CJ has now put up a fifth part to his ongoing series of articles exploring the nature of ghosts, and in particular the SPR’s theory that they’re telepathic projections from a mind or living brain, and suggests how this could be tested experimentally. He begins with a literary nod to the summer-y weather around Cheltenham and the Cotswolds when he was writing with a quote from INXS. Cheltenham really is in a beautiful part of the Gloucestershire countryside, and walking through it, or simply going through it on a train you can feel a connection to the great poets of the English countryside, even if you’re in a different county to A Shropshire Lad. But on to the spooks.
CJ wonders what state of mind you have to be in to see ghosts, and suggests that it might be a good exercise to compare what spooks experienced after the consumption of a few pints look like compared with the more respectable apparitions recorded by the Society for Psychical Research in their Census of Hallucinations. This is partly inspired by his own academic research on drugs and religious experience. This was the subject of his dissertation at college, and it is a serious topic of investigation. Many cultures use psychedelics and what the Hippies euphemistically described as ‘mind altering substances’ as part of their religious rituals. There have been many articles in the popular Fortean and New Age literature about shamanism and magic mushrooms, or at least there were in the 1990s when Terence McKenna was picking up where Timothy Leary et al left off. The Maya of Guatemala use powerful psychedelics in the Chaac Chaac ceremony, where they seek to persuade the rain god, Chaac, to send the rains for the next growing season. A Channel 4 documentary on the history and cultures of the Caribbean nations reported that, contrary to expectations, the people of one of the islands still carried a large amount of the genetic heritage of the pre-Columbian indigenous people, the Taino. They were now extinct, but had not all been exterminated by the invading Spaniards. Some of these people were attempting to reclaim their indigenous heritage by practising the pagan rituals of their ancestors. This included a ceremony in which the priest or shaman snorted a highly psychoactive substance which caused intense pain as well as other effects to enable him to get onto the plane of the gods. It was illegal, so only the leader of the revived pagan cult did it, and the camera discretely looked away.
These are extremely powerful and potentially lethal substances. The drug used in the Chaac Chaac is an emetic and purgative, and so the worshippers spend the next day after the ritual in their hammocks completely exhausted, recovering from the experience. There was also the case a few years ago of a backpacker, who died in the Amazon trying out one of the shamanic plants, and whose associates were charged with his manslaughter. Timothy Leary argued that LSD use by the general population would be beneficial in his The Politics of Ecstasy, and some of the support for the legalisation and use of recreational drugs by the psychedelic movement was based on the idea that drugs could recreate and give the user an experience similar to that of religious visions. There are dangers to drug use, both personally and at the societal level. People can suffer disturbing flashbacks from prolonged LSD use and there have been deaths from people taking a supposed ‘legal high’ someone had cooked up in their bathtub. As a result, some of those still involved in the psychedelic scene have said that perhaps it would have been better if the use of drugs like LSD had been confined to intellectuals rather than the general population, as initially advocated by people like Aldous Huxley.
Fortunately, CJ states that you don’t have to go that far. Huxley also felt that you could achieve profound altered states of consciousness simply through alcohol. He therefore impishly suggests that one particular experiment in chemically enhanced religious or supernatural experienced could be fruitfully replicated by taking various peeps from one of the psychical research groups round a pub crawl of Hitchin before taking them to a very atmospheric, spooky ruined chapel out in the woods.
The problem with experiments like these is that, while I’ve no doubt people have seen genuine spectres while under the influence, the presence of the drugs in their system, even if it’s only alcohol, raises questions about the objective truth of the experience. Have they really seen a ghost, or was it the product of the drugs or alcohol? Years ago there was a question on Radio 4’s long running panel show, the News Quiz, about a drunk driving case or similar where the judge had made some kind of weird comment about green ferrets. This led to jokes about whether this no doubt worthy member of the judiciary saw green ferrets when he was blotto. People can see strange things when drunk, which have their origin entirely in the brain’s neurochemistry rather than the supernatural. Unless somewhere on the astral plane there really are green ferrets, waiting for the right moment to manifest to drunk drivers or respectable judges, who’ve just had one drop o QC sherry too many with their meals in chambers.
But nevertheless, people have had supernatural experiences after a convivial evening’s drinking, and were naturally concerned to state that whatever it was they saw was not the product of the demon drink. One example is in Robert Hunt’s two-volume book on Cornish folklore. Written in the 19th century, one the stories is of two miners who had spent the evening half-pinting at the local pub. The two stated that, despite this, they weren’t drunk when they decided to go home. As they were passing the Gump, a particularly rocky and eerie part of the county they were overtaken by a dark rider, who urged them to follow him to watch the wrestling. They did so, and saw huge forms emerging from the rocks, which began to grapple with each other. One of them threw the other giant on the ground with such force that it looked like he was dying. At which point one of the miners rushed up to whisper in his ear ‘the hope of every Christian’. At this the lights went out, there were screams and cries and sounds of running, and the dark horseman retreated so that all that could be seen was his glowing eyes. The men then made their way home in a state of terror.
It’s hard to know now what the reality of the incident was, though it contains the folkloric motifs that giants are an anti-Christian force that, like the fairies, nevertheless persist in hidden abodes. The horseman in his black clothing seems to be the Devil in a form clearly influenced by local folklore. In Somerset folklore he’s supposed to haunt Whistman’s wood on Exmoor, hunting the souls of the dead. The horseman’s glowing eyes, which are described as moving around the darkness, look to me as if there’s a connection with later UFO lore. But the relevant aspect to all this is that the men had been drinking, and were possibly a bit tipsy, but not drunk.
CJ then goes on to ponder what kind of mental state is best conducive to seeing the spooks. Is it boredom, as suggested by the great psychical researcher D. Scott Rogo, who said he associated some of his experiences with boredom. CJ states that he can’t stand tedium, and so did all manner of daft, romantic and Dionysian things to escape it, because even embarrassment and rejection were better. He also states that apparently he has a high level of absorption, which means that he can become totally immersed in something to the exclusion of everything around him. He also states that when trapped he retreats into his thoughts if trapped.
I think I can understand this. The late Irish comedian Sean Hughes in one of his routines describes doing all manner of crazy things, driven by the strange moods he experienced as an adolescent at school. Scientists used to believe that the brain’s structure was set during childhood. This changed in the ’90s when they discovered that during adolescence the brain starts re-wiring itself. It was suggested that this explained teenage moodiness, as well as the cry ‘You just don’t understand me’. This came from teenagers’ sudden inability to understand their elders thanks to the rewiring that was going on in their heads.
I recall experiencing something similar. Unlike CJ, I’m an obsessive clock-watcher and admire his ability to lose himself in an activity or train of thought so that he loses track of time. There were times in my adolescence when I felt very depressed – the world seemed bleak and flat, and the grave our ultimate destination – that I’d also act stupidly or madly in order to cheer myself up. I have an odd feeling that some of the stunts done by some of the Surrealists may have come from the same sense of crushing despair. The French proto-Surrealist Alfred Jarry is a particular example. He used to perform a number of practical jokes. One of these was painting himself green all over, and then going into his usual Parisian cafe. This was to startle the maitre d’ and the other customers. Unfortunately for Jarry, one of his friends got wind of this, and told everyone there about it. Thus, when Jarry turned up he simply got the usual greetings and possibly nothing from the barman except the question ‘Your usual, Monsieur Jarry?’ Unable to get a rise out of anyone, he went home. These and his other pranks give me the impression that he may have been a depressive, carrying them out to stave off the despair. I also felt at time that I should somehow be enjoying every minute, because ultimately we’re only here once. A few years ago I read a few books on Phenomenology, which I previously thought was a branch of philosophy but which now seems to be an academic discipline in its own right. There was a passage in it which described the miserable feelings Jean-Paul Sartre had one day when he was suffering a terrible cold, sitting on a park bench in Vienna when he was studying medicine there. This seemed extremely similar to the way I’d felt at times when I was secondary schoolboy. Does this suggest Existentialism is based on the common sense of despair felt by a lot of adolescents? If you poked your average teenage Goth or Emo, would they be an existentialist like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty?
After reassuring us that he is pragmatic and analytical in many ways, and definitely not away with the fairies, CJ explains why he’s telling us so much about his own psychology. He states that this is partly because he wishes to offer himself as an example, but also because psychology began with introspection. Phenomenology still does. From what I understand, as founded by Edmund Husserl in Vienna, Phenomenology begins with a rigorous analysis of one’s own consciousness before moving on to the external world, and brackets what it cannot explain or reconcile with the other objects of consciousness. But it strikes me that parapsychology is acutely concerned with matters outside of normal psychology, such as whether consciousness arises from the brain or exists independently, the nature of consciousness and whether the subjective is intimately connected to the external world so that it can have real effects on it.
Now I wonder if subjective states do affect supernatural experiences. CJ had already been hunting spooks before he came to College, sparked by the experience he and his friends had at Thetford Priory. He was also interested in ritual magic and Aleister Crowley, as were a couple of the other students. This made for some very interesting conversations. I have an interest in world mythology and had studied medieval history at school. I was very interested in what the Cathars had believed, and had flicked through a book of contemporary medieval texts on the Cathars and their beliefs in the school’s ‘A’ Level library. For anyone taken in by the ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ and ‘Da Vinci Code’ nonsense, these are going to come as a shock. Far from teaching that Christ was the mortal progenitor of the early medieval French Merovingian dynasty, the Cathars taught that Christ and the Virgin Mary were pure spirit. The sect may have held orgies, but the religious leadership – the perfecti – who could include women, abjured sex and were rigorously celibate. It was therefore fascinating to talk to CJ on these subjects, and I did have some spooky experiences at this time.
One was a Sunday morning, when I heard sounds of people working on the roads coming through the walls of my room. It sounds like there’s a straightforward explanation there, but as it was a Sunday I wonder if anyone was working on the roads. There was also an incident where I was in my room working on an assignment or just reading, I can’t remember which, when I heard loud banging on the wall coming from the room next door. Eventually I got annoyed and opened the door ready to have a word with the lad in that room, only to find him just outside about to have a word about it with me. I don’t know what caused it. It could simply be that someone was making a noise on the walls elsewhere in building, and through some freak of acoustics it sounded like it was coming from the wall between our rooms. But I doubt this explanation as well. These incidents and others make me wonder if a prior interest in the supernatural makes a person more open to a supernatural incident. I’ve also wondered before now if some people suffering from mental illness may also be genuine centres of supernatural activity. As if something from their disordered inner consciousness somehow leaks out into the objective world. CJ’s and Becky’s research has refuted has refuted the old assumption that poltergeist cases centre around adolescent girls. They don’t, but I wonder if some of them are centred around those with some form of mental condition, which also helps to disguise the supernatural activity around them.
As for researching the general state of mind of people seeing ghosts, I think you could possibly get an idea of some simply by looking at some of manuals of necromancy dating from the Middle Ages and later. Necromancy means the conjuration of the spirits of the dead, and looking through these grimoires should give an insight into the mental state of those using the spells, or at least what they may have hoped to achieve when doing so. But this obviously only applies by those purposefully seeking to make contact with the dead, like those who now go to seances or attend Spiritualist meetings. Most cases seem to be spontaneous and unintended. For example, one of Dad’s stories from work was how one of his friends came back one day shaken from a store room. He said he had just seen one of the managers appear down there, despite the fact that the man had left work and died sometime previously. I don’t know quite what the poor fellow had been thinking about before he saw this apparent ghost, but I’m reasonably sure that it was simply the job at hand, or perhaps what he was going to have for tea or do at the weekend. And I think that in this is probably true of most other spontaneous cases. The witnesses had simply been going about their business thinking of nothing in particular, or of prosaic, humdrum matters. In some cases they only realise they have encountered a ghost when it suddenly disappears or walks through a wall or does something similarly supernatural. Sometimes the environment where the ghost is encountered has an ominous, spooky atmosphere that makes people wish to avoid it, and this might act as a trigger to some who go on to see a spook there. But other people may just look around and leave, glad to be away from the location but not having seen anything.
There are also other rare mental states that can also give rise to apparent ghosts. One of these is fatigue. One of the cases in Hilary Evan’s compendious Seeing Ghosts is of a pair of spectral legs seen walking round the corner of a farm in Cumbria by a woman staying there in the 19th century. I seem to recall reading that deep fatigue can leave people seeing hallucinations of individual body parts. It might be that the female percipient of the disembodied legs in this case was also extremely tired, and so her mind had started to project that fatigue into her vision as the pair of walking legs.
Similarly, the Fortean Times a few decades ago covered the case of a trucker, who was astonished and shaken to see his doppelganger driving a truck past him in the other direction. The magazine reported that there were several cases of this a year, again arising through an unusual but definitely not pathological mental state. In cases like these, it’s important to assess the physical and psychological state of the percipient to rule out entirely rational causes behind the apparition before suggesting that they experienced anything supernatural.
CJ then ends his article by suggesting a way to test the telepathic theory of ghosts experimentally. This is similar to the experiments with Zener cards, in which the sender tried to send an image from a randomly shuffled set of cards to a receiver. If you got over 25 per cent correct – the number that would be expected to be correct guesses from random chance – then the experimenters may well be psychic. In this case, the sender is trying to project a telepathic image of him- or herself according to the suggestion that ghosts are hallucinations projected by a mind or brain. In this case, he suggests that the sender should sit in semi-darkness facing a full length mirror of themselves, because, as he said in part four, most people don’t really know how they look. In order to help them, the sender could use wine or music, or whatever works for them. To check whether this is really working, they could wear something distinctive.
The receiver, on the other hand, should sit quietly in near darkness waiting for the ‘ghost’ of the sender to appear. There should be a thirty minute window selected for the experiment, and both sender and receiver should record their impressions. These are vigil conditions, or near to them, as done on ghost investigations and for the same reasons.
I think this is an excellent suggestion, and worth doing, but I think it goes only part way to testing the hypothesis. Yes, it would show that people are capable of sending telepathic impressions of themselves, and this might replicate crisis apparitions where the receiver has a mental impression of the person in danger. But there’s more to hauntings than simple mental impressions. People don’t perceive ghosts as simple mental impressions like the Zener cards. They see themselves as entities in their material, objective surroundings. Perhaps a better attempt at replicating the ghost experience would involve some form of astral projection. In this case, the sender should imagine themselves standing in front of the receiver while also trying to send a telepathic message of their presence near them. This is mentally cumbersome, I realise, but if it worked should result in the receiver seeing the sender in their surroundings, rather than as a mental image in their head.
Once again, CJ has presented some extremely stimulating ideas on the nature of ghosts and human receptivity to spiritual or telepathic impressions.
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