by Adam Selzer
“Olfactory apparitions” are actually very common—and we tend to take them a bit more seriously than other sightings, since smell is the sense least likely to be hallucinated.
Almost every story I heard fell into one of these categories.
Ghost stories have probably been going around since the beginning of storytelling, and people have been debating whether ghosts have existed for centuries. The Chinese philosopher Mo Tzu was arguing in favor of the idea that they existed in the fifth century BCE. The ancient Greeks had stories about them. And even then, most of the ghost stories people told were pretty much the same as the ones they tell now. Most of them, then as now, follow one of two basic formulas: someone dies, then returns, or the protagonist of a story meets a person who turns out to be dead.
Most ghost stories now are still variations on these themes, though they’ve changed with the times. For instance, stories of vanishing hitchhikers like Resurrection Mary have changed as modes of transportation have changed, but the basic story of a disappearing traveler goes back centuries—there’s even a variation, of sorts, on it in the New Testament (Acts 8:26–39), in which the Apostle Philip vanishes after baptizing a eunuch in whose chariot he’s been hitching a ride. Now, of course, hitchhikers vanish out of cars, not chariots.
Ghost stories in America were always common. Most of the earliest European settlers tended to blame weird things they saw or heard on the Devil, not ghosts, but, if one reads Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” it’s pretty clear that small villages were full of local ghost stories by the end of the eighteenth century and that many of these stories were already regarded as ancient.
One of the first ghosts to be widely publicized in America was the ghost of Nelly Butler, who was first reported to appear in Maine in 1799. According to the stories about her, she started out as a regular old poltergeist, throwing things around the room and beating on walls. Then, around 1800, she began to talk. Eventually, she even began to appear as a floating humanesque form who would engage people in conversation—often long conversations about religion (a lot of nineteenth-century ghosts seemed to be very much in the habit of giving lengthy lectures on religion).
A fellow named Reverend Abraham Cummings arrived on the scene ready to debunk the whole thing, then came away a believer. He built his career as a preacher recounting the story of Nelly and her religious chats, holding it up as solid proof of the afterlife. Many people agreed that it was incontestable proof. In fact, though, Reverend Cummings seems to have made the whole thing up—Nelly wasn’t a real ghost at all, but a literary device that he used in sermons and insisted was a true story (which was not very preacherly of him, if you ask me). Still, the fact that people bought it indicates that belief in ghosts was very much alive at the time.
One of the first “real” ghosts in America to become famous was the Bell Witch, a malevolent ghost who stalked the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, beginning in 1817. The story of the Bell Witch remains one of the strangest and most exciting ghost stories ever told.
The story begins with John Bell encountering a bizarre animal, having the body of a dog and the head of a rabbit, on his property. It fled when he shot at it. Shortly thereafter, the family began hearing strange noises around the property. Bell’s youngest daughter, Betsy, began to feel as though she were being poked, prodded, and assaulted by a strange, unseen force. Soon, the family began to report a voice that sounded like a whispering old woman crying or singing hymns.
The assaults on Betsy began to get worse—she would report getting her hair pulled and her face slapped hard enough to leave marks on her face.1
Eventually, the family had a neighbor, James Johnston, spend a night at the house. Johnston reported feeling his face slapped and feeling the bedcovers ripped off of his bed, prompting him to get up and shout, “Who are you, and what do you want?”
Johnston was clearly ahead of his time, using that line more than a century before it would become one of the biggest cliché lines of horror movies. It worked better for him than it usually does in the movies—the disturbances stopped.
But they were back the next night, and they became even more vicious. The fame of the ghost spread, and people came to see things for themselves. Even Andrew Jackson, the general who would later become president, and his men reportedly spent a night on the property challenging the “witch” to a fight and got their asses kicked so thoroughly that Jackson said he’d rather face the entire British army alone than fight the Bell Witch again.
Over time, the voice got louder, and the “witch,” who came to be known as Kate, began to shout at people, order them around, and, like any good nineteenth-century ghost, lecture them on religion at great length. When Betsy decided to marry a boy named Joshua Gardner, the witch ordered her not to and tormented her endlessly until she broke off the engagement. It even took credit for killing John Bell when he died, reportedly laughing and shouting, “I’ve got him this time! He’ll never get up from that bed again!” The witch, it seems, had replaced his usual tonic with some sort of mysterious poison.
Troy Taylor, the guy who signed my checks at Chicago Spooks, happened to be one of the world’s greatest experts on the case. He theorized that the ghost was some sort of spirit that had been appearing in various guises for centuries and had been disturbed when the Bell family accidentally dug up a grave near a cave on the property.2 Others (and Troy may want to kick my ass for siding with them) point to the fact that a great deal of the story as we know it comes from a “family history” written decades after the fact by Richard Bell, who was only a little kid when the whole thing happened. It’s generally agreed that there was some legitimate poltergeist activity going on, but Richard had a good thirty years to embellish the story in his mind and around the campfire. His version is the primary source of most of the best parts of the story. His account, for instance, is the only evidence we have that Andrew Jackson had ever even heard of the Bell Witch.
As the nineteenth century progressed and cameras were invented, people almost immediately hit on the idea of trying to use the newfangled contraptions to capture images of ghosts. Unfortunately, people also hit on the idea of using them to fake ghost pictures right away, and some people made a lot of money taking pictures of people and claiming that the pictures showed ghosts in the background. Practically no ghost photo from the early days is ever held up as genuine ghost evidence today.
Organized, semi-scientific ghost hunting really didn’t take off as a popular pastime until the nineteenth century, when the Spiritualist movement—the movement based around the belief that, instead of going to heaven, dead people turned into spirits that floated around and could be communicated with by “mediums”—was all the rage.
The Spiritualist movement began in 1848 when a family by the name of Fox rented a house in Hydesville, New York. Leah, Margaretta, and Kate Fox, the daughters of the family, began to hear lots of odd knocking sounds around the house, which they began to attribute to a ghost named “Mr. Splitfoot,” which was a colloquial name for Satan.
Why exactly the girls just went straight to thinking that Satan had nothing better to do with his time than bang around on their walls, instead of blaming the sound on, say, a raccoon, is up to some debate, but the girls claimed to be able to communicate with whatever the thing was. Kate called out, “Here, Mr. Splitfoot. Do as I do!” and began to clap her hands. The ghost clapped along.
Soon, they had worked out a system of communication where the ghost—which they apparently no longer thought was the devil—would answer questions with two knocks on the wall meaning yes and silence meaning no.
Eventually, they ended up with a story that the entity was the ghost of a man who had been murdered on the property. Hundreds of people came to the house to see demonstrations of the Fox sisters in action, and eventually P. T. Barnum had them doing their “act” in New York. They became among the first peopl
e to make a career for themselves as “mediums.”
This was the beginning of an entire movement. The idea that spirits of the dead were not yet in heaven, but at some place in between, floating around knocking on tables, became a whole new religion. Throughout the late nineteenth century, there were countless self-styled mediums offering to communicate with the dead for a fee.
These “mediums” came up with all sorts of ways to talk to the dead. In addition to having the “spirits” knock on tables, some dabbled in “automatic writing,” and others spread the popularity of séances in which participants would sit around a table trying to get ghosts to ring a bell or knock on the wall. Really accomplished mediums could even get “ectoplasm,” a misty, sheetlike material said to be physical evidence of the spirit, to float around the room.
It was the popularity of these séances that led to the first scientific investigations of ghosts. Even believers knew that there were a lot of frauds out there, and debunkers, eventually including such luminaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, set out not to debunk the whole idea of Spiritualism, but to separate the real mediums from the frauds. Even the movement’s most ardent supporters admitted that most of the mediums out there were full of shit—knocks on the walls were hardly difficult to fake, after all.
Most of the phenomenon, in fact, was ridiculously easy to fake. In 1888, the Fox sisters confessed that they had produced the knocking sounds by cracking their toes (though they took it back a year later). The “ectoplasm” some mediums produced was pretty generally cheesecloth that they had rolled up and hidden in some of their more nefarious bodily orifices—at least one debunker noted that you could tell where the cheesecloth had been hidden by the way it smelled. Others, it seems, learned to swallow and regurgitate the stuff.
Spiritualism and séances remained popular with people of all social classes throughout the nineteenth century and on through the first half of the twentieth century. They experienced major revivals every time there was a particularly bloody war that made people want to communicate with recently departed soldiers (the Civil War and World War I eras were boom times). While the Spiritualist religion has mostly died out since then, the séances and practices it popularized, such as sitting around tables waiting for them to vibrate or waiting for knocking sounds to appear, are still very much alive today. The difference is that séances of the nineteenth century were novelties—no one, except for some of the more devoutly religious types, seemed ashamed to give it a try. Today, it’s more often looked upon as something for teenage girls to do at slumber parties or for flaky people to demonstrate on cable TV.
As people began to debunk phony mediums, others began to look into haunted places to see if ghosts and spirits could be scientifically proven or disproven or if anyone besides mediums could see them. Various groups formed with the intent of either proving or disproving ghosts and Spiritualism. Most of them died out rapidly; those that survived tended to be those who were a mix of skeptics and believers. The best known was probably the English Society of Psychical Research, which formed in 1882 with the intent of “examining allegedly psychic phenomenon in a scientific and unbiased way.” Members eventually included Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a whole host of famous (as these things go) physicists and philosophers. They (the society, not the people) still exist today.
In the early twentieth century, they became best known for their member Harry Price. Price grew up fascinated by stage magic and, after marrying into money and finding that he didn’t need to get a real job, became a ghost hunter.
While he was certainly no scientist himself, Price’s experience in stage magic made him a natural at exposing the tricks of fake mediums. He spent years putting supposed psychics to the test, using methods of his own devising. But it was with his investigations of Borley Rectory, which he called “The Most Haunted House in England,” that he brought ghost hunting into the scientific age.
If I bought an old house with a name like Borley Rectory, I’d be pretty disappointed if it wasn’t haunted. The house itself was built in 1862 near Borley Church, a little church next to a graveyard that dated to the twelfth century. One of the more venerable of the many “ghost of a disgraced nun” stories that go around holds that there was once a fourteenth-century monastery on the Borley Rectory grounds,3 in which a nun was bricked into a wall alive within the convent as punishment for her affair with a monk.
The story appears to have no basis in fact, but, of course, it’s one of those things that the fourteenth-century monks probably wouldn’t have gone out of their way to leave proof of, so there’s no way to know for sure.
When Borley Rectory was built, ghostly footsteps began to be heard almost immediately. Around 1900, the ghostly apparition of a nun was seen on the grounds. Other people reported seeing a ghostly coach driven by headless drivers. The owner at the time—Reverend Henry Bull—seems to have thought all of this was pretty nifty. He and his son, who later took over the house, spent many evenings sitting around waiting for the ghostly nun to show up.
Things really heated up at the rectory in the 1920s, when new occupants found a human skull on the property. They began to report all sorts of weird stuff, like bells ringing and mysterious footsteps. They sold the house after a short time, possibly due more to its bad condition than any hauntings.
By this time, over a dozen people had seen the ghostly nun. A handful had seen the carriage, and a couple had seen a headless man walking around—Borley Rectory was apparently the place to hang out if you were a headless ghost. It was around this time that Harry Price was brought in by a newspaper to begin investigating the place.
In the late 1930s, Price recruited about four dozen volunteers to keep constant patrol on the house, using such basic equipment as cameras, string, tape measures, and watches with second hands. He issued a pamphlet to them instructing them in the proper way to investigate the house, making this investigation perhaps the first truly organized modern ghost hunt.
The investigation went on for a couple of years, with investigators experimenting with different kinds of equipment and holding séances. Information from these séances indicated that the nun was the ghost of a woman who had been murdered on the grounds in the 1660s.
Borley Rectory burned to the ground in 1939. Price did some quick digging in the rubble and found a St. Ignatius medal and a couple of bones that were said to be the remains of the nun. Some said that they were actually the bones of a pig, but they were reburied before anyone could find out for sure.
Price ended up publishing two books on the strange phenomena associated with the house, which some members of the Society for Psychical Research held up as proof of the existence of ghosts and the afterlife. After Price’s death in 1947, however, attacks came from all sides—a report issued by the Society itself determined that most of the things reported in the house were natural phenomena, such as rats, and that others had been hoaxes. Many believed that Price himself had been behind many of the hoaxes.
Today, many still believe that the rectory was genuinely haunted, though most feel that Price was more of a showman than anything else and that his works should be viewed with skepticism. Some point out that he mainly reported what people said they experienced and how they reacted—he never said that he was behind the experiences they were having, but he didn’t exactly say that he wasn’t, either.
When I went back and read all of this in the early days of my quest to get to the bottom of this whole ghost business, most of it was familiar to me from my days as a preteen strange-phenomena buff. I especially enjoyed reading that Harry Price had investigated “Gef the Talking Mongoose,” a poltergeist-type talking ghost that claimed to be a talking mongoose. I remembered reading about Gef when I was in fourth grade (and, in what was at the time a rare show of skepticism, thinking it sounded ridiculous).
Reading about all of this stuff in more detail—in an a
ge when I could go online and see a skeptical response that was sorely lacking from ghost books and TV shows when I was a kid—didn’t do too much to alleviate my skepticism. I still felt, though, that many skeptics were being too quick to brush things off. The fact that some of the evidence at Borley Rectory was faked or simply misinterpreted natural phenomena doesn’t mean that the place wasn’t haunted; it just means that people sometimes played tricks and made mistakes there. With forty-eight volunteers working on the place, it’s inevitable that some of them are going to get bored and play a joke now and then.
Even if some of the phenomena was genuinely ghostly, in any given house that’s thought to be haunted, it’s natural to blame ghosts for noises that you would otherwise blame on the cat. But because you blame the ghost for one noise that the cat made doesn’t mean that the ghost isn’t around.
Let’s stroke my vanity a bit and call this Selzer’s Second Theorem: The more haunted a place is, the more false positives will be reported, even if the haunting is genuine.
If I may be a bit crude, I’ll nickname this the Fart Theory. Reporting a ghost can be about like reporting a fart. Say you have a roommate who really cuts one on the day he moves in—a big noisy one that makes you think he must have just eaten a big bowl of sulphur and washed it down with onion juice. Over the first couple of days he lives with you, you find that these emissions come out of his butt pretty regularly. Thereafter, when you hear a shoe squeak or when a garbage truck rolls by outside, you’ll assume that the roommate farted again. You’ll be wrong, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it the first time, and it doesn’t mean he won’t do it again, no matter how often he denies it or tries to blame it on the nearest dog.
The same is true of ghosts—once a ghost is seen in a house, people will blame every stray noise and shadow on it. It stands to reason that the more haunted a place actually is, the more false positives will be reported. No matter how many sightings get explained away, it doesn’t mean that a place isn’t haunted to begin with.