Fame (kind of) At Last

As a joke, my brother was given a crap low budget video for his birthday a few weeks back called 'Oxfordshire Ghosts' made by a guy called Richard Felix. It looked like it was going to be rubbish but it was - excelling itself in bad film making and lack of self awareness. Felix is a man in a black suit who, considering he claims to work for Most Haunted on Living TV, has no idea about the art of film making and speaking on camera. He talks so exceptionally slowly and with such weighted pauses for (lack of) dramatic effect that years pass and you realise that you have died of old age and have come back to haunt the living and he is still on his video introduction! At the end of each segment he freezes, staring at the camera like he's fallen into a coma until the cameraman remembers that he is supposed to pan away at the end of each part and shakily moves to focus on a bit of floor or wall. You can tell Felix is making the script up as he goes along and that his research has consisted of asking a few locals if they've ever seen a ghost. Now lets face it, when you ask this question it's a bit like asking if you've ever been on a reality TV show i.e - who hasn't?!. We don't actually see a ghost on the video, despite the suspense-building crap classical music but we do see Felix's arse climbing some stairs, a haunted toilet, a gate outside Oxford Airport and shockingly, a grave yard (who'd have thought it - on a ghost video...). This graveyard is 2 mins away from my shop and I have often sat in it amongst the discarded syringes and used condoms and contemplated my life (the syringes came in useful here). Felix tells us that apparently there is a ghost of a woman who walks around shaking her head in this graveyard....I can't bring myself to break it to him that this could be me (see life pondering above for explanation).

I was finding Felix's commentary and lack of camera awareness so funny (at one point he interviews two people in a hotel bedroom half a mile away from the camera and actually manages to stand right in front of one of his interviewees so you have no idea what she looks like, the other interviewee hides behind a wardrobe - I have seen better presenting skills at the junior school I used to work at on show and tell day) that I was almost crying with laughter when all of a sudden we noticed something familiar about the setting of his final haunting. 'I am standing inside one of only two haunted phone boxes in the UK' Felix tells us as he stands inside the phonebox at the top of my lane. 'Oh my god - that's our village!' my brother says, 'fuck'. We sit stunned as Felix tells us that this phone box has been known to ring in the dead of the night and those who have answered it have received a 'ghostly message' and have been traumatised for life. Now as anyone who has been to my house will know, I don't exactly live in the throbbing centre of civilization. Here is not where the action is, here is a small hamlet that barely features on the map, doesn't even have an original name and no one has ever heard of it. If you search for my village on multi map or wherever it doesn't recognize it or gives you a map of a straight line through some fields. It is not really a place that exists - so to be featured on any kind of video, no matter how crap is pretty amazing and to actually have something notable here is surprising to say the least. Although it did cross my mind that the most surprising thing in this story is mostly that if this phone does ring in the dead of the night - who the hell is it that answers it? There are about 3 people here and they barely go out in the daytime. Spooky...Someone must of though and this person must have reported this experience to the ghost hunting world and Richard Felix (a Derby man) saw fit to come all the way down here in 2003 to stroke the phone boxes shiny BT walls. Since the pub closed down, the phone box is the only actual feature of the village. My friend and I used to go and call people we fancied from school on it when we were about 12 and try and get their parents to accept reverse charge calls - had we known it was haunted I think we would have probably stayed the hell away (perhaps the ghostly phone calls are these boy's parents ringing us back demanding we leave them the fuck alone) none of them ever did accept our reverse charge calls....Tonight I drove past the phone box slowly, looking at it with new eyes and I had to admit, Felix has a point - it is a scary phone box - mostly because it seems so out of place - there is nothing else here. I wonder who it was that decided we needed one - perhaps it was a psychic medium workign for the phone company who knew that this precise point could be a direct line to the spirit world.

So there you have it, ghostly goings on seconds from my house. The scariest thing out of all of this however, is that Richard Felix, who has the cold dead eyes of a serial molester has been within metres of my front door. Shudder. To get your local Felix ghost tour video/DVD - go to Ghost DVDs and enjoy, you'll laugh, you'll cry - you won't be scared in the slightest, well maybe by the wobbly camera work but not by the content and you never know, maybe the post box at the end of your road has a ghost in it. Or your garage or your left shoe or your toaster.