After a pause of a few days, CJ has returned to writing down his thoughts on ghosts. These are an ongoing attempt by him to sort out his ideas on the matter. This is not an easy matter, as scholars – scientists, theologians, and philosophers, whether sceptics and believers, have been arguing about what ghosts are, if they exist, down the centuries. CJ in this series of blog posts follows the line of the founders of the Society for Psychic Research that ghosts are a kind of hallucination broadcast telepathically by a mind. It’s the same idea that provided the great 19th century writer L. Sheridan LeFanu with the basis for his short story ‘The House and the Brain’. In this latest post, CJ ponders the vexed question of ‘Phantasms of the Living’ as the SPR put it.
Along with investigating ghosts as the spirits of the dead, the SPR also investigated and compiled records of cases where the apparition was of a living person. These were full, so full, in fact, that Gurney, Podmore and Myer, three of the founders, published a book devoted to them, Phantasms of the Living. This comprised two volumes with a total of 1,400 pages. It is one of the books CJ recommends that serious researchers into ghosts should start before moving on to later works, such as Hilary Evans excellent Seeing Ghosts.
Looking through the surveys done over the past century of the appearance of ghosts and apparitions, it appears that there has been something of a change in the phenomenon. It may surprise the modern reader to known that in the census of hallucinations, of those that were recognised there were rather more of the living than of the departed: 32 per cent of the total number of recorded cases compared to 14.3 per cent. In 1948 Mass Observation carried out a survey for Donald West. Of the cases they recorded, only 9 per cent were of the dead while 40.5 per cent of the living. Both of these surveys also recorded cases were the apparition wasn’t recognised: 41 per cent in the census of hallucinations and 31.5 per cent in the Mass Observation’s survey. Mass Observation were a peculiar outfit. They were a group of anthropologists who lamented that ethnographically we knew more about other societies, the primal cultures over which the empire ruled, than we did ourselves and so set about the anthropological study of the British themselves. How they didn’t get arrested with some of their antics I honestly don’t know. This included studying how long it took men to urinate in lavatories to how long it took women to undress for the night. Most of their studies were much more ordinary and socially acceptable than those two examples, and I do wonder if the men making these studies ended up being beaten up or in court trying to explain to a judge that their suspicious activities weren’t voyeurism but serious science.
Back to the spooks. Over the next few years this situation was reversed. Of those ghosts the percipients recognised, the majority were of the dead. The postal survey carried out by the Institute of Paraphysical Research in 1968 and 1974found that of the 28 per cent of cases where the apparition was recognised, two-thirds were of the dead. Another postal survey carried out in 1974 by Erlendur Haraldsson found that only 11 per cent were phantasms of the living, and 31 per cent of the dead. He also cites the findings of ASSAP treasurer Becky Smith, whose survey found that 25 per cent of recognised apparitions were of the living. However, only 16 of the cases in her survey were of people recognised by the percipient. From the available information it appears that there was a change in the phenomenon between 1948 and 1968, but this may be illusory. We naturally don’t know how many of the apparitions in the unrecognised cases were of the living and dead. It’s possible that the real figures may be different, but this is impossible to know because the percipients didn’t recognise the people whose shades they saw.
One of the explanations the SPR put forward for the appearance of ghosts of the living was that they were crisis apparitions. These are broadcast telepathically by people undergoing an emergency or crisis, including their own deaths, to their loved ones. CJ notes that this feels like a natural explanation due to the fact that we are used to ghosts as distressed or seeking help. He could have added here that this type of apparition seems related to the doppelganger or fetch of traditional fairy lore. The term ‘doppelganger’ is German for ‘double goer’ or perhaps ‘double walker’. They were supernatural doubles of individuals, and it was considered an omen of that person’s death if one was seen. One of the explanations advanced in the 16th or 17th century for them was that the bodies of seriously ill or dying people exuded vapours, which coalesced into a replica of the original. After this person’s death, the fetch then went to join the fairies in their hills.
Becky’s suggested solution to this apparent change in the phenomenon is that the publicity surrounding the publication of Phantasms of the Living or the SPR’s hypothesis that ghosts were created telepathically made it more likely that people would report instances where the apparition was of someone still alive. The fact that Sheridan LeFanu uses the idea in his ghost story shows that it had permeated some way into popular ideas about spooks, at least among that section of the public that read ghost stories.
Another possibility CJ considers is that these are cases of mistaken identity. He cites an instance where he himself was struck by the astonishing similarity of a young woman drinking a milkshake in an ice cream parlour on Cheltenham High Street and that of a young female friends who had sadly passed away from lung cancer. It’s quite possible that some cases of doppelgangers and apparitions of the living are indeed due to mistaken identity. There is a limit to the number of different faces human biology can create, and so, in the words of the popular saying, ‘everyone has a double’. Well, possibly not everyone, but a few. There are cases of people who are physically identical but who are completely unrelated. I was once mistaken for someone who worked for the Ministry of Agriculture’s laboratory outside Bristol.
CJ ends his piece by wondering how many of us can visualise ourselves, and that it’s probably easier for someone to project an image of somebody else than of themselves. He therefore believes that if the ghost of a murdered girl is seen, it probably comes from the minds of other people, such as the murderer or the girl’s relatives and loved ones, rather than the girl herself. Could it come from folklorists thinking of the tale? And so could we build a ghost?
This takes us into the realm of the ‘Philip’ experiment, in which a group of psychical researchers constructed an entirely fictional entity, ‘Philip’, with whom they tried to make contact during seances. They succeeded, which seems to suggest that it’s possible for living experimenters to create entirely fictional communicating spirits, spirits that have never lived and which don’t exist outside of the imaginations of the researchers.
Related to this is an apparition that haunts the house of one of the American pulp writers. I’ve forgotten the details, but the pulp writer wrote a series of stories of a tough crime fighter. Visitors to his house since his decease have seen a dark, shadowy figure haunting it. One of the British Marvel magazines, in which this story appeared, posed the question of whether the writer’s intense concentration had resulted in the psychic creation of this apparition. I can’t remember who the writer was, but one of the writers on that magazine was Alan Moore, a titan of British and American comics as well as a ritual magician. This was about forty years ago, but it may be that whoever wrote the article based his supposition on the experiences of Moore and others.
Now, I respectfully differ from CJ in that I don’t think there is a single, one-size-fits-all solution to the question of what ghosts are. The telepathic hypothesis may explain some ghosts and apparitions, but not all. It certainly offers a solution to the old sceptical question that if ghosts are the souls of the dead, why don’t they appear naked? A few naked ghosts were reported in 17th century Quebec, but apart from that the vast majority of spooks appear clothed. I also agree with CJ in that we don’t really know offhand what we look like, although obviously we have no trouble recognising ourselves in mirrors. I dimly remember reading back in the ’90s in one of the papers that scientists had discovered that subconsciously people think of their appearance as it was when they were in their 20s. In the Welsh medieval classic, the Mabinogion, the inhabitants of Annwn, the land of the dead, all look like young people of 30 with the exception that their hair is white. And according to some Spiritualists, at least from what I’ve read, on the after death plane we age backwards, becoming young and vital once again. Despite this, most ghost reports seem to be of the person as they were in life and seem to show that age, no matter how young or old they were.
There have been a number of attempts to solve the problem of ghosts and their appearance. Terry Pratchett in Mort explained it with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields. Mort is Pratchett’s third book following the Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. In it, a young lad gets recruited by Death to take over the Grim Reaper’s job. One of the souls he collects is that of a witch. At the woman’s death, the morphogenetic fields maintaining her appearance collapse, and she goes from aged crone to beautiful young woman before finally become a floating light ready for her next incarnation. The idea that our post mortem appearance could be due morphogenetic fields is interesting, though somewhat different from the theory as it was propounded by Sheldrake. I doubt Pratchett was serious about it though. My impression is that he was a Humanist, although when he was suffering from the Alzheimer’s that took him from us, he said that he could feel the presence of his father reassuring him that everything was all right. He was serious about his own writing, and clearly loved Fantasy literature, but he was also much less than respectful towards it. He couldn’t tell whether he was writing it or satirising it. At a talk he gave at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature back in the ’90s he described himself as ‘a giant hairy maggot crawling over its [Fantasy’s] corpse’. He certainly didn’t seem to believe in magic, which he found far less interesting that science, which had produced wonderful things like street lights. And it all came from the brains of monkeys, as he said in a Beeb programme on him. It seems to me that when he cited morphogenetic fields, it was as a literary device rather than a serious proposition.
Another suggested solution, proposed by the German physicist Gerd Wassermann, was an alternative form of matter, shadow matter. This could explain the ghost phenomenon, though as it stands it’s purely theoretical and so the Magonians concluded that it was another case of trying to explain one unknown with another. Nevertheless, this week there was an article in one of the journals suggesting that along with the objects of the normal matter in the universe there was an invisible, dark matter mirror universe. If ghosts are composed of exotic matter, could this dark matter universe somehow be their origin and domain. If so, what would be the physics in which this normally invisible substance becomes visible during a haunting?
I’ve also wondered before now our consciousness, our sense of self, also includes our appearance and our clothes. We do have a sense of our own bodies. For example, if we lift an arm up, we’re aware that we have done so, and although we may not always consciously be aware of it, I wonder if at some level we’re also aware of our clothes. It could be that it is this awareness of our bodies and our clothing that results in ghosts being visible and clothed in hauntings.
Another idea is that ghosts may be the product of Platonic Ideal Forms. Plato believed that apart from raw matter objects were shaped by transcendent ideal forms, somewhat like the idea a sculptor has when carving stone. Apart from the general ideal forms, there are transcendent forms of individuals as they are at any given time. Their matter may decease and decay, but their ideal form continues and is intelligible and perceptible to those with psychic gifts.
Returning to CJ’s suggestion that ghosts may be impressions of a person’s appearance as seen by another, it may be able to test this. If this is true, must an observer be in the same position as the person, whose observation generated the spook, in order to see it? Would a person in a different position not see the ghost at all, or would they see the ghost from the same perspective as the first person? For example, suppose a ghost appears in a room directly facing the entrance door. Would someone also have to be in this position to see it? Suppose there was a second person occupying a position sideways to the ghost. Would they also see the ghost facing them straight on, as the person who made the original observation saw it, and which the observer at the entrance door sees it? Or would it see it sideways, or not at all. If they see it sideways, then either there was another person there, whose telepathic impressions are still generating the ghost, or the ghost isn’t a telepathic impression from an observer.
This experiment reminds me of my experience viewing an exhibition of holograms at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Bristol in the summer of 1980. Holograms in this sense were three dimensional photographs made by lasers on glass. It was a strange experience, as when you moved from one to another the image would suddenly materialise in front of you out of, it seemed, thin air. Would something like that occur to the observer of a ghost that had been created as an image by another observer, long since departed? As he or she adopted the position of the original observer, would the ghost suddenly materialise just as the holograms did when someone moved in front of them?
CJ is raising some serious and definitely thought-provoking ideas in his series of blog posts, ideas which deserve serious consideration.
Ghosts: Working Notes (Part 4).
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