Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

by Will Storr

  ‘Whoops!’ Trevor says. ‘Hang on,’ he adds, ‘I’ve got another one brewing.’

  Another vast ruction explodes from Trevor’s trousers. His bad medicine fills the small room.

  ‘Name that tune,’ he says, and the teenagers collapse, releasing their rolling laughter.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘I think I might have broken vigil conditions.’

  This goes on for twenty-five minutes.

  Later, during the team debrief, I notice that Rain-On-Face isn’t with us. I sneak out of the kitchen and creep up the stairs. Eventually, I find him in a back bedroom with Stephen. It’s dark. The room is illuminated only by the orange fog that’s pushing up against the curtainless window. I can just make out a pretty bedside lamp on a chest of drawers, a framed picture of cartoon pigs on the wall and Rain-On-Face lying flat on his back on the floor. The druid looks up, sharply. I get the feeling that I’m not welcome. I crouch down in the corner anyway, and guiltily watch the action.

  Rain-On-Face has ‘gone under’. That is, he’s deliberately got himself possessed by the ghost that’s haunting this house in an attempt to discover biographical information about it.

  ‘How did you die?’ Stephen says.

  ‘It’s the pains in the … ’ Rain-On-Face says in a faltering, almost female voice. ‘I was in bed all the time.’ He speaks so quietly you can almost hear the fog above his voice.

  ‘Do you come to the house often in spirit?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just sometimes?’

  Rain-On-Face stays silent.

  ‘Can you connect with any of the other spirits that are in the house at the moment?’ asks Stephen.

  ‘Lizzie.’

  ‘Did you like Lizzie?’

  ‘Mmm, walking around with her … fancy tits.’

  There’s a silence.

  ‘Fancy tits?’

  ‘Thinks she’s everything.’

  The question and answer session creeps on in the eerie dark for another ten minutes. As it does, Rain-On-Face’s answers become more cracked, distant and whispered.

  ‘Have you had enough, Mary?’ Stephen eventually asks. ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘You don’t like it? You don’t like talking to me? Do you find it strange?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I’m going to leave you in peace now.’

  ‘Oh, good. He he he he. Ahh.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Ye heard.’

  ‘Rain-On-Face?’ says Stephen. ‘Rain-On-Face?’

  But Rain-On-Face isn’t stirring. Slowly, a panic seems to build in Stephen.

  ‘I can’t wake him,’ he says.

  He leans over and starts stroking his hair.

  ‘Come back, Rain-On-Face, you’ve wandered a long way off the path. We shouldn’t have done that’, he mutters to himself, ‘he was gone for too long.’

  Then he says, a little louder: ‘Come back, Rain-On-Face. It’s time to return to us. Step back, Mary, and let Rain-On-Face come forward. Step back, Mary. Step back.’

  Eventually, Rain-On-Face speaks. ‘Tell her to leave,’ he says, as if straining to break out of a profound sleep.

  ‘Mary, you’ve got to leave, now,’ Stephen says. ‘Mary, it’s time to let go. Take my energy to return. Come back, Rain-On-Face. Come back.’

  When Rain-On-Face stirs, it’s as though he’s loosely grasping at the details of a rapidly lifting dream.

  ‘There was this woman,’ he says, rubbing his eyes, ‘she didn’t want to let go.’ He props himself up on his elbow. ‘Where is everybody?’

  TWO HOURS LATER, I’m sitting in Trevor and Debbie’s front room drinking tea. The milky dawn has filled the house with a dank, grey light. I’m exhausted. Behind me, a green parrot in a wire cage is having a noisy episode. The walls of the living room are covered in posters of white wolves howling at the moon. On the shelves there are heavy hard-backed books about magic and stone statues of dragons.

  Trevor wants to show me some of the evidence Avalon Skies has gathered during their vigils at Newcastle Keep, the old fortress in the centre of the city. To be honest, I’m just being polite. At the moment, I really want to be by myself. I find it difficult, spending this much time with strangers. I feel like a bride who has to keep a piano-grin hoisted up for the whole day.

  Trevor slides a homemade DVD into his machine and presses play. The static on the TV blinks off to reveal a green infra-red image of a stone staircase. The member who took the film thought that a wobbling sprite of light in the bottom left of the screen was interesting, but Trevor, being the sceptic that he is, quickly dismissed this as the unusual refraction of a nearby candle. It was only when he was watching it back, however, that he saw what I can see now: thin, beautiful wisps of light swishing down the stairs. They’re delicate and quick, shimmering and weightless, and they vanish as quickly as they appear.

  Then, a fat globe of light shoots down the stairs and disappears.

  ‘Fuck!’ says someone on the screen. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Fuck!’ I say. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Aye,’ says Trevor, ‘it’s neat, isn’t it?’

  It is startling. I ask him to send me a copy of the video and more footage he has of Debbie in a state of violent possession.

  ‘Every time we go to the Keep we get something different,’ he says. ‘Do you want to come with us next time?’

  ‘Urrrmm,’ I say, transfixed by the footage that’s replaying over and over again on the TV. ‘Yeah. Yeah, all right.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. Is Andrew Green there, please?’

  ‘ … Who is this, please?’

  ‘My name’s Will Storr.’

  ‘I’m afraid Andrew passed away a couple of days ago.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘ … ’

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘Goodbye. Sorry.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  5

  ‘Distrust the mystic’

  WHAT ARE THEY, anyway? These strange machines, these units? Since the start of my journey, I’ve found myself watching the world in a different, more curious way. If you constantly look at everything through question-mark specs, things very quickly begin to get weird. And the weirdest thing of all is the people.

  Honestly, if you view humans with enough distance, it really does get bizarre. I was having a meeting in the office this morning and, as I watched my workmates in action, I slowly became repulsed. In the end, I had to fight the urge not to run out of the room, screaming. Because gradually, my colleagues turned from ordinary, familiar people – Paul, James, Doug, Emma – into these horrific skin-covered engines, all interacting with each other, arms shifting, fingers slithering, eyes scanning up and down and left and right. They were machines, relentlessly gathering information through the senses and giving it out again, through this wet pink voice-hole that’s rimmed with gory off-white food-blades. I sat there, spellbound and revolted, by these strange self-generating motors, all occupied with their own secret agendas and singular goals, chewing down their food-fuel and examining everything through their twitchy, blinking brain-cameras. What are these machines? Where did they come from? What do they want?

  I’ve been pondering the nature of humans because I have become convinced, since I started thinking about ghosts, that I am not my body. I am the software and my body is the hardware. If I’m to believe in ghosts then this has to be the case. Because if spirits are dead people, then it’s this ‘me’ – this mind, this software – that escapes death. And it’s just the body, the flesh-and-bone vehicle, that stops working. If ghosts exist, then we’ve all got a ghost inside us. It’s the consciousness, the spirit, the soul or the mind. But is this right?

  I decided to call the Royal Institute of Philosophy and tell them about the odd business that’s been taking place in my head. By the time I’d finished, they’d agreed to despatch an Emerge
ncy Philosopher right away.

  I wasn’t expecting Dr James Garvey to look like a rugby player. I also wasn’t expecting him to be clean-shaven or any younger than ninety-two. Most of all, though, I wasn’t expecting my philosopher to be an American. To be honest, I thought, when we met outside the top-floor café of the Tate Modern in London, that I’d been short-changed. I wanted a wizened Greek hermit with a Crusoe-length beard and a staff. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that Dr James is excellent at his job – which is thinking. You can tell as much by his walk. He moves with a slow, graceful ease, as if he’s thought thoroughly through the implications of each individual step. He has sad, dewy eyes, beautiful nostrils (I know it sounds strange, but really – they’re like a dolphin’s) and shoulders like a harbour wall. There is something hypnotic about Dr James. He’s so rapt in his thoughts that a mist of serene detachment surrounds him. It’s as if he has no worries at all – after all, what are worries but little, individually wrapped philosophical puzzles to solve?

  We sit down with our coffees at window seats. From here we have a view over St Paul’s, and the blue winter sky hangs, like a chilly ozone desert, over the spires, towers and lanes of old east London. I’m hoping Dr James will help me with my particular philosophical puzzle, which is this: if a ghost is the mind of a person that has survived death, then the mind must be a separate thing from the body. And my question is … is it?

  ‘The view that the mind and the body are made of different stuff,’ he says, placing down his white china coffee cup gently, ‘is known to philosophers as Cartesian Dualism. Descartes had the view that there are two distinct substances. There’s a physical thing, which has properties, like it’s located in space and it’s movable. And there’s the thinking stuff that doubts and wills and affirms and believes. One is physical and the other isn’t. One is located in space and the other isn’t located anywhere. It wasn’t part of Descartes’ main aim, in his meditations, to prove that mind and body are different, but he ends up doing it along the way.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, putting my cup down, too.

  ‘Well, no,’ says Dr James, ‘he tried to. But unfortunately for ghost people, the arguments for Cartesian Dualism aren’t very good.’

  He then tells me what Descartes’ main arguments are. And he’s right. They aren’t very good. The first one involves language.

  Descartes was so impressed by our ability to speak to each other that he thought it was obvious something magical was running us. To him, it was impossible that a simple stimulus response machine could do something so complex, creative and spontaneous as to speak. So, we had to be divine, he thought. This, however, was before the invention of computers. But back then, Descartes, quite reasonably, thought that language proved we were special – unlike the stupid animals who couldn’t speak and therefore were, effectively, just machines.

  ‘For him,’ Dr James says, ‘animals didn’t have souls. He thought that when you kicked them and they screamed, that it wasn’t the sound of a soul in pain, but just air coming out.’

  Just for a moment, I’m sure I can detect the first light wafts of a smile blowing in on the edges of Dr James’s mouth.

  ‘I don’t remember their name,’ he continues, ‘but there was a group of monks who were vivisectionists, and they shared Descartes’ beliefs. They would nail dogs down to the table and cut them open. “Oh, don’t worry about the screams,” they’d say, “it’s just air coming out.”’

  ‘Oh dear’, I say, ‘that’s awful.’

  ‘Yes’, says the philosopher. ‘Yes it is.’

  Then, Dr James tells me that the second argument is stronger than the first and it’s called the ‘argument from conceivability’.

  ‘This said that whatever is conceivable is possible. And, for Descartes, it was conceivable that the mind and the body could come apart. And if it’s conceivable that they could come apart, then they can’t be the same thing.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘He said that anything that’s conceivable is possible?’

  ‘That’s what he thought, yeah. So, you can’t conceive of a three-sided square, can you? It’s impossible to have one. The reason this is interesting is that, if you think that the mind and the body are the same thing, it should be inconceivable that the two could come apart. But it’s not. That said, when you said “hang on”, you were right. This is crap.’

  ‘Was I?’ I say. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah. Because it’s also conceivable that I’ve got tiny monkeys living in my ear. You see, just because it’s conceivable, it doesn’t mean it’s possible. And also, what’s conceivable depends on your background, your experience and all those kinds of things.’

  So that’s Descartes fucked, then. I take another sip of coffee and look out of the finger-smeared plate window again. A tatty stream of tourists trickle and eddy across the Millennium Bridge. And the sight of them gets me thinking. Could there really be a meaning to life? Are we, as the priests and the afterlife believers claim, all part of one giant, cosmic plan? From way up here, those people appear utterly pointless. What’s the grand plan for that tubby old fella with the sunburned pate and blue jogging pants? Look at him, dropping his camera. Could he really be an essential cog in a complex, divine machine? I watch him bend down and pick up his camera. He rubs it against his anorak and gesticulates a grumble in the direction of his partner. Perhaps, I think, all this afterlife stuff is just a way of making us feel valuable and significant. From up here, it’s hard to conceive that we’re important enough to have souls. From up here, we look meaningless and silly and lost. Just a spreading rash on a rock near a sun.

  Are there, I ask Dr James, any better philosophical arguments for independent souls?

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘There’s the claim that the soul doesn’t have any parts. It’s not physical, therefore, it can’t be destroyed, so it can exist after the death of the body. And then there are a lot of contemporary arguments concerning zombies.’

  ‘Zombies?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, can you imagine a world filled with zombies? That is, humans with no inner life?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we’re not like that, are we?’

  ‘No,’ I say, glancing again at the dizzy little ticks of humanity on the riverbank beneath me. They may look a bit silly, but they’re anything but zombies. They’re jogging and snogging and bobbing about on the Thames in boats. There are hundreds of filled-up lives down there, all busy loving, worrying and bursting with thoughts and joy and tragedies. I imagine what it would be like if we were just machines. There’d be no art gallery here, for a start. And I wouldn’t be sitting next to a philosopher, either, because there’d be no need for answers: we’d never have any questions that didn’t involve food, drink, fighting and sex. The reason, then, that this functional zombie-world isn’t a reality is because we do have an inner life, a soul.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Dr James, with a small nod, ‘but there’s a thousand problems with this argument as well.’

  ‘But what about love?’ I say. ‘I can see the function of sex – that’s to procreate. But why do we have to have love, as well? That’s a uniquely human thing. That proves we’re special, different, above the animals.’

  ‘Love’s for sex, isn’t it?’ says the philosopher. ‘Maybe – and I hope your experience is different – lots of people seem to fall in love just long enough to have some excellent sex for a few years, raise a kid and then wander off. Love goes away, doesn’t it?’

  You can’t argue with that. I’ve got several hundred CDs at home that sing sad, lonesome testament to the cruelly ephemeral nature of the heart. But there’s another thing. What’s the function of art? Art has no evolutionary purpose at all. You’ve only got to wander downstairs to work that one out. Art is the expression of emotion, from the artist to the consumer. Art’s job, in other words, is to speak to the soul.

  ‘I’d say that art is a kind of people-glue,’ he says. ‘It’s a kind of thing that keeps people together.’


  He takes another sip of coffee and shifts on his stool.

  ‘There is something you could say about evolution and ghosts, though,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to see how souls fit in to the evolutionary story, isn’t it? Before humans evolved, were there souls just floating around waiting? And then, when we were ready, bang, they popped into our empty bodies? That would be weird. That doesn’t fit. And there are other lines of philosophical thought that could apply to ghosts, too. A good one is from David Hume.’

  Mr Hume, he tells me, occupied his thoughts with miracles, which he defined as anything that defies the laws of nature, like a man walking on a lake, or water turning to wine or, indeed, a person’s mind surviving death and jeffing about the planet for eternity as a ghost. Hume saw it as a simple balance of scales. On the one hand you have the evidence for ghosts, which comes as testimony from mediums and witnesses. On the other hand, you’ve got all the evidence which suggests that people actually die when they die and that things can’t move without something physical moving them.

  ‘And evidence for that,’ says Dr James, ‘is everywhere you look.’ He gazes around, at the customers and the food-trays and the plates of cake. ‘Nope,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s moving by itself. There’s no dead people here. So the evidence for not believing in ghosts is, essentially, all the evidence you have for believing in the laws of nature, which are backed up constantly every time you look around. The evidence is overwhelmingly against it. It seems staggeringly unlikely that ghosts exist. So it seems like your default position ought to be: distrust the mystic.’

  Hume’s argument, that we shouldn’t believe in the supernatural because clever people say that it can’t be true, seems to me to have one obvious elephantine problem. It assumes that all these ‘laws’ of science, which are laws that humans have written, are absolutely error-free and finished. They just simply cannot be wrong. But ‘experts’ change their minds all the time. Priests, for example, claim to be experts in interpreting the rules of existence that God has laid out. A few centuries ago, they thought the Crusades were a great idea. They changed their minds about that. And still, Catholics believe that homosexuality and contraception is a sin. How long will it be before those tricksy opinions are rethought? It’s inevitable, surely. And scientists used to think the world was flat. They changed their minds about that. These days, every single time they send a space probe up, they’re forced to have a rethink. Really, every generation thinks they know everything, but everybody knows that they don’t.