YORKSHIRE, England – William Wilberforce would like to make one thing perfectly clear: He is the ghost of a 19th Century philanthropist, abolitionist and politician, not a 21st Century porn performer.
Recently, while entwined in an erotic embrace with the ghost of fellow stranded-soul Lana Turner, Wilberforce found himself suddenly in the crosshairs of a night-vision camera wielded by a crew of ghost hunters prowling the grounds of the graveyard in Sculcoates, East Yorks, where Wilberforce has made his limbo-home since his death in July 1833.
“I’m shocked and disgusted these so-called ‘ghost hunters’ would describe what Ms. Turner and I were doing as a ‘porn shoot’,” Wiberforce said in a statement released through a Ouija board. “The two other apparitions observed by the ghost hunters were not cameramen in the way this term is understood by the living, but otherworldly historians documenting the plight of earthbound souls — people like me who have been denied access to heaven due not to sins we failed to repent, but due to an ongoing bureaucratic snafu emanating from within the Pearly Gates.”
Wilberforce said this isn’t the first time he’s had sexual encounters interrupted by ghost hunters, who he says have “hounded me from haunted houses to graveyards, subway tunnels to clock towers.”
“All in the name of capturing a few seconds of grainy, night-vision footage and a bit of wraithlike wailing, these obnoxious paranormal paparazzi violate every social norm in pursuit of their voyeuristic thrills,” Wilberforce said. “And they have the audacity to call me a pornographer?”
Wilberforce angrily rejected the idea that trysts with the likes of Turner and Josephine Baker, another of his afterlife flings, were newsworthy in light of his vaunted commitment to his wife, Barbara Ann Spooner, during his living years.
“My beloved and I have been separated by celestial pencil-pushers for nearly 183 years,” Wilberforce said. “How long would you have us both deny ourselves the pleasures of sex? Is 200 years enough? Must we wait millennia? Ghostly masturbation can carry you for only so long, you know.”
Wilberforce isn’t the only ghoul who has had his style cramped by ghost hunters, according to famous necromancer Edward Johns, who has been lobbying Congress for more stringent regulation of ghost hunting since the late 1990s.
“What we think of as harmless entertainment is really a horrible invasion of afterlife privacy,” Johns said. “I was talking to the ghost of Miles Davis the other night, and he said not a day goes by without one hunter or another trying to measure his presence or capture the eerie strains of his protoplasmic trumpet during private jam sessions with Johann Bach. Miles blames it on rampant racism among ghost hunters, but I think this has more to do with his spiritual state than the color of his skin — all of which has long since rotted away, it should be noted.”
On the other hand, Johns said we shouldn’t be too quick to discount the possibility ghosts make porn, despite Wilberforce’s objection to the notion.
“I’ve met Bill Wilberforce, and there’s no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth about what happened in the graveyard,” Johns said. “But anyone who thinks the ghost of Oakland Raiders great Lyle Alzado isn’t using the creation of post mortem pornography as an excuse to bed every hottie in the Second Circle of Hell is kidding himself.”
Jason Grant, host of the History-ish Channel hit show Specter Spotters, said while some ghost hunters cross the line between legitimate paranormal investigation and “ghoul gossip,” he believes Wilberforce and Johns are exaggerating the problem.
“If we ghost hunters are so bad about interrupting ghosts during sex and invading their privacy in general, how come the footage we capture for our shows is always so vague, fuzzy and unconvincing?” Grant asked. “Shit, if I had clear footage of Marilyn Monroe blowing Mussolini or Genghis Khan giving Isaac Newton a handjob, do you really think I’d be spending all night prowling dusty old houses trying to ‘document’ the rather unsurprising fact the ancient wood floors therein creak when people walk across them? Would I really be pretending the grainy image of a house cat is the ghost of a previous resident rumored to have been a werewolf?”
