The York Ghost Hunt: a mockery of a ghost tour?

The York Ghost Hunt is just one of several ghosts tours that ply their trade up down the city's nighttime streets and alleyways. I stumbled across it during the day, noticing the guide drumming up business around the evening's starting point, the wonderfully named street, The Shambles. Little did I know there were so many competing tours in town or that the one I was to take had had been attached in the local paper for "making a total mockery out of a beautiful and well established style of walk”. This war between competing ghost tours of York seemed to revolve around 'my' ghost hunt accepting a hen night carrying a giant inflatable phallus on the tour. Having spent a few days in York, I can see how that could happen. 

Come the appointed hour, our guide arrived in vintage undertakers garb and took cash from the large crowd that had gathered. Standing on a small set of steps, he spelt out what the tour would be in his slow, precise delivery. It became immediately clear that this tour was not going to chill or haunt, it was going to be played for laughs. He dragged in a Canadian volunteer to play the fall guy and we were off.

The complaint in the local paper, that this tour "makes a mockery" of ghost tours is more or less true, but this is clearly done by design. In a sense, this isn't really a ghost tour at all, it is a comedy show that uses the form of the ghost tour but, in another way, he did manage to tell the story of some of York's most famous haunted sites so it remains, first and foremost, a ghost tour. Somehow, ghost tours have something inherently ridiculous about them and for them to receive this treatment is not so shocking. If this were a tour of a war memorial it would be a different story: people would, ironically, be up in arms.

Although billed as a 'ghost hunt' there was no sense of this search taking place in the present tense. We were following a tour that felt like it had been given a great many times before and honed to extract the most laughs. Here it reminded me of Bizarre Bath, another popular comedy tour in an historic British city. I would have quite liked to have gone on a genuine open-ended hunt on which we didn't know where we would finish and might just as likely find ourselves in a KFC as a graveyard. But no, no self-respecting ghost would be seen dead in a fast food outlet. We instead followed a spectral topography: a 15th century townhouse, the steps of the famous York Minster and a medieval alleyway. One of the exciting things about history is its spatial anarchy: Richard III's body was found in a municipal car-park in Leicester. Here, however, everything went to support an idea of the city and its sites that was essentially touristic in origin. That should be no surprise since this is a show for tourists.

With the light now failing, it became difficult to capture any more pictures of the tour. There is however a clip on Youtube that gives a good flavour of the York Ghost Hunt.

We ended the tour with the story of a gruesome child murderer after which the crowd drifted off in all directions, none the wiser but entertained for an hour or so. The jokes were often crude but never became obscene, this remained a family event. To return the question of whether of not it is appropriate to parody a ghost tour, I have to conclude that it is. Most ghost tours already include some self-conscious comedy because a completely serious ghost hunt would probably come over as cranky. Where this tour differs from the others is that it looks at ghost tours primarily as content to be ridiculed, and the form as a very handy hook upon which to hang the show and sell it to a mass audience. This formula is portable in space and genre and it might even be a good a thing to have one or two jokers in the pack, like this, in order to keep the more conventional tours on their toes. I'd caution against the idea of a 'good old days' when tours played by the rules; formats evolve and have to stay relevant to the public, who vote with their feet. I'd be perfectly happy if all the city's comedians decided to leave the bars and clubs and make their shows on the street instead. That is not likely to happen and this will remain a speciality dish that still leaves more than enough space for serious tours, if such a thing still exists and is not itself a phantom.

The Bizarre Bath Comedy Walk

In complete contrast to the Bath Abbey audio tour, which I took in the afternoon, was the Bizarre Bath Comedy Walk that began at 8PM outside a pub in the city centre.

Our host for the evening, Noel, sprung up seemingly from nowhere and after a few brief jokes, explained that this wasn't going to be a history walk and took the money for the tickets. There must have been a good forty odd of us, so it took a little time to hand out the coloured wrist bands but the process was transparent and efficient so we hung with it. 

He had a confident way to work the crowd and figure out where we were from. Wherever people said they came from he had a caricature about them to offer in reply; the Dutch were pot smokers with funny accents while the Kiwis just a little bit slow, the Americans knew nothing about geography and were on the big side, which indeed those present were. It was not the most politically correct of intros, but comedy rarely is, and I got the feeling it was all done for laughs rather than with any malice. Playing to an international crowd it had to be pretty broad and I got the sense he knew his public and pitched it well. He had one or two props with him, a crate that he stood on, which proved essential as he is no basketball player, a small backpack and two helium balloons. This was a comedy routine that was well practiced and everything he took with him had a purpose.

The walk is made up of different elements: magic show, comedy and challenges for a member of the audience to complete. What I thought was very smart about it was that these different elements could all form part of a stage show but had instead be adapted into a walk around the city centre. Whereas a comedian working in a club would probably be under pressure to constantly develop new material, by performing his act as a walk, principally, though not exclusively, for tourists, he was instead able to go deeper into the same material. I had the feeling this walk had been gradually added to, refined and the relationship it had to the locations deepened over time. What's more, because it is an interactive, outdoor show it remained a bit out of control and he still has to ad lib from time to time. In this way the act didn't feel stale in the way it might if it were the same stage show performed for several years.

Here we were treated to a very nice parody of a history guide who doesn't know the first thing about history. Having seen one or two guides bluffing their way through tours before, this was especially amusing for me.

We had a bit of fun following a blindfolded Noel in search of ley lines. This, like pretty much the whole show, was eccentric stuff that didn't really tell us anything very directly about the city of Bath, but it did show how the city could be used by someone in search of gags. To my mind that does finally tell us something about the city, about how it functions and how a professional street entertainer has enough flow of public to make it worthwhile doing this routine every night. You wouldn't find this in my city of Portsmouth: he'd make no money and get into problems with local yobs and jobsworth officials. 

There was a deliberate and pleasing ambiguity whether some of the things that we encountered were deliberate or accidental. Without giving away what these were, this grey zone is something that can only be achieved with acting, being well prepared and being able to ad lib so that everything can be brought back into the frame of the show. What's more, he parodied this quality of being surprised at a later point in the walk too, and because we had already bought into the game this parody of the rules also worked and kept the show moving forward.

The basic format of the walk was that the group walked a short distance, stopped and then at each spot he did something that got a laugh. Sometimes this involved complicated routines but other times it relied upon simple observations such as a joke about an empty events board. This all flowed very naturally but, I had to think about it and take things one step back and imagine the process of making a walk like this. It must have required looking at every banal thing in the city centre, re-imagining it and looking for its comic potential. That in itself would be a tour worth taking.

He made a number of gags by tempting them with a cash prize. It was funny to watch how people think they might be in with a chance of winning something when he clearly held the winning hand every time. Such is the power of money and he knew how to play the game well, pulling people in, playing with them then turning it all into a big joke.

Compared to the historic tours I have taken so far, the Bizarre Bath route was quite different. Although he stayed in the city centre, he used it in a different way and thus revealed an alternative side of it. He was not looking for historic buildings to talk about but was instead looking for places he could gather a crowd easily, places that didn't involve crossing too many roads and locations which serviced specific gags, such as this walkway down by the river. 

As it went on it became more and more a magic show which here features an escapology routine. Something that you can notice is just how colour co-ordinated Bizarre Bath is with it's insistence on purple. What's more, scattered around Bath city centre are a number of bikes bearing adverts for the walk, too. I've noticed how parked bikes have become a site for adverts in a number of cities, this being an effective way to circumvent the larger companies that control the poster sites. By choosing a relatively unusual colour and pushing it for all its worth in a fairly unsaturated environment, it has the local effect of becoming Bizarre Bath Purple, as nobody else is using this colour.  

One thing that surprised me was that there was an 'invisible' assistant who did some work behind the scenes, such as running out to clear up after the group had moved on. I'm a big believer in the old adage of "if you can't hide it spotlight it" and I felt that this was one of the very few awkward moments of the walk when I saw something I shouldn't have. Seeing as the rest of the show was so immediate and Noel, the guide, could clearly talk his way out of an ISIS hostage situation, I found this unnecessary, though it may be that there are some technical details that need ironing out and no solution is entirely elegant. This is, however, a very minor point, and one I was deliberately looking for. Most of the group missed it as they were already in tow on their way to the final destination and in any case, it didn't seriously detract from the fact that Bizarre Bath was a very enjoyable couple of hours of nonsense played out on the streets, which, while done for laughs, does up the game for all the more straight guides too.