Blackwell Ghost

A self-deprecating filmmaker decides to abandon zombie films for ghost hunting, and finds he's terrified of fairly standard haunted house tropes in this documentary-style horror film. After viewing a couple of not-especially compelling ghost videos on Youtube, the filmmaker flies a plane to Pennsylvania, where he interviews a homeowner who captured footage of a supposed full-body apparition meandering through his dining room. As luck would have it, the home has a dank basement with a "well" covered by a heavy iron lid with the word "sewer" on it, where a legend says that a crazy woman dismembered children and tossed their remains within it. 

The filmmaker and his wife take up the owner's completely-not-creepy offer to spend three nights alone in the house, and they set up apps, cameras, and a trigger object and wait for results. During the night, the couple awakens to find the basement door mysteriously open, but of all the haunted places in the house, they neglected to place a camera on the possible source of the phenomena. Newbie mistake, or plot device? 

The next evening, they awaken in the night to a house filled with smoke, as the oven and all the stovetop burners were on. Not sure if that would cause smoke, though. I guess that would depend of the cleanliness of the homeowner's oven or the special effects department. The filmmaker does some research, and finds a newspaper article backing up claims of murder. Because he felt like getting suffocated by sewer gases, the filmmaker opens the well, because why not. Suddenly, all the equipments' batteries are drained, the lights go out (although one lone continuity-defying night vision light remains on), and the haunting hits a fever pitch. 

The Blackwell Ghost consists of interviews, selfies, emails, cellphone usage, computing, flight footage, muffled onboard microphone usage, shaky cam, one seemingly annoyed wife, and very little ghost footage. Brief at less than an hour, it's mostly irritating when we're forced to watch cellphone footage, but has a compelling quality about it when the film gets down to the actual ghost hunt. It also raises a couple of observations. One, no matter the quality of 'evidence', there will still be disbelievers, particularly if you already have a career as an effects-heavy filmmaker, whether it's in ghost hunting, climate change, science, politics, or what have you. And two, what noises in someone's house can be attributed to spectral phenomena, and what can be attributed to faulty wiring, the expansion and contraction of old wood, absent-mindedness, overactive imaginations, or the effects of gravity on clutter? When the filmmaker is conducting his walk-through of the house, the owner describes the alleged spirit climbing the stairs and the accompanying creaky sound. The wife shrugs this off, saying houses often make noise, which is true.

After viewing The Blackwell Ghost, I decided to prepare dinner. I thought to myself, "Odd noises don't happen where I live. Noises have a reasonable explanation. Usually, it's because something expensive needs to be repaired."

At that exact moment, an unexplained noise occurred, as if something moderately heavy fell somewhere in the depths of my abode. My dog, sitting in his usual place, dangerously underfoot as I cook, looked in the direction of the noise, and then looked up at me with an expression of wonderment. I said, "Yeah, buddy. I heard that, too."

After an investigation into the source of the sound, as if we were Scooby Too and Shaggy, I have no idea what it was, or what caused it. This does not mean my home is haunted, but it does seem to contain some amount of gravity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDmE0zv2oo4