Open Writing

"Whatever she says you have to look as if you believe it otherwise she won't talk," I told my friend as we crossed town to meet an interviewee.

"Even if she exaggerates I don't mind, I just need a good ghost story for my article," I continued. "As long as she's happy to give me her name and swears it's the truth then it's all right."

We arrived at the establishment and the person I wanted to speak to wasn't there. No one else knew that I was coming or what to say to me.

"Don't worry, that happens all the time," I told my friend as we left. "When you're a journalist no one is obliged to speak to you and you get let down all the time. It's just par for the course."

I was looking for haunted buildings for an article an editor had asked me to write. He regards ghosts as a bit of a joke and found it astonishing that I was taking it so seriously.

I prefer to keep an open mind. I lived in Korea for two years, where people leave food out for ghosts on national holidays. So I can't mock it.

I had spent three days asking around for information and was surprised to find that so many Londoners seem to take ghosts for granted. Either that or the English are exceptionally polite and no one wanted to laugh in my face.

I heard stories of cold unseen hands touching shoulders and other strange things told as naturally as if they were accounts of a horse race.

If I'm honest I will admit that hearing all those tales didn't do me a lot of good. It made me feel nervous. It's not healthy to think about ghosts all the time. One night I woke up at 4 a.m. because I needed to pee and couldn't get back to sleep again.

I wonder what happens to journalists who are forced to contemplate far nastier subjects such as war and child abuse. Do they ever sleep?

After my unsuccessful trip across town, somebody tipped me off about another place with a spooky reputation. The following day I was given the name of two people who worked there, one was a female medium and the other was an ordinary man.

I asked to speak to the man and by a strange coincidence I got muddled and named the medium's boss instead. He was absent but she agreed to speak to me.

A medium is probably something like a Korean shaman. I've been told that Korean shamans hold ceremonies to send the spirits of the dead up to the sky. Mediums talk of helping the dead move toward the white light and away from the earthly plane.

I liked the lady because she spoke in a very common sense way. She doesn't encourage people to think about ghosts all the time and she stresses that things can be misinterpreted as hauntings when there are natural explanations. She says that ghosts are nothing to be afraid of because they were people once.

One of my teachers told me that journalists can become protective of the people they interview. I must admit I felt like that. For this lady the things she believed in were as precious as any religious belief and I wanted to respect that.

It was ironic that I began my investigation expecting nothing more than fibs and exaggerations from a barmaid and ended it with someone telling me what was really important to them.

Journalists are lucky because people share so much with them, but it's an awesome responsibility. They have other people's words, identities and reputations in their hands. They have to get it right because otherwise they could ruin the people they write about.

After speaking to the medium I felt that I had enough for an article, but then I got greedy. There was one more place where I was told there was a ghost story. I kept going there but each time they said the people to speak to were out.

I went back again one last time, hoping for a fun story that wouldn't be possible to fact check.

Again the people were out, but the man I had spoken to each time said there was another place, a place that was extremely haunted, and that strange things had been captured on CCTV. I felt rather shocked and went on my way.

"I don't want to touch this," I thought as I walked down the street. "This is too big. This is a national news story if it's true. I don't want to touch this, it's not right. Something's not right. This is too big."

I didn't want to write about it but I hate to see stories going to waste. I thought I ought to pass the story onto someone with more experience who could check it out and decide whether they wanted to make use of it.

So I went to speak to that someone and he identified it as a hoax or a joke.

"I have no doubt that poltergeists exist," he said. "But if there was a film those people wouldn't be sitting on it. They would have sold it and made a fortune."

I felt ashamed of myself. I had done the right thing by knowing instinctively that I should avoid the story but I hadn't been thinking clearly when I tried to pass it on.

A week of witnessing people's genuine belief in the supernatural had brought me too close to the subject. I must have looked very gullible as I politely went here and there saying, "Excuse me, do you have a ghost?"

I'm writing about this because it touches on something all citizen journalists should be wary of. When you interview people who passionately believe in what they're telling you, it's easy to lose the distance that you should have with the subject. It's that distance that enables you to think rationally.

For me the subject of ghosts was a tricky one because I was always dealing with people's beliefs and I had no way of checking that what they said was true. I had to trust my ability to decide whether they believed what they were telling me.

And of course, as I have admitted, a few little exaggerations were acceptable to me as long as it wasn't blatant and I got a person's name to go in my story. The problem was that the talk of CCTV footage sounded like more than a little exaggeration.

I've finished the article now. Instead of being the spooky story I thought it would be, it turned into a more considered piece about the medium and how we can imagine places are scary when they really aren't.

To tell you the truth, she made me feel sorry for ghosts.