Drunken Ghost Hunters 2 - Electric Boogaloo

G’day lads and lasses, Bruces and Sheilas, dingos and possums, boils and ghouls. It is my utmost pleasure, nearly 2 years since our last hugely successful and culturally resonant masterpiece, to deliver to your outstretched and trembling arms, one of the finest scientific works in human history, if not the greatest product of all human labours ever conceived and wrought into existence. I submit to you, for the viewing and listening pleasure of your well-proportioned and aesthetically-pleasing eyes and ears, the best video on Youtube EVER — past, present, and future.

Without exaggerating the gravity of this supreme moment for you, your children, and your children’s children — one jot or tittle — I humbly and reverently present to you the next installment of The Whistler Philanthropic Foundation for Humanity’s ground-breaking scientific documentary series, “Drunken Ghost Hunters 2: Electric Boogaloo.” The nostrils positively quiver with anticipation.

In this monumental milestone of an episode, which we expect will shortly see us nominated for a Nobel Prize, we will answer, empirically and definitively, once and for all, whether transcendent spirits of our dearly departed loved ones manifest themselves within the murky confines of the electromagnetic spectrum, once they have regrettably, but inevitably, shuffled off this mortal coil. To wit, we shall uncover the truth about whether ghosts actually exist on a plane of existence beyond our own. Or any plane whatsoever, whether flying first-class or coach.

The answer may surprise you. It may shock you. Unless, of course, you thought, “Ghosts don’t fucking exist, what an unbelievably stupid fucking question,” in which case the answer won’t surprise you at all.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first episode of Drunken Ghost Hunters which takes place at the Sydney Quarantine Station. This time, it’s a haunted cabin in the Hunter Valley.

The Methodology

Meanwhile, here’s roughly how our investigations work:

STEP ONE. Get shitfaced. Blotto’d. Chemically contorted in the brain. Swimming in a fountain of whisky and regret. Drunk as a puddle of piss on the Vegas strip. Then go to a site of alleged paranormal activity. The purpose of these aforestated alcoholic ablutions is to antagonize the apparitions. For reasons unknown to most ghost theorists (mostly because they are peddling bullshit) ghosts react to the presence of humans. It is mostly hand-waved as ghosts and humans somehow detecting each other on the electromagnetic spectrum. The ghosts for some reason run primarily on emotions and “unfinished business.” We hope to exploit those emotions and to affront and insult the ghosts. The purpose of the alcohol is to behave like utter assholes in the hopes of eliciting the most virulent and robust metaphysical response. If the ghost drowned in a bathtub, we will pee in the bathtub. If the ghost was murdered by his wife’s lover, we will laugh, jeer, and call him a cuck. If the ghost was murdered by a former business partner, we will read out estimates of how much the killer made after the victim’s death. All in the hopes of summoning the most extreme paranormal responses: bleeding walls, rattling floorboards, puking little girls possessed by demons, or the terrifying, booming cry of “Zool” from the refrigerator while some eggs boil on the countertop. Or seeing the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

STEP TWO. Vomit. Moan. Try to find the condom that you hope you used the night before. Endeavour desperately to cleanse the alcohol from your bloodstream as soon as possible. Overdose on water. Lay in agony for 6 hours till the pain passes and you are just pathetically tired. Order greasy takeout. Question one’s life decisions. Vow to never behave so badly again. Then immediately forget the hangover vow after a good night’s sleep.

STEP THREE. Head back to the haunted site during the daytime, dried-out and sober as a judge, to quote-unquote “science the shit” out of all the phenomena you observed in Step One. Anything that you observed previously has to be rationally and plausibly explained, to the utmost extent that your intellect, the scientific method, and the laboratory equipment (that was definitely not provided to you off-the-books by former university colleagues) will allow.

STEP FOUR. Get shitfaced again with your collaborators and write this unutterably idiotic but amusing script.

STEP FIVE. Wake up the next morning, again full of regret, and censor the more lascivious parts of the script before sending it off. For those sentences that are borderline, just say “fuck it” and see what happens. It’s the internet. What could possibly go wrong?

And that is the foolproof methodology of Drunken Ghost Hunters™. We’ve actually copywritten-slash-patented this format in multiple countries. So, Hollywood, we look forward to your generous monetary offers, you trashy, blood-sucking, lowest-common-denominator reality-show-peddling pieces of shit. Or we’ll sue you and your poxy production companies for every fucking penny you’re worth.

The Dramatis Personae

Hi! My name is David. I have a PhD and other similarly overpriced wall decorations.

For 15 years, I have studied long-term patterns in human history (including publishing on how those complex patterns can be examined and predicted mathematically), I also have considerable expertise in evolutionary biology, and I’ve worked with a Harvard physicist for over a decade on the complexity dynamics of baryonic matter in the Universe (cosmological, chemical, geological, biological, societal, or technological). I’ve published two trade books on natural and human history, three other books no one will read, and about two dozen academic articles that roughly ten people have read, five people understood, and two people actually liked. I am the first of your overqualified ghost hunters for today.

I am joined again by Alexandra. She would like to thank you for all the sexual propositions made in the comments of the last episode. But she thinks, quote, “anonymous internet dick is overrated” and prefers, quote, “a long-term monogamous partner with an in-depth knowledge of my sexual fetishes” (again, her words, not mine).

She also has a PhD, recently snatched from the grips of the shitty post-secondary institution we both worked at (congratulations, Alex) and she immediately quit academia to run a small but lucrative company that deals in wildlife management and rural pest eradication. Alex is a specialist in ecology, evolutionary theory, and human psychology. She’s a 5-foot-11 spear-fisher, hunter, and has more than once coldly shot a kangaroo in the face (all kangaroo meat sold in Australia is shot in the wild due to their impact on local farmers).

Alex has given me permission to say that she is “the Queen of the Bogans”, complete with anger issues, and she would rather punch a ghost or demon in the mouth or run it over with her ute than to flee, cower in the corner, or piss in her pantaloons.

But, wait! There’s more! Today’s cast doesn’t stop there. Last time, Alex and I joined a ghost tour, which gave us a multitude of test subjects to mine for reactions. This time, we were headed for a haunted cabin at a single location. So we felt the need to capture the perspective of witnesses who had no particular scientific training and had an ambiguous attitude toward ghosts and the afterlife.

Enter Jess. A 26-year-old female primary school teacher from the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney who has known Alex since early childhood. Prior to the ghost hunt (a distinction which is significant) she claimed that she believed in ghosts and supernatural occurrences, and asserted she was agnostic.

Regarding the existence of the afterlife and the truth of the mainstream world religions, she has definitively said that she, quote, “just doesn’t know, but I believe there is something out there.” She also expressed a vague belief in the reliability of horoscopes. Fun fact, horoscopes can be broadly likened to racism because you are essentially pre-judging a person’s behaviour and character based on how they were born.

Jess is a lovely woman, total wifey-material, with a proclivity for sundresses and Hallmark movies on Netflix, who will pose as one of our test subjects on this auspicious occasion.

The other test subject is Ryan. He is a 21-year-old bartender at a wine bar and pizzeria round the corner from where I used to live. We were lining up the whole ghost venture there one night and offered him a spot in the car. When asked about whether he believed in ghosts or not, he replied, and I quote, “Who gives a shit?”

That about sums it up. Ryan is currently attending TAFE New South Wales, a vocational college, in the hopes of becoming, quote, “Something easy that earns me a shit-ton of money so I can impress the bitches.” He does not like Hallmark movies, and prefers fishing and cheering for the Sydney Swans, an Aussie rules football club, the logo of which he has tattooed on his right leg.

We here at The Whistler Philanthropic Foundation for Humanity felt that this selection of test subjects was a good cross-section of typical Australian beliefs and personalities. And at any rate, fuck it, these were the people who agreed to come and we only had room for four people in the car.

Expertly Chosen Equipment

On the Friday morning of our weekend stay in a haunted cabin we loaded up the trunk of the car with all the essential supplies. This time we’d procured our own EMF Meter, a device used to detect abnormalities in electromagnetic fields. If a disturbance is picked up, the green light on the EMF Meter turns red, thus signaling the possible presence of a ghost.

In order to experiment with the EMF Meter, we also brought along a few things that are also known to disrupt electromagnetic fields: a TV remote, an electric generator, our mobile phones, and a pink vibrating dildo. The problem with EMF Meters is that a billion and five fucking things can disrupt an electromagnetic field other than the presence of some “spooky boys.”

We’d also acquired a “spirit box” or “ghost box” from Amazon, at ludicrously disproportionate expense. A spirit box turns on, filling the room with static noise, as it rapidly flicks through FM and AM radio frequencies. A staple of ghost-hunting shows, the snake oil salesman who hosts the show will stand in a dark room and ask the ghost a series of intrusive questions.

Apparently, the ghost can hear these questions on a different plane of existence and understand them perfectly. The ghost will then reply. The spirit box will inevitably pick up an EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon, which is either some burble of static noise that excitable ghost hunters will interpret as any set of words which make sense in the context, or which the hosts of ghost-hunting shows will fabricate entirely in post-production.

Our spirit box was also capable of recording the static and potential EVPs so we could waste a couple hours of our precious lives listening back to garbled noise over and over and over.

Rounding out our technological equipment, we brought along an infrared camera to capture any “spooky boys” in flagrante delicto, a heavy-duty thermometer to detect slight and rapid changes in room temperature, a couple of simple motion sensors, and a run of the mill Geiger counter to detect ghostly spikes in radiation should the EMF Meter get distracted by the dildo. We also brought a Ouija Board because apparently Hasbro and Parker Brothers either like selling useless products to credulous idiots, or because they are secretly a pack of necromancers. And we brought a copy of the Simon Necronomicon, an alleged Book of the Dead published in 1977 by the trendy Satanist Peter Levenda under the pseudonym “Simon”, which is a respectable name, but as far as pseudonyms go, you’d think he’d be a bit more creative.

We figured we’d read out a few of the Sumerian-Gibberish incantations in the Necronomicon on the off-chance it would summon a demon or the devil himself. However, we couldn’t be fucked staging the rituals and sacrifices the stupid book says it requires.

In addition to all that, we brought one bottle of Makers Mark whisky, a bottle of Southern Comfort, a bottle of Bundaberg rum, a bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two 6-packs of Newtowner beer, a 6-pack of some IPA pineapple and passion fruit tropical-flavoured beer that tasted like the Koolaid mascot jizzed in it, a litre of Coke (the soft drink, not the nose-candy), a litre of lemon lime bitters, a litre of ginger beer, a jug of tomato juice, tabasco, and Wooster sauce to make Bloody Marys (appropriate, given the context), a pack of plastic cups, and a small cardboard box containing 6 shot glasses. Additionally, we brought 24 bottles of water, several bags of potato chips, a variety box of chocolates and a bag of Maltesers, eight cans of chicken soup, a bag of dried pasta and a couple jars of tomato sauce, and a jar of pickles, all to use as makeshift hangover remedies. Unfortunately we could not purchase frozen chicken wings or pizza or the like, because it would have defrosted in the trunk of the car during our journey. We did, however, resolve to pick up more substantial sustenance for our regular meals once we got to our location.

One notable thing was absent from our supplies. We neglected to purchase any wine because we were headed to the Hunter Valley, for three blissful days in Australian wine country. Once we arrived, we planned to stop off at a couple of vineyards to pick up a few bottles of wine to top off our otherwise meagre alcohol supply. Just kidding, the amount we brought was already completely buttfuck insane – but we did plan to pick up a case or two of wine regardless. It’s not like you need to drink it all.

Welcome to the (Ghost) Hunter Valley!

The Hunter Valley is a sublimely picturesque region in New South Wales a few hours drive northwest of Sydney. It centers, somewhat predictably, around the Hunter River. With roughly 2.5 million tourists quite understandably rocking up to the Hunter Valley per year, you could scarcely imagine a more quintessentially Australian part of the world: vast swathes of land carpeted with gum trees, the other-worldly wildlife of the Great Dividing Range, including kangaroos and wallabies, snakes and spiders.

There are wide open skies painted a light sub-tropical blue, and, amid all that, some tiny country towns stuffed with friendly happy-go-lucky people with “crikey-dingo” accents. Think of it like JRR Tolkien’s “The Shire” except with a bunch of shit hiding in the bushes that can kill ya.

Perhaps less quintessentially Australian, the area is festooned with around 50 European-looking vineyards and large modern buildings that host weddings and bougie wine tours. The landscape is also dotted at intervals with hordes of pretentious aspirational assholes taking pictures for Instagram to show the world how wonderful their lives always are, before heading home to their extortionately high Sydney mortgage payments, traffic jams, office jobs, anti-depressants, and Saturday afternoon white-wine-passouts on the couch.

In 1797, less than a decade after the British first established a penal colony at Botany Bay, an officer in the Royal Navy, John Shortland, was sailing up the coast in pursuit of some escaped convicts who had preferred the dangers of the bush to serving out their sentences. At the place where the city of Newcastle is today, Shortland discovered the mouth of a river which he named after the Governor of New South Wales, John Hunter. This river became a vital artery for trade ships travelling from the interior.

They carried timber and newly mined coal back to Sydney. In 1820, a man named John Howe led a team to carve out an overland route through the subtropical rainforests to the Lower Hunter Valley where we would be staying. This region, with its temperate climate and fertile soil bequeathed by ancient extinct volcanoes, quickly became recognised as ideal for growing wine.

Shortly after the British arrived in Sydney, they had tried to grow wine there, but the climate proved too damp and humid, and the results were fairly piss poor. The Hunter Valley, situated a short boat ride north of Sydney, was developed as an alternative, forming a monopoly on the wine supply for the city’s burgeoning population. Wine production in the Hunter Valley exploded as a result.

Sydney authorities meanwhile encouraged the uptake of wine-drinking as an alternative to high alcohol content spirits like gin or whiskey. It was thought that former convicts and common people would be less prone to violence and degeneracy if they tippled a bit of wine, rather than knocking back the hard stuff. To a certain extent this made sense, when you bear in mind that in the earliest days of wine production, the beverage was more watered down and did not have as high an alcohol content as the stuff that followed later at a devilish 12, 13, and 14 per cent per 750 milliliters.

That stuff followed later in the century as alcohol consumption and brain-bludgeoning became the object in itself, rather than being an alternative to drinking freshwater which might contain a tasty dollop of cholera.

To facilitate the growing wine economy, a number of trading posts and towns sprang up across the Hunter Valley, stretching across the river as the main artery of commerce. But the river was overtaken in the mid-19th century with the construction of the Great Northern Railway, which over the subsequent decades slowly reduced many places to literal ghost towns, that are still creepy to walk around at night today.

Prior to the arrival of the Pommie bastards, the Hunter Valley was inhabited by numerous aboriginal peoples. They arrived in the northern tip of Australia approximately 60,000 years ago, having migrated within just a few thousand years from Africa, through India, and down a series of land bridges that then existed off the Malay peninsula. After arriving in Australia, the aboriginals gradually migrated down the continent until they arrived in New South Wales approximately 40,000 years ago.

At the time of British first contact, the Hunter Valley and its surroundings were populated by the Wonnarua, the Awabakal, Darkinung and Worimi peoples, totaling an estimated 2000 to 3000 hunter-gatherers. However, in an age before germ theory even existed, British settlers brought with them a variety of Eurasian diseases like smallpox, for which the aboriginals had no natural immunity. Disease reduced the native population by approximately 70%.

An additional 10% may have died from starvation as a result of hunting territory being transformed into farmland, and an estimated 2.5% may have died in violent clashes with the British settlers. Most of this horrific wave of death happened in the small space of time between 1797 and 1850. By the end of the 19th century only a few hundred aboriginals were left.

The Darkinung people were entirely wiped out.

According to some local legends, the aggrieved spirits of the aboriginals who departed the mortal realm in agony still roam the Hunter Valley to this day. This is mildly refreshing from most Australian ghost legends, where eons of occupation by aboriginals (which should have produced thousands of ghosts) are completely ignored for hauntings by the few Europeans who rocked up in the past few generations and died of syphilis, a hangnail, a telltale heart, a raven that says ‘forevermore’, or whatever the fuck.

Speaking of which, the Hunter Valley is replete with ghost stories about bushrangers: the escaped convicts who took a chance on life in the wilderness only to die of starvation, be murdered by other convicts, die in fights with local tribes, or at the fangs of a poisonous snake or spider, the venom of which had no known antidote. There’s also stories of coal miners who died in collapses, abusive landlords who were murdered by their angry tenants, travelers who fell afoul of bandits, farmers who died in house fires, hospital patients who died of dysentery, children who perished in tragic accidents, and shell-shocked soldiers who returned from the First World War only to kill themselves.

It was into this cauldron of swirling phantasms and ectoplasm that we four plucky ghost hunters were diving. We were headed to a country cabin about an hour northwest of Newcastle. Note: an Australian country cabin is more like a cozy holiday cottage, rather than a squat, dirty Unabomber affair.

It lay at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by green fields, and, beyond them, hills covered with an endless dark canopy of towering eucalyptus trees. Inhabiting this cabin were reputedly six powerful spirits: two twin girls, the burnt man, the hunter, the convict, and the old soldier. And allegedly the very fields in which the cabin was situated were witness, two centuries ago, to the slaughter of a large group of aboriginal warriors by a British militia in retaliation for an attack on a local farm.

It was here, in the middle of nowhere, on this cursed and bloodied soil, that we intended to spend the next three nights.

The cabin itself is managed by a woman named Fiona. She is the manager of several holiday rental properties in the region, along with running a charming bed and breakfast out of her own place. Interestingly, the cabin in which we stayed was billed in two separate online tourism profiles either as a place of extreme paranormal activity for those interested in such things, or alternately as a place of tranquil relaxation nearby several high-class wineries, with no mention of ghosts in the second profile, and where reviews didn’t report any overnight distress. I suppose with the pool of wingnuts and mystics being small, one has to diversify one’s marketing tactics.

On Friday afternoon, while we made our way there, we stopped off at a couple of wineries in the Pokolbin region and picked up a case of cheap Hunter Valley Sémillon, a full-bodied dry white wine that, given the 6 bottles cost us next-to-nothing, can be forgiven for tasting vaguely of vinegar and turpentine. We also pooled our money to purchase a top tier bottle of Shiraz (one of the region’s specialties) for roughly 400 Australian dollars, or 100 dollars apiece. We figured we’d drink it on the final night to celebrate a successful ghost hunt.

That is, until Alex wisely pointed out that we might get so fucked up on the first night that we’d impulsively decide to drink it at a such point of late-night inebriation that we could not properly taste it nor barely remember it the following morning. Unless, of course, any of us were forced to enjoy it a second time amid our morning-after regurgitations. As such, Alex, Jess, Ryan, and I all agreed that the absurdly priced bottle of lovingly-rotted grape juice would be our first port of call shortly after we had arrived at the haunted cabin.

Six Residents, Four Guests

The “House of the Six” is a fully restored and renovated Colonial Regency homestead built in the 1830s, with the characteristic metal hipped roof and an ornate veranda out front. As mentioned, it is not so much a cabin as it is a cozy little cottage where one could pass a relaxing weekend in the countryside. Or at least you could say that, if it wasn’t for all the SPOOKY GHOSTS (which definitely existed, I’m sure).

Fiona, a cheerful sun-tanned woman in her mid-60s, very kindly met us at the property to hand over the keys and, as appears to be customary with the paranormal-loving guests, a brief tour of the grounds. For the next 20 minutes, we walked around the property while she gave a history of the place and the local spirits, along with some anecdotes of people’s frightening encounters with them. This is what we in the ghost-hunting game call “front-loading.”

It is where you plant the seed in someone’s brain about the presence of specters in order to increase the chance that they will interpret some innocuous bump in the night as something more sinister. If you were on a business trip in Oklahoma and stayed at a Holiday Inn, identical to pretty much every Holiday Inn around the world, you’d think nothing of it. You’d order some room service, watch some crap TV, and go to bed.

But if someone happened to mention in conversation at the hotel bar that this particular Holiday Inn was built on an Indian burial ground, no matter how rational a human being you were, there would come a point in the evening, perhaps just before slumber, where your mind would flicker briefly toward the possibility that this place (where you were about to be unconscious and at your most vulnerable) might have some bad juju in its foundations. You’d then shrug it off and go to sleep.

In our case, Fiona’s front-loading did not have much of an effect on Alex or myself. We knew exactly what was going on and shot each other a wry smile which Fiona did not detect. Jess took the situation a little more seriously and peppered Fiona with a few questions, out of a mixture of anxiety and mere politeness. Ryan maintained a sullen, bored silence throughout the tour, clearly eager to kick back on the veranda and start drinking.

We were told that the cabin itself was originally built for farm labourers on a recently cleared patch of sub-tropical rainforest. Merely years before, allegedly, the forest had been stained with blood, as a group of aboriginal warriors (the precise name of the tribe was not mentioned) were cut down in a hail of bullets by a British militia after a few of them had raided a local farm, stolen some livestock, and run a settler through with a spear. But later researching the history of the region, we can find no evidence of such an event taking place.

Retaliatory raids of this sort did happen across Australia, but they were reported to the British authorities, who kept records. There were strict rules of conduct about what one could do on such raids, and any disproportionate or unnecessary violence or targeting of women and children would be punished as criminal offenses. However, it is generally accepted that there were retaliation attacks on aboriginals that were never reported to the British authorities, perhaps because the level of force was questionable.

But we also could find no record of the precipitating event – a local farmer getting run through with a spear and his livestock stolen, which almost certainly would have been recorded somewhere. So, while the idea that the land was cursed from the start seems like a good explanatory factor for why the place continued to build up paranormal energies, it appears the whole thing is a bit of touristy hokum. This did not bode well for the veracity of the rest of the ghost stories.

The cabin itself was of fairly conventional Australian Georgian design. Four bedrooms all lined up on the right side of the house, all kitted out with newish beds and cozy looking doonas (what the Aussies call comforters or duvets) with flowery patterns on them. If the owners had catered to ghost hunters exclusively, I imagine there would have been an attempt to retain furniture that was more antique and vaguely creepy.

But I imagine such wingnuts traipse through that small corner of the world only once in a blue moon. There were, however, a few strategically placed antique dolls, which indeed were unsettling enough. The floors were made of hardwood, the walls painted hues of soft pink.

On the left side of the cabin heading back from the front doorway was a small sitting room with a couch, a couple of comfy chairs, and a flatscreen TV, followed by a kitchen with all the mod cons, followed again by a bathroom, with tub and shower, newly tiled walls, with a large flower decal on them. There was no toilet, which was in a small room next door, so that after defecating you’d have to exit the toilet and enter the bathroom to wash your hands. At least they’d installed a toilet, rather than shitting in a hole in the backyard like “great grandpappy Bruce” probably used to do.

Behind the toilet and also the bedrooms was another wide-open area used for a dining room, with a lovely mahogany table (new, not antique) and a couple of cabinets containing glasses, plates, and a smattering of ornate and fragile looking china. Beyond that was a screen backdoor which led to a small porch at the back of the cabin, looking out across a field for a few hundred yards before the landscape turned to darkened bush. Heading down the porch stairs into the backyard, one could spy a small hut which I initially assumed to be an outhouse.

However, upon opening it we found what looked like an old shower, decidedly careworn and not updated like the rest of the house, with a stone floor and a drain in the ground. Except there was no water spigot. At over top of the floor drain there was a thick length of chain, at the end of which was attached a large rusty hook.

It was at this point Fiona told us that one of the cabin’s former residents, The Hunter, was rumoured to kidnap women (European and aboriginal alike) and keep them hanging in the small shed while he did what he pleased with them before inevitably killing them. As chilling as this little story was, it struck Alex and I as a little unfeasible, given that a person’s screams could easily issue out of a small wooden shed. Sure, there weren’t any other buildings around for a couple of miles, but sound carries, and all it would take is a single visitor or passerby and you’d be caught.

Alex later opined that the shed was likely just a makeshift abattoir, where you’d hang an animal carcass upside down while its blood ran down the drain. It was not so useful as a discreet rape dungeon.

Throughout the tour, Fiona regaled us with tales about the cabin’s long-term residents who had somewhat overstayed their welcome and failed to keep up with the rent. The oldest ghost was “The Burnt Man” who was evidently a farm labourer who shared the place with other workers in the 1830s. The Burnt Man was allegedly an opium addict, and spent much of his off-hours insensate and lying in bed, in the room second from the front of the house.

One night he smoked so much opium that it sent him into a deep slumber. However, the pipe was still smoldering and the embers fell upon his bedsheets setting them alight. The man, completely out of his gourd on opium did not wake until it was too late, and he burned to death where he lay, screaming in vain while the fire consumed him.

Numerous guests have allegedly woken to the sound of a man’s screams in the middle of the night. Audio hallucinations are not uncommon when just emerging from sleep, and the noises that one hears in one’s dreams are muddled with noises that are happening in the waking world. It is hardly surprising an impressionable person, front-loaded with the story of the Burnt Man, might imagine such a thing happening.

Unless of course the person was just an attention seeking idiot, or a hopeful person desperate to find any evidence whatsoever that ghosts exist. Or perhaps the guest accounts themselves were entirely concocted by Fiona. When looking at the second bedroom, we could see no evidence of fire on the walls, but of course such damage would have long since been repaired and painted over nearly 200 years ago.

Ryan, our resident smoker, volunteered to take the room, given the association might summon up some juju from the Burnt Man. Naturally, we admonished Ryan not to smoke in bed.

The next long-term resident was the ghost of The Convict. Australia had been used as a British penal colony for 80 years between 1788 and 1868. In all, some 160,000 convicts were transported, and today approximately 5 million of Australia’s population of 25 million, or one in five people, boast some convict ancestry.

I myself am descended from British North America’s first convicted murderer, so I am in good company. Speaking of connections, The Convict had not come from Britain, but had participated in the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837, which was ultimately crushed by British troops. The Convict had allegedly been sentenced to 21 years in prison and transported to a bay off the mouth of the Paramatta River in what is now Sydney.

Today it is named “Canada Bay.” The Convict was pardoned three or four years into his sentence, and spent the next decade working in Sydney, trying to save up enough money to board a ship back home. However, such voyages were hugely expensive in the Age of Sail, and the Convict apparently gave up, headed north, and in the 1850s settled in the Hunter Valley, where he lived in the cabin for a few years before dying alone and childless, a world away from his family.

He is said to occasionally overcome paying guests with a sudden feeling of extreme sadness or intense anger, especially when they sleep in the Convict’s bedroom at the front of the house, or when the guests sit on the veranda. A common trope, the phenomenon of being hit by a “wave of emotion” is so stupidly vague and supremely untestable that I’m willing to dismiss such accounts as easily influenced people who already believe in ghosts deluding themselves into thinking such emotions were somehow being projected onto them by an inanimate fucking structure. A pile of stone, wood, and nails.

Or perhaps the strong feelings of sadness and anger are a result of the guests realizing they paid through the nose to sit in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for their holiday. The Convict’s story, however, strikes me as particularly curious, because it is so specific, when some simplistic bilge about a pickpocket from London would have done just as well. Looking into those rebels who were transported to Sydney, we could find no sign of someone relocating to northern New South Wales in the Hunter Valley area.

But the lack of such evidence certainly doesn’t rule it out. In fact, the story is so specific that has the ring of truth and is likely based on the experience and travels of a real person. I ultimately wound up taking the front bedroom, due to the Canadian connection.

Perhaps if he appeared, we’d have a lot to talk about. Although, given he was a convict from the Lower Canada Rebellion, the odds were overwhelmingly in the favour of him speaking French rather than English. And my spoken French is très exécrable.

Perhaps the most disturbing story was that alluded to earlier: The Hunter. A man who lived in the cabin in the late 1870s until his disappearance in the 1890s. He’d work odd jobs around the area for the local farms and vineyards, and supplement his diet by fishing and hunting game like kangaroos and the larger birds like bush turkeys.

And apparently he’d also kidnap, rape, and murder women. The Hunter’s ghostly influence was accordingly the most malevolent. One would be struck with an impression of being “unwelcome” in the house.

More with the fucking feelings! At least with a sudden rush of cold you can measure it with a thermometer and figure out where the draft is coming from. People also reported seeing dark figures sitting on the chairs of the living room, or on the veranda, or on the deck out back.

Visual hallucinations are easily explained if one is impressionable and feeling a little antsy at night. Especially if you were front-loaded to be on the look-out for the ghost of a murderer. The Hunter’s bedroom, at the back of the house, was also a site of extreme paranormal activity.

Allegedly female guests would awaken in the night feeling a hand caressing the back of their neck or the feeling of fingertips tracing a line down their bodies underneath their bed clothes. Drafts and changes in air pressure can explain the stimulation of the hair follicles on the back of one’s neck. As for the sensation of fingertips under the covers, its either the product of paranoia, shifting fabric on sensitive skin when one is half-asleep, or, given it is Australia, you might want to get up and flick on the light to make sure that a local insect or arachnid hasn’t decided to spend the night in the same bed.

That prospect, to me, sounds much more terrifying than any bloody ghost. The most extreme testimonials of the Hunter’s nighttime visits were of covers being thrown violently off the bed, or the guests being awake and pinned to the mattress by an unseen force. Covers can be explained by kicking, tossing, or turning in one’s sleep, accompanied by the force of sheer fucking gravity, even if you wake up halfway.

As for being pinned to the bed, sleep paralysis is by no means uncommon, affecting approximately one in ten people in the course of their lives. Sleep paralysis can be brought on by various causes, mostly related to insomnia, anxiety, and sleep deprivation. All of which might be easily explained by being a little freaked out from sleeping in the former bedroom of a murdering creep.

I initially volunteered to sleep in The Hunter’s room, to spare either Alex or Jess any sort of discomfort. But Alex somewhat sadistically insisted on the fair Jess staying in The Hunter’s room, since she was female and decidedly on the fence about the existence of ghosts. If anyone was going to arouse some sort of supernatural phenomena, it would be Jess.

I began to argue with Alex that there was a limit to the extent we could torture our two tagalongs, but then to both of our surprise, Jess intrepidly declared that the room didn’t bother her and she’d give it ago. To which Alex replied, “That’s the spirit. And if he pins you to the bed tonight, just raise your knee and crush his transparent little balls.”

The Old Soldier was allegedly a veteran from World War I who, like many returning soldiers, was granted a plot of land in the Hunter Valley by the Australian government. He turned his hand to building a vineyard, but it didn’t work out, so he began working as a delivery driver in between towns. The Old Soldier had a wife who, while he was away at war, died of some sort of wasting disease – probably diabetes.

When the Old Soldier returned home, he collected his two twin daughters from relatives, and they lived together in the cabin. Unfortunately, that same year, the Twins died of the Spanish Flu. Guests have attested to seeing their ghostly figures playing on the veranda and in the back garden.

They have also claimed to hear children laughing, the sound of running footsteps on the wood floors when no one else was there, and, most creepily, the sound of children singing. Naturally, all of these phenomena occurred at night, making it all the more dubious you could make out two children playing on the veranda or in the yard, much less make out what sex they were. As for the audio hallucinations, their coincidence with a state of sleep and with impressionable minds is too much to ignore.

Children laughing and singing, if it occurred at all, might be the issuance of bored real-life children from the nearby town farting around the area past curfew. Footsteps on the wood floors meanwhile can easily be mistaken for wood creaking from changes in temperature, or rodents in the house, or even possums on the roof. And the list of possible explanations for the noise goes up to about a thousand.

As for the Old Soldier, he lived on for a couple of decades into the late 1930s before killing himself. Apparently after the death of his daughters, he became a recluse and a drunk. Accordingly, his supernatural activities are largely relegated to being a bloody nuisance.

Bottles and other glassware were reported to come flying off shelves, doors would slam on their own, windows would fly open and shut, and an invisible entrant would knock on the front door in the middle of the night. Presumably the Old Soldier was drunk and had forgotten his keys. Most alarmingly, people would awake in the middle of the night to see a cloaked figure standing by the side of their bed, cackling loudly.

The doors flying shut we can attribute to the wind. The windows probably the same, although we investigated them and the mechanisms were several decades old and some locks may just slip loose once and a while. The knocking on the door at night has no explanation other than someone playing a prank or else a guest imagining the whole thing.

As for the cloaked figure, see above for guests imagining things, or else there is a more nuanced explanation of a half-awake lucid dream, with shadows forming on the bedroom walls being mistaken for ghosts as people awake. And any visual hallucination more pronounced than that would require medical intervention, since it might imply either a tumor in the brain, a concerning chemical imbalance, or some form of severe mental illness.

The Old Soldier slept in the front bedroom of the house, same as the Convict. Meanwhile the Twins slept in the second bedroom behind it, same as the Burnt Man. Both Ryan and I were in for a potentially crowded night. As for the third bedroom, it had no ghosts, and was occupied by Alex, remarking she was glad that she would at least enjoy a good night’s sleep. I said I doubted it, and reminded her we were going to get pissed-as-parrots on the first night. Hardly anybody was going to sleep well, ghosts or no.

As for the impact of the tour on our test subjects, Jess, as mentioned, courageously volunteered to sleep in the Hunter’s room (albeit after Alex coaxed her into it). Jess seemed only a little discomfited at the idea, but was mostly cheerful and putting a brave face on it. Ryan, meanwhile, once Fiona had left, joked that, quote, “The fuckwits are charging too much to rent this place. Did ya hear how many people died here? Place is a fucking death trap.”

The Piss Up

Alex got in the car and drove to a nearby service station to see if she could find some dinnertime victuals, comestibles, and provisions. We had hoped the service station had some frozen meals that could pass muster for the night, otherwise it meant a longer drive for Alex into town. While she was gone, Ryan wasted no time heading out to the veranda, putting up his feet, and cracking open a bottle of beer, which he chased with a bit of bourbon whiskey.

Jess and I politely waited for Alex’s return. Well, partial politeness in my case. I was already half-dreading the hangover.

After roughly 30 minutes, Alex rocked back up to the cabin with a couple of frozen pizzas for dinner, and some fresh milk for morning coffee or tea (I was the only tea drinker in the group, having grown up drinking PG Tips, not coffee – meanwhile, Australians can be such insufferably pretentious wankstains about their coffee culture, particularly in the big cities, that I maintain my habits in petty protest). Alex also bought a couple of cartons of ice cream, though we doubted we’d be tucking into it that night.

The pizzas went in the oven while we cracked open the fancy bottle of Shiraz. This is where you might expect me to pompously say that it had notes of blackberry, blueberry, plum, cherry, chocolate, licorice, tobacco, vanilla, and Margot Robbie’s armpit sweat, or whatever the fuck. I’ve never gone in for that sommelier shit – swishing it around your mouth and imagining you can taste spectral hints of random foods and substances that were nowhere near the wine-making process.

It’s about two levels above listening to static on a spirit box and imagining you’ve heard an EVP (more on that later). Furthermore, I find that expensive wines start to show diminishing returns after about 80 dollars. I’m not saying the really fancy stuff doesn’t taste better, I’m just saying that after about 80 dollars, you might get an extra 2 dollars of actual added value for every additional 50 dollars you pay.

All I’ll say is that the fancy Shiraz had that typical syrupy smoothness of an expensive wine, completely liberated from the acrid fumes of alcohol and the harsh aftertaste of the cheaper stuff. But that is neither here, nor fucking there. What is more pertinent is the fact that between the four of us, we had inhaled the entire bottle within 25 minutes, before the two pizzas were even finished cooking.

A bad sign.

Over dinner, we cracked open a bottle of Sémillon, and then another. The volume got louder. Alex and I got increasingly foul-mouthed and loquacious. Jess got very red in the cheeks and giggled at everything – from actual jokes, to Alex and my drunken soliloquies, to the patterns on the couch cushions.

Ryan, who had paired his glasses of wine with more bourbon whiskey, got a dull glassy look in his eyes, and a shape to his mouth like he had just sucked on a lemon. He mostly resided in silence as he got progressively fucked up. We started toying with the EMF meter, attacking it alternately with the TV remote and the dildo before we got bored. For the record, the dildo belonged to no one in particular.

It had been purchased for the expedition. Employing a used one just seemed weird.

After that, we started reading passages of the Simon Necronomicon punctuating the incantations with calling the Devil a cunt and basically saying “come at me bro.” The Necronomicon proved to be something of a disappointment, with a surprising dearth of actual demonic phrases in ancient languages in the book. And the writing was such unbelievable 1970s San Francisco Satanist dreck, produced by an obvious huckster, that we soon lost patience with it.

By the time we cracked open the third bottle of Sémillon, the remains of the second pizza had been entirely forgotten, meaning that we were drinking on half-empty stomachs. Another bad sign.

Somewhere in the chaos of the third bottle of Sémillon, Jess stopped drinking for the evening. Evincing a sort of instinctual modesty and good sense. As I said in the introduction, total wifey material.

At this point in the evening, I’d say that each of us had consumed around 6 to 8 standard drinks, with Ryan’s total being considerably higher due to his slurping down of bourbon. From that point forward, the exact amount consumed becomes a little blurry. I monopolized a fourth bottle of Sémillon all to myself.

Alex began drinking Southern Comfort, a New Orleans substance that people either love or hate, which is somewhere between a whiskey and a sweet liqueur. Initially, she added ice to it, though I noticed as the evening advanced, she ceased to bother and just dumped it in her glass al dente, completely undiluted. Jess, bless her heart, seemed to alternate between ginger beer, water, and giggling.

Ryan hopped from whiskey, to rum, to straight vodka, to wine, to beer, and back again. In a nutshell, he got absolutely shitfaced very early in the night. Chalk that up to the folly of youth.

It was at this point in the evening that the quote-unquote “ghost abuse” began. There were two ground rules which all of us (mostly) obeyed. No one could go off alone in the dark (except when time came to pass out) since being alone in the dark is more likely to trigger paranoia and delusions of ghostly occurrences, without another person being there to corroborate things. The second ground rule was we were forbidden from trying to scare each other, since that would place our senses on ultra-high alert, again risking some delusions of other-worldly activity.

The second rule required extra enforcement in Ryan’s case, who tried to make Alex jump by creeping up behind her. But after she threatened to make him sleep outside, he desisted. Our aggressions were to be entirely focused on the ghosts.

We fired up the spirit box. We all were eager to contact the ghost of The Hunter, whom we called the “Bogan Bill Cosby” and a “Discount Ted Bundy”. Alex, as is her drunken fashion with the ghosts of sex predators, began to make countless references to the likely diminutive size of The Hunter’s penis. She then went out to the makeshift abattoir in the backyard and placed the pink dildo inside it so he could, quote, “Go fuck himself.”

The spirit box meanwhile yielded nothing but static, though I think for a few milliseconds we picked up a local rock station. We also cracked open a tropical beer and placed it next to an empty chair in case the Old Soldier wanted to join us. Nobody else was drinking it. When that did not seem to elicit a supernatural response, Ryan went over, snorted disgustingly and spat in it.

Still nothing. Quelle surprise.

For the Twins, Alex busted out her laptop and put on a children’s cartoon on Youtube for their entertainment, and when that failed, she navigated over to Pornhub, found a pornographic video involving adult twins having their mouths used in unhygienic ways, so the ghostly Twins could, quote, “see what they had missed out on.” I am ashamed to say we had porno playing in the background for a rather unseemly length of time over the course of the evening. I think it was mostly because Alex thought it was hilarious.

She eventually went and placed the laptop on the bed of the second bedroom, where the Twins allegedly slept. Jess declared that she thought this was going a little too far, since the ghosts were little kids. Alex snorted and pointed out that they were actually over a century old and, quote, “Also, ghosts don’t exist, so fuck it.”

We then sat down at the Ouija Board and started asking questions to thin air. Once it became clear that Ryan (and to a lesser extent Jess) couldn’t be trusted to not move the cursor deliberately or involuntarily, Alex and I operated the thing as a duo, intent on keeping the thing stalk-still. We sat for an extraordinarily long time without the cursor moving at all.

Then the cursor started drifting slowly across the board, spelling out gibberish. Numerous studies have been conducted that found the drifting of the cursor, even when you are making a concerted attempt not to play into the supernatural nonsense, is the result of involuntary muscle movements and spasms, particularly after you have laid hands on the thing for a long time, and your subconscious generating thoughts and responses to questions even when your conscious mind might be resistant to it.

At some point during the Ouija Board experiment, the door to the toilet slammed shut, making us all jump out of our skin. We went over and scanned the thing with both the EMF meter, the Geiger counter, and the infrared camera, but found nothing above the baseline. Frustrated at this, Alex, Ryan, and I all went into the second bedroom and smoked Ryan’s cigarettes, blowing the smoke at the bed, in order to provoke the Burnt Man. It generated no effect other than to momentarily relax the tension headache I was already getting, and accelerate my heartrate which was already elevated from alcohol abuse.

It was beginning to get late in the evening (at least in terms of our flagging consciousnesses) when Ryan started to roll around on the carpet in the sitting room, drunkenly shouting in slurred cadences, that, quote, “the house was angry and the house needed blood.” Ryan claims to have no memory of doing this, which is plausible given how utterly plastered he was. Yet the occurrence was odd. There are three possible explanations.

One, Ryan was fucking with us. Two, Ryan was reacting adversely to the less-than-legal substances we suspect he was taking, in addition to a boatload of alcohol. Three, he was possessed by a demon, who demanded blood in a form human sacrifice, but apparently was one of those cowardly demons, since it stopped demanding blood once we told Ryan to shut the fuck up.

Somewhere around 1 am, I passed out on the couch of the sitting room. I woke up at 4 am by Alex shaking me awake. She told me that Jess had a nightmare about the Hunter breaking into her bedroom via the window, and was a little freaked out. Initially, Jess said she wanted to sleep in the car, but Alex dissuaded her and convinced her to share the bed in her quote-unquote “ghost-free” room.

Alex and I went to the Hunter’s room and could find no remarkable reading on either the EMF meter or the Geiger counter. We did, however, see a small heat signature on the wood floor near the door. At this point, I went to the toilet, dry-heaved, and then went to my bedroom, and flung myself under the covers, still wearing my clothes. I did not fall back to sleep, but lay there in semi-conscious, heart-palpitating agony for a few hours, scrolling through Twitter and Youtube on my phone.

Haunted by a Hangover

I emerged from my bedroom at around 7 am. I was the only one up. I discovered the bottle of Southern Comfort had fallen to the floor at some point during the night, pouring out all its contents.

I drank a couple of glasses of water, dry-heaved again, and went back to bed. I spoke to a couple friends via Instagram DM. A few hours later, at around 10 am, I heard other people stirring around the house.

I got up, unwilling to change out of last night’s clothes, and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, which proved difficult, given how sensitive the wine had made them the night before. I had functionally just eaten a bowl of sugar. I made myself a cup of tea and bummed another one or Ryan’s cigarettes, which made me feel better for a few minutes, despite the fact those things would only accelerate my heart rate.

I then curled up in the fetal position on the couch and speculated quietly about how long it would take an ambulance to get there if I started to die.

At 1pm, I dry heaved for a third and final time before I began to feel better. The agony phase had passed. After that, I was just tired. As for the others, Ryan took the strategy of making himself a couple of Bloody Marys with copious amounts of vodka, in the proverbial “hair-of-the-dog” treatment.

He vomited it all up early in the afternoon and then spent the rest of the day smoking and lying in bed. Again, the Burnt Man did not make an appearance. Ryan could not prevail on the rest of us to join him in drinking again. But I did at one point make myself a Virgin Bloody Mary, heavy on the tabasco and Wooster sauce, since I find that spice is very comforting in a hangover.

Alex was doggedly determined to eat something, but we had neglected to get breakfast food the day before, so she munched on the leftover pizza. She also drank three or four cups of coffee. She too vomited all that stuff up in the early afternoon.

But all told she was in better shape than Ryan. Jess and I could not be coaxed to consume any solid food until dinner time, when we began picking through the various hangover remedies. Jess had drunk the least of us and it showed.

She even went out for a walk around teatime to clear her head. I did not join her, as I felt in my hangover-induced anxiety, that I would drop dead of a heart attack. When it got dark, I went to my bedroom, closed the door, and fell asleep listening to Youtube videos at low volume so as not to disturb the others.

I woke up every few hours, experiencing lucid dreams about travelling in airports and train stations, and enduring a gross, sweaty, listless sleep. Thus passed the hangover day. There were no ghostly occurrences of any sort whatsoever.

Though ultimately Alex and Jess switched bedrooms.

The Investigation

Alex woke me up early Sunday morning, saying she been to the service station, and had made everybody bacon and eggs. Indeed, I could smell the blessed fragrance issuing from the kitchen. Alex sternly reminded me, quote, “Don’t sleep all day, we’ve got some science shit to do.”

“Fuck science,” I replied groggily. I was now, at the age of 36, at the point where hangovers don’t last one day, but two. My heart rate still had not returned to normal and I still felt like someone had bludgeoned my brain out of my skull with a brick and duct taped it to a telephone pole.

Alex replied, “You don’t fuck science, mate, science fucks you,” which might have impressed me more for its wittiness, if I hadn’t heard her use the line before. Still, top marks as far as one-liners go. Instead I grumbled and staggered out into the kitchen to guzzle down some scrambled eggs and bacon, with a healthy dose of tea (which my Aussie acquaintances did not hesitate to give me shit for drinking).

After a slow start to the morning, Alex and I got to work investigating what little phenomena had occurred two nights before. And there I will have to apologise, dear listener, since the majority of ghost occurrences we have so far discussed are from Fiona’s stories about other guests. The odds were always going to be low that we experienced anything spooky ourselves.

As it was, it came out that the bottle of Southern Comfort had fallen on the floor, not because of the Old Soldier, but because Ryan had thought it would be funny to smash it on the ground to freak us out. Unfortunately, the bottle was so thick that it did not smash easily, so Ryan just settled for dumping its contents on the floor of the kitchen and leaving it at that. After that story came out, Alex was annoyed since she was the one who had cleaned it up.

Meanwhile, when it came to the door of the toilet slamming shut while we played with the Ouija Board, it didn’t take long for us to figure out that it was the result of the open window, and the air pressure acting on the condensed space of the small room. While the room was reasonably long from the door to the shitter at the back wall, it was exceedingly narrow. That seemed like a much more plausible explanation than one of the ghosts wanting some privacy while they splattered the bowl with some translucent turds.

Jess’s nightmare had arisen solely in her subconscious, and she did not experience any sort of delusion that the Hunter was actually in her bedroom once she had woken up. She was a little freaked out at the time, but by Sunday had completely calmed down and was laughing about it. Which left the heat signature we found on the floor by the door.

Using the infrared camera again, Alex and I noticed the heat signature was no longer there. After a frustrating 45 minutes trying to come up with an explanation for it, Ryan hopped in the shower. It was then we realised that the heat signature on the floor was coming from the pipes connecting the hot water cistern outside the cabin to the bathroom across the hall from Jess/The Hunter’s room.

Sure enough, using the infrared camera again while Ryan was in the shower, the heat signature had returned. And that was our somewhat anti-climactic ghost investigation. Yet if you are exploding ghost myths, I suppose every investigation is going to be somewhat anti-climactic.

That afternoon, we all went on a winery tour, and a merry time was had by all. I did notice, however, that our consumption of wine during and after the tour was very modest indeed. Even with Ryan.

Some harrowing experiences take time to fade into memory before we can comfortably repeat our mistakes again.

Monkeys in Shoes 2: Electric Boogaloo

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures. It’s how we went from stone-tools to skyscrapers in the blink of an evolutionary eye. We are also highly instinctual creatures, afraid of imagined threats in the dark.

Combine those impulses with a certain wishful thinking about the existence of an afterlife, and hundreds of generations of folklore and, voila, ghosts. And I can sympathize with the appeal of wanting something to exist beyond the grave. Another instinct of ours is to be terrified and repulsed by the eventual disappearance of our consciousness, even though our bodies will simply be recycled back into the Earth, and the atoms that once constituted us will never disappear from the Universe for trillions of years.

If we didn’t revolt against the idea of our consciousness disappearing, our fear of death, we would have long since gone extinct as a species. But take comfort in the fact that fear is only a temporary sensation, before we spend the rest of eternity under anesthesia. Yet if someone were to offer me immortality by uploading my consciousness to a computer, or reverse the aging process via CRISPR gene editing, you can bet the animal in me would want to bloody-well take it.

In the meantime, our inclination to believe that ghostly apparitions do indeed go bump in the night will always lurk in a tiny corner of our primate brains. Nevertheless, no credible scientific study has ever revealed even a whisper of such things actually existing on the electromagnetic spectrum. All the supposed quote-unquote “proof” of ghosts is either anecdotal, hearsay, easily debunkable pseudo-science, or non-falsifiable claptrap. And, furthermore, remember that what is asserted without solid evidence, can be dismissed without solid evidence.

Sweet dreams! Sleep tight!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the purpose of the alcohol in the Drunken Ghost Hunters’ investigations?

The purpose of the alcohol is to antagonize the apparitions. The ghosts, according to ghost theorists, react to the presence of humans, and the alcohol is used to behave like utter assholes in the hopes of eliciting the most virulent and robust metaphysical response.

What is the methodology of Drunken Ghost Hunters?

The methodology involves getting drunk, vomiting, sobering up, investigating the phenomena observed while drunk, and then getting drunk again to write the script. The process is repeated with censorship of more lascivious parts before sending it off.

Who are the main characters in Drunken Ghost Hunters 2?

The main characters are David, a PhD holder with expertise in human history and evolutionary biology, Alexandra, a PhD holder specializing in ecology and human psychology, Jess, a primary school teacher, and Ryan, a bartender attending vocational college.

What equipment did the Drunken Ghost Hunters bring to the haunted cabin?

They brought an EMF Meter, a spirit box, an infrared camera, a thermometer, motion sensors, a Geiger counter, a Ouija Board, and a Simon Necronomicon. They also brought various alcoholic beverages and hangover remedies.

What is the history of the Hunter Valley?

The Hunter Valley was inhabited by aboriginal peoples for thousands of years before the British arrived. The British established a penal colony and developed the area for wine production. The valley has a rich history of ghost stories involving aboriginal spirits, bushrangers, and other tragic events.

What are the six residents of the haunted cabin?

The six residents are two twin girls, the burnt man, the hunter, the convict, and the old soldier. The cabin is also said to be haunted by the spirits of aboriginal warriors who were slaughtered by a British militia.

What happened during the first night at the haunted cabin?

The group got extremely drunk, toyed with various ghost-hunting equipment, and engaged in ghost abuse. They experienced no significant paranormal activity, but Jess had a nightmare about the Hunter breaking into her room.

What was the outcome of the ghost investigation?

The investigation revealed that the phenomena experienced were due to natural causes. The heat signature was from hot water pipes, the toilet door slamming was due to air pressure, and Jess’s nightmare was a product of her subconscious.

What is the conclusion of the Drunken Ghost Hunters about ghosts?

The Drunken Ghost Hunters conclude that there is no credible scientific evidence to support the existence of ghosts. They believe that ghost stories are a result of human instincts and folklore.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Drunken Ghost Hunters 2 - Electric Boogaloo
• Hero image source by Q_Station+whales.jpg: me derivative work: Regi51 (talk) / openverse, by.