Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there

by Richard Wiseman

  Eventually, Gef simply vanished. In 1970, writer Walter McGraw tracked down Voirrey and interviewed her about the entire affair. Though eager to keep her current location secret, Voirrey insisted that Gef had indeed existed and had chatted to her on a regular basis. She recounted how the clever mongoose had gone away for progressively longer periods of time, and then one day just never showed up again. Gef was not a positive influence on her life, said Voirrey, wistfully adding, ‘Gef has even kept me from getting married. How could I ever tell a man’s family about what happened?’ Voirrey died in 2005.

  In 1937, Cashen’s Gap was sold to a Mr Graham and the Irvings returned to mainland Britain. Graham never saw or heard Gef. In 1947, the new owner of Cashen’s Gap claimed to have killed a strange animal that was neither ferret nor stoat. His claims remained unverified and the pelt was never analysed. Cashen’s Gap was demolished in the 1950s, but the mystery of Gef lives on. Gef has his own Facebook page, and one website dedicated to matters paranormal recently suggested that he may have been ‘a supernatural entity from either an alternate dimension or an entity comprised of forces we do not quite understand’.

  Perhaps the final word in the whole surreal story should go to Gef. James Irving once described how he reprimanded Gef for taking too long to calculate how many pence there were in seventeen and sixpence. The self-proclaimed eighth wonder of the world responded with a suitably enigmatic reply which, for me, sums up the entire affair beautifully:

  ‘My rectophone wasn’t working.’

  5. GHOST-HUNTING

  In which we spend some quality time with an old hag,

  discover why poltergeist researchers once shook a house

  to pieces, meet the non-existent phantom of Ratcliffe

  Wharf, learn how to see a ghost and explore

  the psychology of suggestion.

  There is an old joke about a University lecturer who asks his class, ‘Has anyone here ever seen a ghost?’ Fifteen students put their hands in the air. Next, the lecturer says, ‘Well, who here has touched a ghost?’ This time only five hands go up. Curious, the lecturer adds, ‘OK, has anyone actually kissed a ghost?’ A young man sitting in the middle of the lecture theatre slowly raises his hand, looks around nervously and then asks, ‘I’m sorry, did you say ghost or goat?’

  Thankfully, the results from national surveys have yielded more clear-cut findings. Opinion polls from the past 30 years or so have consistently shown that around 30 per cent of people believe in ghosts and that about 15 per cent claim to have actually experienced one.1 Additional questioning has revealed that these alleged ghostly encounters do not involve white-sheeted figures drifting through walls, women in black bringing death and destruction, skeletons prancing through cemeteries or headless knights clanking their chains. Despite the frequent appearance of such images in ghost stories and horror films, actual apparitions are far more mundane.

  A colleague of mine, James Houran, has carried out a great deal of research into the nature of these ghostly experiences. James is an interesting fellow. During the day this mild-mannered statistician works for a well-known internet dating site creating mathematical models that help promote compatibility. By night Houran transforms into a real life ghost-buster, conducting surveys and studies that aim to solve the mystery of hauntings. A few years ago he analysed almost a thousand ghostly experiences to discover what people report when they believe that they have encountered a spirit.2

  Houran’s work revealed that reports of fully fledged apparitions are very rare. In fact, they only account for 1 per cent or so of sightings and when such figures do turn up they usually appear at the foot of a bed as people are either waking up or drifting off to sleep. Such apparitions have an uncanny knack of looking like a normal person, and their ghost-like nature only becomes apparent when they do something impossible, like suddenly vanish or walk through a wall.

  So if people are not seeing full apparitions when they encounter a ghost, just what do they experience? Around a third of Houran’s reports involve rather fleeting visual phenomena, such as quick flashes of light, odd wisps of smoke or dark shadows that move furtively around the room. Another third involve strange sounds, such as footsteps from an empty room, ghostly whispering, or inexplicable bumps and knockings. The remaining third are a mixture of miscellaneous sensations, including odd odours of flowers or cigar smoke, sensing a ghostly presence, feeling a cold shiver down the spine, doors opening or closing of their own accord, clocks running especially fast or slow, and dogs being unusually noisy or quiet.

  For well over a century scientists have attempted to explain these strange experiences. Some firmly believe that their investigations provide compelling evidence of life beyond the grave. Others are equally convinced that these seemingly supernatural sensations have down-to-earth explanations. Their experiments involve an odd mixture of ground-breaking dream research, camping out in haunted houses, vibrating fencing foils, sitting in the dark waiting for God, shaking entire buildings until they fall to pieces and staging large-scale hoaxes.

  Our journey into this mysterious world begins with perhaps the most widely reported of all ghostly experiences.

  Henry Fuseli and his Emotionless Horse

  In 1781 the Swiss oil painter Henry Fuseli created his most famous work. Entitled The Nightmare his painting depicts a woman having a terrible dream and the content of her frightening experience. The woman is sound asleep, lying on her back and with her head hanging down from the edge of her bed. A small evil-looking demon sits on her chest and peers out from the canvas. Towards the back of the painting a horse’s head with emotionless eyes is seen emerging from a curtain and staring menacingly at the woman.

  The Nightmare proved an instant hit when it was first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy, quickly achieved worldwide acclaim, and now features on the cover of almost every academic textbook about the paranormal. Fuseli created another version of the painting several years later, but it is generally agreed that this painting lacks the emotional impact of the original, in part because the demon appears to be wearing a Batman mask and the horse looks like it has just won the lottery.

  Fuseli’s painting depicts perhaps the most frequently experienced of all ghostly encounters; the arrival of the incubus. According to legend, the incubus is a demon who adopts a male form and forces itself upon sleeping women using its unusually large and cold penis (the Arthurian wizard Merlin was allegedly the result of such an encounter). Sitting on the chest of their victim to prevent movement, the incubus goes about its beastly business while other equally demonic creatures stand by the bedside watching. Never ones to miss an opportunity, it is said that such demons can also take the form of a female succubus and seduce sleeping men (albeit presumably without the aid of an unusually large and cold penis). These creatures have been reported in many different cultures. In Germany the demon is referred to as the ‘mare’ or ‘Alpdruck’ (‘elf pressure’), in Czechoslovakia they are the ‘muera’, and the French call them the ‘cauchemar’.

  Although it is easy to believe that nocturnal demonic experiences could have been the height of supernatural sophistication when Fuseli created his paintings, surely they are not still alive and well in the 21st century? In fact, recent surveys suggest that around 40 per cent of people have experienced exactly the same sensations, including waking up and feeling a crushing weight on their chest, sensing an evil presence, and seeing strange figures in the darkness.3 These episodes are often interpreted as evidence of demons, ghosts, or even an alien abduction. Regardless of the way in which they are perceived, one point is quite clear – even to the modern mind they are a terrifying and unforgettable experience.

  For centuries many of those who have come face to face with night-time demons have been convinced that they have encountered hell on earth. It is only in the last fifty years or so that research has revealed the remarkable truth behind these apparitions.

  The Incurably Curious Eugene Aserinsky

  The year 195
1 did not start well for University of Chicago psychologist Eugene Aserinsky.4 At work, his post-doctoral research into the eye movements of sleeping babies was proving both slow and unrewarding. At home, Aserinsky was facing severe financial difficulties. His family were forced to live in a small, cold apartment and he could only just afford to rent the typewriter that he needed to write up his work. Years later he described the sense of desperation that he faced:

  If I had a suicidal nature, this would have been the time. I was married and had a child. I’d been in universities for twelve years with little to show for it. I was absolutely finished.

  In addition, he was exploring avenues that simply didn’t interest his more mainstream colleagues. The vast majority of academics at the time assumed that the brain switched off when people drifted into the land of nod and turned back on when they woke up, and didn’t share Aserinsky’s interest in the psychology of sleep. However, Aserinsky wanted to discover if this ‘move on, nothing to see here’ approach to the sleeping brain was correct. Unable to attract proper funding for his work, he found an old brainwave measuring machine (referred to as an ‘electroencephalograph’) in the basement of his department, dragged it up into his office and managed to get it working. Unfortunately, one major problem remained – without proper funding who would be willing to spend several unpaid nights in Aserinsky’s sleep laboratory covered in sensors? Eventually he managed to come up with a lateral solution to this problem as well. On a cold evening in December 1951 he tucked his eight-year-old son Armond into the laboratory bed, connected eye movement and brainwave sensors to Armond’s face and head, and retreated to his office.

  After an hour or so, Armond drifted off to sleep and the experiment began. For the first 40 minutes or so Aserinsky carefully monitored the pens tracing the output from the electroencephalograph. The lack of movement was underwhelming, and it looked like the scientific establishment had been right to let sleeping brains lie. About 20 minutes later the pens started scribbling away, indicating large amount of activity from both the eye movement and brain activity sensors. Assuming that his son had woken up, Aserinsky went to check that he was okay. When he opened the door to his laboratory, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His son was sound asleep.

  At first Aserinsky assumed that his experimental equipment was faulty and set about checking the large number of leads going in and out of the electroencephalograph. No obvious problems emerged. The following day he showed the charts to his supervisor who also thought that there must have been a problem with the equipment, and asked Aserinsky to run a second set of more thorough checks. The system came back with a clean bill of health. A few more nights of monitoring Armond in the sleep laboratory convinced Aserinsky that his findings were genuine. At certain points during the night the sleeping brain became mysteriously and amazingly active. Additional work revealed that these sudden rushes of brain activity were accompanied by rapid eye movements or, as Aserinsky referred to them, ‘REMs’ (he originally wanted to call these ‘jerky eye movements’ but was worried about the negative connotations of the word ‘jerk’). Not only that, but whenever Aserinsky woke a participant up after a period of REM the person almost always reported a dream.

  In September 1953 Aserinsky and his supervisor published their findings in a now-classic paper entitled ‘Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep’, and changed psychology for ever.5 Suddenly researchers realized that there was a great deal more to the sleeping brain than they had previously assumed, and that Aserinsky had discovered a way of entering the hitherto hidden world of dreaming. As one researcher later remarked, it was like discovering ‘a new continent in the brain’, and scientists across the world were suddenly eager to explore this brave new world. Strangely enough, Eugene Aserinsky didn’t join them. Ever the unconventional but incurably curious polymath, he left the University of Chicago soon after his ground-breaking experiment to investigate the effects of electrical currents on salmon.

  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream – Ay, There’s the Rub

  Researchers have now identified five distinct stages of sleep.

  Soon after nodding off you drift into the creatively labelled ‘Stage 1’. Here your brain is still very active and producing high frequency brain waves known as ‘Alpha’ waves. During this stage people frequently experience two types of hallucinations known as hypnagogic imagery (which occur when people are drifting into sleep) and hypnopompic imagery (which occur when they are waking up). Either type can result in a wide range of visual phenomena, including random speckles, bright lines, geometric patterns, and mysterious animal and human forms. These images are often accompanied by strange sounds such as loud crashes, footsteps, faint whispers, and snatches of speech. Interestingly, these are exactly the type of experiences that have been mistaken for the presence of a ghost for hundreds of years.

  Having survived the potential terrors associated with ‘Stage 1’ you drift into ‘Stage 2’. Again, your brain is far from calm, often producing brief bursts of activity known as ‘spindles’. ‘Stage 2’ lasts for about 20 minutes and can result in the occasional mumble and even full on sleep-talking. Slowly you drift further down into, you guessed it, ‘Stage 3’. Now your brain and body are starting to become properly relaxed and after another 20 minutes or so you finally enter the deepest stage of sleep . . . In ‘Stage 4’, your brain activity is at a minimum, resulting in very slow moving ‘Delta’ waves. If you are going to engage in a spot of bedwetting or sleepwalking, this is the moment.

  After around 30 minutes or so in ‘Stage 4’ something very strange happens. Your brain moves rapidly back through the first three stages and then enters a mysterious state. It exhibits the same high levels of activity originally displayed during ‘Stage 1’, but your heart races, your breathing becomes shallow, and you produce the REMs that so fascinated Aserinsky all those years ago. Now you are dreaming. Everyone experiences this REM stage about five times each night, with each of the periods lasting an average of twenty minutes. Although some people think that they don’t dream, if they are woken up directly after exhibiting REMs, more often than not, they will report a dream. It is not that some individuals don’t dream, but rather that they don’t remember their dreams in the morning.

  Additional work has shown that two curious things happen to your body when you dream. First, your genitals become active, with men getting an erection and women exhibiting increased vaginal lubrication. Although hailed as a breakthrough in the 1960s, some researchers have argued that the effect may have been discovered long before, pointing out, for example, that one of the 17,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux depicts a dreaming Cro-Magnon hunter with an erect penis (then again, he might just have really enjoyed hunting). Second, although your brain and genitalia are very active during dreaming, the rest of your body is not. In fact, your brainstem completely blocks any movement of your limbs and torso in order to prevent you acting out your dreams and possibly hurting yourself.

  Just as your brain can fool you into seeing an afterimage of a ghost, it can also trick you into thinking that you have encountered an evil entity. As you move between ‘Stage 1’ and the REM state your brain sometimes becomes confused, causing you to experience the hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery associated with ‘Stage 1’, but the sexual arousal and paralysis associated with the REM state. This terrifying combination causes you to feel as if a heavy weight is sitting on your chest and pinning you to the bed, sense (and sometimes see) an evil entity or two, and believe that you are having a rather odd form of intercourse.

  For centuries a significant percentage of the public have convinced themselves that they have been attacked by demons, ghosts and aliens. Not only have sleep researchers revealed the true nature of such experiences, but also uncovered the best way of banishing these entities from your bedroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, this does not involve extensive chanting, the sprinkling of holy water or an elaborate exorcism. In fact, it turns out that all you have to
do is try your best to wiggle a finger or blink. Even the smallest of movements will help your brain shift from the REM state to ‘Stage 1’ of sleep, and before you know it you will be wide awake and safely back in the land of the living.

  Those who believe in ghosts have now been forced to accept that the incubus experience is not evidence of hell, but rather a clever trick of the mind. However, rather than jettison their belief in hauntings, they have focused their attention on an altogether trickier problem – the many ghost sightings that happen when people are far from sleep.

  HOW TO SUMMON THE SPIRITS

  Would you like to see a ghost right now? If so, stare at the small white dot in the left-hand box below for about thirty seconds, and then look at the small black dot in the empty right-hand box. After a few moments you should see a mysterious woman in white emerge in front of your eyes. If you repeat the exercise, but look at a white wall rather than the tiny box, you will see a giant ghost projected onto the wall.

  Psychologists refer to the ghostly figure that you just saw (and that many of you will continue to see for the next few minutes - sorry about that) as an 'afterimage'. Your perception of colour is based on three systems. Each of these systems is based around two colours, with one dealing with the red-green continuum, another with blue-yellow and the third with black-white. In each of these systems the two colours oppose one another and can't be seen together. For example, when the eye and brain encounter the colour red, the 'red' half of the red-green system is activated, disabling your ability to see anything green at the same time (this explains why you never see colours that appear yellowish-blue or reddish-green).