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

by Erin Gilbert

  Additionally, folklore holds that the barrier between life and death fluctuates in strength throughout the day. Ancient superstition states that when a cock crows at dawn, ghosts must return to the other side until nightfall. While more ghosts are reported during the evening, it’s not clear this has anything to do with “cocks crowing.” It could be that we are more perceptive when the sun is down, the TV is turned off, and we’re in bed with a good book. People are certainly more sensitive to the paranormal at night—as the saying goes, “During the day, I don’t believe in ghosts. At night, I’m a little more open-minded.” (We’re not sure who said that, exactly. Erin says it was Benjamin Franklin, but Abby swears it was Nicolas Cage.)

  Ghosts are also said to be more active during certain times of the year—in particular, on Halloween, when the barrier is said to be at its weakest. While more parapercipients report experiencing phenomena on October 31 than on other days by a wide margin, it’s likely because people are primed to expect the paranormal. Everybody believes in the paranormal on Halloween. It’s just like people who don’t normally drink getting falling-down drunk on New Year’s Eve. It’s amateur hour.

  The Ectomaterialistic Nature of Ghosts

  But, you ask, if spectral particles are truly invisible to our senses, how is it that thousands upon thousands of parapercipients have reported seeing and hearing ghosts over the years?

  To which we pose another question (this time directed your way): Why has no one ever seen a ghost leaving a body? Surely, if ghosts were nothing more than disembodied human spirits, some doctor somewhere would have at least reported seeing a ghost exiting a newly deceased patient! This is one of the eternal mysteries surrounding the paranormal, and we are pleased to say WE KNOW THE ANSWER.

  When a parapercipient sees a “ghost,” they are actually seeing an ectoplasmic avatar animated by PKE. Ectoplasm is a spectral foam generated through interactions between PKE and Standard Model particles when spirits cross back through the barrier. According to the mathematical framework we’ve developed for Spectral Field Theory, negatively charged ectoplasm is in turn utilized by spirits to physically interact within the three-dimensional framework of our world. To the naked eye, such manifestations may appear either transparent or opaque, depending on their density.

  Philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg is credited with the discovery of ectoplasm in 1744. When he was fifty-six, he began hearing the voices of spirits and angels. Since he was a respected Swedish intellectual—and a man—nobody dared call him “Ghost Guy.” In his very first vision, he spoke of “a kind of vapour steaming from the pores of my body. It was a most visible watery vapour and fell downwards to the ground upon the carpet.” The ionized eco-matter transmogrified into spectral rats, which scurried off in all directions.

  Ectoplasm made a big splash (pun intended) during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when it began appearing at spiritualist séances as a mucus-like substance. Physical mediums were said to excrete the spectral foam not just from their pores, but from every orifice.

  Including that one.

  And that one.

  Unfortunately, every sample of ectoplasm tested so far by paranormal investigators has been found to be some other substance, such as wet cheesecloth. One medium was even busted for using livestock entrails (YUCK). Although it gets a bad rap due to its association with fraudulent mediums, most paranormal experts, such as Maureen Kemp (whom you’ll meet in the next chapter), are confident that ectoplasm exists. We’re inclined to follow her lead. And not just because we wrote her a fan letter and she responded that she’d blurb our book.

  Getting our hands on ectoplasm and testing it in a lab might be the only way we’re going to make the breakthrough necessary for parapsychology to be taken seriously by the scientific establishment. It won’t be easy, though—according to Spectral Field Theory, the rate of decay for low- to medium-density ionized eco-matter all but guarantees that ectoplasm dissipates in a matter of minutes. Higher density spectral manifestations, while rarer, should provide more substantive samples of ectoplasmic residue.

  The Reasons Spirits of the Dead Return

  Based upon the malevolent actions of specters reported in most ghost sightings, we aren’t visited by many peaceful spirits. The calm spirits appear to all just be chilling out on the other side, while only the most desperate or angry make the trip back to our world.

  Just as only the most determined sperm find their way past diaphragms, it appears a certain amount of grit and determination is required for spirits to find their way through the barrier. Even if spirits aren’t motivated by hostile intentions, they’re bound to pick up some interdimensional road rage along their arduous journey.

  The reasons ghosts return are as varied as the forms they take on Earth. According to William Ambrose Collins, author of The Great Book of Other Realms, spirits make the journey

  To seek revenge, especially if they were murdered

  To request their remains be buried properly, so they can rest in peace

  To say good-bye, offer comfort, or give warning to a loved one

  To confess their sins . . . or to commit new ones

  To guard over hidden treasure or assist their heirs in finding it

  Just for the hell of it (“mischievous in life, mischievous in death”)

  As you can see, most reasons are related to unfinished business. Ghosts, just like Abby’s ex-boyfriend Sam, seem to be obsessed with getting “closure.” Whatever that is.

  The vast majority of ghosts presumably get their closure and return to the spectral ether. We assume this because most ghost sightings resolve on their own, without any intervention on the part of ghost hunters, exorcists, or the like. Perhaps spirits return of their own volition, finding their way back the same way they came, through weakened spots in the barrier. It’s also possible they are involuntarily drawn back by the same unseen forces that initially sucked them through to the other side.

  When spirits exit our world, there’s a remote chance they also leave some ectoplasm behind as residue. Until we find and test some of that ionized eco-matter in the lab, we’re really just relying on educated guesses as to how all of this works. Theories can only take us so far.

  Spectral Field Theory also doesn’t tell us anything about the sentience, intelligence, or malevolence of paranormal entities, let alone the physical forms that manifestations may take. For that, we will need to consult the spectral anthropologists in the next chapter.

  Ghosts: Never Nude?

  “Even if you are disposed to believe in spirits, how can you account for the clothes they wear when they appear before your startled vision?” early-twentieth-century feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman once asked. The question has dogged believers and nonbelievers alike since the beginning of time. Here are a few theories:

  Ghosts are as modest as the living. “Of course they are clothed,” Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote, suggesting that ghosts would find it just as unpleasant as parapercipients would if they were to make appearances in their birthday suits.

  Ghosts are “projections” formed in the parapercipient’s mind. We’re not talking about hallucinations here, at least not as we understand them. According to this theory, all spectral entities exist as little more than balls of light. Our brains interpret them as humanoid apparitions. What to one person looks like their grandfather may appear to another as the Virgin Mary. A fascinating take, but the physics boggle the mind.

  It’s cold on the other side. Alexandre Inman, writing in It’s Your Afterlife: A Handbook for Lost Souls, says that the temperature registers in the negative double digits in the spirit world—almost as cold as Michigan in February. There is a long tradition in some parts of the world of friends and relatives leaving garments out on graves to clothe freezing spirits, although the gesture is seen as more symbolic than practical.

  Ghosts appear exactly as they did at the time of their death. Of the variou
s theories, this one holds the least ions for us. Some spirits appear as they did earlier in life, and not at life’s end. Besides, if this theory were true, wouldn’t more ghosts appear in hospital gowns?

  Chapter 7

  Unnatural Anthropology

  The Evolution of Supernatural Taxonomy

  In the past couple of chapters, we’ve introduced you to spirits, spooks, and specters—all different names for the entities we call “ghosts.” However, not all ghosts are created equal. Some ghosts appear as dim balls of light; others as entirely opaque humanoids. Mistaking a Class II repeater for a floating free-roaming vapor is like calling iceberg lettuce “kale.” They’re both green, leafy vegetables, but one goes on a burger and the other goes in the compost.

  The kale, not the free-roaming vapor. Don’t ever toss a Class II in the compost.

  Classifying the biological world is difficult enough. To continue with our hamburger-topping theme, consider tomatoes for a moment. Are they vegetables or fruit? How would you like to be the scientist who had to make that call?!! At least there’s enough physical evidence for the existence of tomatoes. When you’re dealing with the paranormal, direct observation is maddeningly elusive. Evidence is woefully lacking. There are very few dependable photographic accounts to rely on, let alone any sort of fossil record.

  That’s where the supernatural anthropologists in this chapter come in. Instead of chasing ghosts, they have spent their time examining ghost stories recorded by cultural historians and cataloging the reports filed by paranormal investigators in order to do the unthinkable: make order out of chaos.

  Archibald Dutton’s Systema Unnaturae

  Among the earliest attempts to classify the paranormal was one made by prize-winning British equestrian Archibald Dutton (Figure 7.1). Born in 1742 in Haslingden, the child prodigy went to the New College at Hackney to study medicine at the age of thirteen. He graduated in two years and immediately went to work as a physician in London.

  They say practice makes perfect, but Dutton was, in fact, a terrible doctor. He accidentally killed more patients than he accidentally saved. Which makes total sense, AS HE WAS ONLY FIFTEEN. After six painful months, he retired from the medical profession and became a man of letters (that’s what writers were called back then—even women, if they were allowed to write).

  In 1787, Dutton published Systema Unnaturae, the first major scientific assessment of paranormal phenomena. Although Dutton’s medical schooling had done little to prepare him for such a study, he had plenty of experience with spirits of the dead based on the unintentional body count he’d amassed during his time as a working physician.

  In between tales of his dead patients coming back to haunt him, Dutton included a selection of ghost stories plagiarized from earlier (now lost) works of the paranormal. (He also, bizarrely, penned an entire chapter on the history of the horse as a means of transportation, which not even his biographers have been able to get through.) None of that matters, thankfully. What does matter is the classification system found in the appendix of his book.

  Dutton sorted spirits into seven different categories: bogeys, fantomas, wheaties*, vapours, spectres, poltergeists, and daemons. Unfortunately, he did not adequately explain his methodology within the text. Are the ghosts arranged by size and shape, or by some other as-yet-undiscovered logic known only to Dutton?

  Despite the obfuscation (which may very well have been intentional, given Dutton’s lack of scholarly acumen), no one dared challenge his taxonomy of spirits for the next hundred and fifty years. This was primarily due to how Dutton met his end: at the sharp end of an axe. His crime: running afoul of the Blasphemy Act of 1697. The system of spirits outlined in Systema Unnaturae appeared to conflict with the Church of England’s teachings—we say “appeared to,” because no one, not even King George III, could make sense of Dutton’s work. Especially that chapter on horses.

  Though the Act of Parliament banning blasphemy was rarely enforced, Dutton’s refusal to renounce his views (or even clarify them) earned him a date with the executioner. The aristocracy, intending to make an example of him, had him publicly beheaded—the first execution of its kind in decades. Dutton’s head rolled off the chopping block and into the Haslingden town square, where children kicked it around the cobblestone streets, leading some to wryly credit Archibald Dutton with the invention of soccer.

  Figure 7.1.

  Archibald Dutton

  SYSTEMA UNNATURAE

  I. BOGEYS

  II. FANTOMAS

  III. WHEATIES

  IV. VAPOURS

  V. SPECTRES

  VI. POLTERGEISTS

  VII. DAEMONS

  Source: Archibald Dutton. Systema Unnaturae. London: J. W. Bouton, 1787.

  Vernon Heiss’s Occult Manifestation Index

  By the 1920s, Western governments had cooled off somewhat on the whole “executing people for blasphemy” concept. After investigators unmasked most famous mediums of the day as frauds, the public’s appetite for the paranormal waned during the latter part of the Roaring Twenties. Besides, people just wanted to drink and have a good time, not dwell on the dearly departed. While most of his colleagues were busy drinking bootleg liquor in speakeasies, Vernon Heiss (Figure 7.2) was hunkered down in his Upper West Side apartment with a typewriter, pounding out a 1,007-page guide to spooks and specters.

  A man of humble origins, Heiss wasn’t born in a manger, but close to it—Jersey City. His father was a touring musician who played tenor saxophone with Louis Armstrong. His mother was a table-tipping medium. In a letter to a childhood friend, Heiss recounted the painful experience of learning that his mother was a fraud, and that his father only knew how to play three notes on the sax. Apparently Louis Armstrong had a large band, and it was easy to get lost in the mix.

  Figure 7.2.

  Vernon Heiss

  Disillusioned, young Vernon Heiss left home at the age of nine for the mean streets of New York. (That may seem young, but back then it was practically middle-aged.) He made money the only way he could: by hustling, first as a fortune-teller on the streets of Harlem, and later selling hastily written and copied pamphlets promising to impart secrets of the sax. He didn’t make much money, but he made enough to get by. By the time he was eighteen, he thought he’d seen everything there was to see in life.

  That’s when he saw his father’s ghost.

  Heiss hadn’t even been aware his father had died until his ghost visited him one cold December night in 1925. The ghost warned him that if he didn’t change his hustling ways, he would wind up alongside him in the hellish spirit world.

  Trembling, Vernon Heiss vowed to change.

  He learned how to play his father’s old sax, which had been left to him in the will. And instead of writing misleading saxophone-lesson pamphlets, he turned his pen to the paranormal. He joined the American Society for Psychical Research and dove into their extensive case files and paranormal library, which the organization still maintains in Manhattan. (It’s open to qualified scholars via appointment only. We haven’t checked it out, but that’s only because neither of us can afford to visit New York.)

  In 1928, Heiss published The Heiss Guide to Frightful Entities, featuring his now legendary Occult Manifestation Index. Heiss separated paranormal entities by their general threat level, starting with the lowest levels of malevolence and increasing by manifolds of ten until reaching the “purest” evil beings. He organized them into three major “arcana”—a term borrowed from the tarot card system, showing he couldn’t quite shake his mother’s fortune-telling days after all—each of which contain three minor arcana. Of particular note is his inclusion of cats as “potentially dangerous” occult beings, which he believed was due to their use as witches’ familiars. Pretty freaking weird, huh?

  Heiss’s Occult Manifestation Index

  Major Arcana the First: Benign

  Minor Arcana I—Common Haunting�
��Harmless, unseen specter.

  Minor Arcana II—Ghoulie—Rarely visible (although sometimes irritating) wraith.

  Minor Arcana III—Boggart—Mischievous household spirit; more annoying than dangerous. Partial-bodied apparition.

  Major Arcana the Second: Potentially Dangerous

  Minor Arcana IV—Fantasm—Full-bodied apparition. Non-humanoid.

  Minor Arcana V—Cats—Cats.

  Minor Arcana VI—Corporeal Entity—Full-bodied humanoid apparition. Offensive in both behavior and appearance.

  Major Arcana the Third: Malevolent

  Minor Arcana VII—Shkreli—Gaseous, mist-like apparition.

  Minor Arcana VIII—Poltergeist—Violent, troublesome spirit.

  Minor Arcana IX—Demon—Pure evil.

  Source: Vernon Heiss. The Heiss Guide to Frightful Entities. New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1928.

  Despite how foreign his system appears today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the field of parapsychology whose theories about spirits weren’t somewhat influenced by Heiss. Unfortunately for Heiss, he wasn’t around to reap the rewards of his success. The Heiss Guide to Frightful Entities was long out of print by the time he went missing while climbing Mt. Hood in 1932. His posthumous follow-up, The Heiss Guide to Frightful Funguses, bypassed bookstores and was sold to farmers as cattle feed (the unfortunate fate of many books during the Great Depression).

  And if Vernon’s surname sounds familiar, you’re right: His grandson, Martin Heiss, is now a famous debunker of the paranormal. Kind of a pompous jerk about it, too.

  Maureen Kemp’s Spectral Field Guide

  The most up-to-date and generally accepted taxonomy comes to us from Dr. Maureen Kemp (Figure 7.3), the paranormal scholar who took Vernon Heiss’s work to the next level.