"Brisbane has been voted the 2ndmost haunted city in the world by National Geographic magazine."
Or so the story goes.This claim has been made loud and proud by Cameron ‘Jack’ Sim, owner of a Brisbane-based small business called Ghost Tours. It first emerged on the Ghost Tours website a few years back, and is still there today. The National Geographic logo was even used (without permission). The ‘most-haunted’ claim was also repeated in October 2010 on Channel 10’s 7pm Project, so it's been getting quite an airing.
Which is not too smart, because its a total fabrication.
Suspicions about any story of Brisbane being particularly haunted are quite natural because in the wider scheme of things our haunted status should be marginal at best. Ignoring tourismwebsites that mindlessly regurgitate the marketing blurb, a broader search of paranormal-themed websites reveals dozens, if not hundreds, of ‘most-haunted place’ polls. Of course, none of these polls have any real credibility as the supernatural is a notoriously difficult thing to prove, let alone quantify, but one fact that clearly emerges is the almost complete absence of Brisbane in any results. Even in pages assessing supposedly haunted places in Australia alone, Brisbane is seriously under-represented.
This is unsurprising. Why would this city be more haunted than London, Paris or Rome, with their millennia of bloody history? What about places that witnessed scenes of incredible wartime carnage, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Stalingrad (Volgograd), Gettysburg, the Somme, Baghdad, Nanking, and others? There are hundreds of cities that you would expect to be higher up the rankings than sleepy ol' Brisbane.
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| Their business wouldn't have lasted two weeks here. |
So how did we get here? The timeline that emerged from Liam Baker's investigation followed this path:
Sim made inflated and unproven claims about just how haunted Brisbane was right from the get-go, when he started in his ghosty business back in 1998, saying it was the 'most haunted in Australia'. Then in 2000 a rather unreliable little publication called The International Directory of Haunted Places (put together by an author who had previously written on sea monsters and UFO's) listed 14 'potentially' haunted places in the city, a list provided by Sim himself. A couple of years later the website related to the book carried the claim that Brisbane was the most haunted city in Australia. No prizes for guessing where they got that info from.
Anyway, shortly after this it was reported in a Sunday Mail article that 'Brisbane had been voted the most haunted place in the southern hemisphere by international ghost hunters'...
...which was simply not true.
Once again the source for this info was Sim, and now there was a definite pattern emerging as he upscaled his claims without providing any supporting evidence. He tells somebody something, they repeat it, and then he reports what they said like it had nothing to do with him.
Around this time an amateur backyard operation calling themselves ‘Ghost Research Foundation International’ (GRFI) started producing 'most haunted' lists, based on the say-so of a person who has since been accused of being an actor posing as a 'parapsychologist'. In 2002 they wrote that York, England, was the ‘most haunted city in the world’ with Brisbane in third place behind Los Angeles. The numbers jumped around illogically in similar reports over the next few years, and in early 2009 the Courier-Mail recycled this nonsense for another non-news space-filler reporting that Brisbane was considered ‘one of the most haunted cities in the world’... according to the International Directory of Haunted Places.
It was later that year that the story took a quantum leap when the claim that National Geographichad 'voted' Brisbane as the 'second most haunted city in the world' first appeared on the Brisbane ‘Ghost Tours’ website. And that's when the questions started. Where was this National Geographicpoll? It couldn't be found anywhere, and even National Geographic themselves denied that any such poll existed. Last year some curious commenters on the ‘Ghost Tours’ Facebook page started asking to see a copy of the increasingly mysterious poll. This was when the whole lie started to unravel, and Sim backpedalled away from his original claim (while, quite incredibly, still making it).
Important details of the story suddenly changed, so instead of National Geographic voting Brisbane to be the second most haunted city in the world, Sim now claimed that they had merely been told it was by an unnamed ‘paranormal society’. It was now embarrassingly clear that there was no poll. A few months later it emerged that the ‘paranormal society’ in question was actually Ghost Tours themselves, who confessed that they had ‘happily supplied information to NG’. However, Sim was not so happy or willing to supply a scan of the article, or even something as simple the name of the magazine in which it appeared.
It was left to the National Geographic themselves to officially inform Liam Baker that they have never rated haunted cities, although the October 2008 issue of a magazine called Traveller (part of the National Geographic stable) did feature an article about the paranormal industry in York, England. At the end of that article the writer briefly listed some other supposedly haunted places, including New Orleans, Prague and St Petersburg. The last sentence reads:
"Then there is Brisbane, Australia, ranked after York by the Ghost Research Foundation International, with more than 240 sightings, including phantasms who wander the stairs and ride the elevators of City Hall."
And that's it. The only mention that any National Geographic publication has ever made of ghosts and Brisbane. The writer had merely referred to the the dodgy 'second most haunted' claim made years ago by Ghost Research Foundation International, after Ghost Tours had fed them unreliable numbers.
This was the point where the simple manipulation of baseless statistics, although dishonest in itself, turned into outright fabrication. A passing reference to a fallacy by some freelance writer in a spin-off magazine suddenly became this:
"As voted by National Geographic".
‘Lie’ is a strong word to use, but there is no other explanation for what happened. The big question here is why did it happen? What was the intent of the 'most haunted' lie? And why, after it was becoming obvious to all and sundry that the claim was a blatant lie, did Sim so arrogantly continue to use it anyway? I wrote an article about this 15 months ago, and the lie is still being told. This is the kind of thing that Choice magazine hands out 'Shonky Awards' for.
The 'most haunted' claim was an own goal of massive proportions, reflecting very poorly on the integrity of those responsible, and people like Liam Baker and myself will not remain silent in the face of such unethical behaviour. Part of our brief as researchers and historians is to engage in public debate. This is what we have done in our discussions on this matter so far, and we will continue to do so if required. Meanwhile, we would love to hear the other side of the story.
So what happens next? Will Sim apologise to the public, as he should? Will he even remove the lie from his website? Probably not. He has yet to publicly defend himself in the way that a real historian would - using facts and logic to construct a counter argument. There has instead been ongoing and deafening silence, as if none of this really happening. Maybe he is too caught up in his never-ending quest to get his face in newspapers or on TV, but that is no substitute for real credibility and it doesn't turn lies into truth. The following quote is often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
So what happens next? Will Sim apologise to the public, as he should? Will he even remove the lie from his website? Probably not. He has yet to publicly defend himself in the way that a real historian would - using facts and logic to construct a counter argument. There has instead been ongoing and deafening silence, as if none of this really happening. Maybe he is too caught up in his never-ending quest to get his face in newspapers or on TV, but that is no substitute for real credibility and it doesn't turn lies into truth. The following quote is often (but probably incorrectly) attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."
Unfortunately, Cameron 'Jack' Sim seems to have taken the George W. Bush variation to heart:
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on."Don't be one of those people.
