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from various sources around the internet

Daily Mail

Is this theatre haunted? CCTV footage captures the spooky moment a chair moves all on its own... hours after a medium's show

Get ready to feel a ghostly shiver down your spine. This is the haunting moment a chair was caught on CCTV apparently moving on its own in a closed theatre hours after a psychic finished his show. It was recorded at Brookside Theatre in Romford, Essex, at around 4am on Sunday.

Metro

Spooky CCTV footage captures ‘ghost’ at theatre

Spooky CCTV footage has emerged from an Essex theatre that appears to show a chair moving all on its own – just hours after a psychic medium took to the stage.

In the clip, recorded on security cameras at the Brookside Theatre in Romford on Sunday morning, a chair moves backwards unaided and a table appears to get pulled as orbs of light float across the room.

Mirror

Is this a ghost at theatre? Spooky CCTV footage shows chair MOVING all on its own

This spooky video of ghostly goings on was recorded inside a closed theatre after a psychic medium's show.

In the CCTV footage, a chair mysteriously moves back unaided and unexplained beams of light float across the room.

It was recorded at Brookside Theatre in Romford, Essex, on Sunday.

Medium Roy Roberts, who performed at the theatre the previous night, believes the video could prove there's a resident ghost.

Duralumin
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    Personally, i believe it's a fake, but a friend asked and I wasn't able to find anything about it. So I throw the bone to you fellow skeptics. – Duralumin Jul 30 '14 at 12:06

2 Answers2

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The video is not definitive evidence of the presence of a ghost. We do not have definitive evidence of the contrary either, unless we could find someone who was present in the room at the time and that, say, checked for the presence of a thread used for pulling the chair.

However, we can rely on experience to tell us the most likely solution to the problem.

We can say with an extremely high degree of confidence that chairs (and inanimate objects in general) do not move by themselves, because we witnessed endless times the event of a chair/object not moving.

On rare occasions some of us may have witnessed an episode of a chair seemingly moving by itself, but we may have found that it was due to an earthquake, or to our neighbour drilling holes in the wall.

Also, the great majority of us have never witnessed the appearance of a ghost, and those who believe they have, have not been able to give definitive proof that they effectively did see a ghost. In a good many occasions, proof of the contrary can instead be found, for instance sleep paralysis is sometimes associated to hallucinatory experiences (1 and 2).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in this case there is hardly any evidence at all provided to prove that a ghost is involved. We should go with the other, extremely more likely hypothesis: the video is a trick used to give some cheap publicity to the medium.

Note that these are not the only possible hypotheses. The chair may as well had been moved because of an extradimensional being, a living human wearing a cloaking device, an earthquake, wind, an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire, God, the neighbour drilling holes in the wall, someone listening to very very loud music, and so on. Many of these are even more unlikely than the ghost hypothesis, therefore we discard them.

PS: here is definitive proof that my buddy can fly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWMB279ZfP0

nico
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To your question "Is this video about a moving chair in Essex theatre truly a “direct proof of the paranormal”?

Certainly not. A video on YouTube proves absolutely nothing at all.

To your question "is it explainable by some more natural phenomena"?

Certainly. Video editing tools for example. Or even a simple wire could do the job perfectly on a video with a quality this bad. Why would you assume that for something which is this simple to explain, there is even a small chance that the "supernatural" or the "paranormal" is at work?

BaGi
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    And I perfectly agree. In the title I tried to repeat the same claim made by the medium involved. Obviously i think that a video doesn't prove anything, but i was hoping that someone was able to find something more substantial. – Duralumin Jul 30 '14 at 14:47
  • It also seems strange that this "proof" is found by a stage psychic who presumably is getting much desired press attention now and is probably sky-rocketing in publicity. – Jonathan Jul 30 '14 at 16:28
  • @Duralumin "but i was hoping that someone was able to find something more substantial." Why is it that hard evidence is expected to debunk a claim that rests on the flimsiest evidence? It should be the other way around I feel. – hdhondt Jul 30 '14 at 23:47
  • @hdhondt: Totally agree. If you need evidence for everything that is not true we have a lot of work to do. Everything from gnomes to the toothfairy would need to be proven to be not existing. – BaGi Jul 31 '14 at 06:04
  • Because it is evidence of a sort, and it's a public claim.Isn't that the purpose of Skeptics website? I can easily dismiss the video as "i believe there must be some other explanation". But if someone watches the video and thinks it may be true, and comes here, the only answer he's going to see is a generic answer saying that a video proves nothing. I think i could dismiss half of the questions in Skeptics with "xxx proves nothing". I could actually dismiss the whole concept of the Skeptics website, saying that a notable claim is simply an argumentum ad populum so it proves nothing. – Duralumin Jul 31 '14 at 08:11
  • @BaGi because you start from the assumption that it's not true. As I do. We can on the question, and change it to "is this video fake". The fact remain that a friend asked if the video was true, and if i can only answer "the video is fake because ghosts don't exist" that's not a very good answer. – Duralumin Jul 31 '14 at 08:18
  • "Because you start from the assumption that it's not true". Of course! Did you know I can fly? Here is a blank piece of paper that proves it. Now you prove me wrong. – BaGi Jul 31 '14 at 08:51
  • "Because it is evidence of a sort" It is not at all. I mean: a black and white video of the blurriest kind showing a moving chair? Come on, any 10 year old kid can make a video like this that is far more credible. If you see a magician on stage taking a pigeon out of a hat, do you need prove that he does not have supernatural powers while the real explanation is so self-evident? – BaGi Jul 31 '14 at 09:03
  • That's a bit different.Actually, it's just mocking without even the pretense of an argument.We can move this to meta, but in this with you writing that you can fly, you're not even attempting at providing evidence, you're just making an assertion. If you would provide a video of you flying, I could find the flaw in your evidence, like finding out that the video is fake.The question is not if *I* need to be proved that ghost don't exist. I posted links of newspaper and there are people thinking that the video is legit. So it's a notable claim.You need to convince people that the video is fake. – Duralumin Jul 31 '14 at 09:12
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    I understand your reasoning. But my point is exactly that I ***don't*** need to convince people that this is fake. If you do that you will have to do that a million times over and over again. What we ***do*** need to convince people of is that they need to change the way they think. Why do people assume very unlikely things which have always been proven wrong rather than the most evident explanation since mankind? What we need to convince people of is to learn to use Ockham's razor. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor). – BaGi Jul 31 '14 at 09:23
  • btw, here is a YT video proving that I can fly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUlsIX9q-To – BaGi Jul 31 '14 at 09:29
  • @Duralumin - I think the last paragraph of the answer, which provides possible ways to fake it (video editing or a wire), should be sufficient as counter-proof. It could be made more explicit, in the sense of "There are perfectly rational explanations which could produce this, such as..." but since there *are* ways to fake it, that should be sufficient to counter a video like this. – Bobson Jul 31 '14 at 14:35
  • @Bobson by your reasoning, Skeptics shouldn't ever accept a claim made with a video, as there are always ways to fake it. And neither answers with a video. I would move this to meta, if it wasn't that both problems are already discussed in meta. http://meta.skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2513/is-is-this-video-staged-scientific-skepticism ( ...a bunch of people do believe the video is true, so it's certainly on-topic here - Sklivvz). I'm then convinced the claim is on topic for the website, the question is if the answer is. But I'm altering the title of the claim – Duralumin Jul 31 '14 at 14:55
  • @Duralumin - I didn't say that. I said that *listing* ways to fake it is how such a video can be answered. We very much should accept questions about it. nico's answer below is ideal - better than this one, since it's much more explicit about alternative explanations. – Bobson Jul 31 '14 at 17:12