Books to Die For

Will Storr's WILL STORR VS. THE SUPERNATUAL

Between summer winding down and us working on our annual double issue, I've got Halloween on the brain and, as such, I've decided to spend this week and next spotlighting a pair of untraditional ghost books - more non-fiction than fiction, but no less unnerving. And both utterly fascinating to boot. 

I wrote about this week's book, WILL STORR VS. THE SUPERNATURAL, all the way back in Rue Morgue #63 (December 2006). Storr is a British journalist who decided to challenge his scepticism, with some surprising results. The story of his journey and experiences, along with a whole host of interviews with everyone from demonologists, ghost hunters, psychics, doctors, scientists and exorcists to purported victims of hauntings and possession, form the basis of his engrossing, beliefs-challenging book.

Excerpted from "Diary of a Ghost Hunter" in Rue Morgue #63:

"I wanted to do this piece about this demonologist guy from Philadelphia called Lou Gentile, and the idea was that I'd go across [the Atlantic] and gently make fun of him," Storr tells Rue Morgue of the assignment for Loaded magazine, which ultimately launched his research into the paranormal. "I thought he'd have this added kind of comedic level where he'd be like somebody out of Sixth Sense comically seeing ghosts. ... But obviously when I went across, it was very different because everything that he told me would happen did happen and I experienced so much crazy shit that it kind of made my head hurt."

The incidents Storr witnessed while shadowing Gentile - including mysterious floating globules of light following family members, loud reverberating knocks and thumps from behind walls and parts of the house no one was in and even some convincing EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) - sent the award-winning journalist spiralling into a kind of crisis of faith.

"You can't just say, 'I believe in nothing but ghosts,' because as soon as you sign up to believing in ghosts, you're signing up to a whole series of other kinds of beliefs," Storr explains. "Things like the laws of physics as we understand them can't be right. Things like there might be an afterlife - all these really insane kind of things come into play when you're studying ghosts. So that's why it became a bit of an obsession and something I really wanted to get to the bottom of, because if you're saying that there's an afterlife, it effects everything that you do everyday."

With that impetus, Storr decided to seek the truth. However, he neither set out to prove nor disprove ghosts, only to find some answers wherever and however they might come. His search took him across the UK, as he sought out a variety of professionals and lay folk who have claimed some experience with the supernatural. It even took him to the Vatican and onto the set of TV's successful ghost-hunting series Most Haunted, which he quickly debunked after finding a shooting schedule with "happenings" planned for certain points in the show.

A much more challenging aspect of Storr's research, however, turned out to be tracking down interview subjects and getting them to agree to be in the book. 

"A lot of people who've had these strange experiences, they don't really want publicity, they don't want thousands of people to hear their story because, frankly, they're traumatized by it," says Storr.

Storr wasn't content to simply conduct interviews for his research. He also spent considerable time shadowing paranormal investigation organizations, as well as visiting some of England's purportedly most haunted locales. One of Storr's most frightening on-site experiences - one he credits for changing his sceptical attitude - took place at what is considered to be the most haunted house in Britain, Chingle Hall. 

"I'd been there a week and nothing much had happened, and on the final night I spent the night alone up in this room that had a particularly bad reputation," confides Storr. "It was a room that I kind of avoided going into...because it just had a horrible feeling in it, I can't tell you how unpleasant it was to be in that room. I decided that I was going to spend the night there and I heard breathing in the corner of the room, the really clear, unequivocal sound of a human being breathing and it was absolutely terrifying."

Storr was searching for more than supernatural experiences though, he was looking for answers to the ghostly occurrences that have been reported worldwide for centuries. This quest led him to doctors who attempted to debunk the experiences by calling the witnesses' mental health into question and open-minded scientists who believe that ghostly manifestations might be explainable either through the stone tape theory ( which operates on the premise that in certain situations wood, stone, etc. can function almost as a tape recorder), consciousness research (which seeks to prove that consciousness can influence the physical) or even quantum physics. What became clear is that no one explanation could suitably account for the myriad different phenomenon reported.

"It's like that thing [paranormal researcher] Maurice Grosse said to me - if you are looking for answers you're not going to find any, you only get answers from charlatans," says Storr. "Anyone tells you definitively what ghosts are, they're talking out of their ass because nobody knows. I don't know, priests don't know, scientists don't know, we just don't know yet."

In the end, Storr didn't find his answers, but he did lose his scepticism. He even confesses that he will continue to investigate the paranormal as time allows. 

"Finding out how little science does know about the area kind of gradually sold it to me," says Storr, adding that witness testimony went a long way to converting him. "If a rational explanation was discovered tomorrow, I'd accept it, but at the moment I think we are a long way away from any rational explanation that could do justice to the sheer weight and number of experiences that there have been through record history."

WILL STORR VS THE SUPERNATURAL is available in paperback and digital from Amazon.com for under $14.