I mentioned that The Dead Files and The Dead Files Revisited are two of my latest guilty pleasures. A few more things occurred to me and I wanted to talk about those today.
The opening of the show has a line that goes "If it's safe to stay or if you should get out." In most of the episodes I've seen, there are usually steps the people can take to improve/mitigate their situation. However, I have seen a couple of shows now where the medium, Amy Allan, has told them they need to leave. The ghost/demon/skinwalker/evil entity is too dangerous.
This brings to mind several immediate questions. First, didn't these people sense something was wrong with the house/hotel/building before they bought it? I totally believe that we can sense energy.
I worked with a woman back in Minneapolis who was a total non-believer in anything paranormal. While she and her husband were building a house, they needed to rent somewhere to live, and since she had a small child and a big dog and a specific area they wanted to live in, their options were limited. Her husband located a house for rent, and when she took a look at it, she didn't like it.
They kept looking, but couldn't find anything else in their price range that fit all their other requirements and they rented it. The weird stuff started happening before they moved in. (In an aside, the house had been for sale forever and the owners couldn't sell it--that's why it was available for rent.) I won't list all the the things that happened while they were in that house because I can't remember many of them, but it scared this skeptic enough to find a minister to clear the house.
The owner had built the house for his mother and she'd died there. The man lived down the street, and after she had the house cleared, she borrowed a picture of the woman to show to her husband. Her two-year-old son saw it and identified the woman by name even though he had no way of knowing it. But this isn't my point. The point is that this fervent non-believer in ghosts knew something was off with that house when she walked through it so why the heck don't these people on the show sense the presence?
My next question, and this is the big one, okay so the people on the show put the house up for sale and move out. What happens to the next family who buys the home?
Some of these entities make people sick or violent or encourage them to harm themselves. This situation will still exist when the next family moves in. Can they sue the original family for not mentioning the house contains a demon in the disclosure statement?
This really bugs me because while the family who's on the show is leaving (potentially), the entity will still be there unless someone takes care of it. Someone should step up and do something.
Which leads to my next point: If it's safe to stay once some actions are taken, why doesn't the show help them take these actions? I get why Amy doesn't do all the clearing herself. That's very draining work and she might not have some of the skill sets needed. Also, there are times she recommends the medium be male. But sometimes I feel bad for these people trying to locate who she says they need.
I watched an episode from season three recently where she recommended they get a psychologist who is also a medium to counsel the dead. She suggested they check out the university for someone. All I could think is if they went to the psychology department of the university and explained what they needed, this couple would be considered wackos and they'd probably being the ones getting counseling.
This leads me to my final point of the day about the show. Sometimes she has really simple things to do like have a shaman bless the land and the house and the people don't do it! Why did allow the show inside your home if you're not going to fix anything?
The episode that I thought was egregious on this score involved a hotel in Seattle. The owner is talking about how her health has deteriorated and blamed it on the spirits present. She'd even been hospitalized. Employees are scared, and IIRC, some had been physically attacked. What has this woman done after The Dead Files visited? Absolutely nothing. In fact, there was another one of the "ghost shows" that went in there (not sure if it was before or after Dead Files). Sounds to me as if she only wanted the publicity.
BTW, I totally don't care if the show is real or not. I'm enjoying it.
