On Wednesday night, Ghost Hunters International-the Syfy primetime show in which people traipse around the world investigating supposedly haunted houses-featured Trinidad's own Lopinot Great House. The show is unmitigated rubbish and Wednesday's episode didn't even look good, shot as it was largely in black-and-white "night vision." The cast spent most of the 44 minutes of airtime wandering around bumping into things in the dark, looking very much like lost extras searching for the set of The Blair Witch Project. For almost all of the show, nothing at all happened, until the last nanoseconds immediately before each advertisement break, when one of the presenters excitedly pretended that something had touched her leg or that her stomach rumbling because she refused her roti lunch was a vicious growl. Ghost Hunters International strives mightily to be bloodthirsty but ends up being only content-famished.
The ghost hunters listened to obviously made-up tales of Count Lopinot mounting his horse and galloping to "the hanging tree"-a cashew tree, where the colour of the fruit is itself drawn into the melodrama: could cashews be blood-red because of the blood of the slaves hanged in this very tree? Creepy, unless you remember that people don't bleed when hanged, or that cashews from trees where people were not hanged are also red. (A far more accurate comparison might have been the bulging fat seeds: could it be that they took their shape from the popped-out eyes of the hanged slaves?) The show's stupidity was most plainly revealed when they went looking for a soucouyant. The ghost hunters, so unfamiliar with a West Indian accent that they put up "English" subtitles on the TV screen whenever the caretaker spoke, could not grasp the French pronunciation of "soo-coo-yah". So they wandered around trying to make contact with the lady who takes off her skin and turns into a flying ball of fire by chanting, "Come to me, Sequoia!", pronouncing it like the Californian tree. I half-expected one of them to say, "Come to me, Conifer!" The young chick in the tight jeans might have been better off looking for the non-scientific giant redwood; especially in Arouca.
It's no wonder the Independent Investigations Group gave the show's parent, Ghost Hunters, the TTTV Award-the Truly Terrible Television Award-for its shameless presentation of pseudoscience and superstition as faux documentary. In Wednesday's decidedly non-climactic final segment, "The Reveal"-more accu- rately a cover-up-everyone present conspired to pretend a splotch of discolouration on a frame might be a soucouyant. Or sequoia. But had the ghost hunters really been interested in finding houses haunted by malevolent spirits, I could have taken them on a tour that would have filled a 13-epi-sode season. To begin with the right, disturbingly evil atmosphere, I'd have taken the crew first to the collapsing President's House, which can be seen by anyone walking along the northern edge of the Queen's Park Savannah, and has been witnessed without protest over the last decade by Everyman. There, the ghost hunters could find startling and incontrovertible evidence of the death of all civic responsibility in T&T. "Look," I'd tell them, "at how we value our heritage and tell me if that ain't a real firetrucking horror."
I'd end that episode with a to-camera standup: "On a full-moon night," I'd say, softly, meaningfully, "they say you can see the ghost of former First Lady Hassa-nali, weeping in the tangled overgrowth, all that remains of the self-sustaining kitchen garden that once supplied baigan choka to official cocks-tail parties." I'd walk the ghost hunters along the path connecting the old President's House ruin to the Palace of the Peacock, the Prime Minister's residence. "This building," I would tell the ghost hunters, "is haunted by a ghost that makes whoever lives in it care more about what things look like than what they really are. You could have people being murdered in broad daylight in the main streets or shopping centres.
The person living in this house will care only about finding high-paying jobs for friends. It doesn't matter how good their heart is when they move in. Within weeks, the spirit of the house possesses them. And they are damned. But perhaps not so damned as the people they represent." Cymbal clash. Shrieking violins.
Then I'd walk them back through the President's House grounds (if the house hadn't collapsed completely in the interim) and through the Savannah, which they would see immediately is possessed by the spirit of Mammon, so much so that a good part of its sacred green space has been paved and given over to peasant or subsistence level commerce, and some devil has erected ugly streetlights that light up all night to give Port-of-Spain's residents the omen that its central park will soon be one big, stink parking lot. Though the temptation would be great to take them out to the old haunted church at Aripo and show them the actual site where hubris vanquished reality and Afro-Saxon intellectual and self-determination aspirations were sacri- ficed at the altar of superstition and greed, I'd choose not to. Similarly, to preserve the last visitor euro or two keeping Tobago from going right under, I would not take the ghost hunters to the House of the Greens in Bacolet. No, I'd finish my tour at the most frightening haunted house of all: the blood-red House of Representatives. "This entire building," I would tell GHI, "is inhabited by zombies. They wear suits-and-ties in a hot country and drag their disgusting, half-dead, rotting bodies, going through the motions of representation while actually savagely pursuing self-interest. The only way you can save them is by cutting off their heads. You can't shoot them in the brain, because they don't have any."
BC Pires is the star of The Blight that the Living Dread. Read more of his writing at www.BCraw.com