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Programme One
This week the haunted house got their vote.
This is what the guys had to say about it ...
Faking a haunted house was our chance to stick a great fat wise-up nail in the coffin of all flakes, fakers and fraudsters who believe in the paranormal. Scaring the heebee jeebees out of the unsuspecting public was a cakewalk because paranormal experiences are all about context and expectation.
Plas Teg, the stately home we rigged up, is a proper spooky gaff, with a 90-year-old butler, creaking floorboards and freakshow cats that live in a glass hearse.
We settled on three tricks:
Infrasound is sound waves below the audible range for humans. It can have weird physiological effects, like sicky feelings, general discomfort, and even hallucinations. In a lab situation, subjects just feel a bit strange. In a spooky old mansion, they naturally assume that the ghosts are doing it. We hid an infrasound generator in a room next to the room that was meant to be the most haunted. Our carefully handpicked test subjects, erm, three cheerleaders, were truly spooked by the vibes.
An air cannon is a nifty device that makes a blast of donut-shaped air which can be aimed at an unsuspecting victim. Add some dry ice, and bingo, you have the cold chill that ghost hunters always whitter on about. The fact is that a sense of chill really only comes from a blast of cold air. Woooooh!
The wardrobe of doom was inspired by an old fairground trick. We used a two-way mirror with the ghoulish Dr Basil Singer on one side. If you look into a two-way mirror, you can detect just the faintest whiff of whatever is on the other side of the mirror. The trick was to get the timing right, so that only one person saw anything from the corner of their eye. There are rod photoreceptors in this part of the eye that detect movement in low light, but don't have sharp resolution. So get the timing and context right and it's brown trousers time!
The supernatural is bunk, FACT! We showed how easy it is to fake. Science prevails, and we rule!
What was your fave challenge of the week?
