"Whatever else, indeed, a 'ghost' may be, it is probably one of the most complex phenomena in nature." - F.W.H.Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research.
Some thoughts on the nature and existence of ghosts
The Vulcan, St Bathans - NZ's most haunted hotel? (photo: J. Gilberd)
I repeat the Myers quote at the top of our Aims page, because not only do I entirely agree with Myers, but also because the quote comes from the nineteenth century, reflecting how the phenomenon of the ghost has eluded understanding. Modern science has not seriously addressed the problem of finding out what a ghost might be, and actually does not seem to want to even recognise the question.
Here is my humble input, a first attempt to grapple with a topic that I plan to revisit in future, hopefully each time bringing greater knowledge, experience and understanding. But for now, let's just make a start.
It is unnecessary here to offer definitions of the various types of ghost-like phenomena, as this is readily available elsewhere. (Try The Paranormal Encyclopedia, for a start.) While there are poltergeists, crisis apparitions and other categories of spirits, what we're discussing here is your basic, common or garden ghost; that is, a person (or animal) that existed at some other time and has made itself visible, audible, or noticeable in some way to people since it died. Most often, according to anecdotal evidence, the appearances are not interactive; the ghost just does its thing.
We can argue about whether ghosts exist - something that is probably more a matter of belief - but it is a fact that a large number of people have reported experiencing phenomena that are ghostly. There are simply hundreds upon hundreds of published accounts, and about every second person I've met, once we get discussing the paranormal, has told me of a personal experience that is uncanny to say the least.
While one can assume that some portion of these accounts will be fantasies or outright lies and many more will be based on mistaken perceptions, there are just too many accounts to dismiss all of them for those reasons. And in many cases there have been multiple witnesses, the phenomena has been reported similarly at several different times, or the witnesses have been intelligent, educated people of high station with nothing to gain by their claims; not barmy attention-seekers, in other words.
When it comes to hard evidence of ghost encounters, there is a sad lack of it. While we in the paranormal investigation field strive to gather strong evidence, it is elusive. There scarcely exists a photo or motion picture of a ghost that cannot be explained away as some physical effect in the recording device or naturally occurring illusion in the environment. The same applies to audio recordings. It is often the tendency of the human mind to perceive order in chaos, coupled with a desire for proof that ghosts really exist, that accounts for the number of alleged ghost photos, videos and sound recordings published on the internet and other media. Further, many videos and photos of ghosts currently on the internet are hoaxes, some obvious, some not so. These are perhaps inspired by the rash of paranormal investigation TV shows and clicked on by people 'wanting to believe' or just after a thrill or a laugh.
I have yet to see a photo or video that I think definitely shows a ghost. There is always a large degree of doubt. I think that it may be impossible to photograph an actual ghost, and perhaps this is connected to the very nature of what a ghost is.
There are a number of theories (using the word loosely) about what a ghost is. The most common is that a ghost is the spirit of a dead person. This comes from the theory of Dualism, the belief that the mind and body are separate things (the opposite of Materialism, the mind, or consciousness, is the product of the workings of the brain and there is no spiritual component in a person) and from that the belief that humans possess both a physical body and a non-physical spirit - a soul - and that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body. Personally, I accept this as an idea but I am yet to be convinced of it. Whilst awaiting evidence, my fallback position is Materialism.
Another theory, less commonly believed, is that the environment of a ghost (a haunted location) somehow records events of the past and plays them back to people sensitive enough to pick up on it. One idea is that rocks containing particles of ferrous metal can somehow act in a similar way to a tape recorder or videotape and make a recording that can play itself back. No one has yet devised an experiment that demonstrates this concept, sometimes called "stone taping". If this or a similar natural recording mechanism exists, it shouldn't be that hard to discover and recreate it. I suspect that the idea is nonsense.
The theory above, or something like it, has been put forward to explain the famous sightings of ghostly Roman soldiers and horses in the basement of a The Treasurer's House in York, as one example. How would it work in wooden buildings? The nails, perhaps?
OK, you've read this far, now here's the skinny: The concept of a soul that survives the corporeal body after death is a belief and no more than that. There is no solid evidence to support it.
So, as we grapple with the concept of what a ghost might be, it is the culturally ingrained idea of a ghost being the spirit of a dead person that blocks our thinking. Paranormal investigators, mediums and others curious about the supernatural spend their time trying to communicate with the dead. I'm not suggesting that such communication cannot occur, just challenging the paradigm of ghosts as dead people.
The alternative paradigm I suggest for thinking about ghosts is based on the concept of time, rather than the concept of the spirit. By this I mean perception beyond the limitations of the everyday, linear model of time. Because it is just that, a model.
Is it not possible that when someone sees, hears or otherwise senses the presence of a ghost, they may be encountering a person who is in his or her own time, very much alive (from their own point of view) and going about daily business?
This paradigm can be extended into thinking about the causes of premonitions, crisis apparitions, information gained from the past and other phenomena usually thought of in terms of spirits. It also allows for ghostly animals (Some people think that humans have souls but animals do not.) and apparitional objects. Put aside the concept of the immortal soul for a bit and try it.
It is unnecessary here to offer definitions of the various types of ghost-like phenomena, as this is readily available elsewhere. (Try The Paranormal Encyclopedia, for a start.) While there are poltergeists, crisis apparitions and other categories of spirits, what we're discussing here is your basic, common or garden ghost; that is, a person (or animal) that existed at some other time and has made itself visible, audible, or noticeable in some way to people since it died. Most often, according to anecdotal evidence, the appearances are not interactive; the ghost just does its thing.
We can argue about whether ghosts exist - something that is probably more a matter of belief - but it is a fact that a large number of people have reported experiencing phenomena that are ghostly. There are simply hundreds upon hundreds of published accounts, and about every second person I've met, once we get discussing the paranormal, has told me of a personal experience that is uncanny to say the least.
While one can assume that some portion of these accounts will be fantasies or outright lies and many more will be based on mistaken perceptions, there are just too many accounts to dismiss all of them for those reasons. And in many cases there have been multiple witnesses, the phenomena has been reported similarly at several different times, or the witnesses have been intelligent, educated people of high station with nothing to gain by their claims; not barmy attention-seekers, in other words.
When it comes to hard evidence of ghost encounters, there is a sad lack of it. While we in the paranormal investigation field strive to gather strong evidence, it is elusive. There scarcely exists a photo or motion picture of a ghost that cannot be explained away as some physical effect in the recording device or naturally occurring illusion in the environment. The same applies to audio recordings. It is often the tendency of the human mind to perceive order in chaos, coupled with a desire for proof that ghosts really exist, that accounts for the number of alleged ghost photos, videos and sound recordings published on the internet and other media. Further, many videos and photos of ghosts currently on the internet are hoaxes, some obvious, some not so. These are perhaps inspired by the rash of paranormal investigation TV shows and clicked on by people 'wanting to believe' or just after a thrill or a laugh.
I have yet to see a photo or video that I think definitely shows a ghost. There is always a large degree of doubt. I think that it may be impossible to photograph an actual ghost, and perhaps this is connected to the very nature of what a ghost is.
There are a number of theories (using the word loosely) about what a ghost is. The most common is that a ghost is the spirit of a dead person. This comes from the theory of Dualism, the belief that the mind and body are separate things (the opposite of Materialism, the mind, or consciousness, is the product of the workings of the brain and there is no spiritual component in a person) and from that the belief that humans possess both a physical body and a non-physical spirit - a soul - and that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body. Personally, I accept this as an idea but I am yet to be convinced of it. Whilst awaiting evidence, my fallback position is Materialism.
Another theory, less commonly believed, is that the environment of a ghost (a haunted location) somehow records events of the past and plays them back to people sensitive enough to pick up on it. One idea is that rocks containing particles of ferrous metal can somehow act in a similar way to a tape recorder or videotape and make a recording that can play itself back. No one has yet devised an experiment that demonstrates this concept, sometimes called "stone taping". If this or a similar natural recording mechanism exists, it shouldn't be that hard to discover and recreate it. I suspect that the idea is nonsense.
The theory above, or something like it, has been put forward to explain the famous sightings of ghostly Roman soldiers and horses in the basement of a The Treasurer's House in York, as one example. How would it work in wooden buildings? The nails, perhaps?
OK, you've read this far, now here's the skinny: The concept of a soul that survives the corporeal body after death is a belief and no more than that. There is no solid evidence to support it.
So, as we grapple with the concept of what a ghost might be, it is the culturally ingrained idea of a ghost being the spirit of a dead person that blocks our thinking. Paranormal investigators, mediums and others curious about the supernatural spend their time trying to communicate with the dead. I'm not suggesting that such communication cannot occur, just challenging the paradigm of ghosts as dead people.
The alternative paradigm I suggest for thinking about ghosts is based on the concept of time, rather than the concept of the spirit. By this I mean perception beyond the limitations of the everyday, linear model of time. Because it is just that, a model.
Is it not possible that when someone sees, hears or otherwise senses the presence of a ghost, they may be encountering a person who is in his or her own time, very much alive (from their own point of view) and going about daily business?
This paradigm can be extended into thinking about the causes of premonitions, crisis apparitions, information gained from the past and other phenomena usually thought of in terms of spirits. It also allows for ghostly animals (Some people think that humans have souls but animals do not.) and apparitional objects. Put aside the concept of the immortal soul for a bit and try it.
I am beginning to think that ghosts may be explained in future by way of an understanding of time that goes beyond the simple, linear model that we were all brought up with and conditioned to. It seems unlikely that, given the complexity of quantum theory and relativity, our conventional idea of time that allows us to organise ourselves and mentally impose order on nature is even close to what's really going on. Kant could be useful at this point, or he might just make your head spin. He did mine. Let's try Dr Who instead.
The Doctor explains
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff."
- The 10th Doctor Who, in "Blink".
Click on the pic to watch David Tennant say it!
- The 10th Doctor Who, in "Blink".
Click on the pic to watch David Tennant say it!
We know from Einstein's theories that space-time behaves interestingly when we get into extremely strong gravitational fields and/or speeds approaching lightspeed, but relativity doesn't make the blindest bit of difference in our everyday lives, at normal speeds and in Earth's gravity. (If Earth was in close orbit of a black hole, it would be a different matter.)
"Concepts which have proved to be useful in ordering things, easily acquire such an authority over us that we forget their human origin and accept them as invariable." - Albert Einstein
So if time is really not like a straight line that we move forwards along at the same fixed rate and without the option of going back, and the wibbly-wobbly ball idea doesn't quite do it for you, what about imagining time as a strongly flowing river? I know this is something of a cliché, but that doesn't discount it as a useful visualisation.
Imagine that river as seen from a bridge spanning it, swollen from storm rains, with trees and other large floating things pulled along by the current, spinning and swirling. Things move at different rates, depending on their shape or which channel they're caught in. Now imagine yourself afloat in the middle of that river, carried along steadily. You pass someone struggling in an eddy and you reach out to him, just making hand contact before you're helplessly swept on past.
So by thinking of time using this type of physical model, it is not so hard to imagine a ghost as being a person who, to himself, is not dead, but living life continuously in a different current of time, or perhaps caught up in an eddy or some kind of undertow. And in some circumstances or particular conditions we may be able to perceive beyond our own time stream and into this other person's. We may be able to reach across as we drift past him, or he can reach out to us.
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Descent Into the Maelstrom" describes a similar scene, a giant whirlpool in the sea into which is drawn a victim of a shipwreck. But the victim is not helpless, for he has observed that things caught in the whirlpool's current move at different rates according to their shape and nature, and by judicious timing in moving from one object to another he is able to escape the inevitable. The tale is another possible metaphor for time, or fate (unless you somehow are clever enough to sidestep it).
This may all sound too poetic, not concrete enough, unscientific, but it is the early stage of trying to get to grips with complex things that I don't have the scientific or mathematical skills to model in any other way. As I learn more I may be able to describe this idea in more scientific terms, or find that someone else already has.
This may all sound too poetic, not concrete enough, unscientific, but it is the early stage of trying to get to grips with complex things that I don't have the scientific or mathematical skills to model in any other way. As I learn more I may be able to describe this idea in more scientific terms, or find that someone else already has.
Here's another idea concerning ghosts, unrelated to the above. Recently I saw the documentary The Man in the Hat, about a well-known Wellington art dealer who has operated his gallery from the same rooms since the 1960s. He describes how much of his life, his work and his very self is now in those small rooms. He is a unique identity and is known to many people. Seeing the documentary film it made me think - when a person is so strongly identified with a particular place and their living, breathing spirit is so ever-present, what happens when they are finally gone from there?
Perhaps people who know of that kind of person and place, when visiting in the future will find it hard to imagine the place without the presence of the particular person in it. As long as the place exists the person will remain present in the mind of the visitor; because they are so strongly associated it would be difficult to avoid visualising the person. Taken another step, when the visitor brings new people to see the place, their description of that original inhabitant will tend to take the shape of a ghost story, and to the next generation it may indeed become a ghost story. The original occupier remains as a presence because his life was so bound up in the place he simply refuses to leave it. Is that how some ghost stories evolve, starting out as descriptions of living persons and through generations becoming visualisations of persons long departed? I suspect this may happen in the case of well known identities in theatres and other similar public buildings associated with colourful, passionate characters and imaginative, natural storytellers. What theatre worth its salt doesn't have a ghost story or three?
Perhaps people who know of that kind of person and place, when visiting in the future will find it hard to imagine the place without the presence of the particular person in it. As long as the place exists the person will remain present in the mind of the visitor; because they are so strongly associated it would be difficult to avoid visualising the person. Taken another step, when the visitor brings new people to see the place, their description of that original inhabitant will tend to take the shape of a ghost story, and to the next generation it may indeed become a ghost story. The original occupier remains as a presence because his life was so bound up in the place he simply refuses to leave it. Is that how some ghost stories evolve, starting out as descriptions of living persons and through generations becoming visualisations of persons long departed? I suspect this may happen in the case of well known identities in theatres and other similar public buildings associated with colourful, passionate characters and imaginative, natural storytellers. What theatre worth its salt doesn't have a ghost story or three?
Stories and accounts fire the imagination, and people are suggestible. At night the imagination reaches peak performance and any small thing gets magnified. Tiredness is also a factor, especially in the small hours when the only people awake are the paranormal investigators. (Even the ghosts are asleep.) It is hard to be in an old building at night when you know of ghostly encounters there and not get scared, not imagine things. And that is where many ghost reports come from. They can be psychological projections created by people who are in an aroused state of nervousness and high imagination.
I believe this or related states of mind account for many ghost experiences, but I still suspect that there is more to it. From my experience, I think that it is possible that sensitive people are sometimes able to perceive events that lie outside the boundary of linear time. Given it turns out that time is really more like a wibbly-wobbly ball or some other highly complex model yet to be devised, I think that we will be able to understand and explain the phenomenon of ghosts by exploring down that avenue. But first we have to free ourselves of hollow assumptions and of indoctrinated concepts that are really no more than beliefs and superstitions; and stop just thinking in the narrow way we've been taught to think. Then an explanation for ghosts will flow from that new understanding.
It's just a matter of time.
- James Gilberd, April 2010
I believe this or related states of mind account for many ghost experiences, but I still suspect that there is more to it. From my experience, I think that it is possible that sensitive people are sometimes able to perceive events that lie outside the boundary of linear time. Given it turns out that time is really more like a wibbly-wobbly ball or some other highly complex model yet to be devised, I think that we will be able to understand and explain the phenomenon of ghosts by exploring down that avenue. But first we have to free ourselves of hollow assumptions and of indoctrinated concepts that are really no more than beliefs and superstitions; and stop just thinking in the narrow way we've been taught to think. Then an explanation for ghosts will flow from that new understanding.
It's just a matter of time.
- James Gilberd, April 2010
"A deeply emotional thought, for example, may have capabilities little dreamed of by its conceiver; effects not merely transient nor confined to a lifetime, nor limited to any definite number of years nor to any limited space."
Elliott O'Donnell, from 'Haunted Britain', 1948.
Elliott O'Donnell, from 'Haunted Britain', 1948.
Note: I have not considered here the possibility of ghost experiences being closely tied to the phenomenon of telepathy, an idea put forward by Kenneth Walker in 'The Unconscious Mind', and by others. This is a biggie and I'm not ready or prepared to write about it yet!
