The Science of Ghosts

by Joe Nickell

  As it happens, nearly four years before, the San Jose Mercury News had reported on the very incident Browne claimed to see in her vision. The article told of a reported apparition of a little girl at Brookdale: “According to Brookdale legend, the little girl is named Sarah. The niece of the lodge owner 50 years ago, she drowned in the creek that runs through the dining room, the story continues, and her spirit remains to this day in the building” (Rogers 1991). So Sylvia could have received the information when, prior to the Sightings taping, she was “filled in on the lodge's fairly chaotic history” (Browne 2003, 46). There is even evidence that she not only could have previously heard the story of the girl's death but that she probably did.

  As the Mercury News related, “two Gnostic ministers who work with Campbell [California] psychic Sylvia Browne conducted a ‘house blessing’” at Brookdale “to try to communicate with and rid the lodge of ghosts” (Rogers 1991). They returned the next day to appear in a television news story on the “haunting” (Lancaster 2007a). According to Browne critic Robert S. Lancaster (2007a), “members of Browne's church in Campbell at the time” stated that “the lodge's ‘ghostly history’—including that of ‘Sarah’—was common knowledge at the church.” He concluded, “It strains credulity to think that Browne would not have read the newspaper article or watched the TV news story, both of which prominently featured her assistants.”

  PLAGIARISM BY SPIRIT GUIDES

  In 2005, Browne published yet another tome, titled Secrets & Mysteries of the World. It is an exception to Browne's usual practice of collaborating on a book “with” so-and-so. This time the cover simply reads, “Sylvia Browne.” In producing this book, she says, she augmented her “intense search” with her “psychic abilities,” including assistance from “Francine,” the imaginary playmate of her childhood who became Browne's “spirit guide” (2005, 11).

  In the various chapters, Browne says she used psychometry (psychic object reading) at Stonehenge, saw and talked with a tall extraterrestrial from planet “PX41,” determined that spontaneous human combustion is a real phenomenon, 1 and so on.

  However, if readers will stop laughing, it is Browne's ideas on the Shroud of Turin (the reputed burial cloth of Jesus) that interest me most. Some believe the images on the cloth, of a seemingly crucified man, were produced by Jesus at the moment when, lying in his tomb, he rose from the dead. Browne shows some admirable skepticism, concluding: “I believe that the Shroud is a representation and not a true relic—but I don't think that should put a dent in our Christian belief” (2005, 199). Citing a fourteenth-century bishop's report that the image was painted, Browne (196) writes:

  If the Shroud were in fact painted, it would explain some image flaws that have always raised questions. For example, the hair hangs as for a standing rather than a reclining figure; the physique is unnaturally elongated (like figures in Gothic art); and the “blood” flows are unrealistically neat (instead of matting the hair, for instance, they run in rivulets on the outside of the locks). You see, real blood soaks into cloth and spreads in all directions rather than leaving picturelike images.

  I found that passage intriguing, since I had written (in the July/August 1998 Skeptical Inquirer, p. 21):

  That the Shroud is indeed the work of a medieval artist would explain numerous image flaws. For example, the physique is unnaturally elongated (like figures in Gothic art!). Also, the hair hangs as for a standing rather than recumbent figure.

  …Everywhere the “blood” flows are unrealistically neat. Instead of matting the hair, for instance, they run in rivulets on the outside of the locks…. In addition, real blood soaks into cloth and spreads in all directions, rather than leaving picturelike images.

  Now, the shared phrasing between Browne's passage and mine may give new meaning to the term ghostwritten. Considering the book's lack of any reference to my article, one may wonder: Has Francine stooped to plagiarism? What does Browne know about this? Was she in a trance when she wrote it? Are there other Secrets & Mysteries of the World yet to be revealed?

  THE MISSING DEAD

  Then there is Browne's track record in supposedly helping police find dead people. In that pursuit, her “spirit guides” should be especially useful, contacting for her the ghosts of persons missing and presumed dead to learn where their remains are. Actually, most such “psychic sleuths” merely use a technique called retrofitting (or after-the-fact matching). They throw out a few vague “clues” (like “water” or “the number seven”) then wait and attempt to match them with the actual facts once they become known, so as to maintain the pretence of accuracy (Nickell 1994).

  Yet in the case of Chandra Levy, who disappeared in Washington, DC, in 2001, Browne did not do well. Although she visualized that the missing intern's remains were in the area police were concentrating on, Rock Creek Park, Browne said they were “down in a marshy area.” Instead, when they were discovered by a man walking his dog, they were scattered on a steep wooded slope (Lancaster 2009; Nickell 2009).

  Worse, in one case, Browne erroneously told the parents of a missing eleven-year-old boy, Shawn Hornbeck, that he was dead. He had gone missing from his Richwood, Missouri, home on October 6, 2002, and four months later (February 26, 2003) his parents, Pam and Craig Akers, appeared with Sylvia Browne on The Montel Williams Show. There, Browne told the parents that Shawn “is no longer with us” and stated her impression that his body was near two jagged boulders in a wooded area some twenty miles from Richwood in a southwesterly direction (Lancaster 2007b).

  Actually, Browne was describing a general area that had already been searched several times. In fact, all the while, Shawn was alive, being held along with another boy, by a kidnapper in St. Louis. The youths were found by law enforcement on January 12, 2007. Subsequently, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show devoted a segment to Browne's many psychic failures titled Dead Wrong, which aired January 19, 2007. For the show, Sylvia Browne provided a list of her supposed successes, but Cooper and his staff subjected the cases to scrutiny and found them seriously wanting, including claims that were unverifiable and some that were documented only after the fact (Lancaster 2009).

  FANTASY PRONE

  None of the foregoing means, of course, that Sylvia Browne is an out-and-out charlatan. In fact, she could very well believe she has special powers—whether or not she engages in trickery to boost her appearance of success.

  Those who fancy themselves psychics often exhibit traits associated with a “fantasy-prone” personality—a designation for an otherwise normal person with an unusual ability to fantasize, as we have seen. As a child, he or she may have an imaginary playmate and live much of the time in make-believe worlds. As an adult, the person continues to spend much time fantasizing, and may report apparitional, out-of-body, or near-death experiences; claim psychic or healing powers; receive special messages from higher beings; be easily hypnotized; and/or exhibit other traits (Wilson and Barber 1983). Anyone may have some of these traits, but fantasizers have them in profusion.

  Sylvia Browne, for example, as a child had what her parents called “made-up friends,” particularly her “spirit guide” named “Francine.” Browne undergoes “trances” in which “Francine” provides alleged information from “Akashic records, individual spirit guides, and messages from the Godhead.” Browne also claims to see apparitions, talk to ghosts, have clairvoyant visions, make psychic medical diagnoses, divine past lives, and so forth. She has even started her own religion, Novus Spiritus (“New Spirit”). (Browne and May 1998; Browne 1999)

  MILLION-DOLLAR CHALLENGE

  Putting aside the question of Sylvia Browne's sincerity, the question remains: does she have psychic powers and the ability to speak with the dead?

  On Larry King Live (aired September 3, 2001), Browne appeared with famed magician and psychic investigator James Randi, who offers, as he told Larry, one million dollars “to any person or persons who can provide evidence of any paranormal or supernatural event or ability of any kind u
nder proper observing conditions.” Randi challenged Browne to take the test.

  She was defensive, saying, “I don't care about his million dollars,” and switching the subject to whether or not Randi believes in God. However, pressed by Randi, she did agree to be tested, and Larry King volunteered to use his website for the purpose. When the show finally ended, Larry said: “And we're going to see that the two get together and go through this test. And we'll let you know about it.” Yet, at this writing, well over a decade later, Browne still has not submitted herself to being tested by Randi. Maybe she guesses what the results will be.

  As shown in chapter 1, on the history of ghosts, visits made to check out a “haunted” site date as far back as 1 CE. More intentional ghost hunting is known from at least the second half of the sixteenth century. According to Harry Price (1936, 37):

  Ghost-hunting (even professional ghost-hunting) is of ancient origin and was fully discussed as long ago as 1572 when [Ludwig] Lavater's famous book, Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght, was published. In many respects, the book might have been written yesterday, instead of in the sixteenth century, and it is a fact that Shakespeare drew largely from the work when he wrote Hamlet. The first chapter “Concerning certaine wordes which are often used in this Treatise of Spirits” deals with the terms spectrum, defined as “a substance without a body, which beeing hearde or seene, maketh men afrayde,” visions, and apparitions. The author then warns his readers to be critical of the evidence for spirits: “Melancholike persons, and madde men, imagin many things which in verie deede are not. Men which are dull of seing and hearing imagine many things which in very deed are not so.” Lavater's words should be emblazoned in neon lights over the portals of every séance-room. Lavater then proceeds to describe various fraudulent phenomena and again warns us “That many naturall things are taken to be ghosts, as for example, when they heare the crying of rats, cats, weasles, martins, or any other beast, or when they heare a horse beate his feete on the plankes in the stable at midnight, by and by they sweate for feare, supposing some buggs [hobgoblins] to walke in the dead of the night…. If a worme whiche fretteth wood, or that breadeth in trees chaunce to gnawe a wall or waynescot, or other tymber, many will judge they heare one softly knocking uppon an andvill with a sledge.”

  The rest of Lavater's treatise deals with supposedly genuine phenomena.

  Today's emphasis on physical phenomena that are thought to prove the reality of ghosts is interesting. If ghosts are nonmaterial (as evidenced by reports of their walking through walls), how is it that they produce heavy, thudding footsteps on stairs (as also reported)—or that they use stairs at all? And if ghosts represent a dead person's “spiritual energy” (as is often claimed), how is it that they are invariably clothed, that clothing and other inanimate objects pass into an afterlife? The answer (as we discussed in chapter 2) seems to be that all are really only figments of the mind; they appear because they are required by the imagined ghostly drama (Nickell 2001a, 216–17). People, even ghosts, are appropriately clothed both in our memory and in our imagination.

  Nevertheless, the notion that ghosts are at least somewhat physical is the basis for spiritualism's physical mediumship (slate writing, materializations, etc.) as well as much of so-called ghost hunting. Of the physical evidence supposedly supporting both, none is more prevalent than photographs. Interestingly, the first experimental photographs (in the 1820s) as well as the first types of commercial photos—daguerreotypes (invented in 1839), ambrotypes (from 1855), and tintypes (from 1856)—failed to record ghosts. Not until glass-plate negatives came on the scene (about 1859), and made double exposures possible, did “ghosts” begin to appear in photographs (first in 1862). Photography became a ghost-hunting tool that has seen increasing use as photography became accessible to amateurs. (See chapter 38, “Photoghosts: Images of the Spirit Realm?”)

  After photography, other technological developments began to be enlisted in the search for ghosts. In 1920, for example, the prolific American inventor Thomas A. Edison was reported to be working on a device for communicating with the dead. However, while Edison was fascinated with the occult—conducting experiments in mind reading, mind control, and spirit communication (Gardner 1996)—he spoke rather skeptically of the latter:

  I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere. Now follow me carefully; I don't claim that our personalities pass on to another existence, or sphere. I don't claim anything because I don't know anything about the subject. For that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication. (Edison 1948, 239)

  Edison went on to describe his concept as being “in the nature of a valve, so to speak” that would tremendously magnify any exerted force. A collaborator of his having recently died, Edison went on to say, “In that he knew exactly what I am after in this work, I believe he ought to be the first to use it if he is able to do so.” He added, “Of course, don't forget that I am making no claims for the survival of personality; I am not promising communication with those who have passed out of this life. I merely state that I am giving the psychic investigators an apparatus which may help them in their work” (Edison 1948, 240). The important point to note is that Edison did not report any further progress in spirit communication, certainly not any message from his deceased collaborator.

  Undaunted, those attempting to prove the reality of ghosts continued their efforts. In 1936, another researcher, one Atilla von Szalay, attempted to capture spirit voices on phonograph records. Others followed with tape recorders, culminating in Konstantin Raudive's book Breakthrough (1971). It sparked the craze known as “electronic voice phenomena” (EVP), which began to spread in the 1980s (Guiley 2000, 120–21). The reputed ghost voices are unheard during taping but are supposedly manifested on playback.

  Such voices actually have natural explanations (discussed in chapter 34), but one celebrated invention, called Spiricom—which could allegedly permit two-way communications with people who have died—was ultimately revealed to be “no more than a fairly transparent hoax” (Peterson 1987, 97).

  The father of today's ghost hunting, England's Harry Price (1881–1948), became one of the first to use “modern technology” to supposedly detect spirits of the dead (Nickell 2006a, 25). Having married an heiress, Price was able to indulge his interests in psychical research. Although he was a member of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research), he felt the society was too skeptical of physical phenomena and he therefore established his own research lab.

  Seeking evidence of “haunting” activity, Price famously had a “ghost-hunting” kit (see Price 1936, photo facing p. 32). He employed a variety of devices, including a reflex camera (with film packs and flash bulbs), a camera with infrared filter and film (for photographing in the dark), a remote-control motion-picture camera, and “a sensitive transmitting thermograph, with charts, to measure the slightest variation in temperature in supposed haunted rooms.”1 He also utilized “an electronic signaling instrument” to reveal the “movement of any object in any part of the house” (Price 1940, 5–6). Less technological equipment included a tape measure, electric torch (flashlight), string, chalk, notebook and pencils, tape (for sealing windows), a bowl of mercury (used for detecting building tremors), and other items, including “bandages, iodine and a flask of brandy in case member of investigating staff or resident is injured or faints” (Price 1940, 5–6). He rejected “cranks and inventors with machines to sell—pieces of apparatus guaranteed to detect a ghost a mile off” (Price 1940, 107).

  Price combined the u
se of gadgetry with a psychic approach. As early as the 1920s he had a séance with a “famous physical medium” in a reputedly haunted dressing room of the Adelphi Theatre (Price 1940, 46–47). In his famous investigation of Borley Rectory, he noted “the phantasms seen by various people,” statements produced as automatic writing “through the Planchette,” and a séance he held at midnight in the rectory's “Blue Room” (1940, 33, 34, 41–43). Price (1940, 93, 95) also reported that at Borley he suggested reciting the Rosary, “asking our Lord and the Blessed Virgin to assist us,” and he “had several Masses offered in connection with this house.” He even rented Borley Rectory for a year, enlisted some forty volunteer “observers” to monitor it in shifts, and created protocols and report-writing instructions (Price 1940, 193–97, 248).

  Despite all his efforts, however, Price was still unable to prove the reality of ghosts. Worse, he remains “suspected of fraud in connection with several of his investigations, including the most famous one, the Borley Rectory haunting” (Guiley 2000, 299), the subject of his The Most Haunted House in England (1940). (For a discussion, see Dingwall, Goldney, and Hall 1956.) Among Price's many other works is his seminal Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter (1936).

  His most recent biographer (Morris 2006, xv) said of him—in words that might describe some of today's so-called ghost hunters:

  He claimed that his findings were bolstered through his training as a scientist and engineer but in reality the man who had left school at 15 was an academic failure. His scientific methods were nothing more than an act, using scientific apparatus and the trappings of a chemical laboratory merely to convince people he was a scientist. He thought instinctively and impulsively and, instead of trying to disprove his theories, he sought only to prove them.

  (This is called confirmation bias.) Harry Price's style of ghost hunting was slow to catch on in America. Instead, there were many armchair collectors of popular haunting stories. Often riddled with errors or omissions and characterized by a mystery-mongering attitude, the collections include Susy Smith's Ghosts around the House (1970) and Scott and Norman's Haunted Heartland (1985). There have also been many collections of fictional ghost stories, including Marvin Kaye's Haunted America (1990), which presents tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Isaac Asimov, and many others.