by Joe Nickell
Stories of this type continued to be reported, and to be collected by ghost chroniclers, in succeeding centuries. However, in the Enlightenment (the eighteenth-century European movement that emphasized rational and scientific knowledge), ghost tales increasingly began to be dismissed. They were regarded as representing what today would be termed “anecdotal evidence”—that is, as consisting of mere anecdotes (entertaining little tales) and nothing more. Serious thinkers generally relegated ghost stories to the domain of the ignorant and superstitious.
Most of the “real” Victorian-era ghosts that were the subject of such stories were quite dull, “silent grey ladies”—a marked contrast with some of history's more purposeful ghosts (Finucane 1984, 223). In one famous English haunting of the 1840s, the apparition of a woman (seen under conditions that suggest it was another waking dream) was described as “attired in grayish garments.” Indeed, as related in the classic text of the period, The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers by Catherine Crowe (1848, 312, 318), the figure “generally appeared in a shroud”—it having been very common at times to depict ghosts as wearing grave clothes (see Haining 1982, 154, 167, 248; Cohen 1984, 253–254). (Today's Halloween ghosts, so often attired in sheets, may be an extension of this tradition.)
Belief in ghosts began to change in the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of modern spiritualism, a popular movement based on alleged communication with the other world. It began on March 31, 1848 (All Fools’ Eve!), at a house in Hydesville, New York, when two schoolgirls, Maggie and Katie Fox, began to seemingly communicate with the ghost of a murdered peddler. Four decades later, the sisters confessed it had all been a trick. They publicly demonstrated how their “spirit rappings” (akin to those of 1527 mentioned earlier) had been produced surreptitiously in response to questions addressed to the invisible spirit. (For more on the Fox sisters and the origins of spiritualism, see chapter 23.) In the intervening years, however, spiritualism had spread like wildfire across the United States and beyond.
Self-styled “mediums” (those who supposedly contacted spirits of the dead for others) conducted dark-room séances wherein they produced a variety of phenomena that supposedly proved the reality of spirits. The Davenport Brothers, for example, were tied up and placed in a “spirit cabinet” with musical instruments that nevertheless were heard playing in the dark, after which the brothers were found still securely tied. They were occasionally caught cheating, however, and late in life one surviving brother confessed to the magician Houdini how they had secretly slipped from, and back into, their bonds to effect their spirit trickery (Nickell 1999).
Other mediums pretended to conjure up spirits who performed by writing on slates, speaking through levitating tin trumpets, causing tables to tilt mysteriously, and performing other wonders. Some mediums persuaded the spirits to “materialize” and appear to credulous sitters, but there were repeated exposés. For instance, in Boston in 1876 a reporter carefully searched the séance room after the alleged materialization of the medium's “spirit guide,” whereupon he discovered the woman's accomplice hiding in a recess (Christopher 1970, 175–76).
Spiritualists claimed that a substance called “ectoplasm,” which was tangible and produced by the medium's body, could be used by spirits to effect physical phenomena. Like a sort of magical modeling clay, ectoplasm allegedly enabled spirits to fashion an extra limb (or “pseudopod”) on the medium, create an artificial larynx to make spirit speech possible, or simply become visible in a photograph. This was faked in a variety of ways, such as by using chiffon or gauze to produce “eerily convincing” effects according to confessed medium M. Lamar Keene in his The Psychic Mafia (1997, 100–101). Also used were chewed-up paper, concoctions of soap and gelatin, and so forth (Guiley 2000, 116–17).
Many people tried communicating with spirits through automatic writing (in which, supposedly, an entranced person's hand is guided by the spirits), or by use of a planchette (a moveable device fitted with a pencil that scrawled “spirit” messages), or by using a “talking board” (such as the later Ouija board, which had a planchette-style pointer that moved mysteriously to letters printed on the board in order to answer questions) (Guiley 2000, 291–92, 377). We now know that such activity is produced due to the sitter's “dissociation.” In a dissociated state, the consciousness is split so that the individual is able simultaneously to perform one set of functions that he is aware of and another that he is not (Baker 1990, 106–107). Such unconscious muscular activity also explains dowsing, a technique that is sometimes used for attempted spirit communication (Christopher 1970, 132–41; Warren 2003, 169–71).
Spiritualistic “evidence” provoked much investigation. In her book Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death, Deborah Blum (2006) tells how a small band of scientists set out with the intention of proving the reality of the supernatural—ghosts included—and thereby uniting religion and science. In 1882, in London, they founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Unfortunately their credulity, even outright gullibility, did not serve them well.
The notorious medium Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918) was able to confound even some of Europe's most distinguished scientists with her spiritualistic effects. She produced a variety of phenomena, such as rapping noises, even though her hands were placed on the séance table and “controlled” by a sitter on each side of her. Skeptical scientists and investigators soon discovered that she used a number of tricks. Since the control of her hands was of her own devising, consisting of each of her hands simply touching the hand of the sitter on either side, by slowly moving her hands close together, she could eventually let one hand do double duty. This gave her a free hand with which to make raps, touch people at the table, move objects, and so on (Christopher 1970, 188–204).
In contrast to the SPR, genuinely skeptical scientists and investigators uncovered many deceptions and self-deceptions. For instance, noted physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) conducted table-tipping experiments that proved mediums and amateur spiritualists were actually putting pressure on tabletops, often unconsciously (Blum 2006, 30–21, 67). In 1876, British zoologist Ray Lankester caught the medium Henry Slade faking “spirit” writing on slates. And Houdini (1874–1926), who spent the last years of his life crusading against spiritualistic fraud, routed many phony mediums (Houdini 1924). Some of his work was on behalf of Scientific American magazine, which in the 1920s offered $2,500 to anyone who could produce an “objective psychic manifestation of physical character” (quoted in Brandon 1983, 175). (We will return to the phenomena of spiritualism again and again in this book.)
Beginning in the twentieth century, a major venue for hauntings has been the Hollywood movie, but it had less to do with the supposedly “real” realm of ghosts and more to do with horror, like Cecil B. Demille's The Ghost Breaker (1914), or with comedy/horror, like a 1940 movie of the same title starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard (The Ghost Breakers 2007), or Ghost Catchers (1944) (Internet Movie Database 2007).
Among other movies, The Amityville Horror (1979) featured one of the most notorious “haunted” places in the world. Made from the book The Amityville Horror: A True Story, it was anything but true. To various investigators, the tale told by George and Kathy Lutz—that their family had been driven from the house by occult forces—had seemed a questionable hodgepodge of phenomena, part traditional haunting, part poltergeist disturbance, and part demonic possession, including elements that seemed to have been lifted from the movie The Exorcist (1973). Eventually, William Weber, the attorney for the man who had murdered his family in the house, confessed how he and George Lutz had “created this horror story over many bottles of wine that George Lutz was drinking” (quoted in Nickell 1995, 128).
The popularity of the Ghostbusters movie of 1984—which featured three wacky parapsychology professors who set out to trap and remove supernatural entities—may have helped cause today's ghost-hunting clubs to proliferate. Many other mo
vies have promoted interest in ghosts and spirits. Poltergeist (1982) took the idea of disruptive spirits to the extreme, with the science-fiction horrors of angry trees and homicidal dolls. Ghost (1990) was based on a murder victim (played by Patrick Swayze) whose earthbound spirit enlisted the services of a medium to help him protect his girlfriend. The Sixth Sense (1999) told the story of a troubled boy who could “see dead people” and the child psychologist who sought to help him. And White Noise (2005) featured a man who contacted his wife beyond the grave, using electronic voice phenomena. Discussed later, this physical aspect is widely touted by today's ghost hunters.
Television has also long been in the ghost business, with such fare as Topper (1953–1955), Great Ghost Tales (1961), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968–1969), The Ghost Busters (1975–1976), Shadow Chasers (1985), and Poltergeist: The Legacy (1996), as well as made-for-TV movies like The Woman in White (1978), Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (1989), The Ghost Writer (1990), and many, many others. (For a “Filmography,” with TV and movie listings from 1898–1999, see Edwards 2001.)
Whether ghosts exist remains a controversy of our day—not within science but rather between science and what is called parascience. A subsidiary of parascience is termed paraphysics, defined as “the investigation of the nature, and modes of action, of forms of energy not described in traditional Western physics” (White and Krippner 1977, 24–25). Many parascientists (who are sometimes indistinguishable from mystics) postulate a “life force” or “life energy” that they believe can survive death and may explain such supposed “survival phenomena” as apparitions (White and Krippner 1977, 23).
This “energy” accounts for the “aura,” an alleged radiance that is supposed to emanate from and surround all living things, which is perceived not by ordinary vision but by clairvoyance (psychic “clear seeing”). The human body does in fact give off certain radiations, including electromagnetic emanations (from the electrical activity of nerves), sonic waves (produced by physical actions with the body), chemical emissions (such as body odors), and so forth. However, while paranormalists sometimes equate these radiations with the aura (Permutt 1988, 57–58), they do not constitute a single, unified phenomenon; neither have they been shown to have the mystical properties attributed to auras (Nickell 2001a, 142–49).
Still, parascientists have touted techniques for supposedly recording the imagined life energy. These include Kirlian photography (a noncamera technique in which a high voltage, high-frequency electrical discharge is applied across a grounded object), but this technique merely records a corona discharge on the photographic plate. A similar claim is made for infrared imaging, but the recorded emanations are only those of body temperature. At a psychic fair I investigated alleged aura-imaging technology that yielded my own “full body aura photograph,” but it was actually a simulation produced by a colored-light display (Nickell 2001a, 142–49). (See figures 2.1–2.3.)
Again, proponents have invoked quantum mechanics in defense of ideas like “haunted” places having “residual emotions” and “spirits emitting emotions” (Belanger 2007, 166), but they have done so out of gross misunderstandings of the complexities of quantum theory, engaging in unwarranted extrapolations from particle physics to assumptions about the dubious realm of the paranormal. (For a serious discussion see Stenger 1990, 236–52.)
Indeed, science cannot substantiate the existence of a “life energy” that could survive death without dissipating or that could function (e.g., enable one to walk or gesture) without benefit of the physical organ known as the brain. As is well known from the science of neurology, when the brain dies, brain function ceases. The attempts of so-called ghost hunters to detect alleged postmortem “energy” with electronic gadgets, dowsing rods, and “psychics” continues to represent a fool's errand (as we shall see later).
If ghosts did, however, represent the survival of a soul or life force, how is it that—as confirmed by countless published sources as well as my own more than forty years’ experience as a ghostbuster—the reputed entities are almost always seen wearing clothing (which is, of course, inanimate)?
GHOSTLY GARBS
The question is not new, having been posed by skeptics at least as early as the mid-nineteenth century (Roffe 1851) and addressed more recently to me by Esquire magazine (Answer Fella 2005). Psychical investigator Frank Podmore (1856–1910) wondered, since ghosts invariably appear dressed, “Have clothes also ethereal counterparts? Such was and is the belief of many early races of mankind, who leave clothes, food, and weapons in the graves of the dead, or burn them on the funeral pyre, that their friends may have all they require in the spirit world.” However, he notes, “these ghosts commonly appear, not in the clothes which they were wearing at death—for most deaths take place in bed—but in some others” (Podmore 1909, 25–26).
Indeed, the ghosts of popular stories are garbed in many ways, according to cultural and dramatic expectations. For example, while medieval ghosts were typically wrapped in their burial shrouds, they could appear in full armor or other costume as the situation required, just as a woman of a more recent era saw her husband's ghost “dressed in a double-breasted suit long out of fashion” and “wearing equally unfashionable shoes” (Maxwell-Stuart 2006, 7, 62–63).
At the first “haunted” site I investigated (1971–1972), Toronto's Mackenzie House, there were purported sightings of a ghostly man in a frock coat—appropriate attire for its former historical resident, William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861), Canada's rebel-statesman (Nickell 1988, 17–27). Again, at Gettysburg, site of the historic Civil War battlefield, “ghosts” were properly outfitted in military dress—although some reportedly were only reenactment soldiers playing nighttime pranks (Nickell 1995, 56–59)!
Ghostly attire may even be modified according to some dramatic purpose. For example, the ghost of an eighteenth-century murder victim who sought revenge wore garments that were “all gory” (Finucane 1984, 60). Again, the wife of a corrupt moneylender who prayed at his grave beheld him after seven years wearing a black gown, but after another seven she saw him dressed in a white one and having a cheerful expression (Finucane 1984, 82).
Moreover, according to G. N. M. Tyrrell (1953, 66), one is “not only expected to believe in ghostly skirts and trousers, but also in ghostly hats, sticks, dogs, horses, carriages, doors, curtains—anything, in fact, with which a human being is commonly surrounded.” He adds, citing many cases, “that there is no difference in existential status between one part of an apparition and another. In whatever sense the central figure is ‘there,’ the auxiliary objects, the additional figures, and the environment are ‘there’ too.”
I even investigated one instance in which an item of clothing—an old wedding dress displayed in a museum—was itself claimed to be haunted. However, no one reported seeing a nude, ghostly bride donning the gown, whose ghostly movements in any event were attributable to people stepping on loose floorboards near the display case (Nickell 1995, 59–60).
IN THE BUFF
Despite their rarity, there are reports of naked ghosts. Yet even in these cases, the nudity is typically present because the alleged otherworldly situation requires it. For example, in London, from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, came reports of five naked male ghosts. There, in 1447, a gang of ruffians were publicly hanged. Subsequently, their bodies were stripped and their clothing flung into the clamorous crowd, after which they were drawn and quartered. According to the legend, a notice of reprieve arrived belatedly and was read to the crowd, whereupon a misty ghost arose from each man's remains. The naked specters asked for their clothes to be returned and, when they were not, they ran away, only to be seen intermittently thereafter (Waters 1993, 114–16).
Again, the grounds of Scotland's Holyrood House Palace are supposedly haunted by the nude specter of Agnes Sampson, who was tried for witchcraft in 1592. She was stripped of her clothing, had all her body hair shaved off (in search of a “devil's mark”), was tortured into
confessing, and then was executed by being strangled and burned (Cawthorne 2006, 118–20). Her ghost is reportedly seen as naked or, alternately, wearing a white shroud (Waters 1993, 55–56).
There are other instructive examples. One involved the naked and shivering ghost of a priest. This was explained by the bishop and his executors having milked the priest's estate to such an extent that he was left “spiritually naked” (Finucane 1984, 82). In some instances the overtones are decidedly sexual, as in the fourteenth-century case of an unclothed maiden's ghost running from a wood near Ravenna, pursued by a spectral knight on horseback (Maxwell-Stuart 2006, 8). Another story, “The Gypsy Girl and Her Lesbian Lover,” tells of a tryst, followed by the disappearance and possible murder of the gypsy, whose subsequent apparition “was said to walk across the field behind the inn, and vanish through the wall into the hayloft where the two women had been found in a naked sexual embrace all those years ago” (Waters 1993, 117–20).
APPARITIONAL DRAMA
Proponents of ghosts do not have a ready answer for the question, why aren't ghosts naked? According to Hilary Evans, “We need clothes in this world, either to keep warm or to conform with notions of propriety, but surely in the next world the spirits will abandon the use of clothes with all their inconveniences?” He continues, “do we suppose that they change back into Earth-style clothes when they return as ghosts, so as not to offend us, and perhaps so as to be recognized?” (Evans and Huyghe 2000, 151).
Do ghosts clothe themselves either out of their modesty or to conform to ours? (In fact, there are even ghost encounters in which the spirits “are naked except for a small scrap of cloth concealing their private parts” [Maxwell-Stuart 2006, 62].) However, this rationale only further raises the question of how spirit entities obtain their spectral costumes. Are there really otherworldly shops that offer clothes, shoes, belts, hats, and other items—analogous to early theater or movie-studio prop departments?
