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. Let’s have a few examples from Britain. Seen on many occasions in St James’s 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 Sellis’s 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 valet’s 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 England’s 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 person’s 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?
by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk
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. Let’s have a few examples from Britain. Seen on many occasions in St James’s 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 Sellis’s 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 valet’s 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 England’s 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 person’s 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?
by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk
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