By Tim Binnall
A British city council's rejection of a records request about paranormal activity has been called into question by a government watchdog agency that ordered a review of the decision. According to a local media report, the peculiar bit of bizarre bureaucracy began earlier this year when the community of Southampton received an official inquiry from a resident curious about incidents between 2020 and 2024 wherein people living in public housing asked to be moved because of "ghosts, hauntings, monsters, aliens or demons." Alas, the city council promptly rejected the unusual request, calling it "vexatious."
Specifically, city officials asserted that there was no "public value" for the requested information on alleged paranormal activity and that finding such reports would prove particularly onerous. To that end, they claimed that a staggering 6,633 files from public housing residents during those four years would have to be manually searched for mentions of high strangeness, which they estimated would require a whopping 138 hours of labor. Fortunately for the individual who filed the request, it may not get 'ghosted' after all, as a British agency that oversees such matters overruled the city's dismissal of the inquiry.
Responding to what was presumably an appeal of the decision, Britain's Information Commissioner’s Office found the dismissive characterization of the inquiry to be insufficient. While conceding that "the subject matter of the request is unusual," they wrote, " a request is not vexatious merely because it concerns unusual, speculative or apparently limited-value information." Interestingly, the ruling observed that such insights could be worthwhile, since they would shed light on how officials handled someone complaining about paranormal activity in their home. Also expressing skepticism about the claimed 138 hours of required labor, the board ordered the city council to issue a new ruling on the request within 30 days without relying on their previous reasoning for rejecting it.