Residual Haunting

Rm 113, Mokena Hotel, Te Aroha. Photo: J.Gilberd

During a recent visit to the Mokena Hotel, in the historic Waikato mining and spa town of Te Aroha, I was trying to record and communicate with an entity that reportedly lingers in room 113. The Maori lady is said to sometimes be seen sitting on or near the bed and gazing out the window, and there is a slight depression on the bed that resembles an imprint of a sitter, an imprint that it is said cannot be permanently smoothed away. The friendly hotel owner and staff informed me about other 'residents', and events in the hotel's past. I wasn't able to perceive or record any of them on my first visit but I hope to try again in future.

So, what is a 'residual haunting'? The word residual obviously comes from residue - a small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone. In regard to haunting, this means that something of a person remains in a place after they're gone. It can also apply to multiple people, animals and objects.

Residual hauntings have been downplayed in books on paranormal investigation and ghost hunting as something rather insignificant that we shouldn't be too concerned with; mere distractions from the quest for a full body apparition or real-time communication with an intelligent entity. OK, I exaggerate, but there is nothing trivial about the concept of residual haunting. If I had strong documentary proof of such a thing - hard, science-grade evidence to back a theory - I wouldn't be writing about it here. I'd be submitting a paper to Nature or some other major science journal and quietly hoping for a Nobel Prize!

There are many published reports of residual hauntings, worldwide and in New Zealand. Their believability comes down to how reliable, and independent, the witnesses are, and things like the quality of interviewing, the credibility of the writer and publisher, or if they have some agenda. What is lacking, overall, is hard evidence that will withstand scientific scrutiny. So far we are reliant on testimony.

A thing I hear or read often is that the ghost in a residual haunting is locked into a loop, endlessly repeating the same pattern or chain of events. Well, that may be so in some reported cases; but is not our daily life fairly routine? We usually eat, sleep, watch TV or sit at a computer at about the same time and place on any given day, work at the same place, etc. If someone from another time was somehow observing our activity they might easily think they're seeing some poor soul doomed to repeating a chain of events for eternity. We living humans are creatures of habit as much as any ghost.

One of the most famous cases of a residual haunting, and a personal favourite that I hope might actually be true, is that of the Roman soldiers in the basement of the Treasury House in York, UK. Here is a video that gives details of plumber Harry Martindale's account of seeing the soldiers, as well as information about other independent encounters.

Martindale's account rings true for several reasons:
- Details given, such as the soldiers' shields being round, rather that rectangular as was commonly thought, mean he didn't just see a picture of Roman soldiers in a book or in a movie. And clearly he was not an expert on Roman military history.
- He describes the soldiers as appearing solid and real, not translucent or wispy - the way ghosts are usually shown in popular media.
- He had nothing to gain from inventing such a story, and he has accepted no money for his story.
- He has not changed his story over time.
- There are other independent witnesses, earlier and later,  who knew nothing of Martindale's account.
- Archeological evidence from the area aligns with the details.

There is a lot of information, in books and online, about this example of residual haunting. I intend to do more research on it and I would encourage you to as well, and to decide for yourself if you think it's genuine. I haven't yet heard of anything that debunks the account. If it is true, it really is a game changer.

At this point I feel obligated to mention that old chestnut Stone Tape Theory. But I think it's one that's safe to dismiss as nonsense, nice-sounding as it may have been. I'm sure that if there were anything to it we would've come to understand the mechanism by now, yet it remains in airy-fairy land. The linked Wikipedia article agrees.

Mokena Hotel, Te Aroha, New Zealand. Photo: J.Gilberd

Residual hauntings are closely associated with, or sometimes described as, Time Slips. More about time later.

In New Zealand, the books edited by Grant Shanks and Tahu Potiki; 'When the wind calls your name' and 'Where no birds sing' together give some 80 accounts of paranormal experiences. They're well told in the language of the witnesses, but in most cases the witnesses' names and the exact locations have been deliberately left out. There are some compelling accounts of residual hauntings and/or time slips in these twin volumes. Two that really strike me both involve waka (Maori canoes); in one case  on a river (viewed from a low-flying helicopter, yet the paddling warriors did not look at the chopper despite the racket it made); in the other the waka was being carried through the bush by warriors, led by a chief. The witnesses in both cases were parties of hunters - hardly types to make this stuff up! And it was impossible that such waka and warriors could actually have been in those areas. The books are out of print but are available second hand and from libraries. I cannot recommend them enough to those interested in the paranormal in New Zealand. Some details on this page, along with other NZ books on the paranormal.

Personally, I have some doubt that there's such a thing as an 'intelligent haunting' (but I'm well prepared to change my view in the face of compelling evidence.), and NZ's world famous paranormal investigator Andrew MacKenzie - a significant member of the SPR for several decades, backs me up in his book Hauntings and Apparitions (Granada Publishing Ltd, London, 1983). In its concluding chapter, he says, There does not seem to be evidence for the operation of any intelligent agency in most hauntings, though in the occasional case where there is a response to questions or taunts in the form of raps . . . there are indications that a rudimentary form of intelligence may be operating.

Intelligent hauntings require the ghost, spirit or other entity to be aware of us in our present time and also be capable of some form of communication with us. This ability seems more consistent with and reliant upon the Spiritualist understanding that ghosts are souls that have survived bodily death, or perhaps with or upon the existence of demons or other entities that are tied in with religious beliefs. I don't think intelligent hauntings will ever be addressable through science, and so will likely remain an area for subjective experience and belief.

On the other hand, I have interviewed people who have experienced time slips - where they've walked into a room or to an outdoor location and seen events and people as they were in that place decades earlier, and without the people from the past apparently being aware of them. I understand that our senses really aren't that reliable, our memory that accurate, and various other psychological missteps might interfere with our subjective reality and our memory of experiences; but I have, with careful assessment, believed these people. Although I'm not certain that I've experienced such myself, I think for now that residual hauntings and time slips are a thing.

Residual hauntings and time slips require no supernatural belief if we consider that they are related to time, and so are potentially explicable by the science of physics.

Cover of an early edition of 'Flatland'

Edwin A.Abbott's 1884 book Flatland was intended as social satire but became more valued for its original and imaginative way of explaining dimensions of space. (In 2007 Flatland was made into a film. It looks fascinating. Must track it down.)

Flatland describes geometrical beings - circles, squares, triangles - living in a two-dimensional world. They perceive each other, viewing edge-on, as lines with various shadings. (Let's not worry about actual thickness, or how the light gets in there - it's just an intellectual model.) A.Square, an inhabitant of this 2D world, is unable to imagine that he might, as a three-dimensional being, visualise his world from above, as he is conceptually trapped in two dimensions.

Where this gets interesting and perhaps pertinent in relation to our paranormal question is when A.Sphere - a three-dimensional being from a higher plane of existence - visits Flatland. A.Square perceives A.Sphere passing through Flatland as at first a point, then a shaded line that gets longer, (reaching maximum length when the circumference of A.Sphere is in Flatland), and then diminishing in length, then a point, then nothing. A.Square's experience of seeing something appear, rapidly grow, shrink and disappear, defies his concept of reality, as experiencing ghosts and time slips do for most of us.

But what we understand, and can easily visualise, is a sphere passing through a plane - a solid object moving in three-dimensional space. Where the plane of Flatland intersects A.Sphere, a circle is formed. A.Square perceives the moving three-dimensional object as a two-dimensional object changing over time.

Edwin A.Abbott encourages us to make this extrapolation: what if, like A.Square, we were to encounter a being from a universe with one more spatial dimension than our own - a four-dimensional alien - moving through our 3D world? How would we describe this event?

Could we possibly see this creature passing through as something changing in time? A thing appears from nothing, changes in some way (maybe it grows, or spreads out, or does something), then it disappears (without necessarily moving off or being bound by time). Or another possibility (albeit a stretch); if it were, say, a cosmos-exploring cat, we might see the sudden appearance of a newly born kitten and watch it grow rapidly into an adult cat before our eyes, then grow old, die, shrivel and vanish. In other words, we see the visitor's entire life development as it moves through our space; we see it in every state of its own existence within the amount of time it takes to transcend our plane of existence. We see its movement as change over time.

Meanwhile, in 4D world, Kosmo Kat is able to move around in four dimensions quite freely, back and forward in time as we would understand it; but, in its perception, the 5th dimension might be called Time, and it might be as much at the mercy of progress in that dimension as we are in our 4th dimension of time.

Superstring Theory, we are told, requires 11 dimensions for consistency. What?!? Just attempting to think about it makes my brain hurt. The same could be said for quantum mechanics, although Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's book The Quantum Enigma is a great introduction.

I often feel like Mr Gumby

Stepping back to the end of the 19th century, it was widely thought (mainly thanks to Sir Isaac Newton's brilliant work) that physics was near complete, with just a few details to fill in. Then along cometh Albert Einstein with his damned Relativity theories (Special and General) to turn our concept of reality on its head.

And if that wasn't stressful enough, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger and his infamous cat, and other (human) scientists developed Quantum mechanics. In a nutshell, Quantum says that there is no absolute reality as such, but that we create reality by the act of observing it.

Link to video explaining quantum

Quantum mechanics gives us the Many Worlds Interpretation. By this, or some other concept of multiple or parallel universes, it might be that dimensions can somehow rub up against one another, momentarily intersecting to allow some perceptive (or lucky) individuals to perceive events in parallel but time-shifted dimensions. (Tying knots in my hanky now, as I type - which is indeed quite tricky.)

Fast forward to now. Only a very smug, ignorant person would say that physics is basically complete except for the the last minor details, or that it will from now on merely progress in small increments. Just because they can't imagine how our understanding of nature might again undergo forced, radical change doesn't mean it can't happen. We've been here before, remember. The next way of re-understanding the cosmos might turn up next week, year, decade, or tomorrow. And, if we're lucky, with it might come an understanding of time that allows for and explains ghosts of the past or the future, for time slips, maybe even for Roman soldiers to march through our living rooms. 

By James Gilberd, co-author of Spooked - Exploring the Paranormal in New Zealand.