So many people take it for granted that ghosts are spirits of
the dead. Whether this is true or not is unlikely ever to be proved
one way or the other. And perhaps that is the beauty of a mystery
We need mysteries to be fully human, and nothing satisfies this
factor more than a ghost. But the reality is there ARE
psycho-sociological mechanisms that can account for the vast
majority. Lets have a few examples from Britain. Seen on many
occasions in St Jamess Palace is the ghost of valet to the Duke of
Cumberland, Sellis. Usually seen propped up in a bed with a slit
throat, this gruesome ghost seems to be a remembrance of Selliss
death in May 1810. According to his master, Sellis tried to kill
him, but, failing, committed suicide. A pertinent rumour of the
time had it that the Duke was the murderer, killing Sellis to stop
him blackmailing him after he had had an affair with the valets
daughter.Past residents of the Cumbrian village of Eden Hall used
to speak of a ghostly skeleton that swung from a rotting gallows on
stormy nights. The ghost is said to be that of Thomas Nicholson,
hanged in August 1767 for robbing and murdering his Godfather. His
body was left on the gibbet for two days as a warning to others.
Screams are said to echo through Marsden Grotto, a series of
caverns between South Shields and Sunderland. Once used by
smugglers to hide their booty, one smuggling gang was betrayed by a
man known as John the Jibber. A friend of the smugglers heard of
the betrayal and warned the gang before they were arrested. Later,
they got John the Jibber, took him to the cavern, put him in a
barrel, hoisted him to the roof and left him to starve.Most of
these stories we can dismiss in terms of producing real ghosts. But
within most ghost stories we can see an important social function.
For in the main, the classic true ghost story usually held an
important moral message, warning of the dangers of such things as
murder or infidelity.Thus, by allying the moral aspect to the
supernatural, the morality is enforced by scaring a superstitious
population into thinking twice about being immoral. Indeed, not
only did ghost stories become the vehicle for the moral tale.
Sometimes fame would be achieved and remembered by the famous
becoming ghosts.
Typical is Grace Darling, one of Englands greatest heroines. Born
in 1815, she was the daughter of William Darling, keeper of the
Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands off Northumberland.
In 1838 the ship Forfarshire floundered. Grace and her father took
their small rowing boat into stormy seas and rescued five crewmen.
Grace then made a second trip with two of the crew and saved a
further four seamen.
Grace died of consumption four years later. Seen as a darling of
the nation, it was evident she would not be forgotten, and it seems
her ghost walks the lighthouse to make sure of it. As late as 1976,
two lighthouse keepers appeared on television, telling of their
separate sightings of the heroine.
THEORIES OF HAUNTINGS
Most people, today, appear to be scathing of ghost stories, yet in
private, most people have experienced something strange enough to
be classed as a ghostly experience. In 1971 Dr W Dewi Rees reported
in the British Medical Journal that half the widows in his practice
had seen their loved ones after death. In the 1890s the Society for
Psychical Research published a Census of Hallucinations, showing
that out of 17,000 people interviewed nearly 1,700 had seen
ghosts.
Many theories have been offered to explain ghost sightings. SPR
member Frederic Myers thought ghosts to be a kind of residue of
personal energy they generated whilst alive.
Edmund Gurney suggested they were, perhaps, a form of telepathy
from beyond the grave. In 1943 GNM Tyrrell advanced this telepathy
theory by arguing a ghost is a two part drama. The telepathy
becomes the producer, then an other-worldly stage director went
on to provide the props.
MIND + ENVIRONMENT = SPOOKY
Following the publication of Alfred Watkins The Old Straight
Track in 1921, introducing leys and the subject of Earth
Mysteries, ghosts have been put down by many to geophysical forces,
many ghost sightings appearing at the conjunction of two
leys.
Fellow founder of the SPR Sir Oliver Lodge came up with a well used
theory when he argued that an event can be photographed upon the
environment in which the event took place. Known as the tape
recording theory, from time to time the event is replayed,
producing the ghost.
Researcher Tom Lethbridge offered a variation on this theme in
1963. An old witch used to live next door to him. When the witch
died, he felt a field of depression around her cottage. It reminded
him of when he had felt a similar depression near Wokingham as a
teenager.
A couple of days after this feeling, the body of a suicide was
found at the exact spot. Could such fields be impinged upon the
environment? Later, Lethbridge and his wife were to visit Labrum
Bay and he again felt a depression. On a subsequent visit to the
nearby cliffs, his wife felt an urge to jump off.
Lethbridge associated these fields with magnetic fields. Calling
them ghouls, he knew people also produced magnetic fields. Could
emotions pass from an event imprinted on a ghoul to a persons
field, thus producing the same emotion, and maybe a ghost?
Ghosthunter Andrew Green has another variation on the theme. When
he was a teenager he visited a building thought to be haunted. A
murder had been committed there and twenty people had jumped from
an adjacent tower. Going up the tower he, too, felt the urge to
jump.
Outside the building once more, he took a picture. When developed,
there was an image of a girl looking out of a window. Kodak
informed him that such images were not unusual with certain films.
Green decided such images, and ghosts in general, were generated by
someone thinking of a loved one, the thought placing a heat image
of the deceased on the location.
DREAMING AND HALLUCINATION
There is, of course, a problem with all these theories. They are
all unprovable. More practical is research, in the 1950s, by
Nathaniel Kleitman of Chicago, into dreaming. He noted that
dreaming actually occurred during REM, or rapid-eye-movement
sleep.
If awoken during this period or soon afterwards, the dream was
recalled with absolute clarity. Researchers then went on to ask,
if, at the point of awakening, the dream was on-going, could it be
externalised? The most common ghost is, of course, the bedroom
visitor.
If externalisation of what goes on in the mind was possible, then a
valid and logical explanation could be put to the majority of
ghosts. Research then went on to show that at the point between
wakefulness and sleep, externalisations were, indeed,
possible.
Whilst going off to sleep, hypnogogic hallucinations can occur.
Whilst awakening, they are known as hypnapompic. But could such a
phenomenon be at the heart of all ghostly activity?
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