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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.

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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, 2014 at 12:06

2 Answers 2

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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

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    You've forgotten to mention a sneeze of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which is clearly the most probable cause. Aug 1, 2014 at 4:57
  • @belisarius shhhh don't tell anyone
    – nico
    Aug 1, 2014 at 6:20
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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?

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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, 2014 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, 2014 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, 2014 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, 2014 at 6:04
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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. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor).
    – BaGi
    Jul 31, 2014 at 9:23

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