Terms of reference
The Survey was set up with a single instruction. It has never been amended:
Establish where instruments behave abnormally. Record the conditions under which they do so. Refrain from explaining it.
The third clause caused most of the trouble. It was written by someone who had watched two earlier programmes collapse — not because they found nothing, but because they found something and immediately announced what it was.
A thin place is an old idea and not ours. It is the folk name for ground where the distance between one world and another is supposed to narrow. The Survey borrowed the phrase because it needed a word for what it was looking for and did not want one that came with an answer attached. It is not a claim. It is a heading on a form.
What we do
We take instruments into rooms and we write down what they say. That is the whole method, and it is less romantic than people expect. Most of a survey is walking a building with a clipboard, finding the consumer unit, noting where the wiring runs, and establishing what the place reads when nothing is happening — because you cannot know that something is happening unless you first went to the trouble of finding out what nothing looks like.
What we have found
In fifty-two years the Survey has logged something over forty thousand hours across eleven hundred sites. Around ninety-four per cent of anomalous readings have been traced to a cause: wiring, appliances, transformers, lift motors, badly earthed lighting, a fridge, a phone left charging in a coat.
The remaining six per cent are not evidence of anything. They are readings we could not trace, in rooms we could not fault. We keep them because a programme that throws away what it cannot explain is not measuring anything — it is confirming something.
What we do not say
The word ghost does not appear in a Survey report. This is not squeamishness. The operators say it constantly — in the van, on the stairs, at three in the morning, usually followed by a laugh that is slightly too quick. It is not in the reports because a report is for what the instrument recorded, and no instrument has ever recorded a ghost.
What the reports do contain, quite often, is the sentence cause not established. Anybody who tells you that sentence means something more than it says is selling something.
Funding
It ended in 1994. There was no scandal; the line item simply did not reappear, and the letter explaining why was two paragraphs long and had been photocopied.
What the Survey has instead is the equipment, which was specified to outlast the money and duly has, and a number of people who never quite stopped. The instruments on this station are the third or fourth revision of heads built in the seventies. Some of the springs are tired. We have kept the serial numbers.
Station 07
This is Station 07 — the public terminal. It exists because the equipment is more interesting in other people’s hands than in a cupboard, and because a survey with eleven hundred sites and six staff was never going to cover the country.
You have been assigned an operator designation. It is held on your device and nowhere else. We do not have a copy of it and could not produce one if we were asked, which is a state of affairs the Survey has come to prefer.
About the instruments on this station
Every one of them reads a real sensor in your phone and reports what that sensor actually says. Not one of them detects the paranormal.
That is not a disclaimer bolted on for legal reasons, although it also serves as one. It is the only interesting way to build them. An instrument that lies to you is a toy, and it stops being fun in about ninety seconds, because you can feel it deciding. An instrument that tells you the truth about a room is unnerving for as long as you keep walking through rooms. The method is written up in full, instrument by instrument, with nothing held back.