Ghosts From Our Past: Both Literally and Figuratively: The Study of the Paranormal

by Erin Gilbert

  No one knows what type of particles dark matter and dark energy are composed of, because scientists haven’t gotten their hands on any. In fact, no one has even observed dark matter or dark energy through a telescope. Yet we believe it is out there because we have observed its effects on the rest of the universe.

  Along those same lines, no one has ever dragged a ghost into a lab for testing. We believe ghosts exist, however, in part because we have witnessed their effects upon parapercipients throughout history. We’ve spent untold hours researching the paranormal, and we’re going to unload it all on you in this section.

  Chapter 4 is our attempt at an abbreviated cultural history of ghosts. In Chapter 5, we will look at the investigators who paved the way for our current understanding of the paranormal. In Chapter 6, we will examine the science behind the supernatural, which is at least twice as spooky as dark matter and dark energy. And in Chapters 7 and 8, we will survey the various attempts made to classify and categorize ghosts, including the now-standard Spectral Classification Table found in Kemp’s Spectral Field Guide. If all of that doesn’t split your mind open like an atom during nuclear fission, we will give you a full refund on the purchase price of this book.*

  * Offer expires 10/31/97.

  Chapter 4

  Ghosts Throughout History

  Pondering the Preponderance of Paranormal Activity

  There was at Athens a large and roomy villa, where in the dead of the night the rattling of chains was frequently heard. One night, a specter appeared to the homeowner. The apparition was extremely emaciated, with a long, matted beard and disheveled hair, and iron chains shackled to its hands and feet.

  The terrified homeowner put the villa up for sale the very next day. It just so happened that the philosopher Athenodorus was in the market for a second home. The extraordinarily low listing price raised his suspicion. When he heard it was because the owner thought it was haunted, however, he laughed it off. Athenodorus was a learned man. He did not believe in ghosts and goblins.

  His first week in the home passed without any disturbances. Then, late one night while philosophizing, he heard the telltale sound of iron dragging on the floor. It was distant at first, but approached nearer and nearer, slowly but surely.

  Suddenly, a specter burst through his locked door!

  Athenodorus glanced up at the hideous phantasm. It stood before him beckoning with a finger, like a person who calls another. Athenodorus in reply made a sign with his hand that it should wait for him to finish, and returned to his philosophical work.

  So begins one of the first ghost stories ever recorded, by Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger in a letter written nearly two thousand years ago. Despite Athenodorus’s request that the ghost leave him alone, it rattled its chains morosely until the philosopher agreed to follow it into the backyard. The ghost pointed out a spot on the grass and let out a guttural moan. Athenodorus dug up the area, hoping to find some buried treasure. Instead, he found a rotting corpse. Athenodorus reluctantly paid to have the body given a proper burial at a graveyard, and the ghost never bothered him again.

  At first glance, there’s no reason to believe the story. For one thing, Pliny was relating a story passed down through the years, and you know how twisted a story gets just from one person to another in a game of telephone. Plus, how can a philosopher afford a second home? Erin took a philosophy class her junior year, taught by an assistant professor named Greg. He lived with three roommates. She might have gone on a couple of dates with him after the semester was over. Abby might have told Erin not to date one of her professors, especially one who was using his philosophy powers to manipulate her into thinking he was hot. BE WARNED: PHILOSOPHERS ARE MIND WIZARDS. They don’t wear pointy hats or swing wands around, but they can trick you into picking up the tab for dinner at Weber’s—and tickets for The Net, and a six-pack of Zima that neither of you touched—with nothing more than words.

  So there are several reasons to be skeptical of Pliny’s ghost story. Science demands evidence, not anecdotes. It is often said that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” Every scientist worth her sodium chloride knows that.

  However, is it not just as foolish to dismiss Pliny’s tale—as well as the long historical record of ghost sightings—with one well-practiced Queen Elizabeth–like wave of the hand? Do we not then become Athenodorus, with our heads so buried in our work that we ignore the spectral visitors before our very eyes? As psychologist and metaphysical examiner William James pointed out, the sheer number of reports of paranormal phenomena throughout human history outweighs the anecdotal nature of the data. The prevalence of ghost stories across all cultures and time periods warrants serious consideration.

  A Ghost by Any Other Name

  Ghosts are known by many names around the world:

  Apparition

  Appearance

  Bogey

  Essence

  Gidim

  Nightshade

  Phantasm

  Phantasma

  Phantom

  Phenomenon

  Presence

  Shade

  Shadow

  Sight

  Specter

  Spirit

  Spook

  Spud

  Vision

  Wraith

  Source: Maureen Kemp. Kemp’s Spectral Field Guide. New York: Doubleday, 1984.

  Ancient History

  Belief in ghosts predates the story of Athenodorus and his bothersome, incorporeal housemate by thousands of years. Prior to recorded history, stories of ghosts were passed by word of mouth—or, as historians call it, “the oral tradition.” (STOP GIGGLING, ABBY.)

  As a result, historical records from Mesopotamian cultures are kind of spotty. We don’t know much about the political systems of Sumer, but we do know that women used oxen bladders for Spanx! Thankfully, we know just enough about ancient beliefs regarding ghosts to string a couple of sentences together.

  As with most primitive cultures, superstitious beliefs were widespread. Sumerians, for instance, believed that when a person died, their soul descended into the netherworld to spend eternity as a “gidim.” It didn’t matter if you lived your life virtuously or not—everyone would eventually end up in an underground prison camp, toiling away with little to eat or drink. If surviving relatives didn’t leave enough offerings on the grave of the deceased to ease their suffering, the gidim would return to torment the living. (Likely the origin of the modern-day tradition of “pouring one out for your homies.”) However, despite the Sumerians’ beliefs, actual ghost sightings were thought to be relatively rare.

  Other Mesopotamian cultures, such as the Babylonians and ancient Egyptians, shared beliefs about the afterlife and ghosts similar to those of the Sumerians. Again, sightings were rare. Even after records started being written down, few ghost sightings were recorded in the kind of detail that would make them remotely useful to modern-day paranormal scholars such as ourselves. Or, if they do exist, we couldn’t find them in Michigan’s library.

  The closest we have to a blow-by-blow account of a spirit manifestation from the pre-Greco-Roman era comes to us from the Old Testament. The story of the Witch of Endor takes place around 1,000 BC while Israel was at war with the Philistines. If Erin remembers it correctly from Sunday school, Israel’s King Saul ordered a witch to conjure up the dead prophet Samuel, to see if Samuel could get God to confirm He had Israel’s back in the war. (It’s a rather roundabout plan.) The witch did a little hocus-pocus and BOOM! An old man wearing a robe emerged from the ground.

  No, not Hugh Hefner—it was Samuel.

  “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” Samuel asked.

  King Saul explained himself. The ghost listened rather impatiently, and then told the king that God was no longer backing King Saul and his army. “The Lord will deliver both Israel and you into the hands of the Philistines, and tomorro
w you and your sons will be with me,” the apparition said. Ouch.

  As you would expect, there’s plenty of theological debate surrounding this story. Was Samuel really a ghost, or just a trick of the devil? Scholars have long struggled to explain ghosts within the context of religion. As we’ll see later, explaining them within the context of science has also been a struggle.

  Classical Antiquity

  The Greeks liberally plagiarized borrowed their beliefs about the afterlife from Mesopotamian culture. They also added several new twists. Depending upon their position in life and whether they pleased or angered the Greek gods, the dead could end up in Elysium (thumbs up!), the Fields of Punishment (thumbs down), or one of several other realms (thumbs to the side?). The Greeks still believed that ghosts—or “shades”—could return to the land of the living. For the first time, however, some heavy thinkers began questioning just how this whole paranormal business worked.

  People who asked too many questions were called “philosophers.” One such mind wizard stood tall above all others—and not just because he was six-and-a-half feet tall (but kind of for that reason too). In Phaedo, Plato argued that souls are neither created nor destroyed; they have always existed. We just can’t see them. It’s only after they’ve inhabited a body that they become “contaminated,” thus rendering them visible to the naked eye when the body expires. That’s how a shade becomes a shade. At least that’s how Erin understands it, from her philosophy class with Greg. She doesn’t want to call him to verify because we kind of need to finish this book by the end of the summer, and there’s no guarantee Greg would shut up by then.

  The Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

  Let’s skip ahead a couple of hundred years, right past the Roman Pliny the Younger and into the Middle Ages. (You’re not missing anything—the Romans were basically the same as the Greeks anyway, except they spoke Latin, had bowl cuts, and threw way better orgies.) We’re also going to focus on Western cultures from here on out, because our foreign language skills are worse than our artistic ones.

  Throughout the Middle Ages, people were dying left and right in Europe—from wars, from famine, from the Black Death, from . . . well, lots of things. Predictably, reports of paranormal phenomena rose steadily over the course of the Middle Ages as the death toll rose. “It seems that the spiritual world is moving closer to us, manifesting itself through visions and revelations,” Gregory the Great wrote. (That’s a totally different Greg than the one Erin went out with.)

  Although previous cultures had mostly identified ghosts as the spirits of the deceased, some Europeans rejected this notion during the Middle Ages. Christian theologians, such as Saint Augustine, believed that ghostly apparitions weren’t spirits of the dead. Instead, they suggested that parapercipients were experiencing visions caused by demons or angels. Recognize a ghost as a loved one? Mere trickery!

  Following the Reformation, belief in ghosts split along party lines as Catholic theologians began floating the idea that spirits might be able to return to Earth after all. Protestants, meanwhile, remained steadfast that ghosts had nothing to do with the dead. Regardless, no one disputed that there was something out there going bump in the night, whether it be ghosts, demons, angels, or the occasional leprechaun.

  Except for Louis Lavatar.

  In Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges—the title goes on for another six lines, but you get the idea—the Protestant reformer cast doubt on eyewitness reports of all things paranormal, at least when it came to a certain gender. “Women, which for the most part are naturally given to fear more than men [. . .] do more often suppose they see or hear this or that thing, than men do,” he wrote.

  Perhaps Lavatar redeemed himself later in his book for all we know—we stopped reading his little manifesto (man-ifesto?). We do know one thing for sure: He might have been a long-winded sexist pig in serious need of spell-check, but Lavatar’s words would prove eerily prophetic when the era of spiritualism rolled around.

  More Than Just Spirits of the Dead

  The term “ghost” has traditionally referred to spirits of the deceased—mostly people, and occasionally animals. However, as you’ll read in later chapters, this definition has been expanded over the years to include multiple classes of paranormal entities, including powerful interdimensional manifestations thought to be similar to the meddlesome demons and angels popular with Protestants in the Middle Ages.

  The Spiritualist Era

  Interest in the paranormal reached an all-time high in the nineteenth century with the advent of spiritualism. Unencumbered by established religious beliefs, self-styled “spiritualists” not only believed in ghosts, but they believed that communication with them was mainly the provenance of “mediums”—specially attuned individuals (usually women) who were emotionally and spiritually receptive to otherworldly dispatches, and could, on occasion, lure spirits from the other side. At its height, spiritualism had over eight million diehard adherents. Never before or since have ghosts been so popular in Western culture . . . and it all began with two young women.

  Fifteen-year-old Margaret Fox and her sister, twelve-year-old Kate Fox (Figure 4.1), kicked off the spiritualist era when they opened a dialogue with a spirit haunting their cottage in 1848. The ghost, nicknamed “Mr. Splitfoot,” never fully materialized in our world. Instead, he communicated with the girls through a novel method: When the girls asked him questions aloud, their friendly neighborhood ghost would “rap” his responses. Nobody could tell exactly where the noises came from, but the rapping was said to sound like someone was knocking on wood (though it may have very well been a primitive form of beatboxing, for all we know).

  The Fox sisters started with simple yes or no questions. Rap once for “yes,” twice for “no.” They soon moved on to a Morse code–like system that allowed Mr. Splitfoot to spell out words. Curiously, the ghost—said to be the spirit of a vagabond buried deep in the Fox family’s basement—would only communicate when the Fox sisters were around. The spirit told them that there were more spirits like him on the other side. Soon, they would make themselves known to other mediums around the world.

  Figure 4.1.

  The Fox sisters

  The young women took their show on the road. Mr. Splitfoot kindly followed them from city to city. The girls were lucky—not many ghosts would be quite so accommodating as to be treated like a sideshow act!

  At any other point in Western history, the Fox sisters would have been burned at the stake or hung for communing with the dead in so public a fashion. However, the world was undergoing rapid change due to the Enlightenment. The sisters’ traveling act drew huge crowds of the curious. Seemingly confirming the spirit’s prophecy, dozens of mediums sprang up around the country. Not only could these imitators communicate with spectral manifestations in our world, but many boasted of the ability to contact any spirit, including those that had not yet “crossed over” into the material universe.

  Spiritualism spread across the U.S. and Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century like news of a snow day through a dorm. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the thought of speaking with deceased loved ones just as easily as picking up a telephone? Mediums conducted dramatically staged “séances” to speak with spirits. These sessions were held in the dark or near-dark, with a small number of guests sitting around a table holding hands.

  Spirits communicated through mediums not just via disembodied rapping, but through more direct methods like para-transferral embodiment. While possessed, mediums would speak, sing, and dance as if they were the spirits themselves. Ghosts even materialized during séances on occasion, leaving behind traces of spectral residue known as ectoplasm.

  While a great number of people believed the mediums’ claims, many were skeptical. Critics of the movement eventually found the smoking gun they’d been searching for, the one that they hoped would bring the public to the
ir senses: Margaret Fox confessed that neither she nor her sister had ever communicated with ghosts. The ghostly rapping noises had been made by cracking their big toes. Their big, nasty, toes.

  As additional mediums admitted to fraud or were proven to be hucksters, the movement slowly diminished in popularity. Some defenders cautioned against dismissing the entire movement based on a few bad apples. “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud,” Carl Jung said in an address to the Society for Psychical Research.

  The Fox sisters eventually recanted their confession, but the damage had been done. Although it’s difficult to believe every medium was crooked—a few stood up to intense scrutiny from paranormal investigators, as you’ll see in the next chapter—who can blame both the public and the spiritualists for losing faith?

  Medium Tricks of the Trade

  Apport: A solid object materialized during a séance, allegedly teleported from a different location or created by a spirit. One of the most famous instances of an apport appearing occurred during a séance with Eusapia Palladino, who shocked and amazed those in attendance by producing “a melon from nowhere.” “Deports,” in turn, disappear from séance rooms. While apports and deports were once thought to be signs of paranormal activity, they are now seen as fraud. You didn’t really think that melon came from “nowhere,” did you?

  Automatic writing: A form of para-transferral embodiment, wherein a spirit directs the hand (or hands) of the possessed to write or type a message. Automatic writing was a popular method of spirit communication during the late 1800s, as mediums frequently entertained sitters with missives from well-known public figures and long-dead authors. Faking automatic writing is ridiculously easy. Magician Harry Houdini once sat with Jean Conan Doyle, the wife of Arthur Conan Doyle and a famed medium in her own right. She proceeded to deliver a twenty-three-page message from Houdini’s deceased mother. While convincing in some of its facts, he was unconvinced of its authenticity. “It was written in English,” he said, “a language which my mother never learned!”