The Haunt
Hear the soundtrack
This innovative ghost tour combined a free, downloadable sound track with live drama. For the Brighton Festival and Halloween, 2006.
The experiment
The Haunt was an experiment. Many people run brilliant ghost tours of the city where a guide points out places of interest and fills you in on the local stories. Others are making audio gudes, such as local history tours, that you experience through headphones, while you make your own way around a building. I wanted to bring the two formats together to create a chilling, downloadable ghost tour that you hear on your personal stereo.
This isn't a factual tour - it's an immersive drama. Crucially, there's no friendly guide to reassure you as you progress around the tour. You are led by nothing more than a disembodied female voice who talks to you softly through your headphones. As you walk the streets of Brighton, your female companion tells you fragments of her story and intimates that she is in great fear. She tries to establish your trust - if you trust her, you let her lead you through busy streets, into the quiet twitterns of Brighton, and finally to a little-known eighteenth-century room, deep under the city streets.
Genuine Brighton street recordings are interwoven with the vocals and other, atmospheric sounds. This gives the tour an eerie, immersive qualilty. Listeners get the unsettling feeling that the voice could be coming from somewhere in the street where they are walking.
The live conclusion
For this experiment, I teamed up with artist Victoria Emes who had recently been investigating spirit cabinets. A favourite of old-time mediums, the spirit cabinet is a dark, enclosed space, full of plush velvet, where believers claim they can get in tune with 'the other side'.
At the conclusion of The Haunt, participants found themselves in a strange and dark basement room where they were met by Victoria and some of our actors. These actors led participants, one by one, through a series of pitch-black rooms. At the far end was one of Victoria's cabinets. Here, participants would experience a chilling encounter, creating using some old-school stage trickery. Victoria had created an adaptation of the classic Pepper's Ghost illuson to make a real actor appear 'from nowhere', behind the participants, as they looked into a mirror. The actor was Rachel, who also supplied the voice on the audio tour. Before Rachel dissappeared, she put her hand on the participant's on the shoulder and whispered a few words into his or her ear.
On Halloween, we also set up a room where people could steady their nerves after their encounter. They were offered a stiff drink while listening to death ballads and ancient songs of hauntings and necromancy, performed by the Deathwatch Beatles (Jenny Angliss, Mike Blow and Sarah).
Logistics
To participate in The Haunt, people had to download a set of free mp3 audio files and bring them along on their personal mp3 player (total file size approx. 14Mb). Alternatively, they could bring along a CD Walkman and pick up a CD for £2 on the day. All visitors were asked to read a disclaimer before taking part. This explained the tour included references to the paranormal and some theatrical elements that some visitors may find shocking.
Sadly, as we were running the show on a shoestring (this event was entirely self-funded), we encountered problems with our cheap mp3 players that caused headaches on one of the days.I'd be wary of running an audio tour again, without the budget to buy some rugged mp3 players. Despite these hiccups, The Haunt demonstrated how an immersive ghost tour, that builds up your anxiety with audio, before presenting you with live actors and some old stage magic, can be used to memorable and highly unsettling effect.
The Haunt was created by Sarah Angliss and Victoria Emes. Thanks also to Jenny Angliss, Paul and Rachel Attmere, Andy Barron, Mike Blow, Tom Fell, Amanda Hellberg, Laura Rikard, Colin Uttley and Richard Wiseman. We would also like to thank the many venues in Brighton who have helped us host this event, in particular Resident Records and Christopher Gull.