A New Book on Apparitions

      I started this blog with the aim of collecting reports which were in danger of being forgotten, in the hope that, in the aggregate, they might form a pattern. Well, I have now managed to see some sort of pattern - one of which I wasn't aware initially - so I have now collected it into a book. It is called Apparitions: tulpas, ghosts, fairies, and even stranger things, and it is available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle e-book form. Much of it has already been published, but a whole lot more is new: collated from both nineteenth and twentieth century sources. With 213 endnotes, it is fully documented.

The Ghost That Stumbled

     In the movie, Ghost Patrick Schwayze, deceased was shown by a more experienced ghost how to move small objects by psychokinesis. It figures; a ghost has no flesh and bones, so how can it pick up items? For that matter, how can you even see one, since it has no body to bounce light off? Terry White (The Sceptical Occultist) suggested an apparition may be a psychic manifestation, given that occasionally it is visible to one person but not another. But how do they make sounds? To my knowledge - I may need correction - ghostly footsteps are not audible to one person but inaudible to another. What is pounding the floor? And what if you could make a ghost involuntarily collide with something?

She Saw Dead People

     So called "sensitives", who can detect ghosts, are not much use in psychical research. The reason is not that it is unlikely (if you are prepared to believe in ghosts), but simply that it is normally impossible to confirm their evidence. After all, if everybody in the room sees a particular apparition, there is a rebuttable assumption that it has an objective existence. However, if only one person claims to have seen it, it may indicate that he is "psychic", but it may also mean that he is (a) lying, (b) self-deluded, or (c) crazy. The situation becomes even more nebulous when it concerns, not seeing the ghost, but merely "sensing" it.
     Just the same, there do appear to have been good cases where an apparition was seen by one person, but not another. (Here, for example.) I have recorded a couple in my posts of May 2012 and February 2012. In the latter case, you may recall, a visitor saw the apparition while the owner saw nothing, but the alleged psychics were more or less ineffective. If ghosts are psychic manifestations, then it may well be that one person, because of his or her frame of mind at the time, may be more attuned to it than others (particularly when they are children), and perhaps some people are permanently in that condition.

Haunted - But Not By Ghosts

     As I pointed out once before, people who experience various shades of weirdness tend to contact ufologists, even when there is no apparent connection with UFOs. Take, for instance, this bizarre haunting which was reported to the Mutual UFO Network in 2011. Of course, there is no way to confirm its authenticity, but at least it lacks some of the normal features of made-up stories, such as a beginning, middle, and end. For obvious reasons, the publisher suppressed the informant's name.

On Tulpas, Guardian Angels, and Figments of the Imagination

     Of the 83 countries I have visited, one of the most memorable, and certainly the one closest in appearance to another planet, was the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Although it has spent most of its history fighting to prevent itself being incorporated into Tibet, it is essentially Tibetan in culture. It was there that I witnessed the external face of Tantric Buddhism.
     The first stop on our tour of the capital, Thimpu was the Memorial Chörten. It was with a sense of awe that we beheld the beauty of the sanctuary, clean and brightly painted, surrounded by beautifully clipped shrubs. This was a holy place, we were told. No photography was permitted inside. Carefully and respectfully, we removed our shoes and stepped up onto the icy cold floor of this holy of holies.
     Inside stood an unspeakable abomination.

A Walk to the Place of Dread

    In my opinion, one of the best travel books ever written was A Pattern of Islands (1952) by Sir Arthur Grimble, who gave a fascinating account of his experiences as a District Officer in the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati) in the years, 1913 to 1920. Sir Arthur called himself a freethinker. If so, he felt himself free to think about things outside the purview of most people with that self-designation, because in part 3 of chapter 7 he told the story of his encounter with  The Limping Man of Makin-Meang.

The Ghost and Betty Hill

    The late Betty Hill will always be remembered for her part, along with her husband, Barney, in the first publicised alien abduction case in 1961. It has overshadowed her lifetime of social work, but without it, no-one would have recorded her other unusual experiences, which really deserve to be remembered.

The Haunted Movie Star

    Surely we all remember Elke Sommer, the blond German bombshell whose curves and pretty face graced many a Hollywood comedy in the 1960s and later! She was, in the words of her then husband, journalist and screen writer, Joe Hyams, "a girl who once killed a rattlesnake in our backyard with a pair of garden shears, and who fears only spiders and critics." No doubt that was a good thing, because their home was different from the average Beverley Hills residence. It was haunted.

Tracey's Ghost

     Samuel Johnson is famously said to have given as the reason for a belief in ghosts, "the universal testimony of mankind." On the face of it, this carries weight. After all, if you wanted to make a case for the existence of vampires, you would ultimately have to explain why these animated, blood-sucking corpses are apparently restricted to the Balkans. But reports of ghosts can be found everywhere. Nor are they even uncommon. Back in 1894, a survey of 17,000 people by the British Society for Psychical Research revealed that one in ten in the general population claimed to have seen, heard, or been touched by, something not due to physical causes, and every survey since then has revealed a similar order of magnitude. In modern America it is more like 18 per cent. Of course, it would be unwise to take every single one of these reports at face value, but if ghosts don't exist, then every single one must be ruled out.
     Under such circumstances, where did the orthodoxy, "there are no such things as ghosts" come from? Did somebody, perhaps during the Age of Reason, examine a major sample of the best and most cogent ghost sightings, and demonstrate that all of them had mundane explanations? If so, time has not been kind to him; his name and work have been lost to posterity. You will not find them referred to in any skeptical article. No! What really happened is it was decided, about the same time, that ghosts did not fit into the developing scientific materialist framework, and therefore they could not exist - and so, any alleged sighting must have a mundane explanation.
     As for me, I belong to the nine out of ten who have never encountered a ghost. However, I have noticed that if you raise the issue in a group of any size - say a dozen or two - you are likely to find someone who has had the experience. And in one case, the story she told was so vivid and impressive, that I wrote down the details before my memory had a chance to fade.