“That’s one of the main problems when you’re hunting paranormal entities,”  “You never know their motivations.”
     Nicole Monroe sat cross-legged on her bed; bathed in the glow of her laptop, and watched as the man turned away from the camera and began shining his torch into the darkness of the room he stood in, illuminating the various chairs and debris strewn across the floor.
     “Just like there are good and bad people, there are also good and bad spirits.” The man said, “Only problem is, good ghosts are known to be passive and keep out of the way, preferring EVP’s to send a message to the living. Bad ghosts, though... Those tend to get pretty physical.”
     “We are not here to harm or hurt you,” the man exclaimed to the darkness, pausing briefly for effect. “We are only here to understand you. To help you. To understand why you’re still trapped in our plane of existence.”
     Nicole knew what was coming next; a Dorian Evans special. There’s a reason Haunted Encounters was so popular – at least with the more gullible members of it’s viewership anyway. They went crazy for his smooth-talking totally-fearless shit. Then she subconsciously twisted the engagement ring that Dorian had bought her, and realised that evidently she went crazy for all that shit too.
     Dorian listened in silence for several seconds, his cameraman conveniently positioned over his shoulder for the upcoming pantomime. The torch passed across an old, ominous looking grandfather clock that sat tilted sideways against a wall, made to look broken and discarded. Then as the orb of light carried on around the room, the clock was washed away in the blackness again.
    “Do you want us to leave?” Dorian asked. That was the cue, Nicole remembered it from the last meeting the team had. Suddenly there was loud crash, and Dorian swung his torch back around to the Grandfather clock. It was now upright, a small cloud of dust thrown up in the air around it. ‘Something’ had pushed it onto its feet again.
    “What the...”
    That was the cameraman this time, Charlie, playing the astounded onlooker. His camera was pointed towards Dorian, watching as he approached the clock, turning to the camera several times along the way with a concerned look on his face. The clock door was slowly swinging open, a controlled smooth arc to reveal the old brass pendulum within.  
     Nicole smirked as she envisioned Max, the assistant investigator, crouched in just the other side of the wall – damp, cold, pissed off - with a length of super-thin invisible wire pinched between his fingers. He would be peeking through a small hole, waiting for the right moment to give the wire a gentle tug. Max always hated the pressure that went along with illusions like this, he kicked up a hell of a fuss when Dorian allocated him the position of ‘Chief Pendulum Puller’. Still, sure enough, on Nicole’s laptop screen Dorian stopped dead in his tracks.
     “Wait, wait.” He said, throwing his balled fist up in the air, like a squad leader halting his troops. “Look at this! Look!”
     Charlie rushed around to Dorian’s side, fumbling the camera a little bit(you never want to seem too good at framing shots when you’re supposed to be scared out of your wits), and got a great clip of the pendulum on the grandfather clock as it started to move from side to side. That was one for the trailer - once you’ve added a few ominous sound effects to fill the silence, of course.
     “Is that you doing that?” Dorian exclaimed aloud to the room. “Are you not happy with us investigating your home?”
     They waited several seconds - for tension’s sake - before Charlie let out a small howl and swung the camera around the doorway they entered the room through.
     “What? What’s wrong?” Dorian asked.
     “I... I saw someone in the doorway! I thought I did anyway...”
     “Was it a person or a shadow?”
     “It was a shadow, but it was in the shape of a man, I think. It looked like it was watching us, but as soon as I turned my head it darted off around the corner.” He exhaled loudly and shakily, gathering himself. “Something doesn’t want us here man.”
     The delivery was Oscar-worthy, a perfect mix between confusion and genuine horror. Pre-written and practised beforehand by Charlie, of course, but still nonetheless a triumph. The Haunted Encounters team were only on their tenth investigation, and he was getting really pretty damn good at producing little trailer sound bites like that one.

     Nicole paused the video as Dorian and Charlie set off in search of their mysterious audience, and clicked the ‘like’ button underneath the video. There was no need to keep watching, she knew how it would go from here on out. They would spend the rest of their night in that abandoned hotel chasing shadows and apparitions that were always just out of frame, reporting ‘cold spots’ in some of the spookier parts of the house, and throwing small objects into the darkness and blaming it on malevolent ghosts.
     Then she closed her laptop and climbed into bed.

#2

Chris yanked the wheel of his Ford Fiesta, turning it sharply and at some speed towards the kerb. His wheel scraped along the concrete, and he slammed his foot on the brake, throwing himself forward slightly.
     “Shit.” He muttered, turning the ignition off with one hand and snatching his satchel bag from the passenger seat with the other. Throwing open the door and leaping out caused the contents near the top of the bag – his phone, a notepad, a packet of crisps – to spill out onto the road.
     “Fuck’s Sake.”
     He knelt and scooped the wayward items up, checking his phone all over for scratches and wiping off the gravel that now clung to the touchscreen. After he was satisfied he wouldn’t be ringing any insurance companies today, he slammed everything back into te bag and began running up the unkempt garden path to a bright yellow house.
     He knocked twice, timidly, at the front door and patted at his hair. It was too long again, and he could feel it jutting out at all angles where he’d slept on it all night. He licked the palm of his hand and tried to pat the erected clump down, a futile effort. The door swung open to reveal Jessica, a petite but bland-looking brunette, standing with one hand on her hip, shooting him a patronising look.
     “You’re late,” she said, “Again. Dorian started without you.”
     “Slept late.” Chris said, shrugging his shoulders and pointing at his hair, figuring that the distressed Yorkshire terrier sat atop his head would be a good enough testament to his honesty. Jessica gestured for him to enter, and he obliged her.
      Dorian was stood talking in front of his TV with a piece of paper in his hand when Chris and Jessica walked into the living room, like a TV show presenter. He paused mid-sentence to address the new arrival.
      “Afternoon.” He said, smiling.
      Chris shot him a sarcastic half-smile, knowing it was barely past 9 am, and re-iterated that he had slept late. Dorian said he could see that much, pointing at the hair. Chris took a seat in the old leather armchair he always sat, and it let out a big sigh of air as it took his weight. He looked around the room and counted six bodies; Charlie, Dorian, Jessica, Max, Martyn and Aimee. But that wasn’t right, there should have been seven.
     “So as I was saying, this place is infam-“
     “Where’s Nicole?” Chris asked. She was always at the team meetings, so he figured there must be a pretty important reason why she’s not here. Dorian looked annoyed; he must have already covered this before Chris got there.
     “She won’t be coming with us on this one man.” He said, solemnly.
     “Why not?”
     “You’ll see.”
     “...okay.” Chris said, furrowing his eyebrows in confusion.
     Dorian picked up the glass of water on the table beside him and took a big swig of it. He shook his paper and stared at it intently for several seconds, trying to remember what he was saying before the interruption.
    “Okay, so yeah, for the sake of our less punctual members, I’ll just recap what we’ve already covered. The site of our next episode is a place I’ve heard of and wanted to investigate for a long time. It’s a forest, called Mor O Goed, the welsh translation of ‘sea of trees’. Locals call it something else though, because of the tragic history behind the place.”
     “What do they call it?” Aimee piped up, leaning forward impatiently in her chair. She was the newest recruit to the team, brought in partially because she had some knowledge of make-up and hair styling, but mostly because she was an absolutely gorgeous assistant investigator. It certainly wasn’t for her smarts, anyway.
     “They call it Suicide Forest, because there’s been a shit tonne of dudes going there to top themselves over the last, like, twenty years or something.” Chris answered, before Dorian had a chance to reply. He’d heard of the place, and now he understood why Nicole wasn’t here.
     “Two hundred and ninety six people to be precise, going back to 1991.” Dorian said, reading from his print-out of the forest’s Wikipedia page. “And that’s just the ones they found, and could identify.”
     Chris noticed Aimee looking horrified at Dorian, her lips curled upward into a disgusted snarl. He could only imagine what images she had conjured up in her head. She was probably imagining gelatinous blobs of goo with an unrecognisable face stuck over the top of it. As opposed to, you know, a decayed body without a driving licence conveniently clutched in its hand.
     “It also says that in 1990 there were thirty-one miners killed by a collapsed mineshaft near the entrance to the forest. Locals report hearing voices and seeing figures in the woods, and hikers report an average of ten dead bodies a year.”