The Science of Ghosts

by Joe Nickell

  MYSTERY AT THE LOWE HOTEL

  According to a number of sources, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, offers haunting experiences—literally: ghosts have supposedly checked in at the Lowe Hotel and never left!

  Three times I have visited this Ohio River town to investigate its mythical Mothman monster, a fanciful statue of which now stands across the street from the historic inn. (Once, I conducted an experiment in perception for the History Channel's popular TV series Monster Quest, and I include a chapter on Mothman in my Tracking the Man-Beasts: Sasquatch, Vampires, Zombies, and More, 2011.) In so doing, I have twice stayed at the Lowe, each time daring to bed down in its especially haunted room 314.

  The Lowe is one of those grand hotels of yesteryear. Built in 1901 on the bank of the Ohio River, it is very near the site of the 1774 Battle of Point Pleasant (which Congress later decreed the first battle of the American Revolutionary War). Originally named the Spencer Hotel (in honor of a local judge), it was operated by the Lowe family from 1929 to 1990, when it was acquired by its present owners, Ruth and Rush Finley.

  When I asked Rush Finley (2011) if he had had any ghost experiences, he replied that he was “not of that mind-set.” Guests did occasionally have an experience, however. Ruth told a reporter, “We used to keep all those stories quiet, because we thought it would be bad for business. But in the last several years, these kinds of experiences have come into vogue, and we've encouraged guests to share their experiences” (see “Ghostly Encounters,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, Feb. 18, 2007).

  On my first stay (April 12, 2002), I interviewed Ruth Finley as she graciously gave me a tour of the old inn, a place filled with ambiance. She said that the wife of a railroad employee had stayed in room 314 for a week and had once awakened to see a man standing there. The woman also reported seeing the man in a large framed mirror when she did her hair. But are such experiences evidence of ghosts, or does science have another explanation?

  MYSTERY SOLVED

  To explain the Lowe Hotel's ghost-revealing mirror, we must look at how the phenomenon originated. Recall that a guest staying in room 314 for a week had first awakened to see a man standing in the room. This is a rather obvious description of a hypnopompic experience or “waking dream.” As we previously discussed, this is a type of common hallucination that occurs in the interface between sleep and wakefulness. In this state, people often “see” ghosts, angels, extraterrestrials, or other entities. The woman also reported that the man appeared in the mirror when she did her hair—another, similar type of apparitional experience that typically occurs when one is in an altered state of consciousness, like daydreaming or performing some routine chore, as in this instance. (See appendix for “apparitional experiences.”) It would not be at all unusual for a person having the one experience to have the other. Probably, the provocative nature of mirrors, together with the prior experience, played a part in triggering the subsequent sightings.

  Paranormal writer Rosemary Ellen Guiley has more to say about the man in the mirror. In cataloging other ghostly activity at the Lowe in an article, she writes: “The third floor is the most active. In room 314, a tall, thin man in a 1930s suit, with a long beard, has appeared in a mirror. The solemn-looking fellow has not been identified, but he bears a strong resemblance to Sid Hatfield of the famous McCoy-Hatfield feuding families fame” (Guiley 2007).

  Now, Guiley does not say it was Sid Hatfield (1893–1921) who, incidentally, was not a member of the feuding family, although he bragged that he was. A photo of him in his prime (apparently not long before he was killed while serving as police chief of Matewan, West Virginia) shows him clean-shaven. And he died a decade before he would have been dressed in 1930s attire. He also lived several counties away from Point Pleasant and had no known connection with the Lowe (although Rush Finley thinks it possible he could have stayed there). Nevertheless, various Internet postings and published articles suggest the ghost was indeed Sid, often using similar wording. (Indeed, one ghost-hunter's site uses—without attribution—four sentences verbatim from another site that acknowledges Guiley as its source.)

  Still another source (“Lowe Hotel” 2010) has somehow learned that Sid's mirrored reflection did not appear to just one person but “has been seen by many.” But if there were indeed “many” sightings of Sid, we would think someone would see his sheriff's badge or even his most prominent feature—“the gold caps on every one of his teeth”—that earned him his nickname “Smilin’ Sid” (“Sid Hatfield” 2011).

  I did not see Sid—or any other ghost—on the nights I stayed in room 314. I did photograph some “ghost orbs” (bright balls of “spirit energy” that seem to hover in haunted places). The orbs even appeared in the magical mirror on the wall! However, it probably helped that I pointed the camera at the mirror and then shook a dust cloth in the air in front of it. Real investigators know that orbs are merely the result of the camera's flash rebounding from particles of dust or debris—or, alternately, droplets of moisture—close to the lens.

  My last night at the Lowe, I had to move down the hall, giving up my room to a party of ghost hunters from Kentucky who had prebooked it. I chatted with them until midnight, and one agreed with me on the fundamentally unscientific nature of ghost hunters endlessly seeking “anomalies” in “haunted” places, using equipment for which there is no scientific proof that it detects ghosts.

  MARILYN AT THE HOLLYWOOD ROOSEVELT?

  Reminiscent of the Lowe Hotel's “haunting” is an earlier case I investigated at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in June 2000. (I have also stayed at the hotel on other occasions—once when I was in Southern California to make a giant Nasca-geoglyph re-creation on an area ranch for National Geographic Television.) Over the years, I kept meaning to write up this case; obviously, an appropriate time has now presented itself.

  Among many ghostly phenomena claimed in former promotional material from the hotel is the story of “Marilyn Monroe's Ghost in Mirror” (“Marilyn” 2000). It is one of a collection of brief ghost stories related under the heading “Tall Tales,” which perhaps gives an idea of the seriousness with which we should approach the report.

  In any case, the initial sighting was in mid-December 1985, shortly before the hotel reopened following a two-year restoration. “With the opening so close,” the account reads, “all office workers, managers and secretaries spent the day cleaning, sweeping and dusting.” Indeed, several of the “tall tales” have their origin around this time, suggesting a bout of psychological contagion, whereby one report sets up expectations in others, prompting them to have questionable perceptions and experiences. (This is also the cause of many UFO and monster “flaps.”) Ghost stories might also have been hyped for publicity purposes.

  As it happened, while a staff member named Suzanne Leonard was cleaning the tall, framed mirror (then located in the general manager's office) she saw “the reflection of a blonde girl right where her hand was dusting.” She looked around to find no one there, “yet when she looked back at the mirror, the reflection was still there.” She did not say the girl resembled Marilyn Monroe, but the manager later told her the mirror had come from the star's former suite near the pool, and the identification has stuck. (The mirror was later relocated to the area outside the lower-level elevator. See accompanying illustration [figure 19.1], which I created for fun, bringing to the site a Marilyn cutout folded in my suitcase.)

  How do we explain the ghost in the mirror? As at the Lowe Hotel, the Hollywood Roosevelt employee was performing a routine chore and, in the resulting reverie, may have had an apparitional experience (in which an image from the subconscious becomes superimposed on the visual scene). I do not know if apparitions are more likely to happen when a mirror is involved—that is, if there is a scrying effect. However, in such an experience, when the person shifts his or her gaze (as happened with the “Marilyn” sighting), the “spell” is usually broken and the illusory image dissolves. That it did not in this instance could suggest that another f
actor was involved.

  I suspect that in the constantly changing surface swirls and streaks caused by her cleaning, the percipient briefly saw a simulacrum—that is, an image resulting from the brain's tendency (called pareidolia) to perceive recognizable images in random patterns—such as seeing pictures in clouds, inkblots, or the like. That the image appeared “right where her hand was dusting” seems to support this hypothesis. If the simulacrum effect was involved, it probably combined with the apparitional experience to trigger the appearance of the “blonde girl” who was not reflected in the mirror but who appeared on it—before, of course, being dusted away!

  As an example of the utterly shoddy “research” that is often done on such cases by ghost-mongering types, consider the account by Richard Senate (1998, 13–14). Giving no sources for his alleged facts, Senate erroneously attributes the mirror sighting to a “maid”; wrongly places its occurrence “near the elevators” (where the mirror was relocated); incorrectly reports that, when the percipient turned back to the mirror, “the image of the beautiful blond [sic] was gone”; adds imaginative details to the original vague and apparently monochromatic image (“that silky golden hair, those crystal blue eyes, those lustrous lashes, the pouting red lips”); has somehow learned that the domestic was not “dusting” but “polishing” the mirror; and so on. Other sources imply additional sightings of Marilyn in the mirror, as well as sightings of other deceased guests in other mirrors in the Roosevelt's hallways, as what began as single incident obviously becomes mythologized (see Hauck, 1996, 47).

  EXPERIENCING THE PSYCHOMANTEUM

  These cases bring us to the psychomanteum. That is a chamber with a mirror into which one gazes in hopes of seeing spirits of the dead. The chamber is dark, save for a dim lightbulb or a candle.

  On June 26–27, 2010, my wife Diana Harris and I were visiting the charming spiritualist village on Cassadaga Lake in Western New York, the subject of the book Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker (2003). There, in the basement of a three-story Victorian dwelling known as Angel House (figure 19.2), is a psychomanteum. Screened off with fabric panels, and containing a mirror that is slightly tipped up so sitters do not see themselves, the chamber is the topic of chapter 18 of Wicker's book.

  Through a spiritualist friend (with whom we also sat during the evening's healing ceremony performed by visiting Tibetan monks), we were invited with another couple to visit the Angel House's psychomanteum. There we five sat for several minutes and looked in vain for the ghostly figures. Christine Wicker had looked longer on two separate occasions with Lily Dale mediums and had similar results, although one medium's friend reportedly had better luck.

  The psychomanteum was popularized by Dr. Raymond Moody—the professor of psychology best known for coining the term near-death experience (NDE)—whose 1993 book Reunions is based on the mirror chamber. He has used his own psychomanteum as a research tool, encouraging persons to contact the dead as a means of resolving grief. Moody's setup is contained in his rural Alabama facility, the John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind. Dee (1527–1608) was court magician to Elizabeth I; he touted scrying (using an obsidian mirror) as a technique for predicting the future.

  The technique of scrying involves relaxing and placing the mind in an unfocused state, whereupon the shiny surface may seem to cloud over as a prelude to the appearance of mental imagery.

  Thus, the psychomanteum invites use of the imagination. As Francis X. King (1991, 151) cautions in Mind & Magic, with scrying, you may not be seeing clairvoyantly but “just getting better acquainted with the contents of your own unconscious mind.”

  While the country's official name is the Netherlands, most people elsewhere call it Holland (even though that term really applies to only two of its thirteen provinces). Just about a tenth the size of California, the Netherlands is still one of Europe's most densely populated countries (after Monaco and Malta). It has historically been a treasure trove of geniuses—from the Dutch masters, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, to such scientific pioneers as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), who first identified bacteria, and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), who proposed the wave theory of light. Indeed, seated in the front row during my talk at a skeptics congress in Utrecht on October 28, 2006, was Gerard ’t Hooft, cowinner (with Martin Veltman) of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

  Of course, like people everywhere, the Dutch can also be superstitious—hence the conference theme, “the paranormal.” I spoke on the relationship between Dutch and American psychics and for several days before the event toured the country with noted Dutch skeptic Jan Willem Nienhuys, investigating a number of mysteries and legends. These included an Amsterdam woman's visions, haunted coal mines, the well-known boy-with-his-finger-in-the-dike tale, and more. (Our investigation of a mansion haunted by the ghost of a walled-up nun appears in chapter 5.)

  The Netherlands's Limburg Province (the country's southernmost) rests on coal deposits that are some 270 million years old. Coal, once an important Dutch commodity, was mined in the region, which contains many labyrinthine mines as well as cave systems (Harmans 2005, 365).

  Nienhuys had learned of a “haunted” mine, the Emma, but it is unfortunately now closed. Nevertheless, we were able to visit, about twenty kilometers to the south, a historical mine, Steenkolenmijn, which is open to the public as a sort of mining museum. (As Nienhuys learned, however, one must be constantly skeptical: this “coal” mine is actually an old marl pit, centuries old, that was converted to a “model mine” in 1917.)

  In addition to touring a mine to get a sense of the setting of mine ghost tales, we also visited the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, which conducts research on language and culture, including ethnology and folklore. There we met with senior researcher Theo Meder, who helped us sort out versions of the Emma mine's ghost tale.

  The story is elaborated as a children's adventure, Kaspar, by Pierre Heijboer, who was himself from the village of Hoensbroek, where the Emma mine is located. In the story, Little Jo had just turned fifteen and had gone to work in the mine, even though his grandmother thought this work too dangerous for him. His job was to regulate the weather-doors, leather flaps that regulated airflow.

  One day there were no coal cars, but as he sat there he was visited by an old man dressed in a miner's clothes, wearing a beard, and using a walking stick. He told Jo his name was Kaspar and that he could determine who could see him and who could not. He took Jo through a hole into an old section of the mine that Kaspar said was his domain. Everywhere old supports had fallen, and at one place Jo saw, sticking out, the bony hand of a miner who had been killed in a collapse. He also saw fossil trees of the type coal was made from, as well as bright crystals and other sights. Although hours passed, he was not tired, thirsty, or hungry.

  Meanwhile, because he had not returned, Jo's grandmother was worried, especially when she learned that his name-token—kept on a hook during working hours as a safety precaution—was missing. After two days, everyone had given up hope of ever finding him alive again, although his grandmother kept praying for his safe return.

  Then, on the third day, Jo reappeared. When asked to explain what had happened, he began by saying that no one would believe him. In fact, as his family rejoiced, mine officials had a doctor examine him, and a mine policeman accused him of deserting his post. The miners’ chaplain was also skeptical of his story, but his grandmother knew not to worry about him in the future because he was protected by “Kaspar, the mine ghost” (Meder 2005; 2006).

  Obviously, this narrative has a fairy-tale quality, not the least of which is its motif of passing through a hole into a mystical realm. (In Lewis Carroll's 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, for example, little Alice falls down a rabbit hole and into a strange land where everything occurs with fantastic illogicality.) Then there is the supernatural figure of Kaspar. Common to Dutch mine legends and myths, Kaspar is a sort of god of the underworld. He is generally malevolent, angry at h
umans who pillage his rich hoard of coal (Dieteren 1984, p. 33). So when miners arrived at work and found cracked supports, they would suggest, “Kaspar has been here,” or when a coffee can or sandwiches went missing they would suggest, “Well, Kaspar may have taken them” (Lemmens 1936, 62).

  If the Emma mine story is based on an actual event, it had to have occurred between 1913, when that mine first opened, and 1936, when a version of the tale appeared in a book of mine legends (Lemmens 1936, 77). Meder (2006) suggests that the boy may simply have wandered off, become lost, and fallen asleep, dreaming about the old man or inventing him to provide an alibi for himself.

  Asked about haunted mines, our guide at Steenkolenmijn was very dismissive, saying that ghost stories were simply used to scare beginning workers. Even so, Nienhuys did turn up some illuminating tales of mine “ghosts.” One specter proved to be a living miner who was covered in chalk, while another was a goat that had been surreptitiously released underground!

  Still another tale, “the ghost in the mine wagon,” tells about a miner who was attempting to fraudulently change the tags on coal cars to give himself credit for greater production. Suddenly, his hand was grabbed—in one version by a ghost, in another by the supervisor who had hidden in one of the cars (Nienhuys 2006).

  As all these folk narratives about mine ghosts indicate, they have less insight to provide about the reality of ghosts than about the storytellers’ desire to entertain or instruct within their own cultural environment.

  Which is more likely to be “haunted,” a university engineering building or an old theater? That it is the latter seems obvious—for reasons we shall soon consider. When Tom Ogden (2009, x) began to collect tales for his book Haunted Theaters, he discovered that “the hard part wasn't finding theaters that are haunted. If anything, it was finding theaters that aren't haunted. For some reason, it seems that more spirits have taken up residence in playhouses than just about any other type of venue.” My own assessment is similar, except that I suspect theaters are believed to be haunted because people expect them to be.