castle Keep was too much of an opportunity to miss.

“ When I was up here I saw a gap, there’s this great big castle with no ghost tours. There were history tours, but they were focused on old people, there was nothing here for the young people that Newquay thrives on.

I moved the company up here three years ago. The first night was a Halloween opening and we had about sixty people turn up, which isn’t great, but bear in mind we had no help from the council, or from tourist information or anyone.

By November I was getting 20 to 30 people a day for the ghost tours. I did some advertising, and I used to work for an insurance company as a salesman, totally different world!

I used their methods of cold calling businesses explaining what we can offer, like workdays out, and built up a pub ghost tour for hen’s and stag’s parties.

The second Halloween we had over 900 people coming along on one ghost walk. This year we’ve done deals with the councils where we can have special effects characters with lights and smoke, similar to a London Dungeon experience. We’re using more modern technology with PA systems and special effects so people can sit back and just say ‘wow’.

Some people said it would never work, but three years later we fill almost every tour and the pub tour has a four month waiting list so we did really well out of our effort.

” The company is now split into two sections. The tours are the bread and butter of the income, getting people along and entertaining is in the company’s name, but where Steve’s expertise and beliefs come into fruition is through his role as Chief Paranormal Investigator for Ghost Hunters Team UK, a group with keen curiosity with differing levels of inclination to the specter world.

His second in command, Trevor, is a skeptic. Having a non-believer in a ghost hunting team is surely an oxymoron, and slightly counter productive?

“ It’s 100% important to acknowledge other viewpoints. To be honest with you, out of about 100 cases we investigate as a paranormal research team, 98 will be explained. It’s the other two that can’t be explained that keep you at it.

I make sure that not all our team are believers. There are teams out there that are complete skeptics, and some that are all believers, and that is the wrong thing to do - it’s something that no one can prove or disprove, just except that something unexplained happened and it is what it is. I’m open-minded. ”

Steve is a Pagan. Relaxed and comfortable in his beliefs and adamant that his thoughts are his alone, not to be pushed onto anyone else, whether through his paranormal investigations, or his Entertainment business.

“ My mum was very spiritual, a strong believer and traditionally Cornish if you like, she believed in ghosts and I was brought up around ghosts and superstition. The house I grew up in was extremely haunted, I saw a lot of stuff happening from a young age, and I mean really intense stuff.

Some things you can’t explain. This one time when we came downstairs in the morning we found giant foot prints up across the wall and along the roof, kind of like soot or coal, and my dad has size 11 feet and these were much bigger than it, there was no one in the house and it just became one of these mythical things. ”

As an industry, ghost hunting is thriving, reaching its peak after the turn of the millennium when new age religion saw rising interest, claims Steve. The after effect is a loud voice of critics and non-believers. The rise of mediums and spiritualists has brought popularity and exposure, along with ridicule and calls of con-artists. Steve now wants to flex his own philosophies into a unifying body that paranormal entertainers will have to answer to.

“ There’s no ruling over the paranormal industry, basically it’s a rogue pirate industry if you like. Because of that we’re setting up the BPE, which is the Board of Paranormal Entertainment. I’m the chair and what we’re trying to do is get archeologists and research teams, as well as haunted locations like the Castle Keep to come together.

The reason being is we have a lot of people out there being ripped off, we need to be governed and we need to have a set of basic standards. We don’t want people to say ‘yes, this place is definitely haunted’. We’d prefer I if you come out to say this building has unexplained activities that are worth investigating.

We want to make it where people can’t lie, or use fakery. That’s a place that has to be investigated; it’s something the BPE sees as very important. It protects the customers and the businesses, and gives them both equal rights.

What we’d like to see is if you use a medium, by law you have to say you’re in entertainment. You’re either entertainment or research, simple as. ”

The business is booming, Newcastle is a fairly uncompetitive market, especially for someone with so much passion and knowledge of history that Steve has. He even hopes to retire by 35, all from ghosts.

“ We take hardened skeptics that don’t believe in it and we put them in locations, and whether it be psychological or not, we’ve made people think, and we have a guest book full of people saying ‘I came along as a complete skeptic and I can’t believe what happened’.

These people are seeing these things, and it can be life changing for a lot of people, so it’s turning a business into a life changing experience. It’s very rewarding that side of it.

That’s pretty much what we are in effect, we’re modern day hippies in the forefront of business. ”