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

by Will Storr

  I look over at the uniformed man, turn my tape off and say, ‘Yes – can I have a tea, please?’

  ‘Milk and sugar?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘One pound twenty.’

  Christ.

  ‘Thanks.’

  With my drink artlessly delivered, the man pushes his silver trolley away. I lift the lid of my tea and stir the bag. The smell of softly melting plastic causes my mouth to fill slightly with a sprinkle of pre-vomitous spit. I swallow it back and look down at the collapsed landfill of information on the table in front of me. These pieces of paper contain yet more tiny puzzles to add to my larger one. They’re pieces and pieces of pieces of a vastly complex supernatural mosaic. One of the bits recounts a case-report that was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1994. Its authors, Anthony Hale and Narsimha Pinninti, describe their successful treatment of a twenty-two-year-old Hindu man who claimed that he was possessed by the spirit of an old woman who forced him to commit a series of escalating petty crimes. He ended up being sent to prison for hijacking a taxi and kidnapping its driver. The man told doctors that when he was about to be taken over by the spirit, a white fog would materialise and drift towards him. Hale and Pinninti’s report described their patient as an ‘intelligent, well-educated and insightful young man, westernised in his appearance and apparent outlook’. They said he gained nothing from his actions, not excitement, nor financial gain. And they could find no evidence of panic attacks, no history of mental illness or drug use. Then, they say they were ‘disturbed’ by a phone call from the prison chaplain who saw ‘the ghost possess the patient in prison, seeing a descending cloud and an impression of a face alarmingly like a description of the dead woman given to us by the patient, of which the chaplain denied prior knowledge. Similar reports came from frightened cellmates. He and our hospital chaplain concurred on genuine possession.’

  I look out of my window again, at the orange streetlights of some town suppurating out of the rushing, rain-soaked darkness. I pour a dose of sugar and then plop a drop or two of synthesised milk into my tea before rewinding my tape a little and pushing the play button again.

  ‘“ … the other thing that disturbed me was that you have another girlfriend.” Well, he just went white. And he said, “How do you know that?” I said, “I just had this dream. She’s got blonde hair. She’s dressed in red. And she had scissors in her hand. She was cutting somebody’s hair. Is this true?” He said, “Yeah. It’s true. I do have a girlfriend. But how the hell do you know she wears red and that she’s blonde?” I said, “I don’t know. It was in the dream.” Then he said that she worked in such-and-such-a-hairdresser’s in town and they all wore red overalls in there. Well, I was freaking out. And he had his head on my lap, at this point, and guess what happened? He had an epileptic fit. Right in front of me. A grand mal fit. Luckily, with my nursing experience, I knew what to do. The whole situation wasn’t just a little bit like I dreamed. It was exactly the same. It just made me think, what was the dream? A warning? But that was ages ago, when I was about twenty-two. The first really big thing that happened to me that was to do with the afterlife was much more recently …’

  I switch the tape player off again and get up to find the toilet, leaning on the corner of a seat to steady myself as I stand. By the time I’ve returned from my trip to the piss- and tissue-speckled cubicle, the rain has quietened. We’ve sped through the worst of the squall and are now at full cruising speed. I sit down again, carefully, trying not to tip over my almost-empty beaker of tea.

  There are one or two pieces of mosaic, in amongst the rubble in front of me, that sparkle brighter than many of the others, and yet, I’m not sure whether they will actually end up being part of the bigger ghost picture. One of them concerns a man called Dr Michael Persinger and his work in an area called ‘Neurotheology’. Persinger’s research centres on temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a rare condition in which sufferers experience intense religious visions. Some believe they’re in the company of Jesus, Mary or Joseph. Some believe they actually are Jesus, Mary or Joseph. One poor bastard had a fit and was convinced he’d seen a ‘green-skinned devil’. TLE victims’ attacks are triggered when naturally-occurring electro-magnetic energy leans into their lobes with its lightning-fork fingers and short-circuits their brains. Scientists think that St Paul and Moses were both possibly TLE sufferers because accounts of their respective ‘road to Damascus’ and ‘burning bush’ incidents echo the symptoms of the condition almost precisely.

  Dr Persinger, a behavioural psychologist who works out of Laurentian University in Ontario, tried to induce a TLE attack by making people wear a specially built ‘Koren Helmet’ that passed an electro-magnetic field across their temporal lobes. In the end, he didn’t manage to create any new Bible heroes. But he did find that eighty per cent of his guinea pigs felt what he called a ‘sensed presence’ – the creeping feeling that they were being watched. All this made me wonder, for a time, if Dr Persinger was on the verge of solving ghosts. So, I asked him if I could pop over to Canada for a visit. Initially, he agreed. But, for some reason, when I asked if I could have a go on his ghost helmet, he stopped returning my emails.

  Soon after this, I found out that scientists in Sweden have been trying to replicate Persinger’s experiments – except, this time, the helmet-wearers were not warned that they were going to be exposed to magnetic fields. When the Swedes followed this all-important ‘double blind protocol’, they concluded that magnetism actually has no discernable effect at all. The argument still rumbles on between the continents.

  All of the paranormal groups that I’ve been with so far have used EMF detectors to check for unusual strengths in the local magnetic fields because they think that peaks signal a spectre’s presence. But, if you follow Dr Persinger’s logic, it appears that they’ve got it the wrong way around. It’s these EMF peaks that are actually causing some sensitive temporal lobes to jump themselves into having an apparent ghostly experience. And then, of course, there’s Lou Gentile and David Vee. Could they be third stage temporal lobe epileptics? Could their demon sightings actually have been undiagnosed TLE fits?

  The train slows a little and, as it does, a storm of mechanical noise rises up, thick and clanky, from the machinery beneath the carriage. We must be approaching a station. I put my earphones back in, close my eyes, rewind my tape a little and press play.

  ‘ … … first really big thing that happened to me that was to do with the afterlife was much more recently. I suppose it must have been about two years ago. One morning I felt somebody sitting on the end of my bed, but I couldn’t see them properly. I just felt them. I thought my son had come in. I said, “Oh, Andrew, what is it? Are you all right?” and there was just silence. I sat up and I couldn’t see anybody – I just felt this pressure on the bed. Anyway, I went back to sleep again and didn’t think any more of it. And then another night, something similar happened. And then, one day I woke up and I just heard this person laughing at the end of the bed and I freaked. I mean, you can imagine. I just thought that somebody had broken into the house. I just went, “Who the hell are you?” And I heard this Glasgow voice going, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Michele, don’t you know who I am?” I just thought, am I dreaming? What’s going on? I mean, I was freaking out, absolutely freaking out. And I looked and it was a friend of mine’s father. But he’d died, a year before. Ha! I can just see him now wearing this Pringle jumper! He said, “I’ve just come to tell you a few things.” And I said, “Oh my God, it’s five in the morning.” I thought, I must be dreaming, but I wasn’t. I was quite wide awake. And he was as real to me as you are now. At first, he did seem like an outline, and then he was much more solid. And he was sitting on the end of my bed!’ I switch the tape off again and think for a while, trying to piece together some more fragments. I pick up a print-out of an email from the sister of a friend of mine. Her young daughter had an ‘invisible friend’. And this lady didn’t think too much about it, bar
all the wonderful things it promised about her child’s blossoming creative imagination. And then, one afternoon, she overheard her daughter chatting away to her friend while she played in her bedroom. And she walked in and saw the now suddenly not-so-invisible friend, just for an instant, before it faded away into nothing. Apparently, she still hasn’t recovered. And she remains so aggressively baffled about the experience that I haven’t been able to persuade her to talk to me about it.

  I switch my Dictaphone back on.

  ‘ … Well, I was kind of thinking, what do I do? He wasn’t someone threatening to me. He was somebody I knew really, really well. And I knew he was dead. So I thought, OK, bring it on, let’s just see what happens. And my heart was like this. I said, “What are you doing?’ and he said, “Oh, I’ve just realised that you’re open to all these things that I never used to believe in” – because he was very against Spiritualism or anything … he was really a down-to-earth Glasgow guy. He said, “I’ve got a few things to tell the family that you need to tell them.” I said, “All right, give it to me.” And he said, “Right. The wife. She’s not well. She’s got a cold. I don’t want her to be going out. I’ve had enough of this. She keeps going out in the cold and she’s going to get something like pneumonia.” He said, “The family’s got to do all the shopping and the cooking, and whatever.” OK. “Right, tell Alan, thank you very much for the lovely flowers that you put on my grave. The roses were absolutely beautiful.” I said, “Well, OK.” And he said, “Tell Jimmy” – and I didn’t know who the hell Jimmy was – “to watch himself when he’s playing football because he gets too aggressive and he’s going to hurt himself so badly that he won’t have a career in football.” Now I think to myself, why didn’t I ask something profound, like what is heaven like? Is it a wonderful place to be? But you don’t. I was just so gobsmacked I didn’t know what to do. So, anyway, that was that. And then I went to visit the family … ’

  I notice that we’ve stopped again, in one of the towns that all look alike and punctuate the long journey northwards. There’s mangy pot plants, chipped paint on wrought ironwork, an unmanned Puccini coffee shed and, oh Christ – people. And they’re getting on. Quickly, I switch my tape player off, shove a load of paper onto the seat next to me and pretend to be asleep. Only when I feel the train slowly pulling into motion do I open my eyes and pick the sheets back up. In amongst them are my notes on Near Death Experiences.

  I was keen to find out about NDEs because, I reasoned, if it had been established that someone, at some point, had actually been up to something while their brains were officially off, then this would prove that the body and the mind are, as I discussed with Dr James Garvey during the summer, different things. And this, in turn, might mean that ghosts are possible. Then I heard an incredible story about an American called Pam Reynolds.

  Pam woke up one morning to discover that she had a fragile sac of deadly liquid swelling up inside her head. She was rushed to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix for a radical operation to have the aneurysm removed from where it nestled, right underneath her brain stem. The only way the highly specialist medics could do this was to drain all the blood from her head, drill off the top of her skull and tease the gooey bag out of its nest. It was while her brain and body were in the medical equivalent of the deep-deep-freeze that Reynolds felt herself popping free of her mortal machine and floating up through the air. She remembers staring down at her body, looking at the tools the doctors were using, hearing a conversation between the surgeon and the nurses while they encountered a major problem with the procedure and were forced to have an emergency rethink.

  When Pam came round, all the details of everything that she witnessed from her unfeasible perch up by the ceiling were confirmed as being absolutely accurate by her cardiologist, Dr Michael Sabom, and her surgeon, Dr Robert Spetzler. Throughout Pam’s operation, every single clinical sign was being monitored by machines. So it’s official. It was lab conditions. Pam Reynolds’ system was completely shut down. And what happened to her that afternoon, up by the oily light-fittings, should have been utterly impossible. Unless, that is, the mind and body are different things. Because if the mind can float free of its physical vehicle, then Pam’s experience can be explained.

  Physician Stuart Hameroff and his partner Dr Roger Penrose are world experts in the study of consciousness. And the work that they’re doing now might end up changing the way we view existence for ever. Because they do think that the mind and the body are separate things. Their research has led them to believe that our souls exist on the tiniest, most fundamental level of the universe – the quantum level. The one that doesn’t like being watched by humans.

  There are things, I learned, called ‘microtubules’. These minute contraptions live in the base of our brains and act as on-board computers, containing the information and processes that are the very essence of ourselves – our soul, in other words. But that’s not the really incredible thing. The truly tectonic-rocking break-through that Hameroff and Penrose have made is this: when our systems shut down – when we pass away – the information that’s held in our microtubules doesn’t die. It can’t, you see, because it’s part of the quantum level, which is the most basic level in existence. It’s the level on which the very fabric of the universe – matter, energy, space and time – exists. And, what’s more, when they drift free of our microtubules, these little specks of soul don’t separate and float apart: a process called quantum entanglement keeps them bunched together. So, if it’s correct, this elegant nugget of extreme science does appear to show that the mind and the body are separate things – and that they can exist independently. Our brains, these men claim, do not create consciousness. They just channel it, like a television picking up a station.

  All this might explain why people who have Near Death Experiences describe suddenly feeling ‘at one with the universe’ and having the radiant revelation that ‘everything in existence is interconnected’. Because a soul that’s been released from its body does suddenly become absorbed into the universe. And in quantum science, everything is interconnected – that’s what makes it work. Just compare these traditional hippy sentiments with the views of a scientist like Victor Stenger, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, who says, ‘The universe is one and we are one with it.’ Strangely, and for the first time in human history, it would seem that the scientists and the druids are in total agreement.

  And there’s more to come from the frontier sciences. One of the problems with ghosts that Dr James the sceptical philosopher coughed up concerned the physics of a spirit moving things about. He said: ‘If a ghost and a body are different stuff, then the question immediately arises, how does one thing affect the other? The kinds of causal interactions that we understand are things like billiard balls smacking into one another. So how can a thing that doesn’t exist in space, like a ghost, have an effect on something that does?’

  I was thinking about this when I read about some experiments in consciousness that were set up by René Péoc’h and the Swiss Foundation Odier de Psycho-Physique. The experiments involved a robot, called a Tychoscope, and some baby chickens. The scientists ‘imprinted’ the robot’s image onto the chicks by showing them a photo of it as they emerged from the shells. Once this was done, the birds thought the Tychoscope was their mother. When enough of the chicks had been imprinted like this, they were put in a cage, which was placed in an empty room, with the robot. When this happened, the scientists found that the robot’s behaviour changed dramatically. Before the arrival of the birds, as you’d expect, the robot ranged about randomly, spending equal time in both halves of the room. But when the chicks were added – all of whom were crying out for the love and attention of their robot mum – it spent much more time in their half. The astonished scientists noted that the chicks appeared to be mentally willing their mum to be near them. And it worked. Their motorised mother was drawn near.

  These experiments, which are similar
to other incredible ones that have been carried out at America’s Princeton University, seem to provide absolute, verifiable examples of something apparently non-physical having a physical effect. And that thing is consciousness.

  Now, just do some wild imagining with me for a moment … Say a man called Bill has just died. His entangled quantum soul floats free from his body and – what if he suddenly finds that he can interact with the universe that he is now part of? He could pull an iron fireplace out of the wall, say, or throw a Brazilian car down the street or pull Janet out of bed every night. And that’s not all. What’s stopping Bill’s freelance soul just floating on into another person’s microtubules and temporarily taking control of them, because he’s pissed off that he’s dead? He could, if he wanted to, completely possess a still-living human. He could make her talk. And, while he’s at it, he could have her demonstrate knowledge of subjects that she should know nothing about, like the manner of his death and the site of his burial. He could even, if the fancy took him, compel her to tell an interfering priest to ‘shit off’.

  I look to my left. That last town must have been small, because all evidence of human habitation has disappeared from my window. There’s just black. I notice that a couple of people got on at the last stop and have sat themselves near me. I can see the back of an old man’s pink-bald dome over there. And there’s the tsk-tsk-tsk of leaking teenage earphones from someone else, somewhere near. Two more souls, two more sets of fizzing microtubules, getting closer to up north and physical death with every minute and mile that passes. As we rocket through the hostile, spare depths of the open countryside, I check my watch again. It shouldn’t be long now.

  Most recently, and partly in preparation for this evening, I’ve been reading up on some research that’s been carried out at the University of Arizona. Psychology professor Gary E. Schwartz has been experimenting on a medium called Allison Dubois. In one test, Dubois was told to contact the dead husband of a woman she’d never met before – and who was, at the time, sitting thousands of miles away in England. The medium was only given her first name. The information that she then provided about her subject turned out to be seventy-three per cent accurate. But, incredible as this may sound, this was a poor result for Allison. Usually, when Professor Schwartz asks her to ‘read’ people in lab conditions – that is, people whom the medium cannot see and has never met before – she rarely scores lower than eighty per cent. I wonder, as I pack my bits into my bag, if I’ll come across anybody as incredible as Allison Dubois tonight.