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For paranormal researcher and ghost tour guide Alison Oborn, it all goes back to the dark.
“The age-old fear of the dark is deep in all of us,” she told nine.com.au.
“We all have that deep-down interest in what happens after death.”
She’s been a paranormal researcher since 1988, the same year she moved to Australia with her husband, but her own acquaintance with hauntings goes back much further.
Oborn said she lived in a haunted house growing up in England – not some grand gothic mansion, but “your everyday terrace house”.
“It terrified us,” she said.
“I was still sleeping with the lights on until met my husband in my mid-20s.”
Oborn admitted that these childhood experiences meant she was a “moth to the flame” when she started to undertake paranormal research as an adult.
“I was always happy to keep a rational head,” she said.
“I was looking for a rational explanation for what happened, but – haven’t found it yet.”
What she did find was a passion and a career, one which she said is nothing like how it’s portrayed in films or on “ghost hunter” TV shows.
“Wherever you go there’s people, you’ll find hauntings,” she said.
But the practice of declaring one building or another “the most haunted” is generally just “good marketing”.
“If something is haunted, it’s haunted,” she said.
“Saying something’s more haunted than somewhere else – how do you quantify that?”
And while her youthful fear has “mostly” transmuted into excitement, that “age-old” fear can still rear up
She said she had just returned from a trip to the US with a friend, where they had rented some famously haunted places to spend some time there.
“There were definitely moments there, when we were back-to-back, when we were holding on to each other,” she said.
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”That fear of the dark, it’s just built into people.”
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Her line of work and her field of research being what they are, Oborn naturally has a familiarity with skeptics – and it’s an attitude she encourages, noting she’s been looking for an “explanation” for ghosts for 30 years or more.
But instant dismissal, she said, is less easy to justify.
“I’m in these places seven days a week, basically,” she said.
“If you’re there every day, and there’s activity to be seen, you’ll see it.”
A ghost tour guide since 2004, she said all manner of people came along, and there was “no rhyme or reason” to who – if anybody – would end up having a paranormal encounter.
“We used to take bets, looking around at the group,” she said.
“We’ve seen skeptics spend the tour trying to justify or work out why something has happened to them, but they still leave not knowing.”
And then, she said, the “screaming young girls” who might seem primed for the paranormal, could go an entire tour without bumping into something in the dark.
“Science depends on an experiment being repeatable,” Oborn said.
“The paranormal is not repeatable. Believe me, I’ve been trying for 30 years.”
Ghost stories go back to the beginning of humanity, she said, when people would sit around campfires and tell stories in the dark.
They span cultures, have outlasted civilisations, and find new forms in every age.
In a scientific age, of quantum physics finding new ways to understand the universe, Oborn said it’s always possible an elusive explanation for hauntings will be found.
“But do we really want science to explain it all? Don’t we love the mystery, a little bit?” she said.
“There’s definitely something going on.”