by Joe Nickell
Figures 18.1 and 18.2.“Ghostly” forms in photos like these made by a New York state couple are becoming common.
Figure 18.3.Experimental photograph by the author reproduces similar ghostly effects.
Yet again, the mysterious, fluid form appears in a British photo in Jane Goldman’s embarrassingly credulous The X-Files Book of the Unex-plained (1995, reviewed in Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 1996). Goldman’s caption suggests the white shape is a ghost; “Or is it fogged film?” Goldman asks in a rare moment of doubt. Actually it is neither. I learned the source of the ghostly phenomenon when the first young couple visited my office and, at my request, brought their camera and film for me to keep for a few days. Examination of the negatives revealed nothing remarkable, but by the next day I had the answer: the strand or looplike form was caused by the new subcompact camera s hand strap getting in front of the lens. Since the viewfinder on this type of camera does not see what the camera sees (as it does in a single-lens reflex type camera), the ob-truded view goes unnoticed. Although such camera straps are typically black and photograph black (or dark) in normal light, their sheen en-ables them to reflect brightly the flash from the camera’s self-contained flash unit.
Figure 18.4.Another experimental photo is typical of many “ghost” snapshots.
Some of my experimental snapshots are shown in figures 18.3 and 18.4. The braiding of the strap can even be seen in some pictures. When the cord is quite close to the lens, the result is softer, more mistlike. It follows that analogous effects could occur if other articles were placed before the lens—either deliberately or inadvertently. For example, flash- reflected hair, jewelry, articles of clothing, a fingertip, or the like could produce distinctive effects that might not be easily recognized.
It is instructive to note that in each of the cases I have related, including the six examples in Fate magazine, no one saw anything out of the ordinary but simply discovered the anomolous shapes when the photos came back from the film processors. As I point out in Camera Clues, that situation is a good indication that the paranormal phenomenon in question—ghost, UFO, or other entity—is really only some sort of pho-tographic glitch caused by camera, film, processing, or other element. In this case, a new type of camera was the culprit in a rash of allegedly supernatural pictures.
References
The Fate ghost contest. 1995. Fate, Oct., 42-45.
Goldman, Jane. 1995. The X-Files Book of the Unexplained. London: Simon & Schuster, 25.
Nickell, Joe. 1994. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky.
Chapter 19
The Lake Utopia Monster
“Maritimers better lock up their ghosts,” the Canadian Press writer advised residents of the Atlantic provinces. “Professional skeptic Joe Nickell is touring the region,” announced the tongue-in-cheek warning in Canadian newspapers, “and not a lake monster, a beloved spectre or even the Oak Island treasure is safe from the penetrating glare of his cold, hard logic” (Morris 1999). The mock advisory was prompted by my June July 1999 visit to “the Maritimes,” initially by invitation of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Fredericton, New Brunswick. There I addressed forensic experts at the annual conference of the Canadian Identification Society and (incidentally) promoted my new book Crime Science (1999).
Rather than fly to Fredericton just for the event, however, I decided to drive and thus be able to investigate a number of regional enigmas. Naturally I prepared extensively, studying such works as Mysterious Canada by my friend John Robert Colombo (1988), formulating hypotheses and investigative strategies, contacting museum curators and others, and packing a large investigative kit customized for the trip, with camera equipment, tape recorder and notebooks, stereomicroscope (for examining a mystery inscription), among other items.
I passed through Maine (spending my first evening at the “haunted” Kennebunk Inn [see “Haunted Inns” chapter in this book]), then continued on to Canada, where I promptly conducted my first investigations. According to Micmac Indian legend, century-old tales, and modern eyewitness reports, Lake Utopia, in southern New Brunswick, is reportedly home to a fearsome monster. As with other lake leviathans, it is varyingly described, although only rarely glimpsed and more often perceived by a churning of the water and debris sent up from the depths. There are no known photographs of the alleged creature, but in the early settlement period were reported tracks, or rather a “slimy trail”—with claw marks—leading into the water (Martinez 1988; Colombo 1988). Today, it appears that most local people are skeptical of the monster’s existence, although a few have reported seeing an unexplained wake (Murray 1999), or what they believed was a large animal (Gaudet 1999), or perhaps they know someone who has had such a sighting (K. Wilson 1999; T.Wilson 1999).
Figure 19.1. Guide Tony Wilson sets out with author on a jet-ski exploration of New Brunswick, Canada’s, Lake Utopia in search of the fabled monster.
Figure 19.2. Although armed with a camera to shoot over his guide’s shoulder, the author reported the monster a no-show.
On June 27,1 visited nearby St. George, N.B., where I collected local accounts of the fabled monster and hired a guide, Tony Wilson of All Wet Aquatics, to take me on a jetski trip (via the Magaguadavic River and a natural canal) into and around the 3,409-acre lake. Despite my efforts, however, the imagined creature did not have the courtesy to show itself, let alone pose for my camera. (See figures 19.1-19.2.)
As with similar claims, a major problem with the possibility of such a monster is the difficulty of a lake providing sufficient food—not merely for one leviathan, but for a breeding herd that would be necessary for the continuation of a species. Also, many mundane phenomena can simulate a monster. Local candidates include floating logs; wind slicks; salmon, sturgeon (Gaudet 1999), and schools of smaller fish; and Silver Eels (once so plentiful that they clogged the pulp mill’s water wheels [“Brief History” n.d.]). Other potential culprits include such swimming wildlife as deer, muskrats, beavers, and otters (“St. George” 1999)—especially otters, who could have produced many of the effects reported (Nickell 1995, 1999).
In the preface to his Mysterious Canada, John Robert Colombo (1988, v) insisted quite properly that “We should know more about the mysteries that surround us.” And he predicted: “Anyone who looks long and hard enough will no doubt find rational explanations for the mysteries in this book. There is no need to resort to a supernatural explanation to account for any one of them.” And that is just what my series of investigations has shown, I think, that if we steer between the extremes of gullibility and dismissiveness—in other words, if our minds are neither too open nor too closed—we may learn more about our world and ourselves. We may even have some fun doing it.
References
Brief History of the Magaguadavic. n.d. [St. George, N.B. ]: Magaguadavic Water-shed Management Association, 13.
Colombo, John Robert. 1988. Mysterious Canada: Strange Sights, Extraordinary Events, and Peculiar Places. Toronto: Doubleday Canada.
Gaudet, Sam. 1999. Interview by Joe Nickell, June 27.
Martinez, Lionel. 1998. Great Unsolved Mysteries of North America. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell, 6-7,12.
Morris, Chris. 1999. Skeptic shoots holes in Maritimes tales. Globe and Mail (Toronto), June 30.
Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 241-43.
———. 1999. The Silver Lake serpent. Skeptical Inquirer 23.2 (March/April): 18-21.
“St. George, New Brunswick, the Granite Town.” [1999]. Brochure published by Town of St. George.
Chapter 20
Memory of a Past Life
Perhase not since the famous “Bridie Murphy” case of the 1950s—when American housewife Virginia Tighe supposedly discovered she was the reincarnation of an Irishwoman—has a single “past-life regression” case received such widespread attention as that of an English resident named Jenny Cockell. Since c
hildhood, Mrs. Cockell relates, she has had constant dream-memories of another Irishwoman, eventually identified as Mary Sutton, who died more than two decades before Cockell was born, leaving behind eight young children. However, investigation shows not only that the reincarnation claims are unconvincing but also that there is quite a different hypothesis that best accounts for the proffered evidence.
Jenny Cockell was born in 1953 in rural England. Now a wife and mother, she lives and works as a registered chiropodist (i.e., podiatrist) in Northhamptonshire. Her unusual story has been told on such television programs as Unsolved Mysteries and in her own book, Across Time and Death: A Mother’s Search for Her Past Life Children (Cockell 1993). Therein, as a self-described “withdrawn and nervous child,” she relates how she frequently woke sobbing with her “memories of Mary’s death” and her expressed “fear for the children I was leaving behind” (1). In addition to her childhood dreams, she would frequently echo Mary’s domestic work during her play: making “bread” by mixing grass seeds in water, sweeping with a broom, and acting out other chores (14). “I was also constantly tidying and clearing out my room and toys,” she writes, “something that I enjoyed almost more than playing with them” (5). At this time, she did not know Mary’s last name and was unaware of countless other details about her origins and life. Somewhat artistically inclined, Jenny frequently sketched maps of Mary ’s Irish village, although there were admitted variations in the supposed landmarks (5). Among the reasons for Jenny s withdrawal was the unhappy atmosphere of her home, there being, as she described it, “an impossible tension” between her parents (14). “I usually played alone,” she writes, “and the only company I regularly enjoyed was that of my two imaginary male friends” (15).Although she had a high IQ (which would later earn her membership in Mensa, the “genius” society), she reports that she was thought a slow learner due to her “dreamlike state of mind” that carried even into the classroom (15).
Although she describes her supposed memories as “dreams” and refers to her “private trance world” in which she was “oblivious to external activity,” the memories were vivid and seemingly real. As is often the case, this was especially so under hypnosis. In 1988—by then married and the mother of two young children—Cockell was hypnotized for the first time. Under hypnosis, she seemingly became Mary. “I cried as she cried,” she states; “I knew her pain as my own” (33). Tears rolled uncontrollably down her cheeks. Although under hypnosis she seemed to exist partly in the past and partly the present, she says, “Yet I was Mary, and the past had become very real. I could smell the grass on the slopes out-side a large farmhouse, and I breathed in the fresh spring air” (36). Again, “As the questions were being asked and answered in this strange, me-chanical way, I seemed to be free to wander through the places I saw—tangible, vivid places. I felt the wind in my hair; I could touch and smell the air as though I were there” (37).
Under hypnosis she also explored what she believed were her “psychic abilities.” In addition to her past-life memories, she was already convinced she had the power of psychometry (object reading) and dream premonitions (13,28). The hypnotic sessions also took her on an out-of- body experience as part of a dubious test of clairvoyance. (Also, in an earlier session, as “Mary,” she had died, then went out of body to see the surroundings of her “now vacant body” [40, 55].) Not surprisingly, the hypnotic sessions also tapped other past-life experiences. “By chance I found myself,” she reports, “in one of the memories that had been with me since childhood.” One of several such memories, this involved a little French girl from the eighteenth century (40-41). Ultimately, however, the hypnosis helped little in her quest to identify Mary or Mary’s family, leaving her “almost where I was before the hypnosis started” (69). She bemoaned “the lack of concrete details such as that forever elusive surname” (70).
She turned then to actual research, publishing an ad in a Mensa magazine, sending out numerous form letters, acquiring maps, and so on. Eventually she turned up a village (Malahide), a road (Swords Road), and finally a woman named Mary Sutton who roughly fit the target. The story ended with Mrs. Cockell making contact with some of Mary’s surviving children. Although they were supposedly her own offspring, they were—ironically and somewhat bizarrely—old enough to be her parents (117-53). Nevertheless, she was satisfied with her “reunion” and began to look into her “next life”—as a Nepalese girl in the twenty-first century (153).
Unfortunately, Cockell’s intriguing and no doubt sincere saga does not withstand critical analysis. First, consider the overwhelming lack of factual information provided by the dreams and hypnosis. Unknown were Mary’s surname, either maiden or married, or the names of her husband or children. Similarly, the village’s name and even its location were a mystery. Cockell was ignorant of dates as well, including Mary’s birth date or even the year of her birth. And so on and on.
She employed circular reasoning. She sent out queries that sought a village with certain sketchy requirements, and when such a village was—not surprisingly—discovered, she adopted it as the one she was looking for. Obviously, if it did not fit she would have looked further. In addition, the technique of retrofitting (after-the-fact matching) was employed. For example, Mrs. Cockell made a sketch of a church after one of her hypnosis sessions, and this was matched with a photo of an actual church, St. Andrew’s, in the village of Malahide. But the sketch is simplistic, showing only a gable end and revealing no awareness of the greater overall structure. In addition, it entirely omits the central feature of the church’s gable end—a massive gothic window—and there are many other significant omissions and mismatchings. Moreover, St. Andrew’s is not the one Mary had actually attended, which was St. Sylvester’s Catholic Church, but instead merely one she would have walked by, one belonging to the Church of Ireland.
Rationalizations for errors and omissions abound throughout Cockell’s book. “A lot of the remembering was in isolated fragments, and sometimes I would have difficulty making sense of them,” she says (6). “I still find it hard to see Mary herself. It was easier to see the surroundings, which is not too surprising as I see through her and the life remembered as her. I feel her personality mostly” (9). Mary’s husband was “hard to remember,” but then “he seemed to be home less and less” (20). That she lacked even a surname for Mary “was no surprise to me, since I have always been bad at names” (27). Under hypnosis she gave the husband’s name, incorrectly, as Bryan; it was John. At one time she thought the family name was O’Neil rather than Sutton (37, 38). When the name of the road Mary lived on was found to be Swords, not Salmons, Road, Cockell noted that both begin with S and that the accuracy was “about as close as I usually get when trying to remember names“ (66). A village resident “could not quite place the roads” on the map Cockell had drawn, but later found it “to be more accurate than he had expected, given that it had been drawn from dreams” (64-65). Again, when viewing the Catholic church “struck no chords of memory,” she “wondered, however, whether the frontage had changed in the intervening fifty years or so: the lawns might once have been a graveyard, and the driveway certainly looked new.” She concluded that “so little of what I remembered had stayed intact” (84).
But if Jenny Cockell’s story is untrue, where did it come from? The best evidence suggests that such past-life memories are not memories at all. The alleged remembrances made under hypnosis are simply the products of an invitation to fantasize. According to one authority:
For a long while it was believed that hypnosis provided the person hypnotized with abnormal or unusual abilities of recall. The ease with which hypnotized subjects would retrieve forgotten memories and relive early childhood experiences was astonishing….
However, when the veridicality of such memories was examined, it was found that many of the memories were not only false, but they were even outright fabrications. Confabulations, i.e. making up stories to fill in memory gaps, seemed to be the norm rather than the excepti
on. It seems, literally, that using “hypnosis” to revive or awaken a person’s past history somehow or other not only stimulates the person’s desire to recall and his memory processes, but it also opens the flood gates of his or her imagination (Baker 1992, 152).
As to the genesis of “Mary,” I think we must look to Jenny’s unhappy childhood and her consequent tendency to fantasize. An analysis of her autobiographical statements shows her to have many of the traits of a fantasy-Prone personality (see Wilson and Barber 1983). For example, (1) she is an excellent hypnotic subject (35, 39); (2) as a child she spent much time fantasizing (16), and (3) had imaginary playmates (15), as well as (4) a fantasy identity (i.e., “Mary”); in addition, (5) her imagined sensations are quite vivid and real to her (36-37), and (6) she not only recalls but relives past experiences (36-37); (7) she also has had out-of- body experiences (40, 54-55), and (8) believes she has a variety of psychic abilities (13,28,55). Taken together, these traits are strong evidence of fantasy proneness.
As she herself acknowledges, she was forever dreaming: “Sometimes it was about the future, sometimes about the past, but hardly ever about the present.” Indeed, she says, “My escape into the past grew as I grew, and it was like a little death in my own life, a death of part of me that replaced part of my life” (16). Such is the admission of a classic fantasizer, whose need to retreat from an unpleasant reality led her to manufacture a reality—one that took on, in a manner of speaking, a life of its own.
