Ghosts: Working Notes (Part 3)

“When we play at cards you use an extra sense
(it’s really not cheating)
You can read my hand, I’ve got no defense“

Blondie, I’m Always Touched by Your Presence Dear.

I’m currently working through my current thinking on ghosts and sharing my ideas in the hope they will provoke some discussion and new ideas. Dr David Sivier is responding on his blog and others have commented: because of limited time I’m not responding to every comment immediately as some will be addressed in future pieces.

Please do jump in and get involved!

In part one and two I made considerable reference to the telepathic theory of ghosts promulgated by the early SPR researchers. Frederic Myers actually coined the phrase “telepathy” to describe the thought transference he and Gurney initially suspected as being the basis for apparitional experience as described in part one.

As I have already mentioned there are two immediately obvious and potentially fatal objection to the telepathic spook hypothesis: one is physical phenomena, where a ghost moves an item or opens a door, and the second would be a sound recording or photograph of a ghost. In the telepathic hypothesis ghosts are entities of mind stuff without material substance — so they don’t create sound waves or reflect photons.

I don’t find the second particularly difficult as so-called ghost photos are often frustratingly awful. In fact that might give us a clue as to how any genuine examples are created: direct to film or digital media by the mind, creating blurry Serios type images. Sadly fraud and wishful thinking seem more likely.

The first category, physical phenomena seemingly originating from ghosts is a far bigger problem. Long ago I found myself in a hotel room with a beautiful blonde lady: and naturally I therefore immediately felt a strong urge to review a large selection of spontaneous case reports. We both fell apart still reading them, but while romance was definitely not the winner we did make an important realisation – case reports of phenomena actually encountered in real hauntings were closer to the kind of thing seen on “Most Haunted” than the academic literature of the SPR theorists.

So why did Myers and Gurney neglect physical phenomena like beds shaking, knocking and raps, objects moving or even appearing and disappearing? Well firstly they did not entirely — they put them in a different category from apparitions, the poltergeist. Hence ever since physical phenomena are ascribed to poltergeists, and visual appearances to ghosts; apples and oranges, different creatures.

Why? I’ve written about it in several papers now but the early SPR was founded by William Barrett and others who were sympathetic in many ways to mediumistic phenomena, but handed to Sidgwick, Gurney and Myers who were soon publishing exposures of fraud, largely revolving around fake physical mediumship. The early SPR was seen as a debunking sceptical and prejudiced group by many of the more Spiritualistically inclined members, and the SPR inner circle sidelined Barrett, Stainton Moses and Stead’s circle leading eventually to the schism where 200 or more members left to found what would become the London Spiritualist Alliance.

The SPR and particularly Frank Podmore were however sympathetic to thought transference and to the “higher phenomena” as they termed mental mediumship, while suspecting physical phenomena were mainly fraud. Experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance suggested to them they were dealing with a genuine unknown force: they were inclined to explain ghosts in terms of it.

In fact in the Census of Hallucinations the SPR firstly betray their theoretical basis in the name; and secondly do not ask about physical phenomena associated with ghosts.

“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

As such the scope of the study that proved the cornerstone on theoretical work on ghosts ever since – Tyrrell, Green & McCreery, Evans, Smith etc etc was consciously or not designed to exclude physical phenomena. (Curiously something very similar is happening in the media today – I will return to this in a future piece).

So following this theoretical separation ghosts and poltergeists have been treated separately, and reported as if distinct. As soon as I got actively involved with Psychical Research in 1987 I began to suspect this distinction was false: by 1994 I had coined “polterghost” for a category of cases with strong overlaps. In fact though I did not realise it at the time Cornell and Gauld in their book Poltergeists (1979) had already effectively demonstrated this with the computerised cluster analysis. So is the telepathic ghost without legs, or sheets?

Not necessarly: if we accept General ESP then along with telepathy we allow for psychokinesis, or if you prefer telekinesis. Telekinesis is the movement of an object at a distance: psychokinesis is the same but implies a mind is the cause. (Telekinesis is preferable as theory neutral but psychokinesis usually abbreviated to PK is the more common usage). If a ghost can be created by a telepathic impulse, well you can theoretically move any item by PK. Again it is the witness, the percipient who actually does this using their own psychic powers, perhaps at the subtle prompting of the ghost.

So what if like I do you reject the division between ghosts and poltergeists seeing them as phenomena on a broad spectrum? Well this explains that, whereas the classic SPR division sees ghosts as manifestations of telepathy and poltergeists as RSPK (recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis).

The problem with these theories is that we “solve” one set of mysteries by invoking another – human psychical powers, ESP (extrasensory perception). Unfortunate the heat has given me a headache so I’m going to leave it here for today and post again tomorrow.