“Why do I go to lectures?” would be a more useful session for me to attend, given that I invariably fall asleep, or become incredibly bored, or gaze out the window and think about when this room was the SU Bar, and Roger Puplett used to rip his shirt off while playing Van Halen’s Jump as last record of the night, and … see?!! I have the attention span of a newt on uppers: I find it hard to sit still for 5 minutes, and almost impossible to go two minutes without asking a question. It’s bad enough when I’m lecturing, I get bored by my own lectures, and tell the audience that frequently.

Well given I hate sitting through lectures, was stuck by a hissy radiator turned on full blast that slowly baked me and the room was too full to sneak out to get a drink, I should have hated this. Given Mark Vernon announced that his talk had three parts, and would last 45 minutes, and that after two parts were on 45 minutes and he stopped to ask if he should proceed, hell I should have been crawling up the walls. Yet so effective a speaker is Vernon that we all asked him to continue, and I’m sure would have stayed much longer if it was not for the heating stuck on (I crept out to the SU bar and got a drink at the beginning of questions, but returned to loudly ask more as is my nature )

Vernon read his presentation: a long introduction on Aurignacian art, which I was confused a little by the relevance of, then a rather succinct but fun critique of EvoPsych stuff on religion, and Hyper-Sensitive Entity Detection stuff like Dennett’s ideas, and those of Bruce Hood – he has more time for Scott Atran, but still regard him as wrong from what I can make out — and a short but well aimed attack on over generalising modular mind theorists (folks like Steven Mithen?), with some interesting research cited. I would hesitate to use as Vernon appeared to (in passing, as a minor point) Developmental Psychology as a way to judge how early human psychology evolved; but compared with some of the problems with the Evo-Psych approaches, that is easily forgiven, and I may have misunderstood. It was really hot, and the radiator was annoying me with its hiss, burble, hiss, while slowly cooking me. I wished more of my friends from Skeptics in the pub were present (any of them actually) — some Skeptics often seem to buy wholesale highly questionable EvoPysch “just so” stories without any real effort at critical analysis or awareness of the problems with them in my experience, just as earlier generations of rationalists embraced Frazerian and Comptean ideas of Religion with equal fervour. (Occasionally one sees all three argued in the same forum thread on certain New Atheist sites… ) Mark Vernon’s objections would have perhaps made it clear that these theories are not just contested, they are highly controversial, even among Evolutionary Psychologists and evolutionary biologists and morphologists, let alone cognitive scientists.

I found it hard to concentrate because of the heat, but Vernon kept me listening, and I was particularly interested in some of the paleontologist Simon Conway-Morris’s ideas. Graham Budd had mentioned him to me recently, and I will definitely look up his work, and would have by now if Wikipedia was not down today in protest over SOPA. Vernon acts as a great introduction to others ideas: he seems astonishingly well read, ad his reading particularly showed in the second part, which was on being good without God.

I have long been of the opinion that one can be good without God – inevitably the Euthyphro Dilemma came up in the questions, but agree with Vernon the best modern explorations of the issue are by Richard Holloway. It was in this section the temperature finally proved too much for me, and I began to think about a question the friendly gentleman from the Bible Society sitting in the row in front of me had asked me before talk began about how authentic a lot of ‘Celtic Spirituality’ was to the historical roots. Not sure how we got on to it, but I’m quite sceptical on the issue, and I started daydreaming about writing a blog piece on it, only to reconnect with the talk somewhere about Iris Murdoch on morality, God and Truth and have no idea what was going on. Fortunately as part 3 commended I was on safer ground – for now Vernon turned to the soul, and the question of post-mortem survival.

Vernon made some excellent points about afterlife in various religious traditions, and the development thereof, but this will be very familiar to anyone who has read my review of Christopher Moreman’s Beyond the Threshold and hence lost some of its force which I think lay in how surprising these things are to most people. Ditto with Vernon’s emphasis on Reconstituitionalism, the merging of the soul with a new body at Resurrection, as being the New Testament view of afterlife. (As I remarked in questions, one of them. I think there are at least two, if not three views of life after death in the New Testament writings, by no means necessarily incompatible). There was a brief discussion of the odd character of the resurrection appearances, which always reminds me of a wonderful passage from Tyrell’s Apparitions I think, but I will leave that to a later post as I have been planning to explore it for years. Anyway I don’t agree Reconstituionalism is the only viable reading of the NT texts on afterlife, but it is certainly a strong theological tradition, and the great sceptic and CSICOP founder member Martin Gardner (who hoped for life after death himself) gives an excellent overview of it on his The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. as I recall. Vernon gave a good overview of Aquinas I think, not that I have ever managed to really grasp Aquinas on the Soul or Life after Death, not least I suspect because some of his ideas are actually contradictory, or divergent. This has inspired me to take another look.

Anyway I had never heard of Mark Vernon before tonight, but excellent speaker, and I will check out his books, such as his latest “How to be an Agnostic”. His website is here, do go take a look. and do catch him at one of his upcoming event s listed there – well worth seeing.

As an aside, I was shocked to learn that despite the Premises and Services Agreement between the University and the Student Union that was agreed when I was there, the SU has now lost control of the bars at the University of Gloucestershire, which are now run by a third party company. None of this was reported in the local press or even on the uni website as far as I know; I have been assured by a friend that a deal was struck to protect the Student Welfare aspects of the SU’s work, which was always funded by the profits from the bars and Summer Balls in the past. I won’t mourn this change, it may be for the better, and my loyalties lie with the College of St Paul and St Mary and CGCHE, predecessor institutions, but I was very surprised to hear from the staff the SU bar was no longer that, while getting a drink.

Ah well, the room TC007 where we had the talk was once the SU Bar, before it moved upstairs to its present location, so change can be good I guess. I recalled sitting there tonight walking in there in 1987, and being hit on the head by an ashtray and nearly knocked out when I first entered the room; and then 1992, and watching the news coverage of the LA riots which was playing on the big screen, Hugh and I (with severe sunstroke) danced 17 minutes to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground before I vomited in a loo that once stood roughly where I was sitting tonight, and collapsed there with a terrible headache. Now it’s a bland lecture room. Such are memories – inappropriate, intrusive. Years ago I taught in a uni classroom that had previously been a female friend’s dormitory room – that jarred, and was almost awkward. Who says there are no ghosts?

cj x

Anyway Prof French edits the excellent The Skeptic magazine: I assume it is excellent based on a small collection of essays that were published in book form a couple of years back, and because I really like Neil Davies, the chap who does the wonderful caricature cartoons, and also Andrew Endersby who I know has long been involved with the magazine. However this remains a statement of faith on my part, as I have never been able to afford to subscribe: perhaps this year I shall, and i am pleased to see one can order individual issues, so if you are interested enough in the subject to have read this far go and have a look at picking up a subscription?

Anyway I am not here to sell magazines, I’m writing today because before Christmas and my annual cold and chest problems I saw an interesting little piece by Professor French on Anomalistic Psychology on Nature.com blogs. It’s a very short piece, well worth reading, and I have already given my thoughts on Anomalistic Psychology in a couple of other places on my blog – at the end of my infamous Paranormality review, and I in my review of Chris French’s Cheltenham SitP talk. So while I will reprise some of those concerns here, this piece if a direct response to Prof. French’s article and video, which you should go view now if you have not yet.

The article opens with a rather well written introductory paragraph that sets the context.

“Ever since records began, people have reported strange experiences that appear to contradict our conventional scientific understanding of the universe. These have included reports that appear to support the possibility of life after death, such as near-death experiences, ghostly encounters and apparent communication with the dead, as well as claims by various individuals that they possessed mysterious powers such as the ability to read minds, see into the future, obtain information from remote locations without the use of the known sensory channels, or to move objects by willpower alone. Such accounts are accepted as veridical by most of the world’s population in one form or another and claims relating to miraculous healing, alien abduction, astrological prediction and the power of crystals are also accepted by many. Belief in such paranormal claims is clearly an important aspect of the human condition. What are we to make of such accounts from a scientific perspective?”

OK, so writes Prof. French. This raises so many fascinating questions — firstly and most obviously, a physical phenomena that was mysterious in late 7th century Constantinople, or 18th century France, or 1970′s Dagenham, may well be fully understood now. French I am sure accepts this point: but indeed much science is anomaly driven, as we refine models by trying to explain things such as “dark matter” or some other scientific mystery. A deeper issue however arises – where is the observer in the “conventional scientific understanding of the universe” situated? If he means there have been through history phenomena reported that are now Fort’s damned “things” (but still they march!) then yes, but are we talking outside the “conventional scientific understanding of the universe” of their period, or today? The conventional scientific understanding of the latter 13th century could accept many phenomena that ours today can not: we have sensibly enough adopted methodological naturalism as an epistemological framework, and resolved the philosophical debate of centuries by deciding yes Nature can be described and modeled mathematically, without arbitrary intervention, ghosts, gods, goblins or witches.

I assume Professor French has in mind the modern scientific worldview, shared by the average Nature reader, who one assumes is not much like Rupert Sheldrake or Bernard Carr, but closer to the kind of chap who writes books called The Magic of Reality seemingly completely happy to accept that Science in some way directly equates to reality. (OK, a low blow — but I think intelligent children can grasp concepts as simple as Instrumentalism, or Inductivism. Failing that, point out to them that if Cheltenham is the Cosmos, then we can draw a series of maps of it; those maps in some simple ways equate to our science’s relation to the actual universe; it is a description, useful for making predictions and getting places, but we should never forget the science is just a depiction of the reality, and the nature of the relationship between the two is still hotly disputed in the philosophy of science…)

So yep, a lot of these phenomena are utterly discredited in the eyes of the modern scientific paradigm, though as much for metaphysical axiomatic reasons as for successful falsification of them. I have a real issues with the very notion of parapsychology, being a negatively defined discipline, and have argued passionately on this blog as to why I find the notion of the paranormal utterly incoherent, unhelpful and indeed probably damaging. I would encourage you to take a moment to understand my argument there before proceeding, if you have the time…

Chris French, like Richard Wiseman, Sue Blackmore and a handful of other committed sceptics have actually done what most sceptics never do, and done a load of experiments. In that process you can easily go, like Dr Sue Blackmore, from a believer to a complete sceptic, or the other way like Prof. Jessica Utts and others have I guess. I think it was during the period when Sue Blackmore was becoming disillusioned with parapsychology that she wrote one of the most important papers she ever published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Luckily that paper is online here and it is absolutely worth reading — it is really the Founding Manifesto of modern Anomalistic Psychology, and Dr Blackmore deserves a great deal of credit she does not often seem to get.

Now in the article Dr Blackmore writes, surveying the SPR in 1987

So first, has our subject really failed so dismally? A dispassionate look at our Society’s activities suggests that it has not lived up to its early ambitions. We do not hold crowded lectures in our own well appointed lecture theatre, nor are we established in a University department. Also there are not many of us. This year, in 1987, the SPR has 830 members; not an enormous increase over the 700 or so who were members in 1887. Size, you may protest, is not everything. No indeed it is not, but what else could we boast? As a Society we are not very well known and are still considered as a fringe group, accorded rather little respect or academic standing. And as for research—most of us do not do very much and there is pitifully little money with which to encourage more.

The situation in 2011: I believe there are about 50 parapsychology PhD students now, and somewhere around the 13 or 14 active parapsychology units or departments doing parapsychological research in UK universities – most are psychology departments, with a couple doing paraphysics. The SPR still has around the same number of members it always had I believe; in recent years the decline in numbers has dropped, perhaps even reversed. As to the money and respect, it is much the same as when Dr Blackmore was writing. This reminds me of the joke of a friend who told me he was working in “Anomalistic Psychology” and i asked him what the difference was between that and parapsychology – “about 50k a year and tenure” he replied. However while we have seen losses, like the European Journal of Parapsychology folding, we have seen gains in terms of a huge increase in the number of PhD students in the field, a large amount of publications with some like Bem’s drawing mainstream attention, and probably more research that I ever will ever have time to even read the abstracts of published in the last three years. (Most of it bores me to tears, because y interests in parapsychology are pretty much apparitions and poltergeists. )

So when Chris French writes in his piece of the failure of parapsychology, I am minded of Susan writing back in 1987, and I remember her call for a new parapsychology –

If we are going to have a new psychical research we must ask ourselves just what are the questions which matter to us. I would guess that most people interested in psychical research are interested because of experiences they have had and cannot explain. These might be dramatic psychic experiences; convincing examples of telepathy or precognition; veridical astral projection or effective communication with the dead but most people’s experiences are far less veridical and much more personal than that—as a glance at any issue of our Newsletter Supplement reveals. I suspect that the crucial experiences are often things which people know in their heart are important but find it very hard to explain to anyone else. For myself, I have had out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams; experiences in which myself and the rest of the world seemed to be one; in which all change flowed in an endless now. I have learned that it is possible to see more clearly, even perhaps to ‘wake up’. These things are hard to describe; even embarrassing to speak about. But it is these experiences which brought me to psychical research.

Anomalistic Psychology is exactly the “New Parapsychology” Blackmore called for in that paper: it performs important work. I have many reservations: I am no fan of fMRI studies that purport to show certain brain states correlated with certain neurological responses, and which crop up in some research in the area, and I am frankly sceptical of some of the modular theories of brain activity that I have seen touted, and the evolutionary psychology explanations often put forward on the fringes of the area. If you stick to Wiseman, French, Blackmore and the APRU you probably won’t go far wrong — once you get involved with psychologists who have no understanding of parapsychology, things get very silly and annoying quite often.

My greatest critique remains simple: Anomalistic Psychology runs the risk of being “faith based”; it is grounded in a materialist reductionist worldview, and as I think most scientists now recognise all observation is theory laden and our preconceptions can shape drastically which research questions we even bother to ask, it runs the risk of being unproductive, if the answers for the anomalies are not actually located in the noggin, but in the wispy shades of the ethereal dead or some such.

And there is the rub: in my recent ANOMALY article I pointed out that physical aspects of “haunts” have been consistently downplayed and ignored by parapsychological writers and sceptics alike for over a century, and I argue the reason why is they are not mental, psychological phenomena. I am sure that Anomalistic Psychology could tell us something about belief in poltergeists, but it would not tell us much about what the chaps from the Max Planck institute measured happening at the Rosenheim poltergeist, or many other bizarre cases with physical aspects?

Still, I remain unsure about how we can be certain about what is actually going on in these cases, and Anomalistic Parapsychology is certainly of interest and useful: but again, it must avoid simply being “parapsychology for sceptics”, and it must never become mired in dogma. Dr Blackmore wanted a parapsychology that faced up to the loss of the self, free will, and triumph of materialism — I am waiting for Prof. Hood’s book before I launch my critique on those positions, but based on the versions Blackmore offered I think the case is weaker now than it was when she was writing in 1987. In either case, I prefer at least some nod to academic impartiality and objectivity: the venerable SPR, for all its eccentricities, has a wonderful thing in it’s “no corporate opinions” rule. Once “believers” are welcome in Anomalistic Psychology, as they are as both subjects and students in Religion and Sociology departments, my doubts will no doubt diminish.

So to quickly finish, because I am aware my hacking cough makes me cantankerous and rude, how do we account for the “retreat factor” in paranormal gains and losses, by which seemingly promising results are soon lost? In the case of Bem, there was media hyping, but plenty of similar papers had been published over the last decade. I am almost completely uninterested in psi research, but I will write a future post on the papers, and their statistical power, and the failed replications (denied publication in the mainstream journals, published in the parapsi ones though?) Sometimes it is possible for dodgy research to grab the worlds attention – but actually there is another phenomena, where interesting and consistent stuff like the Ganzfeld studies are ignored, and largely forgotten, owing to the whims of fashion. Maybe the problem is they show some interesting result, but bring us no closer to a mechanism or theory of psi — as to why that is I won’t speculate. Still, I think the truth may be just that: any ESP research last as long as people are interested in it., and any “paranormal” gains are quickly countered. As my experience of skeptics is that they can be very easily be misled by anything that suits their prejudices, like all of us, being human,the countering may not even be factually accurate — as in when the over enthusiastic skeptic hurls Randi’s Prize at me as a reason why PEAR, Bem or the Ganzfeld trials were all nonsense.

Anyway apologies for the slightly sardonic tone – I am a little unwell, but felt worth commenting on the piece.

cj x

Ethel – A Christmas Ghost Story

There has been much speculation in the press over the disappearance of my dear friend, while in the act of “ghost hunting”.

While sceptics groups have taken the tragedy as a warning to the curious of the hazards of engaging in the infantile pursuit of the impossible, and believers have made many strange and curious speculations about spontaneous combustion, the police have taken the line that he left, perhaps deranged by his recent illness, of his own accord, and will turn up somewhere.

It seems quite probable he did meet a young woman holidaymaker, and has set off to make a new life for himself. Those of us who knew him knew he was at the time of his disappearance both financially burdened and saddened by the end of his media career, but do find it out of character he has not been in touch with anyone.

Temporary amnesia, a romance, or perhaps sadly severe illness seem more likely explanations than the foul play suggested by sceptics or the paranormal end suggested by the woo crowd.

Whatever the truth, his possessions were found by myself when I arrived, two days after his last email and concerned by the rambling bizarre nature of his last message to me.

All of his possessions barring his wallet, clothing he was wearing, laptop satchel and mobile phone were found, as his email suggests, neatly placed in the pantry.

Enough time has now passed for me to share with the interested public his last emails, in the hope they may shed light upon the curious case,and help bring him back to his friends and family. Do contact me or the police if you have any idea of his current whereabouts – young and romantic, he showed great promise in the field of psychical research, and was a good friend to me for many years.

Here are his emails, in order.

***********************************************

Dear CJ.

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. I stepped off the train in to a scene from a Christmas card; snow had fallen, snow on snow, and while miraculously it was exactly the right kind of snow, everyone had made tracks for home. I walked down a few steps to view the tawdry holiday lights of Marley High Street. An American might have been taken by the quaint charm, but I just felt light headed – my recent flu has not quite left, and the wooziness flushed from my floaty brow to my tingling toes. I felt like I was walking in the Christmas of my childhood, in a magical world, where the ghosts of Christmas Past were near.

A few folk wrapped staggered by, hard wrapped against the winter cold; even The White Horse pub appeared to be a derelict floating on a sea of ice, despite the chalkboard promise of big prizes for the pub quiz tonight. Yes, Marley really was dead tonight.

Still, I’m not here for the holiday spirit; I’m here to work, and the very fact that the place seems to be little more than a dormitory town with all the charm of off-season Great Yarmouth makes it all the more appealing. The icy wind actually seemed to clear my head, and the walk through the centre (a rather wonderful art deco cinema – you really should check it out!) and then out along Compton Lane to the house did much to improve my spirits.

It’s about three miles from Marley town centre to the house. Seems that until the ribbon development of the thirties led to houses growing out along the roads, it was a separate village, and the district still holds its old name of Compton. Not a taxi to be had in this Christmas Card scene, so I trudged the whole way, rucksack on my back passed shiny new build estates filled with delightful children and advert-ready families. Or so I imagine: I did not stop to peek through whatever-has-replaced Laura Ashley curtains.

By the edges of Compton I was dizzy and tired, and despite the cold had broken a most unseasonal sweat. I think I told you in my last email; the Letting Agent had three tenants leave, citing “ghosts”, and the landlord who lives abroad finally agreed to my visit, on the understanding there is no publicity. I expect damp or noisy neighbours are the real issue, but a week over Christmas to get over the flu and think about where my career would take me next. Downhill fast probably, without brakes – is that not the definition of “career”? Still my reputation as a “ghost expert” has finally got me something worthwhile, a little holiday not far from town.

When I saw the house I was a little taken a back – on the train my feverish fantasies had been of a little thatched cottage, roof pristine with glistening snow awaiting only the soft thud of Santa’s sleigh, or a crumbling gothic manor set back from the road. In fact there is such a place – Bott Hall, once the home to a man who made his fortune manufacturing some condiment considered quite delicious in the inter-war period – big enough to get a mention in the guidebook, devoid of any charm, it now serves as a conference centre or some such.

Anyway the house I had come to evict the spooks from is quite ordinary; Edwardian middle class home, according to my notes once home to a successful stockbroker, since the early seventies owned by the current landlord (who now lives in France), and let to a succession of tenants, none of whom complained until he had some much needed renovations done a couple of years back. Since that time no one had stayed long, and some had fled well within the six months they were required to pay for. The stories seemed hazy, contradictory – voices, the roar of a motorbike when none could be seen, a black almost shapeless “thing” that scurried around the kitchen, and much more besides.

I passed the village school, now yuppie apartments, the Norman Church and the bookies – which still preserved the antique sign in glistening gold paint of a former occupier, “Theobald the Barbers.” Nothing about the tiny suburb of Marley suggested spooks, and as I walked up the path I was ready to put on a lemsip and settle down for an uneventful week of reading – I brought the book you bought me on Roman religion along, and Simpson & Westwood too.

Suddenly my attention was drawn to something quite ordinary, yet strangely unsettling. I can’t put my finger on why I found it worthy of attention at all, but across the snowy fields I saw an old wooden barn, broken down, indeed barely standing. Something about the silhouette of the ancient structure seemed malignant, like a hunched beast waiting to creep, as son as the curtains were shut, close to the house, and reach out for…

The milk bottles on the doorstep broke my reverie – empty of course, but as I slid on the icy step I kicked them, and cursing struggled to find the right key. And then I noticed something odd – one was not empty, but contained a murky grey liquid, not frozen despite the temperature. I fumbled with mittens, and picked it up, and the secret was revealed – someone had dropped a stick of licorice in it, and seemingly shaken it. Odd, but hardly eerie, so I left it there and went in.

OK, the layout is prosaic enough – a sitting room, dining room, what used to be called a “morning room” and a bookshelf lined study on the ground floor, the kitchen and pantry and a couple of small rooms, perhaps once servants quarter in the basement, with a coal hole and a kitchen door opening on to steps. There are four bedrooms – one was clearly the master bedroom, one had a vaguely feminine air, and their was a smaller room, probably a child’s, overlooking an ancient tree. Cosy enough, I turned on the electric, fired up the boiler – pilot lit first time, and placing a Carbon Monoxide meter in position (could the answer to the ghosts be that simple?) I set out looking for the best place to sleep. Given the fact it’s let unfurnished, I chose to place my sleeping bag in the kitchen, and thanked the landlords foresight in installing gas central heating, even if it had stirred up the ghosts. Anyway I have managed to get a wifi connection, and have fixed some food – there is both a kettle and microwave down here, together with a lot of other stuff seemingly half packed. I’m thanking the ghosts for scaring the last tenants away so well they could not be bothered to collect their possessions!

Have a good night, and if I don’t have time to write or get eaten by the beasties a great Xmas! Will email tomorrow if the Horrors have not got me…

x

**********************************************

Hullo CJ!

I sent my last about twenty minutes ago, but something quite extraordinary happened. I ate a bit – helps with the fever, and then I thought I heard the sound of a motorbike pass by. I’m not sure what it is – probably just the central heating warming up – but it sounded for all the world like a really badly tuned bike driving in, coasting on the gravel, and being lent against the wall with a clank. I was looking at the boiler when I heard what sounded like the back door opening, and someone creeping in, wearing socks and trying to be stealthy.

I have been set up on ghost hunts before, so I slipped my shoes off, and quietly keeping to the sides crept upstairs. Nothing: except an old fashioned tennis racket leaning against a wall, just inside the back door. I never saw it on my first tour, but I neglected to take photos then. Yeah, I know, some “ghost expert” I am. Obviously it was there before and I overlooked it, but it was still a bit odd. I would have paid more attention, but I got a whiff of cologne, and convinced someone was in the house hiding from me I dashed up the stairs, only to freeze in terror.

In the door of the child’s room I thought I saw the thing – perhaps a giant rat, a beady eyed thing. On reflection it perhaps looked more like a dog than a rat, but the scruffiest most outrageous jumble of breeds you can imagine, a disreputable animal. I was standing there looking at it, and it was looking at me – but neither of us moved. Then suddenly it was gone, and I advanced in to the room cautiously, still clutching that absurd old tennis bat.

Nothing – bare boards, moonlight, and the swaying of the apple tree branches, heavy laden with snow. Suddenly I realized – it was just a shadow, and the glistening reflection of ice. How stupid I am! I went round the whole house just to be certain, and apart from a faint whiff of pipe tobacco in the study, which may well have just been my imagination, nothing. In the morning I’ll make sense of this place, and lay the ghosts for good.

X

Hi CJ,

I hope you are having a wonderful Christmas Day. I have had a fairly dull time, but that is how I like it. The fever has now nearly gone, though I think last night played a strain on my nerves, and I’m still a little shaky. I’m annoyed I shall miss Dr Who, but I’ll catch it later on I-Player. I hope you enjoyed The Ladykillers, and dinner was good and DC wicked, or vice-versa.

Not much of interest occurred in the morning – I woke after a strange dream, in which a woman’s voice called repeatedly to someone called Ellen to “get the pudding on to steam”. I did not open my eyes, but lay in a reverie in which I imagined a kitchen bustling with the clank of pots and festive preparation of a century ago. I wonder if they used Bott’s sauce? I seem to recall somewhere that if you consumed too much it was so rich it made you vomit!

The floorboards settled overhead, and I imagined a family sitting for lunch – a stern father, his head in The Times, a tired looking mother dealing with a tousled haired lad, forcing him to go wash his horribly stained hands, and an older boy and his sister filled with excitement about their holiday plans. After an hour or more of vivid dreams and fitful sleep, I forced myself up, had a quick wash, and emerged blinking in to the brilliant sunshine reflecting off the snowy garden.

I had intended to explore the village, but instead I slipped through a gap in the fence, and went off to have a look a look at that run down old barn, determined to exorcise the vague unease it had conjured up in me last night. As I approached I saw that the door had long since fallen, but someone had tacked a notice to the framework: I expected a notice advising demolition and an application for planning permission – it’s right on the edge of town, in unspoilt countryside, you know what barn conversions go for!

Instead I found the most remarkable document, a ink stained piece of paper apparently torn from an exercise book, and scrawled in the most awful hand. It read

Chrismuss Paygent here today 10am.

Admisshun tuppence.

No Hubert Lainites.

By kind permisshun The Outlaws.

Orl Welcum.”

Stopping only to think what text talk and the X box have done to the new generation, I slipped in. Whatever had occurred, I had missed it – I realized it was nearly noon anyway. A smoky fire of wet twigs still burned, and a semi circle of ancient packing crates showed where the “audience” had sat, but of them and the performers there was no trace. Just a single discarded bottle, with a trace of grey disgusting water and a tiny piece of partially dissolved licorice. Something about the scene seemed wrong – I can’t put my finger on it – but for some reason I turned and hurried away, towards the village. I had the strongest impression I was being watched, and jeered at, by some local kids. For a moment I thought I saw them, four tousle haired youths crouched in a ditch across on the field boundary, with a small yapping dog, but when I looked again they were not there. Bloody fever.

I spent the whole afternoon in the house, and nothing untoward happened. I’m heading down the pub now – will email tomorrow.

X

*****************************************************

I thought I saw those bloody kids again. They were following me, but all dressed up in suits, scrubbed pink and shiny, in best shoes. Was down by the church. The dog was skulking nearby, and it looked like the shadow I saw last night. If they are hoaxing me I’ll tell their parents. Getting to me, and my head is swimming. Pub lunch here. Merry Christmas.

Sent by Android

***********************************************

Hey CJ,

Of all the things I thought of when I cam here I never expected this. I have met a girl, and she is adorable. Not in the pub, as you might expect – as I was walking home. She is slender, adorable, has red hair, in a very stylish bob, and was dressed in old fashioned clothes. When I commented on her 1920′s outfit and how well she pulled it off she laughed and asked if I had been at the Christmas Pageant too, and then I understood! Fancy dress!

We met just outside the pub in the street, and she joked when I made a passing comment about how good she looked and she said I looked quite remarkable as well. She really is very attractive, and Ethel – that’s her name, rather sweet hey – Ethel Brown, well we stood and talked for ages, and eventually wandered down to the Churchyard, and sat and talked in the church porch. I mentioned what I had seen at the barn, and she said it was just a copy of the adult pageant put on by her dreadful little brother William and his awful friends. Apparently he is quite the little savage, and eleven years old. I thought by eleven nowadays kids were all about playing Skyrim, GTA or whatever else is fashionable on the consoles. I swiftly changed the subject, that boy gives me the creeps.

And then another mystery was solved – we heard the roar of a motorbike, and Ethel said it must be her brother Robert, on his way home, and she must go. We have agreed to meet again tomorrow, at sunset, in the churchyard. I hope to be invited to dinner by Mr and Mrs Brown, they obviously live nearby. I walked home light headed, and I’m not convinced it was the fever. Did I mention Ethel is adorable? I should have told her where I was staying…

x

*********************************************

CJ

Dreadful night. Voices kept whispering, and people creeping about. Ellen the maid nearly fell over me with a plate of pies, and leftover cabbage smells vile, I have moved in to the pantry so as not to get in the way. But Ethel is here, I heard her at breakfast above, talking to her parents and Robert. Oh and William, her little brother, and his gang. I was nice to him, gave him a fiver, but he just said it was funny “furrin” money. They took me to the barn, and I had to drink some of that licorice water and pretend it was the best thing ever. I keep promising William stuff, and I heard him tell Ginger, Henry and Douglas I’m “soft” on his sister. Jumble tore my trousers while trying to worry my sneakers laces. Awful mutt!

Still soon will be sunset, and I am meeting Ethel at the churchyard, and plan to be introduced to the family. I went in to Theobalds and got my hair cut, and boy I look like a freak, but judging by Robert and his mate Hector the ridiculous hairstyle is fashionable round here.

The sun is setting, and I’m sitting shivering, teeth chattering, whether with cold or fever I know not. Laptop is working again, was unable to get a signal most of the day. I’m sitting on the garden wall now and hope this gets through. Oh, one thing. As the sun sets, the chinks in the old burn make it glow red, as it slips below the horizon behind it. Did you not once tell me that the Red Barn at Polstead got it’s name that way, and in Suffolk such places are associated with the supernatural?

Anyway must go, signal getting intermittent, and soon will be with Ethel. She really is adorable you know…

x

Now I have many times touched on “effective skeptical activism” – I regard effective skeptics as those who interact with the wider community, and have an informed perspective — lots of examples of this, people like Hayley Stevens, the dudes at RatSkep, and many of the JREF forum posters. However if I ask about effective skeptical activism, people might think of Rhys Morgan, or more likely maybe james Randi, Michael Shermer, and of course the wonderful Ben Goldacre.

But, nah, my eyes have been opened.All these people reach a wide audience – but mainly middle class types I think. Working class types like Trystan and me are still pretty rare in skeptical circles – dunno if Hayley would consider herself one of us, but a lot of sceptical books seemed targeted at Guardian readers – maybe because they are among the few people who still go to Waterstones?

Nope, my eyes were opened because my housemate had a job that required an hour long bus journey each way. So she started to buy Take A Break, Chat, That’s Life, etc, etc, to read  on the bus. These magazines are filled with terrible tragic horrible stories and make me realize just how lucky I am to live as I do, a life where people do not end up regularly end up being murdered, in prison, or with 14 kids or as in the harrowing account I read in one stuck on the loo for five days, paralyzed and too big to escape after a stroke It’s all a bit Jeremy Kyle, but there are some happy stories in there.

Now I suspect the average skeptic does not read these magazines, where a journalist interviews some unfortunate and tells their woeful tale. Some of the people I find really hard to sympathise with: other i genuinely feel for. Yet this is I think where a huge amount of mass appeal scepticism goes down.

Most of the British public have little interest in evidence based medicine, peer review etc, etc. What they can relate to is stories about people who ended up in hospital after trying a tanning treatment, a diet pill, a miracle supplement, etc, etc. And these little magazines are absolutely full of them, with terrifying before and after pictures. The MHRA and ASA do sterling work, but the first hand accounts in these magazines, along with the wonderful Consumer Affairs show Watchdog, that’s where the real Word goes down.

I’d encourage all skeptics to think carefully about the reach of these publications, what we can learn by looking at them and reading them, and consider buying them alongside The Skeptic and other worthy journals. It’s easy to be snobby: but one story in one of these probably reaches a lot more people whoo might be tempted by scams than a hundred SitP meetings will. Sad, but true.

Now if you are not interested in such things, skip this post — it will be very dull indeed! If you are, I’m going to talk about hints for running games, for Gamemasters. (I prefer GM to the D&D term ‘Dungeonmaster’ — telling my friends I am off to be a dungeon-master before vanishing in to my basement for hours with middle aged men gives rather the wrong impression I find! )

Tonight I have been playing a game set in the English Civil War, with some “clockworkpunk” and real alchemy.  The characters are Robert Gently-Benevolent (owner of a chain manufactory); Lord Hugo, a villain straight out of a bodice -ripper, spy and seducer (played of course by Luke);  Sir Thomas Lavington, an alchemist, and last but not least Henry, a manufacturer of clockwork devices.  The game is Clockwork and Chivalry, and we are on the last chapter or two of the adventure The Alchemist’s Wife. They have trekked across England from Oxford to Cambridge, bodies strewn in their path by their nemesis. Now because this is a published adventure and some people reading the blog may one one day wish to play it (and you should, it’s great fun!)

We have been playing this game weekly for a couple of months now, and the characters have grown as the tale is told. Unfortunately the players are rather clever, and worked out the identity of their nemesis, the murderer if you like, in the very first session. That surprised me, but armed with those suspicions they were able to confirm it pretty much in their mind very quickly, and even work out the motive, about half way through. I won’t explain here so as not to give away the plot, but the story became not so much a whodunnit with a quest for a missing woman also motivating them, but a pursuit of the chief villain across England.

Now the problem. In the story as written the character’s can’t get horses, and are unable to catch up with the Nemesis till the last chapter. In our game they actually had a chance to capture a mechanical device, damaged, but by some with Henry’s skill’s salvageable. Henry had wanted Henry Ireton (Parliamentarian leader and general) as a contact, and armed with letters from him and the Royalist Sir Reginald Perkinson once he had fixed the thing it made sense he could keep it at least as far as the New Model Army HQ in Cambridge. I could have had it mysteriously breakdown, be seized by roundhead patrols, become mired in the mud – but what the hell – I thought it was entertaining that he had captured it!

So I let them keep it, and inevitably they came up with a clever way to use it to catch up with the Nemesis. He managed to escape, and they tracked him dowmn, and captured him, two whole chapters early. Now is this not a bad thing?

Years ago I would have probably thought yes. I have bought a scenario book, and I would have probably intended to use as much of it as possible. Nowadays – nah, they were having fun. The plot is basically a road trip, and they already have clues which will lead them to the final chapter and the twist — having two climaxes to the story not one works just fine for me. When the players are clever, and come up with a way to outsmart the carefully plotted scenario — I just let them. There is nothing more annoying than having to come up with reasons to stop the players short circuiting the whole plot, and thwarting their every move.  I t would be like running  a session without protective fathers and innocent young maidens for Hugo to seduce, or without any opportunity for David who knows about such things to tell us about domestic life and architecture or alchemy or history of the period.  Actually Clockworkers and Alchemists do NOT shine in this game – I think it would work just as well without either, and so letting Kevin’s character grab the “ironhorse” and eventually use it to outrun the Nemesius, was the right thing to do dramatically.

The scenario is basically a “road trip” across England, and players can feel “railroaded”, denied opportunity to go their own way and having to stay on predefined tracks  in such scenarios. I don’t think any of the things that have happened outside of the guidelines of the scenario actually break the plot as regards the next supplement Thou Shalt Not Suffer, and I want the game to not just give the illusion of Free Will to the players, I want to be prepared to allow them to be clever and solve the problem however they want. What if they had made straight for Cambridge, via a different route, and sort a political solution to they problem they were faced with at the start of the game?

I’d have let them. If your players trust you to let them significantly shape how the game develops, and believe rightly they have significant influence over the plot, then sometimes you need to throw away the scenario entirely, and think on your feet, but most of the time they accept that the plot lies that way, and when the old man offers them three silver pieces to go in to the gloomy dungeon at midnight to recover the Runespoon of the Volemage or whatever, they play along.  If they think however you are forcing them to follow your tightly scripted plot, and resisting all their efforts to be clever, then they will grow tired of your game, and resist by every means they can, even opening a shoe shop and giving up the adventuring life.

Hey just a few thoughts, Any alternative opinions?

cj x

I rejoined ASSAP and was surprised how cheap it was, and today through the post came a VERY heavy issue of ANOMALY with a page count of 250. I regret all the years I missed the ASSAP Journal, especially as it is currently not available on LEXSCIEN, but this one contains almost all the conference presentations as well as several other articles. If you are interested in ghosts you may want to take a look. By  kind permission of the editor, Dave Wood,  my paper, with only the graph missing, follows.

Why Everything We Think We Know About Ghosts Is (Probably!) Wrong 

It is easy to be controversial, and makes for a good title. So I must begin with an admission; I have no idea what the reader believes about ghosts, and so can’t tell if you are wrong or not, and secondly I’m probably wrong myself.

Furthermore,when I talk about ghosts I mean “the experience of an apparition”; I’m not going to define apparition, except loosely as an “appearance of a person or object not physically present”. I don’t mean necessarily “spirits”. “Spirits of the dead” may or may not be the same as ghosts, but the case for each stands quite independently. You can have life after death without ghosts, and ghosts without life after death. They may well be, but need not be, related.

I have also committed the sin of using the terms “ghosts”, “apparitions” and even “haunting” as synonyms in this article, simply to make it a little more readable and avoid repetition. All those terms have technical uses in parapsychology; but on the few occasions where I have employed them in a technical sense I have endeavoured to make this clear.

Some years back I was reading a popular book that described a number of purported cases of ghost experiences, when something struck me forcibly. Almost all the accounts were closer to the kind of phenomena featured on the ghosthunting popular TV show Most Haunted than the kind of things my years of careful reading in parapsychology would have led me to expect.

That popular ghosthunting T.V. could be closer to the actual recorded ghost narratives than say Tyrrell’s or Hornell Hart’s magisterial studies of the ghost experience struck me as absurd. Could quite frankly dubious cable T.V. be a step ahead of parapsychology here?

Investigating Ghosts

How do we research the ghost experience? There are several methods. The first is simple – we go and try to see them ourselves, by hanging around purportedly haunted locations. This approach is the “vigil” approach. In fact, it is almost synonymous with ghost-hunting in the public mind. And it’s nothing new – long before Most Haunted and the explosion of paranormal television shows, Elliot O’ Donnell was writing books about his adventures with spooks doing just this sort of thing.

Give the horrendous ethical minefield that is investigating cases in private homes, many ghost groups stick to public houses, castles and stately homes. These ghosthunters are primarily concerned with trying to experience the haunting and record evidence of it, usually directly by sound, photographic, or video recordings, or instrumental readings.

Despite the popularity of this approach, there are other methods of investigating apparitions. It is theoretically possible to “experiment” with creating ‘apparitions’ in the lab – for example by psychomanteum studies, where the percipient is placed in a dark chamber gazing at a mirror and where some report startling experiences. Another form of research that attempts to employ quantitative methods, albeit in the field was pioneered by Gertrude Schmeidler, and involves mapping of the subjective experiences of a large number of people (or a small number of self-professed “psychics”) on a map where information on earlier “spontaneous” experiences are recorded. Some valuable work has been done by Wiseman et al. at Edinburgh Vaults and Hampton Court Palace looking for environmental variables that tally with areas where members of the public report unusual sensations while walking around under controlled conditions.

Alternatively one can do what I tend to do, and just interview witnesses and try to visit the locations and make sense of what happened, taking what one might call a “detective” approach to the case, tracking down testimony and considering its plausibility and possible factors influencing the “sighting”. Many of the cases written up in the journal literature are of this type. Some are extraordinarily well conducted studies of a specific set of environmental variables in a place with a long history of purported “hauntings”, such as for example the work done by Braithwaite and Townsend at Muncaster Castle (Braithwaite & Townsend 2005).

The Survey Tradition

However there is another method used to research the ghost experience, which dates back to closing years of the nineteenth century – the Survey tradition. In fact possibly the most exhaustive piece of parapsychological research ever undertaken was of this type: the Society for Psychical Research’s (henceforth ‘SPR’) Census of Hallucinations. 17,000 people were approached and asked ‘Had they ever, when awake, had the impression of seeing or hearing or of being touched by anything which, so far as they could discover, was not due to any external cause?’ .9.8% of those surveyed responded positively. When you hear the pub quiz factoid that “one in ten people experience a ghost”, that probably comes from the Census Report, that was published in 1894.

When you do this sort of qualitative research, what you do is amass a vast number of cases, and try to find commonalities, themes and motifs in the ghost experiences reported. A number of researchers have used a similar approach, allowing us to look at how the “apparition” experience varies over the years. A brief non-inclusive list focussing on the major British studies might include

1894 The SPR’s Census of Hallucinations

1948 D.J West’s Mass Observation Survey

1974 McCreeley & Green

1990’s D.J. West’s Pilot Survey

2002 Dr Hilary Evans Seeing Ghosts

2008 Wiseman and Watt Online study

2008 Dave Wood (ASSAP Chair)

2009 Romer & Smith: The Accidental Census

             2010 -2012 Strange Survey, Rebecca Smith’s Ph.D. study

In fact other collections of spontaneous cases like those of Louisa Rhine and the early SPR collection Phantasms of the Living, as well as the dozens of collections of “true life ghost stories” published over the years are effectively part of this survey tradition. All that distinguishes the SPR Census from most books of local ghost stories is the methodological rigour and formality of the way the cases are written up, and of course the scale.

Methodological Issues

Clearly in a short article I lack the space to properly explain the methodology employed in each of these studies. (I am also sure many readers will choose to skip even this brief overview of some of the key themes, put off by the word “methodology”.)

Surveys are a phenomenological (in the sense the term is employed by David Hufford) approach; they do not allow us to study the apparitional experience directly, but they do allow us to study the percipients report of the experience. This is the case in many studies however: I might choose to study genius, while not being a genius, or depression, yet have never experienced many of the emotions and symptoms experienced by some depressive patients. The unimportant thing to grasp is that it is the report of the experience that is being studied, and that no human experience is entirely un-mediated by cultural and contextual factors. So is the Victorian experience of apparitions reported in the Census of 1894 similar to that of the present day, those cases from the studies of the 21^st century? There are minor differences, which I do not have space to properly explore here; but on the whole the overwhelming feeling one has is that the experiences reported are essentially similar, and I would find it hard to be able to place a date on many of the apparitional reports, so independent of they seem of time, place and culture.

An obvious question that arises is “how do we know the survey respondents are not lying?”. The answer is simple – “we don’t”. Complex exclusion criteria have been a factor of many studies, and questionnaire research always faces this issue, and some methods have been evolved to reduce the number of false reports accepted. Ultimately however, someone who wishes to hoax the researcher by making spurious claims can always do so, and that case may well enter the database of “classic cases”. However cases which feature a strong set of literary conventions or folklore motifs are obviously suspect, and others may be questioned. The value of the survey approach is that the case for understanding the apparitional experience it makes is based on a large body of cases: while any given ghost narrative may be questioned, and scepticism is the proper approach to take, the overall picture that develops is the important thing.

Given that this “phenomenological” approach is employed that deals with ghost accounts, not the apparition itself, can we really learn anything from it? To explain how the Survey approach works requires a very brief diversion in to some key concepts in research methodology. There are several crucial divisions in research; between laboratory research, and fieldwork, between deliberately produced ostensible psychical phenomena and “spontaneous cases” which just happen unexpectedly, and between qualitative and quantitative research approaches.

Quantitative research has been jokingly categorized as “bean counting”; it is concerned with numbers, and statistical analysis of material. Most census data of the type gathered by the UK Government in the National Censuses which occur each decade is tabulated and presented in this form – such and such a percentage of the populace are employed in manual trades, or state their religion as “Hindu”, or live in households with 2 children for example.. A great deal of the early survey material was concerned with such numerical data: how many people had the experience, what were their ages, genders, education level, social class, etc. All remain valid questions, though today professional survey organisations which conduct large scale polling are perhaps better suited for gathering this kind of information than the independent researcher, simply because they have the reach, facilities and methodological knowledge to deliver high quality data.

Qualitative research is a little different. It deals not with numbers, but with understanding how and why things are and answering non-numerical questions. It is used in a number of academic disciplines but especially in the Social Sciences, and in marketing research and focus groups. Data is collected in the form of interviews, recordings, written statements or survey responses and is then analysed using one of a number of theoretical approaches, often today Grounded Theory or Thematic Analysis.

To help understand how such analysis is performed, let us consider a short narrative from the Accidental Census (2009). In this study the responses were extremely short, collected by use of the Facebook social media type, and were then explored by email with the percipient by the collector.

 No.20

English female, 30′s

When at university, I saw my boyfriend’s housemate standing in the kitchen doorway. Said housemate was taking part in a rowing contest on the other side of the country at the time.

The house was a 3 story terrace with only one entrance – through the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a small hall with doors to the downstairs loo, one bedroom and the staircase up to other bedrooms. John and I were eating at the kitchen table when I became vaguely aware of someone standing in the hallway. Richard (let’s call him that, I can’t actually remember the lad’s name) was tall, blond and sporty, and lived in the ground floor room, so when I saw a tall figure in a tracksuit I didn’t really think much of it, as it was prob. just Richard going to the loo.

Shortly after that – during the same meal – John said that we could do …something…(prob to do with hogging the bathroom) …since we were the only people in the house that weekend. That was when I said “but Richard’s in, I saw him” to be told that no he wasn’t, he was rowing for college over at Lancaster.

Folklore suggests that this must be a sign of imminent doom, but all was well. I really can’t remember if I told Richard about it. Prob. not, as it would have made me sound a bit weird.

This case is of the “phantasm of the living type”, and while brief it provides a wealth of material for analysis. The method employed in the study was to create two columns, with the account on the left side of the page, and the right hand side was then used to write notes on what was going on line by line in the narrative.

So for example

 John and I were eating at the kitchen table

Notes: sitting (percipient), eating (percipient), with others, kitchen (percipient)

when I became vaguely aware of someone standing in the hallway

Notes: “became vaguely aware”, vague sense of person present, not seen directly?, hall (apparition), standing (apparition), different room.

 

While this process is labour intensive, exploring the material in this way leads to the development of a real feel for what is going on. The authors both independently produced notes on each case, and from these developed codes, such as in this case the direct quote “became vaguely aware” which is an interesting phrase because it suggests that the sighting was not as simple as just seeing Richard walk in. We were able to explore questions arising from matters like this through correspondence. Some codes such as the position of the apparition and the percipient are obvious, others such as the ones handling the witnesses response less so, but over a large number of cases the codes begin to coalesce in to categories, such as for example “apparitions of the living” or “apparitions seen while eating”or “witness does not realise anything unusual about figure seen at time” or “apparition and percipient of different gender”. It is important to write brief memos, as you go, exploring your ideas on how the categories and data relate, and eventually you start to build theoretical models – but everything derives not from the existing literature on apparitions, but from what is actually reported in the cases. It is obviously not possible to do justice to qualitative research methods here, and this short explanation is meant to simply act as a brief guide to one possible approach, in the hope that a few readers will be interested enough to explore the topic further.

To understand the value of Qualitative Research methods in the study of apparitions it is important to understand another key division in research methods, between “Top Down Models” and “Bottom Up Models”, which are not as salacious as they sound! A “Top Down” approach is where one starts out with a theory, for example, “ghosts are produced by telepathy”, and then examines how the data collected fits this model. A “Bottom Up” approach collects a number of accounts from people who claim to have seen apparitions (percipients) and then rather than test them against existing theories, the researcher instead looks carefully at what the accounts contain, and attempts to build hypotheses that are drawn directly from the data, remaining “naive” as to existing theories. (In fact if you think you would like to try this approach, you may wish to skip the section on “Theories of Apparitions” below!). Grounded Theory, one popular qualitative approach is so named because the theories are “grounded in the data” – the research questions arise from what is there in the accounts, rather than the hypotheses being dictated by existing theoretical frameworks.

Analysing Apparitions

Many readers of Anomaly have probably noticed that in technical discussion of apparitions a number of classic cases crop up time after time. Many of these cases were first published in the Journal of the SPR, in SPR collections such as Phantasms of the Living or are from the spontaneous case collection of Dr Louisa Rhine (J.B.Rhine’s wife). Yet the majority of “canonical” apparitional cases we read are probably still today taken from the 1894 Census of Hallucinations, and at least five books and articles exist analysing material from that collection. Perhaps the two most important are Tyrrell’s book Apparitions (Tyrrell, 1943), a classic, if somewhat hard read, and the equally dense article Six Theories on Apparitions (1956)by Prof. Hornell Hart. What these two works attempt, with some success, is to critically examine then current theories of apparitions in the light of the cases presented in the Census and Phantasms of the Living. While DJ West has performed invaluable work in keeping the Census tradition alive and has carried out several major research projects, and presented valuable data for comparison with the earlier studies, he did not choose to publish the extensive “raw data” of the witness statements and supporting testimony gathered by follow up enquiries that the Census authors did. (Sadly the SPR never dedicated an issue of Proceedings to any of West’s studies, which would have provided the space for a detailed examination of his cases. West, one of the great figures in psychical research, has in my opinion been done a grave disservice by the lack of recognition afforded to his studies for this reason). It was not until the 1970′s that a major new collection of cases that were published along with an accompanying analysis, by Charles McCreery & Celia Green in their Apparitions (1974). This remains an excellent (and by the standards of most books on this topic highly readable) exposition on the ghost experience, and Green & McCreery identified a number of interesting aspects of the subject. It was not until 2002 that a new book on theories of apparitions, Dr. Hilary Evan’s superb Seeing Ghosts (Evans, 2002)performed more detailed analytic work, though Evans did not conduct a large scale case collection of his own.

For those interested in the study of apparitions these four books are essential reading. There are many other fine books on the subject, but Tyrrell, Hart, McCreery & Green and Evans remain the authorities that every student of the subject should (in this author’s opinion) consult. Yet all of these books careful analysis of the ghost experience are based firmly upon cases and data that were garnered from the survey tradition, not from individual case investigations. So such work is clearly important, and has shaped our modern understanding of apparitions, and our theories about ghosts. It was while conducting a small census of this type that the author first came to seriously question the classic theories of apparitions from the parapsychological community, as not fitting the evidence provided by the narratives, particularly the evidence of physical effects – objects moving, doors opening and closing, and so forth – that seemed to crop up frequently in what were otherwise classic apparitonal accounts.

Telepathic Theories of Apparitions

There are of course dozens of competing theories about ghosts and hauntings. The most popular even today are probably the Spirit Hypothesis (that ghosts are “dead guys”), Recording Hypotheses (ghosts are “recordings trapped in an environment and replayed when the conditions are right”), the Sceptical Hypothesis (ghosts are “mis-perceptions, hallucinations, misinterpretation or downright hoaxes”) and perhaps surprisingly the Daimonic Hypothesis (ghosts are non-coporeal yet non-human intelligences, such as faeries, angels, djinn, extra-dimensional entities or demons). In the USA in particular demonic theories of hauntings are proving surprisingly popular at the present time, with the ghost-hunting community there having a large number of self professed “demonologists” active, following in the footsteps of perhaps the most famous of all, Ed and Lorraine Warren. For a detailed recent study of competing theories I would recommend a paper by Peter MacCue (2002).

To do justice to the many hypotheses offered over the years to explain the ghost experience would take a paper many times longer than this; so I will restrict my comments to the tentative theories produced by the early SPR group who undertook the Census of Hallucinations and to Tyrrell who analysed the findings of that great project later. I therefore will restrict myself to outlining very briefly outline the theories of Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney and G.N.M.Tyrrell here, as representing one major strand of thought in apparitional research, indeed arguably the dominant position in parapsychology to this day. Their theories have much in common, and some major differences, but are all “grounded” in the Census of Hallucinations cases.

The Census of Hallucinations contains an important clue as to the theoretical structures that underlie the research in its title. A hallucination is defined as “perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space.” Many hallucinations occur in persons who are suffering from stress, fatigue or certain illnesses, both physical and mental. However hallucinations are also prevalent in persons who are seemingly well, and not suffering from any kind of disorder (Bell et al. 2011) Some of the most common of such experiences are the sense of being touched when no one is present, the sensation of hearing one’s name called, and seeing motion out of the “corner of the eye” which if often mistaken for a cat or small dog or similar.

Many hallucinatory experiences in normal healthy life are associated with the edge of sleep, and the hypnagogic and hypnapompic states are well known to many with an interest in this area; vivid visual imagery seen on falling asleep, or waking. The author once had a hypnapompic image, essentially a carry over from a dream, of a stocky blonde man who he believed was an intruder in his bedroom. He threw a bedside light at the figure, only to discover he had actually been awakened by his then partner as the cat was being sick on the bed! Most hypnapompic imagery is less realistic than this persistence of a dream in to the waking state, but it is well known and doubtless accounts for many apparitional reports. The Census and later studies have removed cases where there is some doubt as to whether the percipient was actually fully awake, and we must recall that dreams, themselves a hallucinatory episode, show the incredible power of the mind to hallucinate vividly and often convincingly.

It is not therefore particularly surprising that people see “ghosts”, given the well known capacity of the human brain to hallucinate. A second, perhaps better known explanation for many ghosts sightings is simple mis-perception – when we mistake something for something else. I am sure many readers are aware of how the shadow cast by a coat on the back of the door can take on ominous outlines and appear as a menacing phantom in the early hours of the morning, and again to draw upon my personal experience I once saw a figure rush out on a rainy night and attack a friend of mine walking home. The “ghostly assailant” was as we subsequently discovered nothing more than a shadow cast by a street lamp on a wall, but my cry of horror was real enough!

So given how easily our senses can be deceived, are we correct to take on a resolutely sceptical approach and assume that ghosts are nothing more than “phantasies of a disordered brain” as the 18^th century Rationalists believed, brought on by tiredness, indigestion or ill health? Certainly the medicalization of the ghost experience became a dominant trend in 18^th and 19^th century thinking on these matters, with even theologians decrying ghost stories as nothing more than “mere” hallucinations.

This consensus (still popular among academics today) was to be ferociously challenged by the 1894 Report on the Census of Hallucinations. Of course, the majority of cases were of the type one would expect, and entirely consistent with the mis-perception and hallucination hypotheses. There remained however a small number of what the SPR termed veridical cases. A veridical case is not easily explicable by the hallucination hypothesis, because in it some information was transferred to the percipient by the apparition that could not have been known at that time by any normal sensory apparatus. The classic examples are the appearance of a deceased person to a relative or friend at some distance, before news of the death or illness had arrived. (It may surprise some readers that the exact time and condition that constitutes death is still debated today in the medical establishment, though of course a consensus exists that “brain death” is the best measurement. For this reason twelve hours before and after death were treated as death coincidences by the Census).

Other crisis apparitions were of the living; some event or danger seemed to have occurred that caused them to appear at their moment of need to a distant person,and in some cases this may have saved them, Other apparitions provided information that was unknown to the recipient, and subsequently confirmed (one of the most famous cases of which dating some thirty years from after the Census, The Chaffin Will Case, has recently been severely critiqued by new research by Mary Roach (Anon, 1928; Roach, 2007).

That many apparitional sightings were of persons alive and in good health, and not undergoing physical or emotional crisis was already known to the SPR from Phantasms of the Living (Gurney 1886), and the Census bore this finding out. Of the apparitions where the identity of the “ghost” was known to the percipient, half were of living persons in good health. This seemed to raise severe difficulties to the idea that apparitions were the discarnate spirits of the dead, and the hypothesis of an ‘astral body’ that could leave the body at will was challenged by the fact that in some cases the “ghost” was not aware they had appeared elsewhere.

It was not the appearance of the spook that caused the threat to the hallucination hypothesis with the veridical cases, but rather the transfer of information. But what if the information was transferred by something that we would today call telepathy? F.W.H.Myers, wrestling with the problem posed by apparitions, was fully aware of the apparent success of what today would be called ESP tests performed by other SPR members, and was equally aware that one counter tot he idea of human survival suggested by the alleged evidence of mediums was that they had read the minds of the sitters. He coined the phrase telepathy for this mind-mind contact, and in fact it was widely held by many in the SPR circle that telepathy had been demonstrated by various experiments written up in the Proceedings and Journal.

It was with this exciting prospect of an experimentally demonstrable telepathy that the Report on the Census (Sidgwick et al 1894) authors analysed their case materials. (There was much more going on, as we shall see later, but this is perhaps the key influence upon their thinking.) A number of telepathic theories to explain veridical apparitions arose, with the first and simplest being that proposed by FWH Myers (1903) himself. In his model the “ghost” is a living person, who through some conscious or unconscious need sends a telepathic message to the percipient. The percipients brain receives the message, which then manifests as a hallucination: they then “see” the ghost.

Edmund Gurney developed a slightly more complex version of this – in his model, it is not that the “ghost” (a living person) initiates the apparition, but the percipient. According to Gurney we all constantly scan by telepathy the world around us for information of use to us, and we may well pick up information about a distant party, such as their sad death. Again, the brain then tricks us in to “seeing” an apparition to explain how the information came to us. This model can explain cases where the apparition appeared some hours after the death of the “ghost”, as other people who knew of the tragedy could be the source of the “signal”.

Tyrrell’s (1943) theory is close to Gurney’s: it is the percipient who initiates a “scan”, receives the information, and then hallucinates it, using the well known capacity of the brain to dream to generate a hallucination where the apparition makes sense in its environment. Like Myers and Gurney’s theories however, additional models had to be devised to explain certain types of case, such as collective cases (see below) and hauntings, where a number of people over many years see a ghost that appears to be connected to a place, rather than a specific witness.

Nonetheless, rather than postulate spirits or invisible entities that permanently exist and move around us, or the “residual energy” of the Recording hypothesis, the idea that apparitions are hallucinatory, but in some cases are associated with real information transferred from a living (or in some of their theoretical speculations dead) agent is a very attractive one, that does seem to make sense of a large number of the features reported in the Census cases. It is probably fair to say that for the twentieth century parapsychological work on apparitions has been dominated by these telepathic/hallucinatory models of the experience. The question is, are they correct?

Are Ghosts Hallucinations?

Let us assume for a moment a universe where “ghosts” are hallucinatory experiences, generated entirely within the brain. This is a simple and entirely sensible position – in fact I think it’s what the 18th and 19th century consensus of scholars was – ghosts are just imagination, or mental aberrations, or straight mis-perception of normal (or unusual) events or objects. All of this is perfectly reasonable and doubtless accounts for a very large number of “ghost” experiences. We all know we can hallucinate, even if our only experience of hallucination is the weird and wonderful world of dreams. Such “ghosts” will share certain properties, being the product of a “disordered” brain.

The theoretical properties of these hallucinations are –

i) They will only appear to one witness at a time – though a mis-perception (where there is something there, it just fools the senses, as in an optical illusion – mis-perceptions are not hallucination technically) could theoretically be shared by many. If a stick in the water looks like the Loch Ness Monster, it is possible that hundreds of observers could simultaneously see it and reach the erroneous conclusion it is a lake monster.

ii) They will convey no information to the percipient not known to them at the time. Again a caveat – if a ghostly monk now appears to you tonight, and tells you the winner of the Grand National, we would all be impressed. If it subsequently turns out to be incorrect, we might wonder if you simply dreamed the whole affair. Yet even if you were right, that could still be the explanation. Some horse has to win after all? The conveying of veridical information adds weight to the apparition being an external “thing”, not a hallucination, but does not alone substantiate it.

iii) They will not objectively cause physical ‘real world’ effects – no opening doors, moving objects, or otherwise impinging upon physical reality. Being mental constructs they can’t – if physical effects are ascribed to a ghost, then they must be mis-attributed. So this model can not be invoked to explain poltergeist effects, and there has been a sharp tendency therefore in parapsychology to differentiate between apparitional cases and poltergeists, as being completely different types of phenomena. We shall return to this later.

iv) They will not reappear in the same place over time to different witnesses, as in a “haunting”. This requires a little explanation – if it is well known that an Oxford courtyard is purportedly haunted by a Civil War general who was executed by firing squad there, we should not be surprised if others purport to see “the ghost”. If however over a period of many years many people witness an apparition, and agree on certain characteristics, independently and without apparent foreknowledge of the purported haunt or the history of the place – then surely we may be justified in doubting the hallucination explanation?

So how well do ghost accounts meet these criteria? On point I. “seen by a single witness” we know this is commonly not the case. About 10% of SPR Census cases were seen simultaneously by multiple percipients – the experience which got me interested in all this was of that type, shared with four other witnesses. We can invoke mis-perception as I have already stated – human perception is notoriously fallible, and a whole theatre of people can be wowed by a magicians trick.

Furthermore, in many cases there is communication between the parties – “do you see the monk?” etc, and even where there is no verbal communication there is the possibility of non-verbal prompting. In his classic analysis of the SPR Census cases Tyrrell noted that in many multi-percipient cases witnesses saw the apparition from their perspective – a very clever trick for a hallucination. So if I was in front of the ghost, I would see his face – if you were behind, his tailcoats. Yet Tyrrell saw this as perhaps evidence of telepathic refinement; to make the apparition convincing to the primary percipient, others present must be drawn in to the apparitional drama. And of course this does not always happen – the Census contains several cases where others present did not see the “ghost”, even though they should have if it was physically occupying space in the way a normal mundane object does.

Yet I would not want to make too much of this (certainly less than Tyrrell et al did) – for we have the problem that by the time testimony is recorded there has often been conferring among witnesses, which I suspect does much to shape the memory of the experience. In my own experience (at Thetford Priory, Norfolk, in 1987) one of the other percipients (David Aukett) forbade us to discus the experience till we had committed it to paper – and on comparing we found that our descriptions of the apparitional figure were sharply divergent. (We did however all agree on the movements and the staircase which we saw, which did not exist in reality). I am fairly certain (given that none of us can now recall what happened that night with any degree of confidence at all) that the staircase down which the apparition descended and then exited (and which subsequently proved to no longer exist) was mentioned in the verbal exchange during the sighting – presumably why we agree on this detail – once someone mentioned it, we all “saw” it.

So point one is in fact, I freely admit, questionable evidence against the hallucination theory, but clearly it must be taken in to account.

Let’s move on to ii) where “the ghost tells us something we did not know”. The problem with veridical cases, assuming they hold up to thorough investigation and we are convinced by the contemporary evidence or the percipients honesty, is that it could simply be coincidence. Sidgwick et al calculated that there were four hundred and forty times more death coincidences than would be expected by chance in the Census cases, but there mathematics was somewhat questionable. Unlikely coincidences do occur after all, and one might think of something, and then it occur, simply by random chance. One might even hallucinate quite normally information that one has subconsciously pieced together, in an act of intuition manifesting as a waking dream, at least in theory.

It is iii. – physical effects, that would be most fatal to the hallucination theory. Before we consider the SPR groups findings, let us look again at the Census question.

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause? (Sidgwick et al, 1894)

So the Census question actually ruled out iii) – physical effects, barring the common and I suspect very normal somatosensory hallucination of being touched. The SPR theorists did not ask about objects moving, or ghosts physically effecting objects – because they had decided they were telepathically induced hallucinations, and such clearly ridiculous phenomena were quite evidently incompatible with this theory. Rebecca Smith is currently writing her PhD on a pseudo-replication of the Census of Hallucinations, and has shown me many occasions where the census cases do appear to contain physical aspects; these have in most cases passed without comment in the analysis or have been explained away as part of the hallucinatory tableau. Sadly it seems to her that the SPR group were in fact engaging in “top down” analysis, being so convinced of the evidence for the telepathic/hallucinatory model that they overlooked testimony in their sources that was damaging to that case. In the next section I will attempt an explanation as to why in terms of what was going on in the Society for Psychical Research at the time, and subsequently, and why I feel this may have had grave implications for 150 years worth of parapsychological research on ghosts.

We may know turn to point iv., “hauntings” (in the technical sense). In fact Myers theories included an explanation for hauntings, that is “ghosts seen in a location independently by different witnesses over the decades” – he thought a telepathic impulse could somehow be caught in the environment, and then be replayed years later to a suitably sensitive percipient. So if the reader has just expired laughing at my poor arguments, your ghost may be seen in the future by later generations – but it is just a recording of the past events, your amused demise! In fact this “recording hypothesis” is one of the most popular lay theories of ghosts today – but it too rules out any kind of iii) physical phenomena. In fact at the time of writing a major cross-cultural study of popular beliefs in emotions remaining and effecting the physical environment has just been published. (Savani et al 2011).

The Problem of the Poltergeist

And yet – in a large number of cases, apparitions appear to correspond with actual physical effects. Objects move, doors open and close, and stuff gets thrown about, etc. Parapsychologists usually differentiate between “haunts” (where an apparition is seen in a building many times by different witnesses) and “poltergeists” (where physical effects occur), but there is an overlap. And if ghosts are effecting physical objects, they are clearly not hallucinations, which are purely mental phenomena, unless something else si involved, a point I shall return to in my speculative conclusion.

Now it could be that these physical effects are in fact hallucinations, or mis-perception in themselves. Film exists from the Rosenheim poltergeist case where the lights swing, and there are a few other pieces of alleged poltergeist footage – but the evidence is hardly overwhelming. However smashed items, weird electrical disturbances, peculiar flight and impact characteristics seem to be consistent across many of these poltergeist cases. Why? Physical phenomena are an embarrassment to many psychical researchers – but we find them so often I have to concede they have some basis in fact. The same kind of things have been reported for 2,600 years, across many cultures. Yet in the 1890′s the poltergeist was a highly disreputable creature, with SPR member Frank Podmore ascribing the poltergeist to nothing more than naughty children playing tricks, an analysis that many modern readers may be sympathetic to.

Yet the poltergeist cases are really just as acceptable, if in some cases not better attested, than the apparitional cases. So why were they ignored in the Census? Well partly the clue is in the name: the Census of Hallucinations was just that, and it is clear from the early Proceedings that the SPR group who analysed the cases were deeply committed to a telepathic/hallucinatory model. Physical phenomena were, as Rebecca Smith has pointed out, an embarrassment, and were therefore outside the scope of the research project.

Yet something even deeper was at work. The founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 had attracted a number of leading scientists and thinkers, and the American Society for Psychical Research did the same when it was founded a few years later. The early SPR did a great deal of work investigating purported mediums, against a background of popular enthusiasm for Spiritualism, and earned a strong reputation, despite its lack of “corporate opinions”, for what today would be called debunking of ostensible psychic phenomena. Controversy over the sceptical tone of SPR publications and investigations led to a crisis in 1888, when a large number of members who were disposed towards spiritualism and belief in in in particular physical mediumship left the SPR, to form their own organisation (Grattan-Guinness, 1982)

The remaining “rump” of SPR members were certainly no friends to the “lower” or “physical phenomena” of the séance room, and a series of critical reports on mediums such as Eusapia Palladino (balanced by the more positive Fielding report of 1908) led to an atmosphere where claims of physical effects were regarded with grave suspicion. Then the telepathic hypothesis, which was entirely compatible with the mental phenomena of the more “respectable” mediums yet could not be implicated in the suspected conjuring tricks of the physical mediums emerged, and the Census of Hallucinations was conducted with this prevailing attitude of latent hostility among (some but not all) SPR members to alleged physical phenomena. Stephen E. Braude has thrown much light on this period in his excellent work The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis & and the Philosophy of Science (1996). Braude, Smith and myself have all independently reached a broadly similar position; namely that the early SPR was in effect hostile to certain types of “embarrassing” testimony, and may have downplayed them unconsciously in their analysis.

Furthermore, a strong party in British intellectual life was hostile to the SPR as investigating nonsense (others, including of course Disraeli and Balfour, strongly favoured it: Balfour served as Secretary and his brother as President of the SPR, and Gladstone described its research as “the most important work being done in the world today”.) The SPR had to deal with a dual attack, from both extreme proponents of the spiritualist party who saw the Society as debunkers, and from hostile materialists who saw it as simply studying popular superstition and outside of the scientific method. It would be unsurprising if some SPR members were hostile to any “spiritualist” interpretation of the evidence from apparitions, and the constant attempt to find scientifically respectable explanations for phenomena must have made the telepathic/hallucinatory models of apparitonal experience seem extremely attractive.

Of course later generations of researchers were to rehabilitate physical phenomena, and the SPR has been at the forefront of poltergeist research, but I believe it is from this moment in 1894 that the split between the “poltergeist” and the “ghost” dates. It has been accepted with occasional queries right through to the present day, though some writers have bravely opted for a discarnate intelligence or spirit based model at least some poltergeist experiences, including some of the major theorists in the area. (For example Playfair 1980, Wilson, 1981, Stevenson 1972, Spencer, 1997).

The orthodox position in mainstream parapsychology, if such a thing can be said to exist, appears to be that poltergeists are best understood as generated by a living agent unconsciously generating psi in what I have in the past described as a “nervous breakdown taking place outside the head” – the theory of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK for short. A considerable body of theoretical work exists in support of this hypothesis (for example Roll 1980, Rogo 1979). Any attempt to claim that physical phenomena have been unfairly removed from the discussion of apparitonal cases must however contend with the authority on these matters, Gauld & Cornell’s magisterial study Poltergeists (1979), which is likely to be cited by any parapsychologist challenged on the idea that poltergeist and apparitional cases may actually be little more than an accidental classification dating from the 19^th century, descriptive but not necessarily reflecting different causalities.

Gauld himself questions strongly whether poltergeists and hauntings are separate types of phenomena, or a continuum of one phenomena classified by their ‘symptoms’. Central to the book is Chapter 12: The Poltergeist and the Computer, where he performs a cluster analysis on 5000 cases drawn from the Literature and covering several continents and much of recorded history. At the end of ten iterations the clusters are reduced to two groups, Group 1, broadly representing what parapsychologists would recognise as poltergeist cases, and Group 2, traditional hauntings. It seems the traditional divide between apparitional cases and poltergeist cases may hold true.

Yet Gauld notes with apparent satisfaction that many of the Group 2 “hauntings” still contain significant physical effects, and that the Group 1 “poltergeists” contain cases where apparitions were seen. Alan Gauld dismisses (to my mind quite correctly) the tendencies of the telepathic theorists of ghosts to claim any reported physical effects were hallucinatory in a passage so vivid it deserves to be cited in full:-

“ostensibly physical phenomena have taken place that have in fact left a clear physical trace behind them: objects have in reality been displaced, bolts drawn, doors opened, objects smashed, etc. …if normal human beings together or in succession see door-handles turn, feel beds rise under them or bedclothes pulled off them, hear bell jangle…. then we have evidence that certain types of physical events occurred: and if one dismisses this evidence for reasons of theoretical tidiness related to ones views about certain types of visual hallucinations (recurrent apparitions) one is in danger of isolating one’s theoretical position from any modification by the facts – a tendency which, carried to extremes, lands people in lunatic asylums.”

Despite these strong words, physical effects in hauntings are still largely ignored, for just such theoretical reasons; yet one can not help feeling that in parapsychology the “lower” (physical) phenomena remain as disreputable as in 1894.
Recording Hypotheses

So if the evidence from actual reports of apparitional experiences does not seem to support the telepathic/hallucinatory model of ghosts, then how do “recording models” fare? Space will not permit a detailed discussion here, but a brief overview of the evidence seems in order. The earliest “recording hypothesis” I am aware of is that of FWH Myers, where he postulates a psychic ether which permeates buildings or the environment, on which certain events may be recorded, and later replayed to one suitably sensitive if the conditions are right. Myers did not live to fully develop the idea, which he used to explain hauntings (in the technical sense) and collective cases where his telepathic model appeared flawed. However his ideas were taken up and developed by H.H.Price, and are discussed in Hart’s essay Six Theories in some detail. It was not until however Nigel Kneales radio play of 1972 The Stone Tape that the idea really entered popular consciousness, and became one of the most widely held popular theories of apparitions. The play coincided with a new technology reaching the mass market, the tape recorder, and many homes would have these, so the idea of a recording was timely. Wood (2007) provides an excellent discussion of recording hypotheses.

In essence recording hypotheses are just as incompatible with physical effects as telepathic/hallucinatory models. Indeed the actual mode in which the ‘recording’ is played back may well be considered to be telepathic/hallucinatory, but perhaps the central feature of recording theories is that there is no self-aware entity present, merely a recording, what Derek Acorah calls “residual energy”. In recording theories there is no one there to communicate or interact with; it is akin to watching an old episode of The Muppet Show repeated on TV – Kermit is not going to suddenly turn and hold a discussion with you, or move your tea cup.

While the theory is attractive for cases where the same figure is seen repeatedly replaying exactly the same action, it is not the behaviour of many of the apparitions detailed in the literature, or collected in surveys. One example would be the Cheltenham Ghost (Morton 1892) where the apparition appeared to be aware of and indeed actively avoided engaging with the witnesses, but dozens of cases could be cited where this difficulty arises. It is also of course extremely difficult to find a way in which the recording hypothesis can be brought to bear on the physical phenomena commonly reported alongside apparitions.

The Accidental Census

To examine closely the findings of each of the surveys conducted over the years is far beyond the scope of this article, but in 2009, quite by accident, the author became involved in a small scale census that is of interest simply because of the similarities in the way it was conducted and the original SPR census, though they may not be immediately obvious.

Briefly, Rebecca Smith was writing a proposal for a pseudo-replication of the Census of Hallucinations using the internet, and owing to generous research funding from the SPR she has undertaken the research as part of her Ph.D. studies at Coventry University. (It is worth noting that I have not yet seen Smith’s data, as her research is being conducted completely independently of the research I am discussing here, and for ethical reasons and to maintain the independence of her analysis she has not revealed any of her findings to me to date. This means that I am fully aware that everything I say in this article may prove completely nullified in just under a year when Smith publishes her findings. Nonetheless as they employ a different methodology, different type of analysis and are of a much larger sample it still seems pertinent to discuss the Accidental Census now.)

The author jokingly posted the Census of Hallucinations question on Smith’s Facebook wall, where her friends could read it. To my amusement several responded with different accounts of personal appearances. Interested, I then posted the question on my own “wall”: more accounts were forthcoming. Realising we had the opportunity to collect some first hand narratives from people we knew, and easily conduct follow up research, we both refined the question and over a period of several months posted it again and again, and then developed a set of notes for interested friends to act as “collectors”, and to post the account on their “walls” and collect cases for us. This was done fairly informally, but by the time we ceased the project (as Smith was about to register for her Ph.D. and begin her own very different collection of narratives, which is conducted via the website www.strangesurvey.com) we had collected 62 accounts which met the criteria of the original SPR census. (Cases were excluded for a large number of reasons from the Census of Hallucinations, for example because the percipient was in bed and may have been asleep.). While the sample is clearly too small to allow for generalisations to be made, the cases covered North America, Continental Europe and the British Isles, and a wide range of experiences.

While this is hardly a sensible way to go about any kind of research, the serendipitous opportunity was in fact very close to the original SPR method. The SPR administered a questionnaire via “Collectors”, who generally asked the questions of people who were known to them. This was believed to reduce the possibility of deliberate hoaxing, and allow for the avoidance of informants known to be untruthful in such matters. In the Accidental Census the use of the social media site Facebook meant there was usually at least some relationship between the informant and the collector. Smith concluded, probably wisely, that this methodology was too innovative for her own research, and has instead used a more traditional web based questionnaire based upon the Census of Hallucinations to allow for a direct comparison.

What was striking about this small scale “accidental census” was how much it caused Smith and myself to question both popular beliefs concerning the ghost experience, and the theories in the parapsychological literature. Whereas I had formerly questioned telepathic models of the apparitional experience on the common sense objection that it was using one paranormal claim (ESP) to explain another (apparitions), after we completed the project the author came to question a large number of what I have termed “myths” regarding the apparitonal experience. However an obvious objection, beyond the very small size of the sample, arises – what if the ghost experience itself, or what is considered part of that experience has somehow changed in recent decades?

The Changing Face of the Ghost Experience

What was most striking was how similar many of the accounts were to classic apparitional accounts from the 1894 census. The wording of the question undoubtedly led to many of these similarities, but it seemed to us that apparitions still behaved much as they always had. However Wood (2008) has shown that the number of classic visual apparitions appears to be declining compared with earlier surveys in his census (with Nicky Sewell) of Swindon, Wiltshire. Drawing upon earlier work by Sewell and Gould on trends in the depiction of hauntings in popular television Wood argues compellingly that popular television depictions in reality T.V. ghosthunting shows (like the aforementioned Most Haunted) have influenced public perceptions of what constitutes a ghost experience. Researcher Trystan Swale has also identified what he perceives as a change in the phenomena reported in the last ten years, and again ascribes it to the influence of reality television shows concerning apparitions.

This may go some way towards explaining the press releases that accompanied the release of Dr. Richard Wiseman’s 2010 book Paranormality, where he reveals survey results that show much higher figures for the number of people claiming to have witnesses a “ghost” than earlier studies suggested. Today a photograph with an “orb” (an easily explained photographic anomaly that occurs on digital camera shots) or even a rustling of a plastic bag can often be interpreted as a ghost by those inclined to believe in them, and all the more so given the explosion of public interest in participating in “ghost hunts”, whether commercial such as those offered by several companies, or arranged by an enthusiastic “local group”. For the Accidental Census we excluded any report where the percipient was actively ghosthunting at the time of the experience, or which were based entirely on photographic anomalies, no matter how striking. Such social and cultural factors may be the cause of the decline of the reported apparition rather than any actual absence of traditional “ghosts”.

Still we must not take this too far just yet. A further possibility is reflected in the age of percipients at the time of the experience. Many experiences are reported from early childhood, and we chose to discard those where the percipient was aged ten or under at the time of the experience. Given a large number of these experiences were of visual apparitions, and that the average age of the census respondents is much older, this would if not taken in to account lead to a situation where it may appear that visual apparitions were more common in the past than in the most recent decade, if the average informant was over twenty. A second “spike” in the number of visual apparitions reported occurs around the ages of 17-21, so again, if the average informant was as in our study in their thirties, then it would again appear that visual apparitions were forming a smaller part of the reported experiences than they had in previous decades. It should be possible to check this hypothesis from the Haunted Swindon dataset.

A third possibility arose from the Accidental Census. It has long been suggested by researchers that genuine apparitonal experiences are what [psychologists term ‘flashbulb memories’. Wikipedia defines the term as “highly detailed, exceptionally vivid ‘snapshots’ of the moment and circumstances in which surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) news was heard.” I have heard both Caroline Watt and Patricia Robertson refer to how these events are supposedly never forgotten, and Jeff Belanger in his book Our Haunted Lives (2006) where he writes “…these are profound events, and they’ve been burned in to your long-term memory… Whether 5 or 50 years have gone by, the experience is still vivid.”

This has always puzzled me. I have had a few personal experiences that appeared to me to be paranormal, but as the years pass, I have clearly forgotten more and more about them, and when I come to write about them now I have to check back to my earlier writings. This is equally true for me of matters as diverse as when I first met people, what I was doing on 9/11, my first day at school, etc. Many seemingly important and dramatic events in my life, such as a car crash, I struggle to know recall at all, and I even forget who I was with in the car, let alone what the car looked like and how I felt during and after the crash as I lay trapped in the wreckage. I can imagine it, but I can’t actually remember much, beyond a friends joke as we were finally all pulled free, which just came to my mind as I typed these words. I suspect, but have no way to demonstrate, that the act of re-telling an event helps one recall it.

Perhaps some people do have “flashbulb memories”; the notion has been critiqued by psychologists, and I certainly do not seem to. Even in the original SPR Census it was noted that the longer the interviewer spoke to the informant, the more chance they would remember some incident that met the survey question. (Sidgwick, 1894). In fact the SPR Census found something odd; the number of recent reports, within the last year for example, was many times higher than the number of older reports. This effect was very evident in the Accidental Census, and during the conference presentation I showed a number of charts based upon the data to show how memories of paranormal experiences seem to fade over time, and/or people are far more likely to report recent phenomena. I tested this hypothesis by collecting 100 cases at random maintaining the gender bias of the three surveys (see below) I used from recent studies and then looking at time elapsed since the experience.

The ages of the informants provide a cap for the time that could have elapsed since the experience, which is obvious and means we can disregard the right hand part of the chart past age 30. There does however appear to be a clear relationship between gender and the time elapsed since the experience, perhaps suggesting that women are more likely to report recent experiences than men, who are more likely to recall events further back in time, perhaps in childhood. Given the very small size of the sample I have resisted the urge to draw further conclusions from this, and await with interest Smith’s data to see if the pattern is there demonstrated at a statistically significant level.

Two years ago I collected a small amount of survey data on somatosensory hallucinations – the sense of being touched when no one was present. 40% of respondents felt that had been “touched” in the last month, putting it sown to muscle twinges or mis-perception in the majority of cases. Yet few could remember having had the experience before (7%). This suggest strongly that minor experiences like this, or believing one hears one’s name named called, are very quickly forgotten. However such experiences are often considered “ghostly” in the correct context, as can be demonstrated by Smith (2008) where she studied 172 narratives of ghostly experiences of people in a hotel that had featured on the TV show Most Haunted, many of whom were there specifically to “ghost-hunt”, that were collected over a three year period.

My working hypothesis is that therefore visual hallucinations are more commonly remembered with the passing of time, and will therefore if the questionnaire used for the survey is open to physical effects and these more often forgotten phenomena, and if the context is correct (that is that a reputation for haunting is in place) already, then visual apparitions will crop up less as a percentage than in former decades. Looking at the Accidental Census data it does appear that visual apparitions are far more likely to be recalled after twenty years than any other category. Further research is of course needed, but I have come to severely question the “flashbulb memory” hypothesis when applied to paranormal experiences.

Are Ghosts Historic?

Something else of interest came up in the Accidental Census. Swale has suggested that in the past ghosts were often archetypal, of the brown monk, grey lady and phantom cavalier type. Such stories are certainly over represented in collections of British Folklore, but the author wondered if this might be because for an author writing a folklore collection these stories might be seen as reflecting genuine oral legends and historic material, and therefore be recorded while other apparitions, especially personal cases involving family members, were disregarded for genre reasons. I have closely examined the Census Report (1894) and find that perhaps the majority of apparitions appear in what was then modern dress, that is Victorian fashions, or those of the proceeding decades. Often even in the Census apparitonal clothing is noted as outdated such as the figure dressed in 1970′s Saturday Night Fever styles I researched in Suffolk following a sighting in the late 1980′s ; but this does not actually tell us much. A primary way in which the percipient becomes aware of the fact that the apparition is not of “this world” is the fact it is dressed in an archaic manner, so there may be a selection effect, in that apparitions dressed in contemporary manner may not be noted as apparitonal at all! Clothing of visual apparitions reported in the modern surveys was in most cases modern, with a small number of Victorian or “old fashioned” cases making up a minority. If my suggestion that it is the archaic nature of the dress that causes the apparition to draw attention and be noted as such, then I would speculate that such cases will be over represented in road ghosts cases and those reported in outside locations, as opposed to those in private homes, unless there is along history of haunting associated with the property.

Our census research seemed to show no particular association between the age of a property as far as known and the likelihood of a report, though Wood (2008) notes there may be such an effect in Swindon. I think the fairest conclusion would be that while old houses may well have more legends of haunting associated with them, spontaneous cases experiences can occur in buildings of any age, including in our sample several new builds. This again seems to testify against the Recording hypotheses as an explanation for apparitoonal experiences.

Where & When Can I See A Ghost?

The association of ghosts with stately homes, crumbling castles and lonely inns, while undoubtedly useful to the commercial; ghost night companies, does not appear to be borne out by the Accidental Census figures. One might expect “set and setting” to play a large part in producing expectation conducive to apparitonal experiences, yet in fact the locations where apparitions were reported were astonishingly mundane and prosaic. A detailed analysis must wait, but 70.5% of experiences reported when at home (including the garden). Of the remaining 29.5% when not at home almost a quarter happened while the percipient was in a car travelling. Only 16% of cases occurred outside. Other locations varied – a training course workshop, a park bench, two experiences in churches during services, a fashion show, and so forth. Only one – a burial mound overlooking Bristol – met the “spooky” criteria, and that was provided by the author himself.

Given you are much more likely it would appear to witness an apparition at home than anywhere else ( I am tempted to set up commercial ghost nights based on this premise, where interested parties can pay me to sleep in their beds with them to see if ghosts appear) it may be of interest to look at where the apparitions were seen.•53% occurred in the bedroom; 11% on the stairs, 8% in the kitchen, 6% in the Dining Room , and 5% in the Garden or Living Room. Other locations in the house get only one mention: curiously only two people reported an experience in the loo or bathroom.

As to when, in Wood (2008) Wood and Sewell discovered most visual apparitions occurred in the afternoon. In our sample 37% of sightings occurred during the day, but after removing cases associated with sleep paralysis and edge of sleep phenomena, we were left with 50% of cases occurring in daylight, and 50% in darkness. The sample was too small to be sure if this is significant, and there was no strong seasonal association, beyond a slight prevalence of cases in the summer months.

Three Theories of Apparitions

While it is tempting to continue to assail popular and academic theories of the apparitonal experience in the light of survey research, obviously much more work is needed. It seems fitting to instead offer a few highly speculative models of the apparitonal experience for future researchers to shoot down, based upon their own research. I will therefore offer three possible models that seem in keeping with the facts as I currently see them reported.

The first I shall call the Contextual Hypothesis. In a previous article (Romer 1996) I suggested that cases of haunting are often best considered as a series of potentially unrelated incidents, that become a “haunting” by being mis-associated with each other. It is as I noted earlier no great surprise that even healthy people hallucinate, and once someone in a property has seen a figure, then minor phenomena of the type frequently reported instead of being mildly puzzling and quickly forgotten are woven in to the narrative of a “ghost”, and a haunting story develops that is far greater than the sum of its parts. This sceptical and naturalistic hypothesis is supported by some modern research, where persons asked to keep a journal of unusual incidents reported a large array of minor phenomena. (Houran 1996)

A second model is similar, but is based on the idea that humans may possess psi abilities, ESP that includes the potential for psychokinesis. I have developed this at length in unpublished writings, and refer to it as the Psi-de Effect Hypothesis. If psi exists, then we might expect that normally there would be some resistance to manifesting effects that were visible and noticeable to the agent; after all we all “know” it is simply impossible. My psi-de effects ideas suggest that once a place has a reputation for haunting, people may actually haunt themselves, moving objects, picking up information by ESP and hallucinating figures, and manifesting the ghostly activity by their own psi powers. Of course this theory explain a miracle by invoking another miracle, but it does explain why different phenomena seem to be associated with different groups of investigators, even in the same location. The contextual hypothesis arguably does this just as well.

The third hypothesis I propose is nothing new at all: it is the Invisible Intelligences Hypothesis. Perhaps after all these years of research and theorising we are no closer to a scientific theory of ghosts than we were in 1882, and it really is just “dead guys”, daemonic entities or the similar. I am aware that hypotheses about spirits and discarnate entities are immensely unfashionable in parapsychology, and often how parapsychologist differentiate themselves from the popular ghosthunting mob is by their sophisticated and convoluted models. I can not help but feel however that Invisible Intelligences remains far more in keeping with the evidence we find in the accounts than many of the theories that academic parapsychologist have promulgated, no matter how disreputable they may be.

An End Note

It came as a great relief while writing this piece to discover that almost every one who has made a detailed study of apparitions actually agrees with me that they are associated with physical phenomena, though few have expressed it as strongly as Alan Gauld did. It was even more of a relief to find that ASSAP Chair David Wood (2008) found physical effects in 50% of his census cases. I would just like to take this chance to thank ASSAP for the opportunity to address the 30^th anniversary conference and to publish this paper based upon that talk, and the marvellous audience who did not lynch me after my somewhat controversial statements on apparitonal research. If any reader is interested in conducting their own detailed analysis or case collections of this type, I would encourage them to write to me if they feel I could offer any support. Until Rebecca Smith’s Ph.D. research is published I can not say if my speculations in this paper will stand or not, but I also wish to thank her for her kind assistance over the years. I would like to thank Rebecca Smith, Rosie Freeman and Tom Ruffles for reading drafts of this paper, and my anonymous reviewer from ASSAP: all their feedback was invaluable.

References

Anon (1928) Case of the Will of Mr James L Chaffin, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 36, 517-24.

Belanger, J. (2006) Our Haunted Lives, Career Press, New Jersey.

Bell, V, Halligan, P, Pugh. K, Freeman, D (2011) Correlates of Perceptual Distortions in Clinical and Non-Clinical Populations using the Cardiff Anomalous Perceptions Scale (CAPS), Psychiatry Research, (In Press).

Braithwaite, J, Townsend, M, (2005) Sleeping with the Entity -A Quantitative Magnetic Investigation of an English Castles “Haunted” Bedroom in the European Journal of Parapsychology, 201, 65-78.

Braude, Stephen E. (1996: revised edition) The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis & and the Philosophy of Science, University Press of America, Lanham, Maryland.

Evans, Hilary (2002), Seeing Ghosts, John Murray, London.

Gauld, A, Cornell, A, (1979) Poltergeists, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

Grattan-Guinness, I. (1982) Psychical Research: A Guide To Its History, Principles and Practices, Society for Psychical Research, 1982.

Green, C., and McCreery, C. (1975). Apparitions. London: Hamish Hamilton

Gurney, E., Myers, F.W.H. and Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the Living, Vols. I and II. Trubner and Co. London.

Hart, Hornell, (1956) Six Theories About Apparitions, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 50, 153-239.

Houran, J., Wiseman, R., and Thalbourne, M. (2002). Perceptual-personality characteristics associated with naturalistic haunt experiences. European Journal of Parapsychology, 17, 17-44.

Lange, R, Houran, J. Harte, T. Havens, R. Contextual Mediation of Perceptions in Haunting and Poltergeist-like Experiences, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 82, 755-62.

McCue, Peter (2002), Theories of Haunting: A Critical Overview, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 66, 866.

Morton, R.C. (1892) Record Of a Haunted House, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research,8,1311-32.

Myers, F.W.H. (1903). Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death. London: Longmans Green.

Playfair, Guy Lyon, (1980) This House Is Haunted: the Investigation of the Enfield Poltergeist, Stein & Day, London.

Roach, M, (2007), Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife, Canongate, London. (First published in America as Spook in 2005.)

Rogo, D. Scott, (1979), The Poltergeist Experience, Penguin, Harmindsworth.

Roll, W.G. (1979). The Poltergeist. New York: Paraview

Romer, C. Jensen, The Poverty of Theory: Some Notes on the Investigation of Spontaneous Cases, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 61, 161-163

Savani, Krishna; Kumar, Satishchandra; Naidu, N. V. R.; Dweck, Carol S. (2011)”Beliefs about emotional residue: The idea that emotions leave a trace in the physical environment”.in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 684-701.

Sidgwick, Eleanor; Johnson, Alice; and others (1894). Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 10.

Smith, R. (2008) A Grounded Theory Analysis of Anomalous Events at a Purportedly Haunted Location, MSc dissertation, Coventry University Library.

Spencer, John and Anne, (1997) The Poltergeist Experience: An Investigation Into Psychic Disturbance, Headline, London.

Stevenson, I. (1972) Poltergeists: Are They Living or Are They Dead?, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,

Tyrrell, G. N. M. (1943), Apparitions. Gerald Duckworth, London.

Wilson, Colin, (1981) Poltergeist, New English Library , London.

Wiseman, R., Watt, C., Greening, E., Stevens, P. & O’Keeffe, C. (2002). An investigation into the alleged haunting of Hampton Court Palace: Psychological variables and magnetic fields. Journal of Parapsychology, 66(4), 387-408.

Wiseman, R., Watt, C., Stevens, P., Greening, E. & O’Keeffe, C. (2003). An investigation into alleged ‘hauntings’. The British Journal of Psychology, 94, 195-211

West, D.J. (1948) Mass-Observation Questionnaire on Hallucinations. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 34, 187-196

West, D.J. (1990) A Pilot Census of Hallucinations. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 57 (215), 163-207

West, D.J. (1995) Notes on a Recent Psychic Survey. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 60 (838), 168-171

Wood, D. (2007) “Stone Tape Theory: An Explanation”. Paranormal Site Investigators.

Wood, D. (2008) Where Have All The Apparitions Gone? Conclusions of a census of hauntings. Paranormal Review, 46, 10-13.

I know, I know. I’m meant to hate the rich, being by our standards poor.  And at times the bitterness and resentment does well up in me; but I no more resent the average CEO or company director their pay than I resent Chery Cole, Adele, Gary Lineker or David Beckham their money. I don’t really go for three of the above (and the one I like makes crisp ads in case you were wondering) but they are at the top of their businesses, and do well for themselves. Hurrah!  The reason I am poor is I don’t work very much, and don’t have the opportunities, or the luck, others have.  By sheer luck, by supreme effort, and by having been born wealthy, some will always have more than me. In fact given how I live, an almost incredible amount more.  I have friends I see often who earn ten times what I do, but are not well off and indeed moan frequently about having no money. One of my friends owns two houses;  his net wealth is perhaps a hundred times my own. According to Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety that should make me feel really insecure and bad: on the contrary, I’m really pleased he has done so well.

The truth is it is not high pay that concerns me. It is low pay.

Women still receive 10% less than men for the same jobs, and 299,000 people in the UK do not receive the legal minimum wage they are entitled to.  That is absolutely shocking. These are things we should be concerned about, not how wealthy a few company directors are. Even if we put the richest CEO’s who earn 75 times the median wage for their organizations up against a wall and shoot them, that would still be what another £50 a year to each employee?  Sure, I can see how a Scandinavian limit on earnings based on the median drives up the wages of the lowest paid – problem is if we instituted it here the would just outsorce more and more jobs I think, to contractors or abroad, to avoid having low paid employees on the payroll.

Turkeys Voting For Christmas

Now I’m sure for a professional body that represents directors to criticize director’s pay there must be something wrong with it and it really must be unsustainable, and to be fair the IoD is a standards body.  Economically I guess they understand the business community better than I will.  Most directors will never care that I am often left wondering where my next weeks groceries are coming from, or can’t afford to pay the Council Tax until I’m paid for a project, and struggle. I really should not feel sympathy for them. And compared with the “millions of hard working Brits” the papers often talk of, many of whom can only get part time minimum wage jobs, I don’t feel that much sympathy for the really well paid. Yet I can’t bring myself to hate them either.

It all feels like bullying. And yes, of course I blame the government, the Daily Mail, and the sadistic urges to punish that the British public seems to be reveling in and which is better confined to their kinky bedroom games than taken out on the unemployed, the long term sick, youth or whoever this weeks bogeyman is.  Bankers, who I have despised for decades before it became fashionable, are now such pariahs I wonder how they sleep at night (“with beautiful ladeez on piles of money” is probably the reply.)  Yet most people involved in banking were not investment bankers, and were not responsible for the crash, and of those who were, I guess a few actually contributed rather a lot to the national wealth. Certainly a lot sacrifice their family, friendships and health (and probably their souls ) to the ridiculous hours needed to make it in the City, and I can’t help feeling sorry for them.

Medical Madness

Yet the papers revel in all this, and in the sickening bullying of the disabled and long term sick by the government. Look, we all know about the ATOS thing, and about how now apparently doctors are fine to administer the Health Service but aren’t competent to actually say if someone is sick and should be off work or not. This strikes me as something very close to insanity, and rightfully an awful lot of people are furious, about both aspects. Yet kicking the “sicko scroungers” (or the most  deserving, vulnerable types in our society) has been hailed by the right wing press as masterful politics. It’s not: it’s something that if I was a politician and responsible for while handing out money to housing developers to save the property bubble that has rendered our economy utterly unstable would make me think heavily about investing in Factor 300 suncream and a pitchfork-proofed shroud for my sojourn in the afterlife…

In the House…

I’m all in favour of building new homes. Subsidized mortgages;  fair enough though the tax payer taking the risk will only benefit those on fairly high (by my standards very high) incomes. The restored  right to buy your council house at massive discounts, while it will create some wealthy stakeholders in society from the disadvantaged will ultimately benefit the developers who approach Martha and Joe and offer to front the money to buy their council house and then let them live there, but who on their deaths will inherit a very desirable and once publicly owned property and make a very nice profit.  Still, that’s nothing like the scandal of Housing Benefit; the scandal being it acts as a way to subsidize low pay for millions of working people, to the benefit of shit employers and at huge cost to everyone in Council Tax.  The only way round that is to raise the minimum wage, surely?

Representin’ the Private Sector!

Enough! I shall become as much a bully as those I despise. I’m angry, in a mellow kind of way, because of the utter insanity of this punitive attitude that evil doers are ruining the country, and we must take away their benefits/bonuses/sick pay whatever. It may be a reflection of Old Testament covenant theology, where God withholds his grace from the nation when the people turn to sin; but it has nothing to do with Christian compassion, common decency, or the genuine struggle for a more equal access society.  We are encouraged to engage in Public Sector/Private Sector bickering, like an East Coast/West Coast gangsta rapper dispute, and ignore the fact that the reason the Private Sector has shit pay and conditions is that it is almost un-unionized in comparison. You want Public Sector level pensions? Join a union, organize a mass recruitment campaign, get recognized, get negotiating. It is that simple. If your employer tries to illegally suppress unionization, fight them in the courts, or however else you can. Stand up for your rights, demand minimum pay, proper conditions. Be vocal, not a sap. That is the way forward, not moaning about Directors pay.

And if you are really upset about Director’s pay, compare your pay with others doing the same job in your workplace. It may be that it is performance linked, or it may be based on terms of service, but plenty of people are earning ten thousand a year less than the person sitting next to them. So discuss it. It may be against your contract, check, but there are always way to get round this. Bear in mind however that if you have an annual performance review, your pay may vary based on that rather than any unfair prejudice against you, but if you think you have a case then raise it.

Talking ’bout My Generation…

OK, so I come from a generation of disaffected cynical beatnik losers. Well something narrower than a generation – the school leavers/graduates of 1990, who like the class of 1979 emerged in to a hostile economic climate that basically took our career aspirations, stamped all over them and then urinated on the fragments.  When employers talk about “graduate jobs” they lie — they mean “new graduate jobs”, almost always. They don’t want someone with five years on the dole queue, serving fast food or stacking shelves – they want a shiny fresh faced kid straight from uni.

By the time the economic situation changed and bust turned to boom we were too old, too hairy, the grunge generation with no future.  The class of 1979, 1991, 2008 – all kids who will forever struggle because they had the misfortune to be born in the wrong years, and to leave school or uni when no one wanted them. Look at the statistics, and it will bear me out I’m pretty certain. We were ******* by chronology, the cycle of boom and bust, and that we will carry that through our lives, and earn significantly on average less than those entering the workplace a few years either side of us.  A few will excel, but it’s harder for us. Yes I like to whinge.

However, now the Government has turned its sights on Youth Unemployment, a worthy goal, and they have effectively re-invented New Labour’s scheme they cancelled a year or two back (soon after taking power) but it has been proclaimed across the land as a new and exciting thing. (See Channel 4 Fact Check for why there  is very little new here .) Yet there is something almost hypocritical about all this, that no one is commenting on, because to do so will be to seem to attack pensioners and hard working brits…

The Young & The Old.

When the government announced plans to allow large numbers of young unemployed to do up to three months work in supermarkets or other jobs to gain experience for their CV’s, entirely unpaid (though they can still get their JSA), there was an outcry. Now at 30 hours a week, that is 360 hours per youngster that employers could get for free; very popular with employers, but hard to see why they would then go on to employ any of them at maybe £13,000 a year when they can get another JSA claimant to work for free. Well done chaps, you have re-invented some kind of indentured service, without any final reward. Slavery I think you call it?

Still it keeps the kids off the streets. Now the plan seems much more tepid – we are not going to give free labour to employers, instead we are going to pay them minimum wage, but twenty billion has been set aside to pay half their wages on behalf of the private companies that are going to “train” them and employ them in the short term. Woo! At a time of massive cuts in public spending and the decimation of the public sector we are going to subsidize private companies to the tune of twenty billion. Huzzah! Three cheers for the government!

Yet, having just moaned about my generation, I can actually see the logic. We need to do something for our young people. Yet discrete inquiries suggests that already a lot of older people working for minimum wage fear losing their jobs, to be replaced by this cheap labour. And I fear an awful lot of them will be part time workers in shops and supermarkets who have passed retirement age, but are supplementing their income by doing a job they have loved and have twenty or more years experience in.  They will be booted out, to be replaced by workers who cost half the amount, the government taking up the slack. And you can see the governments point – these people have State Pensions, whereas the million 16-24 year olds not in jobs or training are facing a future of quiet desperation unless they take these jobs.

Yet this is insanity. Not just for the human cost to those who will be replaced by these lovely youfs (who won’t be half as productive I guess!) but because the government has abolished the mandatory retirement age to allow people to so just this, keep working, and had repeatedly brought forward the raising of the pension age. If you are actually serious about getting these kids in to work you would pursue the opposite strategy – reduce the pension age to 60, and fund pensioners properly in their retirement off the wages of these bright young things. You can’t have it both ways. This way the supermarket becomes the bad guy, and the older generation still end up forced out of the workplace, but the Job Centres had best prepare for a silver haired influx.

It’s all X’s Fault!

None of this makes sense to me, but the British public still clamour for more punitive measures, for the sick, the young, the vulnerable and the doleys to be hit hard, and despite the inherent contradictions in what exactly doctors know about, whether we should be working longer or not, and whether the fault is the rich or the poor, all we get is bread, circuses and blood on the amphitheater floor. And the public bay for more, as tabloids scream against almost everyone in mounting hysteria.

Sometimes I think we get the politicians we deserve.

by Every Science Staff Reporter Everywhere

Astonishing new results that may suggest that the Standard Model, Common Sense and Randi’s Law have all been violated have been reported from the Gloucestershire basement lab of Dr Jerome Jeromesen (East Cheams Diploma Mill) in his latest zener card trials with Wiccan High Priestess & well known celebrity psychic Tanya Fluffyjugs.

In a set of 25 card guesses Miss Fluffyjugs, attractive mother of six, 27, was able to guess the right symbol an astonishing seven times instead of the five suggested by chance. If this was repeated one hundred more times, and the data holds up to scrutiny, then it may approach the one sigma level of probability, which scientists assure us means they can perform simple arithmetic involving Standard Deviations.

Dr Jerome assures us that he was just running out of funding for his project involving getting attractive young women wrecked on Blue Nun and then making them play Strip Zener when the breakthrough occurred, and while the preceding forty trials had only resulted in his being slapped around the face thirty nine times, and a police investigation, it does seem like that Miss Fluffyjugs has given us a fascinating new insight in to the New Physics.

“It seems we are all connected by a telepathic super sense” said Dr Jerome, who has postulated a new particle, the wouon (pronounced “woo – on”) to explain his amazing results. “While these are early days, I am confident that by Christmas 2012 we will all spend all day in bed doing our work by psychokinesis and social networks like Facebook will be replaced by Super-ESP networks which will allow us to telepathically rifle each others underwear drawers and order pizza without leaving the room.”

“Of course these are early days, and my £85 billion pound National Lottery Grant application is still pending, but I hope to be able to finance much more work with modelling agencies, strip joints and top psi labs around the world to allow us to reach the crucial one sigma level of verifcation needed before we get too excited. Technically, these results could still be down to chance” he stated as he adjusted his mirror shades.

“Still we are sure we can rule out sensory leakage in the and guessing experiments and most forms of experimental error, as I never touched the wine at all!” Star Psychic Miss Fluffyjugs was unavailable for comment as she was nursing a hangover, but noted psi- researcher Donnis Debacle did state that these results were “intriguing” and say that he was hoping to conduct further work personally with the lady in question. The LHC declined to comment, saying that they had several equally promising options that may rewrite physics.

NEXT: How unlicensed psychic experiments might destroy Christmas…

EDIT: Just an amused reaction to the constant hype of  scientific research in press a moment!

Memory…

(and I **won’t** swear I did not have a gun…)

This seems like a good time to reflect; I have an update on the Sally Morgan story later if I have time; but for now, I’m going to think back twenty years to when a miracle occurred. As I joked on Twitter and Facebook, twenty years ago I was for a short period considered sexy and fashionable, and college girls chased me. As this is actually almost unbelievable, I’m going to talk about how it happened…

Christmas 1995, CJ at a formal due. This was what my hair was like throughout the late 80's when Tom Cruise was God of Fashion

While I was born in the Summer of ’69, grew up in the drab greyness of the 1970′s, I hit twelve in 1981.  So I guess the first acts I ever loved were Blondie, Kim Wilde, Adam & the Ants, Abba, The Carpenters,  Dexy’s Midnight Runners and oddly perhaps Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Soft Cell. All great artistes, but by 1985 when I met Hugh Wake I had been heavily influenced by Axel Johnston’s tastes, so punk bands and indie pop were important to me. The Smiths, The Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, etc. Axel introduced me to two bands who were to have an overwhelming influence on me – David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase, and as I already loved Bauhaus from their 1982 cover of Ziggy Stardust that was a natural progression, and the biggest influence of all Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

SO I started to get in to music, and after a while I stumbled across the Beatles, from my sisters old records still hanging round the house, and then I’m still not sure how I one day decided to try Jefferson Airplane, and never looked back. So while the lower sixth were getting in to Goth, and I was a huge fan of the Mission, Cure and Sisters of Mercy, I was also listening more and more to 60′s psychedelic bands.

Why is this relevant? Because by 1987 I had grown my hair long, and resisted the urge to wear all black (though I often did), and was more an more wearing flares, experimenting with tie dye and generally getting more and more hippy. By the time i went to uni in September 1987 I had already taken to adding “…man!” to every sentence and talking like a stoner, even though I wasn’t one. Still in 1987 I arranged a few “Happenings” in Fullwood Halls of what is now the University of Gloucestershire, and painted my bike a bit more white before I ran out of Humbrol Enamel, announced property was theft and left it unlocked telling people they could use it to go from campus to campus. It lasted a couple of terms; meanwhile my CD collection, which was large for the time, and my room became open property anyone could use. To the credit of my fellow students, it worked well.

I was reading more and more about the Levellers and the Diggers in the English Civil War, communes in the counter culture in the 19th century, anarchism and anything I could lay my hands on on the 60′s SF Haight-Ashbury scene. the twenty year anniversary of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Heart’s Club Band in summer 1987 was almost a religious celebration to me; and the quiet Bury St Edmunds lad became more and more a freaky hippy.  My room reeked of joss sticks, and I was more and more wildly Romantic. It was about this time Dave Curtin labelled me “the Byronic Man”, as I started to read Coleridge, Huxley and as much as I could on philosophy of religion, mysticism and Magick. “Do what thou wilt with the hole in the floor!” said a sign on the door of my room, B36, and the Christian Union became more and more concerned about both my bad jokes and the curious passion I had for Aleister Crowley’s wicked sense of humour and in contrast the radical Nazarene. My discovery of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement occurred about this point — I was now a full flung student anarchist hippy idealist Romantic.

CJ in his attempt to look respectable for work, early' 1990s.

In short I had become the epitome of an late sixties/early seventies student, at a time when style was rigorously dictated by the film Top Gun; military short hairstyles, shorts, jackets and chino; yuppie was in with filofaxes, and Rick Astley, Jason Donovan and Kylie dominated the charts with the wonders of Stock Aitken and Waterman, week after week of what now strike me as brilliant perfectly crafted pop.  I was completely outside the mainstream – there were not even any goths around that I knew, and only the metal fan Mark Leech had long hair, his much longer than mine. Looking at a picture of Dave Curtin from those days he looks a bit like Nik Kershaw, at least hair wise!

When Hugh arrived at uni, we were the long haired scruffy freaks, I wearing oddly misshapen baggy M&S pullovers or chunky knit black wool over torn faded and often painted jeans, with flowers and Pop Will Eat Itself logos mixed with New Model Army and All About Eve imagery. I briefly took on a Joy Division inspired look after I discovered C&A sold a range of black shirts, and while in my second year we studied Origins of Communism and Fascism, but I was always an anarchist at heart. Ultimately though I dressed like the poorest elements of Working Class Suffolk; my clothes if I had topped them with a Massey Ferguson cap were those of the agricultural labourers I grew up with, with a hippy accessories. Hell I even wore bells from time to time!

I’m not gonna crack…

And I found God…

About 1989 I got my first leather bikers jacket, later painted around 1993 with a Futurist style piece of art by Polly, with a quote from Laibach. Yet I never consciously thought about fashion as far as I know: while formality and looking “up market” and affluent became more and more popular, I inadvertently drifted in to a style that was to become famous as Grunge. I had no idea what was happening in Seattle – I was listening to the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and other obscure 60′s psychedelic bands. I had absolutely no idea of the Madchester scene, and that others were going the same way: Marcus played me some early Inspiral Carpets, but my one concession to modern music was Pop Will Eat Itself, and I really had no idea what was happening  outside the confines of my small Church college.

Give It Away…

The imagery is so Huxleyian/Castanedasque: Heaven & Hell…

I’m not going to talk about my girlfriends etc; it’s irrelevant. But in 1991 with the release of Nevermind (though it took a good year before it hit our college I think) I was suddenly gloriously and briefly in fashion, and in the early 1990′s I went from being terrified of women to being utterly petrified, as suddenly girls, strange frightening creatures who had always ignored me (and I them – I hit puberty very late!) started to pursue me. I was lucky I had a very sweet girlfriend, who I think I am still friends with today, and was often oblivious to all the attention. Hugh Wake actually dealt with the attention in very amusing ways, with some of the best lines ever that he adopted I think to scare off the indie girls — but it would be unfair to tell the story of the Angry Young Woman, and whose unfortunately brilliant inadvertent put down. Happy times!

Yes I looked awful back then!

And what did I think of Nirvana? As far as I know I had never heard of  grunge, the Lemonheads, the Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, etc, just as I was almost oblivious to the Stone Roses and the Madchester scene.  By the middle of 1993 I was night clubbing most nights of the week, and by 1994/95 I was an occasional DJ, but really I had very little idea of popular culture back then. So I am the worst person in the world to tell you what Grunge meant to the mainstream, because I had no idea. As my hippy idealism waned, and I struggled to work out how to cope with the “real world” post-uni, and I became utterly disenchanted with drugs and radicalism, I retreated in to something like what I have become today. I have always been a little non-conformist, bohemian perhaps, though that may be far too strong a word for someone who is essentially very mild mannered and quite happy to let others live as they please, and prone to occasional burst of wild energy and dangerous enthusiasms — but Grunge really meant nothing to me.

I knew the Lulu version of Bowie’s song…

but I was “closer to the Golden Dawn, immersed in Crowley’s uniform of imagery…”

Looking back on it, I think Nirvana were one of the greatest all -time bands, and Kurt Cobain a fine artist and poet. Sturm und Drang, or whatever the funny old Germans call it. I was a confused victim of their popularity, seen as ahead of fashion, a trail blazer, hip, cool and event to some misguided ladies sexy.  I wasn’t,  I just was being what I was, and had finally dropped all the hippy stuff, and dropped the Ziggy-esque roles I had cultivated, and had emerged in to adulthood scruffy, bedraggled, unshaved and somewhat slightly dazed. I was no innovator: I was simply clueless.

The one Red Hod Chilli Pepper’s song everyone knows, from Blood Sugar Sex Magik

(with one of the best playouts in rock…)

So twenty years ago today the world changed on me, and it took me a decade to realize why I suddenly could talk to women and actually really liked them, and to be convinced I was, to some attractive. But if you ask me what Nirvana meant to me: it meant nothing, for I was oblivious.

Such are the accidents that make up a personality and a life. A small town boy, average in every respect, I owe a lot to Nirvana…

(and here to end the first grunge track I ever heard…)

“most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids…”

cj x

Now Facebook have done an interesting revision, and  a small blue box in the corner of my screen constantly updates me with all my friends comments to other friends. Of course this only effects wall postings etc, mot private messages — and you can only see people set to “public” or “friends of friends” posts. Still I may well now change my settings back for privacy — but in the meantime I am having fun.

It started when I suddenly began to see the possibilities. I have long been a fan of Saki, HH Munro,and one of his best lines came to me. In Saki’s short story Tobermory a cat is taught to speak English, and his sardonic observations on the things he has witnessed cause havoc at a country house party. The line I thought of was this…

Miss Scrawen, who wrote fiercely sensuous poetry and led a blameless life, merely displayed irritation; if you are methodical and virtuous in private you don’t necessarily want everyone to know it.

So what if my friends of friends suddenly became convinced I was a wild girl-whipping goat-rustling bigfoot-faking desperado? I suddenly saw the potential – now  I could get a reputation as a wild rake, lover and daredevil, and all without leaving my keyboard. I may be a Church Times reading Anglican who falls over after a single glass of wine, and hardly ever says boo to a goose, but now my Facebook alter ego could be something amazing. All I had to do was cultivate on my friends comments. Now of course “friends of friends” have always been able to read my comments on the mutual friends wall, but the problem was when I posted about just getting back from running my Yeti-Massage course in the wilds of the Appalachians, some might point out this was utter bullshit.  Now I saw a way of publicizing my (fictional) life of vice! Of course I would have to create fictional Facebook friends and get them linked to people – against the Terms & Conditions – or would I?

So I decided to try &  started, confident that thousands of friends of friends would prefer the new bogus, CJ! My first post was rather mild –

This Facebook thing where you can see your friends comment with people you don’t know is a ludicrous thing. I know want to invent a couple of imaginary friends, make them Facebook accounts and then post about all the orgies, goat rustling, & bank robberies and so forth we are committing. Just because your personal life is dull and blameless does not mean you want the world to know. Now I can create my own scandals!

And my friend Vicky replied “go for it!” Her friends clearly deserved to know more, so I responded…

You remember the time you Hugh and I dressed up as aliens to abduct Traffic Wardens before selling them to the Welsh? Now all your friends and mine know about this sordid episode, lol!

You can see where this is going? Vicky chose to expose Vampire Hunting in Pittville, so I responded with

Yes, but that was nothing compared with the naked roller derby around Dudley with members of several Boy Bands and the Girl Guides…

until eventually we reached the nadir of

Yes indeed, very true. But for now I am happy that my thirty year obsession with the Bay City Rollers will finally be public knowledge, and that the fact that I faked the infamous Beechwood Arcade Yeti footage is inadvertently revealed to hundreds  of friends of friends!

OK, all very childish. But one really could character assassinate a “friend” this way. Then a new idea struck me –

I am resisting the urge to spend the rest of the day commenting on what a fine game Ars Magic rpg by Atlas Games is on all my friends posts just to engage in guerrilla marketing on Facebook and make them realize how this new system of showing people you don’t knows comments is open to abuse and will cost them marketing revenue!

Serious point really. You see you could just comment on peoples posts something like the following…

oh and I just enjoyed a cool refreshing PEPSI while eating a KRISPY KREME donut. Now for a fabulous pint of CARLINGbefore I jump in a HONDA CIVIC and dash off to watch CHERYL COLE in concert. Hell once they realise this is a guerilla marketers wet dream they will stop it?

Anyway it”s all rather amusing, but I guess I’ll change my settings to friends only. But still, where there are new features there are always ways to play with the, and my wicked wanton and wayward persona is now well established in the shocked minds of anyone who pays any attention to the little blue box, if anyone does, and I am happy for that. If one is fairly virtuous in public one does not want the world to know – so I call this “the Tobermory Effect”.