“In other words, if a son strongly wishes to contact his mother at the moment of death, this impulse may be communicated to her telepathically – and, by means as yet unknown, is transformed by her into sights, sounds or other sensory impressions. These moment-of-death or just-after-death apparitions belong in the ‘crisis telepath’ category.”
In October 1942, Tyrell gave a landmark lecture in London – later published in book form as Apparitions – based on his exhaustive enquiries. In this he stated that the existence of ghosts had been proved by “overwhelming evidence” and outlined what was described in the press as the “first level-headed theory” to explain them. In a nutshell, he said that ghosts were non-physical, just as an image in a mirror had no physical properties. They were “seen” and “heard” and sometimes “smelt” by the sense organs of normal people in a temporary state of hallucination. He elaborated his thoughts to the packed audience:
“A ghost is not physically present in space – but a ghost is a visual solid present in physical space. There is no difference in existential status between one part of an apparition and another. In whatever sense the central figure is ‘there’, the auxiliary objects, the additional figures and the environment are ‘there’, too. That is to say that a ghost may be riding a horse through a gate in a farmyard and yet the horse, gate and farmyard may all be ghosts accompanying this phantom rider.”
A decade later, just prior his death, Tyrell was asked by his friend, Robert Thurston Hopkins, for his summation of apparitions. His answer was a model of objectivity:
“Many people find it hard to grasp what is usually called an ‘hallucination of the senses.’ It frequently occurs. For example, I was on one occasion waiting in London for a number 14 bus. I got in. The conductor said it was not going where I wanted to go. It was a number 74. My expectation had turned the ‘7’ into a ‘1’. That I was a ‘ghost’ if you like to call it so. I had created it as a subjective experience of my own. What I find people do not realize is that all we see, feel, hear, smell and taste is similarly created by ourselves, in so far as it is our own experience. Nearly always we create it so that it corresponds with our emotions or expectations or with some telepathic link with another person. The latter are called hallucinatory creations. If the cause is unknown we are apt to call them ghosts.”
Following the groundbreaking research by G N Tyrell, the middle of the twentieth century saw a surge of theories about the nature of ghosts. The proponents were urged on by the new attempt to define what a ghost might be in a pamphlet, Six Theories About Apparitions written by the American Professor Hornell Hart (1888–1967) and published in 1956. A sociologist and psychic researcher, he was a member of the faculty at Duke University and conducted experiments into apparitions and out-of-body experiences which added significantly to the current knowledge of the paranormal. Perhaps, though, his “Theory” was his most important contribution and remained required reading for many years. Hart’s hypothesis took the conclusions of earlier groundwork by the SPR and others and elaborated on them with more precision:
1. Apparitions are mental hallucinations created by individual percipients in response to telepathic impulses directly or indirectly received from the appearer.
2. Apparitions are idea-patterns produced currently or very recently by the subconscious levels of the percipient, with or without the co-operative assistance of the unconscious of the appearer.
3. Apparitions are etheric images, created currently, or in the past, by some mental act.
4. The Occultist theory that apparitions consist of the astral or etheric bodies of the appearers, with clothing and accessories created ad hoc.
5. The Spiritualist theory which assumes that apparitions of the dead are the spirits of the departed.
6. Apparitions are a combination of all or any of the other theories which can be validated by operation or experiment.
Among those with fresh ideas was the distinguished Oxford scholar, Professor H H Price (1899–1984), the Wykenham Professor of Logic, who had been taking a keen interest in telepathy, mediumship and the survival issue for some years. He also delivered a memorable quote in April 1953 that quickly became familiar with members of the public who shared his interest:
“The tea-party question, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ is one of the most ambiguous which can be asked. But if we take it to mean, ‘Do you believe that people sometimes experience apparitions?’ the answer is that they certainly do. No one who examines the evidence can come to any other conclusion. Instead of disputing the facts, we must try to explain them. But whatever explanation we offer, we soon find ourselves in very deep waters indeed.”
The language was that of a man with an open and enquiring mind who, before long, was delivering challenging conclusions from his research. He looked at all the possible forms “survival” could conceivably take and argued that a “bodiless” survival was unthinkable because of the human need for personal identity, social acceptance and love. All of which, he said, were dependent upon some type of bodily recognition. However, Price suggested that images might exist – “persistent and dynamic entities” he called them – endowed with causal properties which, once formed, might persist with a kind of independent life of their own. He explained in a second essay:
“Such images, I suppose, could be originated by a mental act, but not to be themselves mental. These images, being neither mental nor material, might be endowed with telepathic charges. If we apply this logic to a haunting, such a persistent image might be tied down in some particular way to a physical place or object, and act telepathically on a percipient near this place causing him to see an apparition.”
Price was also very interested in stories of poltergeists and made full use of the SPR archives and those of similar bodies to offer some ideas. He examined the evidence and having decided the facts were “complicated and difficult” to interpret wrote in February 1966:
“The German word Poltergeist literally means ‘noisy spirit’, but there is very little reason to think that a ‘spirit’ (i.e. a discarnate intelligent being) has much to do with the phenomena. It is often found that there is a boy or girl in the family who is at or near the age of puberty and it looks as if this young person was somehow responsible, unconsciously, for some of the mysterious movements of household objects. He or she has to be present when these movements occur, but does not cause them in any normal manner, for example by picking the objects up and throwing them, or by means of concealed strings or other physical devices. In that case, some poltergeist phenomena are indeed paranormal. Presumably they are examples of telekinesis – literally ‘causing movements at a distance’ – and are akin to the phenomenon of physical mediumship. We need much more investigation both ‘in the field’ and in the laboratory.”
There were, in fact, others hard at work in both locations, in particular Nandor Fodor (1895–1964), a colourful psychical researcher and writer who was very interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and the paranormal. He had made something of a speciality of studying the “racketing spirit”, vide The Poltergeist Down The Centuries (1951). In this he wrote that one of the poltergeists he had been studying could be “a fragment of a living personality”.
“It is possible that this fragment has broken free in some mysterious way of some of the three-dimensional limitations of the mind of the main personality. In other words that poltergeist activity can arise consciously or unconsciously from the angers, resentments and even sexual frustrations of people. It is possible that they are loosened with conscious malice or quite uncontrolled by the person from which the forces emanate, often female adolescents. In this way poltergeists might be related to the psychic warfare reported between some mediums who must find ways of turning aside the evil to protect themselves.”
A far more controversial theory was offered by retired civil servant, G W Lambert (1889–1983), a man with an insatiable curiosity and a lover of alternative theories for paranormal causation. He investi
gated several important poltergeist cases that had occurred since the Second World War and in June 1955 offered a unique “geophysical theory” as the explanation for such disturbances. According to his interpretation, poltergeist activity was brought about by the action of underground water coupled with the escape of compressed air due to pressure from water, accumulated for various reasons such as heavy rainfall and coastal weather. In his paper, Poltergeists: A Physical Theory, Lambert explained:
“We want to find a force that is able to tilt a house enough to spill crockery off the kitchen dresser, to make sofas and chairs slide about in the drawing room, to tilt beds so that the people in them think they are being pushed out of them, to distort windows so that panes are broken (supposedly by stones) and wrench door-frames so that locked doors fly open and, generally, to strain the timbers of the house in a way that causes them to groan and creak at almost every joint. The force, moreover, must be more often available in winter than in summer and, comparing one area with another, more likely to show itself nearer the coast than inland. So far as I am aware, the only force which answers to that specification is flood water, and as the water has never been actually seen ‘at work’ it must be moving in an unsuspected subterranean stream underneath the building that is affected. I have assembled the evidence to show that earth tremors can cause disturbances in houses in some parts of Britain and these have given rise to stories of poltergeists and hauntings.”
Nor surprisingly, the Lambert theory stirred up a controversy, dividing those who thought the idea was brilliantly original to those who thought it was nonsense. In Four Modern Ghosts by Dingwall and Hall, for instance, the authors said they found it difficult to accept the theory because “Our experience leads us to suspect that if the movement of a house could be sufficiently violent to cause spectacular manifestations of this sort, the building could almost certainly fall into ruins during the outbreak.” Two other members of the SPR, Dr Alan Gauld and A D Cornell, were also critical: “It does not seem likely that even a strongly built house could survive the vibrations necessary to throw an object into the air.” Yet, despite all the differences of opinion – and other subsequent attempts to discredit Lambert’s theory – all investigators of poltergeist outbreaks ever since have satisfied themselves there is no underground water before proceeding.
Water was also at the centre of another idea about ghosts put forward at this time by T C Lethbridge (1901–71), the remarkable Cambridge antiquarian and paranormal investigator. In 1961, he and his wife were on holiday in Ladram Bay in Devon collecting seaweed for their garden. Lethbridge noticed that as the couple stepped onto the beach, they passed into a kind of blanket, or fog, of depression and fear. Mrs Lethbridge soon insisted she “could not stand the place” and the pair left. The following week, however, they felt bold enough to return to Ladram Bay and again experienced the “bank of depression”. Lethbridge’s interest was now fully aroused. From enquiries locally, he discovered that a man had died there not long before during a quarrel. He could not help wondering if the event had “somehow imprinted itself on the atmosphere”. He wrote later:
“I remembered something else, too. That the blanket had a quite definite limit – it was possible to step into it, and then step out of it again, as if it was a kind of invisible wall. It reminded me of a tingling sensation I once had alongside a rivulet when I had been waiting for a ghost to appear. Could it be that such phenomena were something to do with water – or with the electrical field that surrounds running water? Was it possible that the electrical field of water could somehow record the emotions of human beings – and even their appearance? Could the electrical field of water be the ‘tape’ that recorded ghosts?”
Later that year, when Lethbridge published his book, Ghost and Ghoul, he was feeling confident he had stumbled onto an explanation for ghosts. He elaborated:
“I feel reasonably convinced about these [ghosts]. They are pictures produced by human minds. They are not spirits of departed persons from another world. That some of them are produced by persons living on another plane of existence seems to be reasonable enough, but it also seems clear that the vast majority of ghosts must be produced by minds which are still using human bodies on this plane where we are now living. To me they appear to be no more and no less than television pictures. The television picture is a man-made ghost.”
Another investigator who saw validity in the “tape recorder theory” was Andrew Mackenzie (1929– ) author of a series of comprehensive and well-argued books starting with The Unexplained: Some Strange Cases in Psychical Research (1966). He believed it might be an explanation of the famous “Haunting at Versailles” in 1901. This curious event, when two young English ladies, Charlotte Moberley and Elinor Jourdain “saw” several persons, including Marie-Antoinette, dead for more than a century, while walking in the Trianons, was described by them ten years later in An Adventure. Nor was this to be the only such occurrence in Versailles. Visitors witnessed the retro-cognitive experience again in 1908,1928 and 1955, thus ruling out the original story as a recreated pageant, a hallucination or a hoax. With the passage of time the story had continued to baffle one researcher after another, but then Mackenzie discovered that in all four experiences, the participants “felt unaccountably depressed” and heard a curious hissing sound that came when things were about to appear “possibly suggesting some electrical condition”. He concluded from all this:
“The clues are here and it is for us to apply them. The common factors are complaints about sudden feelings of depression for which no reason can be given or oppressive weather at the time of these strange experiences. It seems that unusual atmospheric conditions at Versailles in the vicinity of the Trianons cause certain people to hallucinate the landscape and figures, or just the figures of the past. There is a theory in psychical research that cases of the appearance of apparitions involve an agent and percipient or agent percipient. If this is so, who was the long-dead agent who presumably left some influence on the Trianons which could, in certain atmospheric conditions “trigger off” the hallucinatory experiences of certain visitors to the gardens in modern times? We do not know and, in all probability, we shall never know.”
The early 1960s saw the arrival on the research scene of the man destined to become one of America’s most high-profile ghost hunters, Hans Holzer (1933– ). Born in Vienna, he became interested in psychic research while at university and later crossed the Atlantic where he was invited by the American Parapsychological Foundation to investigate a number of haunted houses in the Eastern United States. The articles and books that followed, notably Ghost Hunter (1963), soon established him as an important and conscientious enquirer. As a result of his investigations, Holzer became convinced that ghosts were a surviving emotional memory of people who have died tragically but are unaware of their own passing. He explained in his first book:
“A ghost is a split-off personality that remains behind in the environment of the person’s previous existence, whether a home or place of work, but closely tied to the spot where the person actually died. Ghosts do not travel, do not follow people around, and they rarely leave the immediate vicinity of their tragedy. Once in a while a ghost will roam a house from top to bottom, or may be observed in a garden or adjacent field. They are free spirits who are able to reason for themselves and to attempt communication with the living.”
Also in Ghost Hunter, Holzer has a warning for any of his readers that they have no chance of seeing an apparition if they are outrightly sceptical or insensitive to the possibility:
“Ghosts are people, or part of people, anyway, and thus governed by emotional stimuli. They do not perform like trained circus animals, just to please a group of sceptics or sensation seekers. Then, too, one should remember that an apparition is really a reenactment of an earlier emotional experience and a rather personal matter. A sympathetic visitor would encourage it; a hostile onlooker inhibits it. Sometimes an ‘ordinary’ person does manage to see or hear a ghost in
an allegedly haunted location, be it a building or open space. Such a person is, of course, sensitive or mediumistic, without knowing it, and this is less unusual than one might think.”
Two years later, in an article, “Ghosts – Fact or Fantasy?” Holzer discussed the support being given by a number of American parapsychologists to a theory of ghosts as “molecules of light”. This, they claimed, was the reason for the apparent reluctance of apparitions to show themselves and was based on the scientific concept of light as a molecular stream:
“They maintain that the spirits of the dead ‘exist’ in a sort of half-dimension. They exist as ‘flows’ of molecules that ‘travel’ the same wavelengths of light. Thus, these theorists say, light will ‘blot out’ or ‘overwhelm’ the less intense ‘ghost-molecules’. They add that most ghosts are ‘bound’ to the rooms, houses or locales with which they have the closest associations, or where they physically died. Why? Because the majority of ghosts are spirits of persons who were murdered or grievously wronged just before their deaths. They return – or perhaps never leave – the scene of their death or sorrow. One school of thought holds that the wraith’s last, and overpoweringly concentrated thought, at the very moment of death, was to remain on earth until he could be avenged or the wrong done to him righted.”
The idea of ghostly molecules was taken a step further by two British writers, Phoebe Daphne Payne and Laurence J Bendit in their book, This World and That: An Analytical Study of Psychic Communication (1969). In it they proposed the theory of the psychom – “a particle of the mind shed in a haunted house which possesses and retains sufficient energy to generate the recreation of an event.” Namely a haunting. The pair had reached their conclusion after years of study of the human mind, its powers and potential.
The Mammoth Book of True Hauntings Page 57