After being through a couple of very active experiences at Geelong Gaol in the past, I was excited about spending three hours there last night, as gifted from a friend. Mind you, I would not have paid for this tour for personal reasons, but that is another story and this investigation was gifted to me as a surprise.
Unfortunately it was rather disappointing to say the least. We had a tour guide who was very ordinary; who constantly tried to validate the tour by talking about her personal experiences or the hear say experiences of others. Although this at times can add to the ambience of an investigation, in this circumstance it was off putting and patronizing, mainly because NOTHING was happening. To constantly hear, "this happened in this room, and this door closed, and this person's legs were grabbed" yet nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing was happening for us, made the experience all the more frustrating. Yes, I know that spirits and paranormal activity will not always happen, but this was just ridiculous. It got to the point where it was a joke.
We would get to a room and the equipment would be set up. The ghost meter pro was obviously way too sensitive, as it was pretty much on the entire night, whilst none of the K2's registered anything. The spirit box was used excessively and questions would be asked within one minute of entering a room and the guide would ask "how many live persons are in this room?".... crackle crackle, random mumbling...."seven, did you hear that, it said seven, thankyou" or "what is the name of your client?" crackle, crackle, random mumbling "Temeka....it said Temeka , thank you spirit".... NO! We did not hear any of that. "Did you feel the cold breeze, the temperature has just dropped" No it didn't. It has fluctuated between 10 - 11 degrees all night. A change in 0.2 or so degrees does not justify a spirit is in the room.
I find it infuriating that guides impose "spirit experiences" on you. It is far more experiential to have these feelings independently and naturally. To sit, to listen, to feel; to become attuned to your senses. Constantly turning on lanterns, using the laser grid until the point of annoyance, talking, rushing through questions and manifesting answers, was not an investigation, it was a poorly scripted and rushed tour with a set agenda.
The final straw in the camel's back of total "I'm over it" was the use of dousing rods in the "gas room". When asked what spirits were usually up here, the response was, Johnny a 15 year old boy likes to come here to play with them - that was it! With all the lanterns on and people talking and sitting around a room with two sets of the rods watching them do nothing was ridiculous. So much so, that one lady left and said I'm over this.
The tour went through the kitchen, the autopsy room, the stair wells, the dentistry room, the condemned cells, famous cells of Chopper Reid, James Murphy and Percy, the gallows, a sewing room/gym space (which the guide claimed was home to a paranormal vortex), the hospital, the body drop and the gas room. Great history and great spaces with so much potential and anticipation, but unfortunately totally anticlimatic.
The only maybe, and a very loose maybe at best, was we played a music box at the bottom of a stairwell in the East Wing. Once the music box stopped, about 5 seconds later, I distinctly heard the tune again from what appeared to be the 2nd or 3rd floor. It lasted for about 3 seconds. This did happen twice. I can not debunk reverberation or echoing, as acoustically this would echo quite nicely, but it was interesting and I would have liked to have spent more time taking this further.
Normally I am not one to feel nothing. I am very sensitive to spirits, I feel them, I smell them and I am told things often by them - very often. Last night, my intuition told me that they did not want to come out as they did not like the guide. I was not the only person that felt this, many of the other guests claimed the same thing.
On the one hour drive home, my friend and my mother spoke about the tour and it was a unanimous vote to not return. All of us were bitterly disappointed. So onwards to our next adventure which will most probably be the Castlemaine Gaol.
