Having found a new house to move into, agreed to do so and started packing the hard part is waiting until moving day. The realisation that in a week I would be able to stop living out of boxes and would instead be attempting to remember where I had packed everything led me to decide that I needed a distraction to make my mind off of events.
This is how I ended up sitting in the self help/occult section of my local bookstore reading 'How to hunt ghosts: a practical guide' by Joshua P. Warren.
Joshua represents an organisation called L.E.M.U.R. (of which he is founder and president - he does not categorically state that there are any other members). Joshua claims to be an expert at hunting ghosts and provides a long and expensive looking list of equipment that you will need in order to see and document supernatural happenings.
Joshua may well go into tedious depth about exactly why you should sell your kidneys to raise the cash for an electromagnetic field meters or an electrostatic generator but I got bored and instead wondered why he stressed so much about the need for candy bars and soda on a ghost hunt. Incidentally, Joshua kindly provides addresses at the back of the book where you can find merchants to by the expensive toys that he deems so vital.
Despite the fact that Joshua assets that "everyone possesses some psychic ability" and that using an ouija board could "serve as a tool to access your inherent ESP" he doesn't seem to be very helpful when it comes to helping you find a haunted house to hunt the ghosts in. Even more of a short coming is his lame advice that when faced with a malevolent spirit you should simply ask it very nicely to leave - and carry a bible or some salt.
At this point I began to suspect that Joshua was not as devoted to ghost hunting as he claimed. This was driven home by his admission that he felt that ectoplasm doesn't exist and that "real ghost hunters don't get slimed. If they did, I'm pretty sure I'd be in a different field."
Instead Joshua skulks about using humidifiers to reduce ghostly activity (apparently dehumidifiers create the dry environment that ghosts favour) and asking unsuspecting home owners "have you experienced strange or unexplainable phenomena here?" - presumably in a mass canvas on neighbourhoods within easy walking distance of his house.
Since I wasn't going to pay good money for Joshua's book, my ghost hunt was limited to the shop floor on the book store during opening hours, and proved to no avail. The 'expert' claims that the best ghost hunting hours are between midnight and 4am. I suggest this is due to the fact that if you have stayed up until 4am to see ghosts the sleep derivation will cause you to see anything.
On the plus side, skimming such unadulterated junk has only increased my determination to use an ouija board to summon Axl Rose to find out if 'Chinese Democracy' really exists.
