At one point in the last year or so I was such a notorious, scary ghost researcher, that established research organisations could only share my writing on social media if they used a disclaimer under it.
What, you might ask, would such a disclaimer say? Be careful if you read this, this woman delivers words in such a way that you’ll question your life? Be afeared all who enter here, for thy socks shall be removed from thy feet with force?
Nah. It was more like… please don’t bully this woman just because you don’t like her ideas.
No really, look.
‘Please feel free to comment on the article, but any containing attacks on the author will be deleted.’
It came after months and months of links to my writing posted on the Facebook page for the Society for Psychical Research attracting scorn and anger from some men.
Yes, men. Shocking, right? Bet you did not see that coming? Even those of you who are psychically inclined, I’d wager.
And the real kicker is that I know some of those very men will likely be reading this post right now, because a woman who is openly sceptical of the paranormal ideas which form the foundation of their own worldview should frankly be monitored.
An opinionated woman is one thing. An opinionated woman who questions what you believe to be true, even though she isn’t writing about you personally because she doesn’t know you? May as well burn her or something. Or shake a fist. I dunno what the rules are.
The admin of the SPR social media accounts were trying to solve the issue. It had gone on for a while, I’d turned the other cheek (very atheist of me), but it got to a point where I had to get in touch with them and point out it had started to cross the line, and they took action, to their credit. But only on that occasion. And from then on, if they posted anything I wrote, it came with a disclaimer.
Please feel free to comment on the article, but any containing attacks on the author will be deleted.
I knew why the disclaimer was there, the admin did too, and so did the handful of men who took issue with my existence, but did everyone else see a post with a disclaimer underneath it and think ‘this is a controversial writer’? I think they might have, and that’s alarming because, mate, I write about ghosts and I don’t think that’s very controversial actually…
The post in the screenshot above was me writing about how a poltergeist case can’t be called one of the best documented, if the evidence is never shared publicly, and that many research disciplines deal with anonymisation so they can publish their findings, so that’s not really a reason to not share.
Twenty Years of the South Shields Poltergeist
The South Shields Poltergeist, first reported in December 2005, has been called “one of the most violent outbreaks in British poltergeist history” and even “one of the best attested cases of a poltergeist outbreak on record.” In the latest Fortean Times (FT465), investigator Darren Ritson reviews the events, the impact on those involved, and the critici…
What was I thinking? Who did I think I was? What was an organisation as respected as the SPR doing sharing the work of a *hiss* materialist? *hiss*
Every time I published something on my blog and I received a notification that it had been shared on Facebook by the SPR, I braced myself for what was about to happen.
As someone who writes about paranormal research and genuinely cares about being a good researcher, being shared by a major organisation in the field should have felt affirming.
And it did! But then the notifications became a warning that hostile men were probably about to discuss whether I had any right to be there, and there are only so many times you can ignore the hatred before it starts to bother you.
Before it makes you question whether you have a place in the paranormal research field because you don’t conform to some invisible (ha) standard. You can have your work valued enough for it to be shared only for your presence to be questioned in that same space, and that’s volleyball for your brain.
But I don’t have to worry about that anymore because the SPR just stopped sharing my writing. I don’t think they banned those abusive men, though, but they certainly stopped promoting the writing of a woman with whom those men disagreed.
Nice one!
And it sucked, actually. I can pretend to be indifferent to what happened, but when the SPR posted a link to a piece I had written, I would see the difference in traffic to my blog. My writing would reach new audiences who may not agree with my worldview but would read what I had to say.
And this helped me, because when you have people reading your writing who don’t agree with you, and they have well formed arguments as to why, you learn things as a writer and researcher. It keeps you open-minded and it holds you to account for sloppy conclusions and assumptions.
If all I ever do is write for people who agree with me, I’m not going to actually learn very much.
So when the SPR gave in (and yes, that’s what they did, they gave in) to the people who would bitch, moan, and bully in their comments when they shared my writing, in that moment they failed to uphold the very reason they exist, which, according to their website, is to ‘foster understanding through research and education’.
And, well, isn’t that a shame?
The Ghost Geek is a blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.
Wow.
I'm not surprised, but always disappointed when I read of this kind of stupidity, and there's far too much of it going around.
I don't know whether it's the alienating effects of social media, the keyboard warrior aspect, or the "I disagree so you must be totally shit" mentality that's the worst driver. The combination of all three is a ridiculously strong mix.
I can totally understand why you're not so interested in writing for these idiots!