Payne and Bendit cite as their strongest evidence for the theory a very well documented case in America in 1887 when an elderly, bedridden widow, known as Granny Osborne, died during a tremendous thunderstorm in her village of Ooltewah in Tennessee. The old lady had apparently lifted herself up to the window to watch the raging weather and had died when a huge bolt of lightning struck a pine tree in the garden. When neighbours entered her house the following morning they found the body of Granny Osborne lying peacefully on her bed – but etched on the bedroom window was a perfect likeness of the old lady staring out into the garden. The etching remained clearly visible on the glass for several years as evidence of the “ghost” and then gradually faded and disappeared.
Peter Underwood (1923– ) one of the pre-eminent British ghost hunters and for years chairman of the Ghost Club, has written dozens of articles and over thirty books, in the main dealing with the supernatural. He claims to have witnessed two ghosts. At the age of nine he saw the ghost of his father on the night he died – his mother also saw it – and in 1971 he spoke with a railwayman whom he subsequently discovered had died a traumatic death several hours earlier. Although Underwood believes there is as yet “no overall explanation for ghosts and ghostly activity”, he agrees that “there are certain climactic or atmospheric conditions under which they appear”. He does have his own theory, which he explains in these words:
“I have long been of the opinion that concentrated thought – a single-minded preoccupation – is linked to ghostly activity, which would explain why places of learning and concentration, such as churches, universities and libraries, have all been common locations for hauntings. However, there are no hard and fast rules and we are forever finding exceptions to our hypotheses and ideas. In the Ghost Club we always try to keep an open mind and acknowledge that in a world of mechanization, standardization and automation there are still some things we cannot explain.”
Similarly original thought on the subject of ghosts has been forthcoming from Dr Lyall Watson (1939– ), known as the “scientist of the supernatural” whose book Supernature (1973) was an international bestseller and undoubtedly changed many prejudices towards the paranormal. Born in South Africa, he became aware of the paranormal from an old Malay shaman and subsequently used his training as a zoologist, anthropologist and ethnologist to firm up a number of convictions and write his landmark book.
Watson was particularly impressed with the experiments of Dr Nicholas Seeds at the University of Colorado who, he said, had “taken mouse brains and teased them apart into their component cells”. Seeds then left these in a culture solution and several days later, the cells had reassembled and were showing their usual biochemical reactions. Watson summarized:
“Somehow cells are capable of recreating past patterns; they have a molecular memory which is passed on from one cell to another so that a new one can reproduce the behaviour of its parents. If a change, or mutation occurs, this, too, is faithfully duplicated by the descendants. The dead live again in defiance of time.”
This cyclical pattern of life indicated to Watson that matter is never destroyed but goes back into the system to re-emerge sometime later. It made him wonder whether the same behaviour pattern could be applied to ghosts. He explained his thinking:
“Souls or spirits that occur without benefit of body are a separate kind of phenomenon, but can be considered in much the same way. For the sake of argument, it is worth considering the possibility that man can produce an ‘astral projection’ or part of himself that can exist without his normal physical body and perhaps even survive his death. These spirits are said to wander at will and there are countless records of their having been seen, in whole or in part, in a great variety of situations.”
Lyall Watson admitted he was puzzled by the fact that all the ghosts he had heard of wore clothes. He was, he said, prepared to admit the possible existence of an astral body, but “could not bring myself to believe in astral shoes and shirts and hats”. He added: “The fact that people see ghosts as they or somebody else remembers them, fully dressed in period costume, seems to indicate that the visions are part of a mental rather than a supernatural process. In those cases in which several people see the same apparition, it could be broadcast telepathically by one of them. And where a similar ghost is seen by separate people on separate occasions, I assume that the mental picture is held by someone associated with the site.”
Colin Wilson (1931– ), who became famous as the author of The Outsider (1957), is now acknowledged as a philosopher and his interest in the supernatural has inspired a host of articles, books and even a handful of novels. His grandmother was apparently a spiritualist, he says, and his mother claimed to have seen an angel when she was ill who told her “her time had not yet come”. She lived another thirty-six years. Wilson offered his own particular take on ghosts in his critically acclaimed volume, The Occult, published in 1979:
“It is certain that human beings possess latent powers of which they are only dimly aware and that these latent powers produce a variety of phenomena from poltergeist activity to ‘thought photography’ and spontaneous combustion. These ‘positive’ powers are connected to, but not identical with, the power of precognition and ‘seeing’ ghosts.”
Like Lyall Watson, Wilson has reservations about the reported behaviour of some ghosts. He explains:
“Apart from man’s own ‘latent powers’, there seems to be strong evidence that ghosts have an independent existence. Their chief characteristic appears to be a certain stupidity, since a tendency to hang around the places they knew in life would appear to be the spirit-world’s equivalent of feeble-mindedness. I suggest that the state of mind of ghosts may be similar to that of someone in delirium or high fever: a disconnection of the will and inability to distinguish between reality and dreams. It must also be admitted – although for me personally, it goes against the grain to do so – that it is not improbable that the dead may be around us a great deal of the time, and that the premonitions of danger, precognition and so on, may be due to them rather than to our own psychic alarm system.”
The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a whole new group of psychic researchers who would once more throw up new and often controversial theories about the nature of ghosts. One of the most prominent of these men was Dr Michael Shallis (1940– ), whose interest had been awakened as a small boy of ten when he saw what he was convinced was a ghost in an old Abbey in Sussex. After taking a PhD in astrophysics at Oxford, he taught physical sciences at the Department for External Studies and then began to study astrology when his wife became fascinated by the subject. Shallis came to realize that – like his childhood experience – there was still much in the world that was a mystery to science, especially time and space. In 1981, having joined the SPR and conducted a number of his own enquiries, he wrote On Time in which he suggested that ghosts might be the result of “time slips”!
“As the idea of ghosts is more familiar than the notion that people we see may not really be here and now all the time, but just visiting us from the future, [my] ghost idea is perhaps more acceptable. For leaving aside the spiritualistic aspects of ghosts and hauntings, ghosts are in a clear sense caught in some from of time slip. When a ghost is seen, it is seen as an apparition of someone who was in another time. Communication with such apparitions raises some problems, but if the event is considered as a ‘time slip’ the ghost is here and now although displaced from his proper time.”
The second important figure is Carl Sargeant (1952– ), who had the distinction of being the first person to get a PhD in parapsychology at Cambridge in 1979. The degree was a vindication for all those who had been trying to get research into the supernatural acknowledged as a respectable science – although not everyone was to agree that the ambitious, outspoken and independently minded Sargeant spoke for all of them. He famously declared, “There are scientists who wouldn’t believe paranormal phenomena if they saw them with their own eyes.�
� The Welsh-born firebrand was soon carrying out experiments at Cambridge and writing controversial articles such as “PSI, Science and the Future” in which he claimed that phenomena “has nothing to do with the evidence”. In his book, Explaining the Unexplained (1982), co-authored with the equally outspoken psychologist, Dr Hans Eysenck, he argued:
“If we accept, for the sake of argument, that apparitions may not be explicable solely in the terms of hallucinations, visual illusions and coincidence, does this favour some kind of ‘survivalist’ interpretation? Or could ‘Super-ESP’ explain the results observed? After all, a crisis apparition could be a telepathic awareness of someone’s death plus a strong hallucination generated in response to that stressful telepathic understanding. This is a fairly tenuous, but not logically absurd, hypothesis and some researchers have advanced it.”
Although Sargeant subsequently gave up science to work in computer software – where he designed a number of popular role-playing games for Dungeons and Dragons – his influence has been evident in the work of other young paranormal researchers and much debated on the Internet.
The final decade of the twentieth century saw two more significant theories advanced about the nature of ghosts. The first was proposed by Vic Tandy (1946– ), a trained engineer and expert in computer-assisted learning at Coventry University. As a result of an extraordinary sequence of events in 1998, he became convinced that the cause of ghosts could be “very low frequency sound waves trapped inside buildings”. Tandy, previously sceptical about hauntings, had a traumatic night when he was working alone late one night in the laboratory of a medical manufacturing company in the Midlands. He had been told the building was haunted, but laughed off the idea, as he explained in June 1998:
“As I sat at a desk writing, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. I was sweating but cold and the feeling of depression was noticeable – but there was also something else. It was as though something was in the room with me. Then I became aware that I was being watched and a figure slowly emerged to my left. It was indistinct and on the periphery of my vision, but it moved just as I would expect a person to. It was grey and made no sound. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck – I was terrified.”
Tandy nerved himself to look at the apparition face on, only to see it fade and then vanish. He decided he must be ill and went home. The following morning after a good night’s sleep, an explanation as to what had happened to him occurred to him when he was in the laboratory. He was in the process of modifying the blade of one of his foils that he used in his hobby of fencing:
“I left the blade clamped in the vice while I went in search of some oil. When I returned I noticed the free end of the blade was frantically vibrating up and down. I realized that the blade might be receiving energy from very low frequency sound waves filling the laboratory – so low that they could not be heard. I did some tests and these revealed the existence of a ‘standing wave’ trapped in the laboratory, which reached a peak in intensity next to my desk. It turned out to be caused by a new extraction fan, which was making the air vibrate at about nineteen cycles per second. When the fan’s mounting was altered, the ghost left with the standing wave.”
Tandy’s further research established that the low frequency sound waves were capable of being triggered by nothing stronger than the wind passing over walls. The sound waves were not audible, but they could still have the effect on the human body that could account for wraith-like appearances – even the feelings of cold and terror that accompanied them. Vic Tandy was convinced he had the explanation for the ghost that materialized in the laboratory.
Although this explanation has been disputed by several authorities – in particular Professor David Fontana, of the University of Cardiff and a former president of the SPR, who believes it “does not explain those cases where there is one interaction between the person and the apparition” – Vic Tandy has received support from an unexpected source, NASA, the American space agency. Research by their scientists has shown that the human eyeball has a resonant frequency of eighteen cycles a second, at which it vibrates in sympathy to infra-sound that would “cause a serious smearing of vision” and a host of physiological effects including breathlessness, shivering and feelings of fear.
The effect of electromagnetic pollution from natural and man-made sources on the brain was also put forward by an American scientist, Albert Budden, as a theory to explain both ghosts and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). However, his suggestion that Flying Saucers might be just another form of the supernatural was not, in fact, new. An English writer, Joseph R Ledger, had put the idea forward in an article “Saucers or Ghosts?” in 1962, in which he listed the points of similarity between legends of ghostly nightriders and UFO phenomenon:
• A curious, broad-brimmed hat shape.
• Nocturnal visibility.
• Rapid movement through the air.
• The central object followed by a trailing appendage.
Ledger’s call that the link between old ghost legends and the UFO phenomena was worth further investigation did not fall on deaf ears. In 1971, the American writer and UFO researcher, John A Keel, argued in his book, UFOs – Operation Trojan Horse (1971) that the space ships and their crews were visitors from an alien, possibly psychic dimension. Being independent of our world, Keel said, they could manipulate the form of their machines at will. He continued:
“In psychic phenomena and demonology we find that seemingly solid physical objects are materialized and dematerialized or apported, just as the UFOs and their splendid occupants appear and disappear, walk through walls and perform other supernatural feats. UFOlogists have constructed elaborate theories about flying saucer propulsion and anti-gravity. But we cannot exclude the possibility that these wondrous ‘machines’ are made of the same stuff as our disappearing psychic phenomena and they don’t fly – they levitate. They are merely temporary intrusions into our reality or space-time continuum, momentary manipulations of electro-magnetic energy.”
In his book, Keel cities numerous cases where UFOs have suddenly materialized from “nowhere” and numerous instances where alleged ufonauts have appeared to earth people “coming and going with the suddenness of the ghosts of antiquity”. He continues:
“UFOs do not appear to exist as tangible fabricated objects. They do not conform to the natural laws with which we are familiar. They seem only to be metamorphoses, transformations that are able to adapt themselves to the capacities of our intelligence. Thousands of contacts with these beings lead us to the conclusion that they are deliberately making fools of us.”
Fools or not, the mystery of ghosts and what precisely they are, is certainly going to continue to tax our intelligence in this century, as ever more sophisticated science and technology are brought to bear. Whenever this debate comes up, I am always reminded of a story that William Oliver Stevens told in his excellent book, Unbidden Guests (1949), a copy of which was given to me when I was an inquisitive schoolboy. In it, Stevens writes:
“A friend of mine, Head of a Department at a famous eastern college, once had a ghostly experience. His wife was with him at the time and she saw the vision at the same time he did. It happened outdoors in the middle of the forenoon, and there was no possibility of illusion. He told his colleague, the Professor of Psychology, what he and his wife had seen. ‘Very simple,’ replied the pundit. ‘You had in your stomach, let us say, a bit of undigested bacon from your breakfast. That set up some disturbances in your blood stream which resulted in a queer image in your brain. Your wife, as she glanced at you, caught the same picture from you by a sort of mental infection, so she thought she saw the same thing.’ ”
The story is, of course, a mixture of the fanciful and the factual as are all the best ghost stories. When I am asked for my own beliefs about ghosts I reply that I have met and talked to too many honest and sincere men and woman completely convinced of their paranormal encounter with the unknown for me to possibly deny their existence. If
pressed for what I think ghosts are, I fall back on the definition of Robert Graves, which seems to embody both the desire to solve the matter but at the same time preserve the mystery:
“The commonsense view is, I think, that one should accept ghosts very much as one accepts fire – a more common but equally mysterious phenomenon. What is fire? It is not really an element, not a principle of motion, not a living creature – not even a disease though a house can catch fire from its neighbour. It is an event rather than a living thing or a creature. Ghosts, similarly, seem to be events rather than things or creatures.”
9
An A–Z of Ghosts
Phantoms of the World
A
AFRIT (Arabian)
According to Arabic folklore, the Afrit is the ghost of a murdered person rising to avenge their death. It is believed that the spirit materializes from the blood of the victim when it drips onto the ground and appears rather like smoke from a fire. The only way one of these apparitions can be laid to rest is by driving a nail into the ground where the blood fell. This practice is said to have given rise to the expression “nailing down the ghost”.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 58
