Interview with Drew Sinton

DREW SINTON on CHRIST the VAMPIRE

A little while ago I had the chance to venture forth on Melbourne's Haunted Ghost Tour run by Drew Sinton who also runs The Haunted Bookshop.
Impressed with his style, wit, and over dramatic delivery on the tour, I decided to corner him in his own regular haunt, the shop, and probe a little further at the Devil's own 'Pied Piper'.
All Saints Day 1999 I ventured into the realm of the plastic paraphernalia sprinkled bookshelves which seem to hold up the roof like the previous spent candle holds up the next all in the name of supplying teen-witch mothers with something to put under the tree.
As I pondered the entrance, I checked my supplies. I, after all, was going to be dealing with someone who owned a bookshop. This could take a while.
Three months later I managed to stagger my way out with enough audio tape to kill an elephant. With this I had managed to put acoustic energy to metal particles and had asked...

When did you start up the Haunted Bookshop and the Tours?
The shop opened on Halloween two years ago. So 1997, and the tour started not long after that, the result of research which I've been doing for many years.

What sorts of people do you get coming on the tours? How popular are they?
We get people ranging from the very left brain "logical" people I like to call them. They're very sceptical; some of them are historically minded, like the Historical Society and the National Trust people. Medical people, we get a lot of medical students along. We get scientific people; there were some Psychic people from Monash.
Then you get through to more middle ground, people who are just out for a bit of fun. Some locals, some from over seas, some from inter state.
Then we get the right brained more intuitive people, they're like the people who are psychic and so forth, and they come along as well. Also people who are more into this scene like the Ghost Hunters Society folk, and Astro people and all those Sudo Scientific sort of groups like NEXUS and ASTRO. So the gauntlet I guess is a whole range of people.
The size, well we had Myers social group along on Friday night celebrating Halloween. Through to twelve-year-olds birthday parties, stuff like that. Girl Guides. So just all sorts of people.
We've got so many markets, ranging from those who are seriously into it to those who see it more as an entertainment sort of thing. It's sort of like, you don't want to say infotainment, but it's sort of in that area. I'm not one of these tours where you have someone planted along the way like a Disney tour with things jumping out at you, that sort of thing. So we've got a responsibility, in that we try to keep it historical as well.
Some people might put it under "Folk Law", that was the case with the State Library tour, that was Folk Law. And even then there are people who have studied Folk Law so we try to keep it as accurate as we can.

Do you think that a large group can take away from the actual "atmosphere" of the whole experience?
Yes and no. I actually take out quite a lot of between thirty and forty, which to some people is quite a large group. Some times it adds to the atmosphere, some times it detracts. I really don't like groups less than ten for the fact that the dynamics aren't there. It's like a person performing on stage to only five or six people compared to a full house. You still have to give them the same performance, but you find that the dynamics just aren't there. You can find that the barrier between the presenter and the audience drops because it starts getting a little more interment. They start disrupting the presentation. I try to keep it as a presentation rather than an interactive discussion because as soon as you do you end up going off the beaten path, the tour takes longer and you get side tracked and it becomes more of a discussion than a presentation.
That's not good, so I actually prefer groups of around about twenty. Because then you've got good dynamics, and if you get a trouble maker in the group, and invariably in a lager group you get one or two trouble makers, their actually depressed by the others because they can't actually inter act with you. So if you get a smart-alec they tend to pull back when there's a large group because a large group would sort of think they were being an idiot. You almost need that.
So if you get a small group say about ten people and you've got a smart-alec then there's a greater chance that it's going to get more disruptive. This is what I've learned from doing it for about two years. I can handle quite a few sceptics in a larger group, but if I had those same sceptics in a smaller group who were trying to divide the attention you'll find that the tour just falls in a heap and I try not to have that happen, if their hostile.
But I try to split it down the middle anyway so that both sides feel that they're catered for rather than one side feeling excluded. I do say that half the groups usually consist of sceptical folk and the others borderline believers if not believers. So you try and present it that way.
But different nights you do get different groups. Like for instance we had a whole lot of Nurses from Corfield, and most of them had experiences, so you know your dealing with believers so you don't acutely have to go through all the hard, you know, here's what scientists believe and this is what this and that believe. Because they already sort of except it you know, where as if you've got an audience, and more often than not I've actually got an audience which are some times very difficult because they're unbelievers.
So more often than not I'm doing tours for unbelievers, in which case I tend to go through the what different people believe Ghosts are so that they sort of feel included.

You do, or have done, tours of the Melbourne Town Hall, the Princess Theatre, and the Melbourne Public Library. Tell us about these?
The Library was probably one of the best tours. That went for about two hours, two and a half hours; that's quite a long tour. That was all in doors and you never saw the same place twice.
It was a vast building, and I've got about twenty different 'sightings' or places in there, and about three hundred staff, and in some rooms there are two different personalities, ie. 'Ghosts' I suppose.
Including above the Arts Library which has the ghost of a woman in a long white dress called Grace on the Northern side, and on the Southern side is a ghost of a black shadow which has been see moving around the music section called Robert Boyce. So it's quite a complex place.
Even in April there were strange things taking place at about ten in the morning amongst staff where chairs would be seen going backwards and forwards by them selves which actually unnerved staff.
We actually stopped the Library tours because it's going under renovation. They're spending about eight million dollars on the place. We used to have the whole place to our selves. It used to be quite a hard one logistically as far as even getting approval because you're dealing with government people. It was very difficult to actually approach them and get this thing through; a ghost tour.
Most of them are essentially academics and they didn't sort of approve of this sort of thing. So if we put it under Folk Law then they were sort of comfortable about it.
Also since we virtually had the run of the place for about six - seven months at night, we had to pay for security. We had to pay for staff and that included meals and stuff like that. So for us to run the tour it coast quite a bit of money and we had to make sure we actually got enough people to actually run it. But they're actually renovating some of the key arias on the tour, so with out those areas, ie. the domed reading room, the tour I felt was not as effective .
I mean we probably could take it on to some other route, but I feel it's just not as effective. But when they pop up we grab them, we are still looking at the Old Melbourne Jail. But it's not as exiting as some people think it might be as the old Melbourne Jail is really just one long corridor, one long hallway. Not like the other prisons around Australia, real big things. The Old Melbourne Jail is one long hall-way and that's about it; once you walk up and down there a couple of times.
Unless you do something like a seance or something the tour's too sort, like an hour or something. But an hour's a funny length for a tour because it's not quite an evening out. So we're still looking that these sort of things.

Have you ever done a seance?
Yeah we used to run seance workshops. I used to spend twenty hours a week in seances last year with strangers from the general public coming in. I used to get more exhausted doing seances than the ghost tours.
There very exhausting, people don't realise that they eat up a lot of energy. I used to feel more drained doing an hour in a seance than about two and a half hours walking around on the ghost tours.
So that used to take up too much energy, so now I just tend to do them for people that I sort of know rather than actual public ones. But they were quite popular.

You used to give lectures on Ghosts and Vampires. What became of those?
The haunting talk evolved into the ghost tour because they got restless sitting in a room for an hour or so. Where as the ghost tour is based on the hauntings theme and they get to go and walk about so they get the same sort of information, and they actually get to visit the places I'm talking about.
The Vampires one; that was probably when the Gothic movement was popular. But it's not popular any more; the Gothic thing. Angelica [Danton] did readings for Halloween at Subculture [Gothic nightclub] on Saturday night and they didn't get the sorts of numbers they really wanted.
The Gothic movement seems to be shrinking a little. So last year the Vampires talk did well and even the end of the year before it did ok. But then it sort of started teetering off. You just open and run things as you feel there's a demand.

What do you believe Ghosts are?
Well look, I have serval different approaches whenever I'm asked that one. I usually say don't come to me looking for answers, come to me looking for questions. One response I give is 'the more I read the more I learn the less I realise I know'. I think I say that on the tours too. And one is 'the greatest geniuses are the people with the fewest fixed ideas'.
Another thing I say is in this area there are that many experts. I get people who are Fengshui people. People who have studied Fengshui for a year and think that Fengshul is the answer to every thing. If you've got a ghost in your house, just move your bed to another corner of the room and they'll go, when I know that's rubbish. But there are experts in many different areas whether they are Fengshui, whether they're physicists, whether they're phycologists, psychiatrists, and this and that.
And we start getting into the nature of evidence. What is evidence? And so forth. Well it varies from person to person. So getting back to the original question, I say if you have a room full of people, and take in to consideration different backgrounds, they're all going to give you different theories. So my background and my theory is really no different from every body else's in the room.
So what I do is go through the different theories and I play different theory lotto. I've got about a dozen different theories and I say take your pick. And it's a bit like, if you want to take a spiritualist approach, I wouldn't know which one is correct and I'm wary of anyone who thinks they've got the right answer in regards to nearly every thing.
Even doctors when it comes to something like Glandular Fever. I've known people who have got over Glandular Fever in a week, people who could still walk around. And I've met other people who were placed in Hospital in intensive care with Glandular Fever and it took them a year to get over it. And a doctor would probably say "Well I don't know". It's a bit like that.
I'd say a Spiritualist would say a ghost has lived his life and died. I would say a Phycologist would say a ghost is only a manifestation of energy which seems to suggest that the personality transcends death. I like that one too. I like the first one. I like the first one because it's simplistic.
A psychiatrist like Elizabeth Kübler Ross says that in dying we shed our physical bodies just like a Caterpillar sheds its cocoon in order to become a butterfly. I love all those, but just when you get one theory, you get another one coming along to bump those theories off.
Those theories are great when it comes to explaining the ghost of a person. Well I say that's great, but how do you explain that they're waring cloths? If ghosts are supposed to be of the soul of the continuation of a person, how do you explain the appearance of the cloths that they're waring? How to you explain ghost cars and ghost trucks that people have seen? Ghost towns, ghost trains; we hear about the coach and horses in England. We see them here in Australia as well. So how do we explain those? So if you start getting to stuck on, say, the New Age, or the traditional soul explanations, you know, a ghost is really an astral shell or something like that, then how do you explain the ghosts of inanimate objects?
I went to one house in Brunswick where a woman saw the ghost of a fellow and she noticed he was so sharply dressed she could see the strips on his shirt and she could see the time on his watch. That's pretty good. It was a ghost; it disappeared. So scientists might say a ghost is a dimensional being. A time shift.
So there are all these different definitions. And everyone who proposed these theories proposed to be the experts. I look at them and say, yes that's one theory that's valid, and that's all it is. A theory is just a theory. It's not a fact, it's not proof. It's just a theory.
In this area I say that there are lots and lots of different theories, but the fact that this is a mystery, ghosts are still a mystery, must prove that we haven't really decided on the right theory. I mean a lot of people claim to have the right theory. But I sure as heck can't tell you the truth. I've been researching this for twenty years and I've heard that many theories but I don't know really all there is.
And so it's all a mystery. That's probably why it's fascinating to a lot of people. Because it's a mystery. I actually meet a lot of people who don't really want to know what it is because they like it being a mystery.
I can tell you this from running the shop that at least in a shop that sells books on parapsychology and phycology and the study on paranormal that scientific books would in this aria would be very popular. That's the slowest moving section. So a lot of people or even scientists I think, they actually like the idea of this whole thing being a mystery. Because there's some sort of magic to it. That man isn't as, he can't conquer every thing. But there are some things left in life that are magical out there somewhere. But then on the other hand we meet people who feel very uncomfortable with that. Because they're control freaks, every thing has to be battened down and put into a box.
So I don't know, obviously we haven't really worked out what the whole area of ghosts is yet. Otherwise they would not be so fascinating and would not be lumped into the mystery basket. I don't know.

Do you find if frustrating, being a ghost investigator, that you can't actually prove that something is a ghost, you can only 'prove' what it isn't?
The hard thing is, and we've had scientists who have actually seen ghosts in here, but your dealing with mainly anecdotal evidence and that makes scientists feel very uncomfortable.
So it's the fact that you're dealing with uncontrollable environments. You're not dealing with houses or laboratory situations. And some of them are very difficult to turn into laboratory situations.
I was talking to one fellow from the Peter McCallam hospital. He's got a piece of equipment worth about one point six million dollars and it would coast an absolute bomb to transport that, and to ensure it off the premises, to put into a haunted house.
Most of these people say 'well, unless there was some reason', financial reason, why they should do that. Ie. it's worth while for them to study drugs because they can market drugs and make a lot of money. But there not a lot they can actually derive from ghost research. It's not like, here put this on the market and bang! So just economically it's not a financially viable medium to explore. How can I make money from it? I don't want to sound like that's the bottom line, but for a lot of research groups they are driven by, like most economies and research areas are driven by money.
You look at herbalculture, all the different scientific areas, medicine, new drugs. But in this area... The only thing that may benefit from it is defence. The Russian's were very interested in using psychic energy to control aircraft and so fourth.
So that's probably one of the reasons why this science called parapsychology or paraphysis if you know it is still called the Cinderella science because it's still yet to come to the ball. Which probably explains why there's still a lot of mystery associated with this area and why a lot of research is not being done into it.
And even in regards to placing it in a faculty in a University. Where do you put this subject called Ghost Research? Do you put it in the Psychology Department, Physic Department. Theologians like to think it's their department, ghosts and Paranormal, the Supernatural.
So even a lot of the Universities don't know what to do with it. There's a lot of interest in it. And I'm sure if someone actually ran Parapsychology as a course they'd get a huge response. Only in America do they actually recognise it. At Duke University, they take it as a very serious subject there. Parapsychology. But the sort of research they do is rats and stats research. Probabilities and that sort of thing. With Zener cards and stuff like that. Ghost research is an off shoot of that.
So even like me. Even with all my knowledge nobody is going to hire me for anything. The only thing I might get hired for is to perhaps put together a book. It's just one of those guozzy sorts of areas.
And even if you're qualified, say you have a degree in Phycology and are interested in ghosts, well that doesn't qualify you for much any way. Like wise a physicist who is interested in ghosts, where does he end up? No one really knows. You end up opening and running a bookshop that's about it. And that's after years of working out what the hell to do with all this knowledge. Which a lot of people say is rubbish.
See Angelica [Danton] the clairvoyant has been going out to haunted housed as long as I have, but there's no demand. We don't charge really to go out to haunted houses. Which may end up changing one day because we get a lot of calls out and you think, well hang on this it taking up quite a lot of our time and we've still got bills to pay.
The only thing I thought of which was a legitimate way of doing any thing with all this research was to start a Ghost Tour. But that's always the dilemma. You either write a book about your ghostly experiences, so you've got a book. And there's not much demand for that because Richard Davis wrote that Ghost Guide to Australia. And we're the only ones who really sell that book, and actually we don't sell many of them. Because people would sooner watch something on TV than buy a book. It's a very strange area.
Unless you move into Palliative care. Because we give talks to hospitals and things like that. That leads into grief counselling. Helping people to understand death. A very, very strange sort of area.

You have seen one, or something, yourself. Can you tell us about it?
Yeah, yeah. I put my hand in one. That was out at Burwood. There were just two ladies living together. They had moved from a house in Northcote to a house in Werribee. And there was this ghostly presence that followed them around over the three places.
So I went out there. It's a long story but basically at one point during the conversation, because we were out there for a while. I guess we were sort of like getting close to what the story was out there and there was a medium who was sitting opposite to me, I was in the kitchen, and there was this shadow which I thought was just the curtains initially, which started moving towards the kitchen. Because I was looking through the French doors.
It was sort of moving across the lounge room. But I would not have been so impressed if it was not for the fact that there were five cats located between where I was sitting and over the other side of the lounge which were watching this thing move between them. It was just seeing these five cats with their tails moving as they do when they see something weird happening, moving into the kitchen where I was.
Though I still wasn't convinced so I got up and actually put my hand in it thinking it was something else. And interestingly enough a lot people who actually have had experiences have not really jumped to the conclusion automatically that it was a ghost so they actually try and think what is it. Is it dust? Is it the air conditioning?

What are the most commonly reported types of sightings in Melbourne and around Australia?
That's the one that I've told you about on the tour. The character dressed in black sort of thing. We had one fellow the other night whom owned a pub at Riversdale on Riversdale drive who had a visitation from this character who was seen moving along this corridor. Like a black shadow.
So it's been seen in quite a few places. But I would say it's like an archetypal type sighting. I wouldn't know if it's actually 'a' person or what? But then again in that area there are many different theories. Some say he's dimensional. Some say he's the Grim Reaper. Some say he's just an earth bound spirit. Some might say it's just the way people perceive that sort of a ghost. Some say he's the Devil. Some say he's a Demon. It just seems to depend on what story you hear. So I get to hear about a black shadow or the form of a man in a long black coat and a hat quite regularly.

You talk about Melbourne dieing, becoming a Ghost town?
Yeah. I'm actually probably the only person in Melbourne who actually does benefit from the fact that businesses are closing. I say that to people because the city centre seems to be dieing. Having worked here for two years and having known a lot of people who have closed up business, just along this little lane here, I've noticed about six people have closed down. So the city's definitely dying.
Even though they like plugging all the big prows of Melbourne like the Docklands, the Cassino, and South Bank. But the city its self is turning into a sort of ghetto. So they're all sort of shrinking. And maybe in another ten years it will be all one big ghetto, it will be my ghost town. All the businesses will have gone. Collapsed.
I think it's too expensive for people to come in. It's expensive to park here, it's difficult to park here. You stay over five minutes in a parking space and you've got a hundred dollar parking ticket. If the ghosts aren't active the grey ghosts certainly are. So I think for most people it's a turn off.
You can get all the shopping places out in the suburbs now. And it's free parking out in the suburban places. South Land, huge, and it's free parking. It's not good.
You go along on a tour on a Friday or Saturday night and it's deserted. It's not good for a city centre. It doesn't make people feel great knowing that's the heart of the city.
There are too many attractions. Lygon Street is a centre and Brunswick Street is a centre, St Kilda is a centre and Prahran is a centre. There are all these places you can go to for a good night out. Why come into the city? I even know a lot of pubs that don't even open on Friday and Saturday nights. And why should they, there's nobody coming in.

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